Tux Machines

Programming Leftovers

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 09, 2023

=> Today in Techrights | Security and Proprietary Software Leftovers

Go Rails World

=> ↺ Go Rails World

This new conference will kick off at quite a momentous occasion, too: Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Ruby on Rails! I started working on the framework in the summer of 2003 as part of the development of Basecamp. By October, the framework had a shape that would be completely recognizable today, with Active Record and Action Pack in place.

Hiding in the Basket

=> ↺ Hiding in the Basket

Like the first Easter egg in 1968, Robinett’s attempt to bestow credit on himself was an act of political protest. But the protest he was making was against the practices of the industry in which he worked—because it reflected how creative work that made Atari millions of dollars was simply not valued at anywhere close to what it earned the company.

From hell to HTML: releasing a Python package to easily work with Wikimedia HTML dumps

=> ↺ From hell to HTML: releasing a Python package to easily work with Wikimedia HTML dumps

Therefore, it is often desirable to work with HTML versions of the articles instead of using the wikitext versions. Though, in practice this has remained largely impossible for researchers. Using the MediaWiki APIs or scraping Wikipedia directly for the HTML is computationally expensive at scale and discouraged for large projects. Only recently, the Wikimedia Enterprise HTML dumps have been introduced and made publicly available with regular monthly updates so that researchers or anyone else may use them in their work.

However, while the data is available, it still requires lots of technical expertise by researchers, such as how different elements from wikitext get parsed into HTML elements. In order to lower the technical barriers and improve the accessibility of this incredible resource, we released the first version of mwparserfromhtml, a library that makes it easy to parse the HTML content of Wikipedia articles – inspired by the wikitext-oriented mwparserfromhell.

tabular and flextable

=> ↺ tabular and flextable

Function tables::tabular() is a powerful tool that let users easily create simple and complex cross tables. Function as_flextable() is simple to use, it transforms ‘tables’ objects into ‘flextable’ objects and let you enrich the table with extra information and or formats.

Go 1.21 will (likely) have a static toolchain on Linux

=> ↺ Go 1.21 will (likely) have a static toolchain on Linux

At this point you might wonder why the Go toolchain is dynamically linked against the system glibc. Although I haven't tried to analyze symbol usage, the obvious assumption is that it's dynamically linked because various Go tools want to download packages over the network, which requires looking up DNS names, which is a very common cause of dynamically linking to glibc.

The Path Dependence of YAML

=> ↺ The Path Dependence of YAML

A hypothesis is that YAML is not only popular because it is more human-readable/writable than JSON but also because it is significantly more machine writable as a raw string.

It doesn’t take much to make machine-learning algorithms go awry

=> ↺ It doesn’t take much to make machine-learning algorithms go awry

Some data-poisoning attacks might just degrade the overall performance of an AI tool. More sophisticated attacks could elicit specific reactions in the system. Dr Tramèr says that an AI chatbot in a search engine, for example, could be tweaked so that whenever a user asks which newspaper they should subscribe to, the AI responds with “The Economist”. That might not sound so bad, but similar attacks could also cause an AI to spout untruths whenever it is asked about a particular topic. Attacks against LLMs that generate computer code have led these systems to write software that is vulnerable to hacking.

Revisiting Borland Turbo C And C++

=> ↺ Revisiting Borland Turbo C And C++

Looking back on what programming used to be like can be a fascinatingly entertaining thing, which is why [Tough Developer] decided to download and try using Turbo C and C++, from version 1.0 to the more recent releases. Borland Turbo C 1.0 is a doozy as it was released in 1987 — two years before the C89 standardization that brought us the much beloved ANSI C that so many of us spent the 90s with. Turbo C++ 1.0 is from 1991, which precedes the standardization of C++ in 1998. This means that both integrated development environments (IDEs) provide a fascinating look at what was on the cutting edge in the late 80s and early 90s.

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