Currently there are still people alive who fought for the freedom of the world in the Second World War against the nazi's, there are not much anymore but they certainly are still here!

I think it's safe to say that #WWII was the most terrible war we've ever had

We are now living in a time where the architects of those horrific times are getting adored, imitated and even praised, this is nothing less then truly disgusting and dangerous

Stand up against #fascism, do not accept or ignore it

Meta recently had their big “this is what we are doing” conference and in all the noise was one very interesting fact. As the Verge writes:

If you think avoiding AI-generated images is difficult as it is, Facebook and Instagram are now going to put them directly into your feeds. At the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, the company announced that it’s testing a new feature that creates AI-generated content for you “based on your interests or current trends” — including some that incorporate your face.

Now let’s avoid the questions around how messed up it is to use your face (and your friends’ and familiy’s faces) from a privacy perspective. What’s more interesting is the shift it shows in how Meta sees their product.

Meta’s “mission” is (phrased in usual corporate bullshit phrasing):

Meta’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

Which is a strange way of saying: We want to build tools that allow people to connect to one another (I mean the whole Meta conference is called “Connect“). This is the good old “social media” story.

But Meta clearly no longer wants to do that. What is the use of generating some content for you that has nothing to do with what the people you care about or are interested in are doing? It is an empty reference, it says nothing about nothing. It doesn’t “build community” in any way shape or form, it does the opposite.

No longer are posts about a thing someone wants to say (even if just to sell you something) but just there to keep you occupied. It’s not about giving you opportunities to engage with other people and their experiences and thinking (“bring the world closer together”) it’s about making you a passive consumer of slop that ads can be put next to.

This is a qualitative shift if how Meta presents themselves: They shifted from “enabling connections” to “being a media company” in the most cynical way possible. As messed up as many (if not all) social media platforms are they do present their users as actors. The term “content creator” makes my blood boil but at the core social media’s narrative (even when it was just blogs) was about giving people the opportunity to publish something they care about. That included the whole “the world is your possible audience”.

When algorithmic sorting became more dominant this narrative was continued: Shape your posts in the shape the algorithm likes and you will get an audience. Of people. With all the opportunities this brings.

Meta shattered that covenant. “We’ll just generate something to keep your eyes busy” discards the promise of you connecting to people. Of you being able to use social media to have new insights into the world and the human condition. It turns the users into lifestock. Into a mere resource.

And sure, that’s digital capitalism for you, but the mask has really been taken off.

https://tante.cc/2024/09/26/meta-wants-to-kill-the-social-web/

#Linux has a big documentation problem. I need to send dynamically sized data from the kernel to userspace, in every piece of documentation I can find bpf_ringbuf_reserve only supports statically-known sizes, but an email I found in an archive talks about dynptr support on ringbuf that allows dynamically-sized data without extra copies. I’ve seen the code that lets you create a dynptr from a ringbuf so I guess that proposal was merged? I have no idea how to use it so I’ll have to search in selftests.

Oh, you want to know what is a dynptr? too bad! there is no documentation on it, it might be used in some self-tests and if you’re really lucky in some blog posts. You want to know the memory and safety models of eBPF? Well that’s really easy, the code is the documentation, if you don’t understand it you aren’t experienced enough to work on it.

Working on Linux most of the times feels like being a researcher of a long-lost civilization, piecing together information nobody bothered to write down by only looking at partial information, what little documentation is left behind.