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The Free Software Foundation is dying
The Free Software Foundation is one of the longest-running missions in the free software movement, effectively defining it. It provides a legal foundation for the movement and organizes activism around software freedom. The GNU project, closely related, has its own long story in our movement as the coding arm of the Free Software Foundation, taking these principles and philosophy into practice by developing free software; notably the GNU operating system that famously rests atop GNU/Linux.
Today, almost 40 years on, the FSF is dying.
Their achievements are unmistakable: we must offer them our gratitude and admiration for decades of accomplishments in establishing and advancing our cause. The principles of software...
Writing Helios drivers in the Mercury driver environment
Helios is a microkernel written in the Hare programming language and is part of the larger Ares operating system. You can watch my FOSDEM 2023 talk introducing Helios on PeerTube.
Let’s take a look at the new Mercury driver development environment for Helios.
As you may remember from my FOSDEM talk, the Ares operating system is built out of several layers which provide progressively higher-level environments for an operating system. At the bottom is the Helios microkernel, and today we’re going to talk about the second layer: the Mercury environment, which is used for writing and running device drivers in userspace. Let’s take a look at a serial driver...
Fine-tuning with LoRA: create your own avatars & styles!
Remember Magic Avatars in the Lensa app that were all the rage a few months ago? The custom AI generated avatars from just a few photos of your face were a huge hit!
Reference portrait image of me
One of my Lensa “Magic Avatars”
The technology behind this product is the open source Stable Diffusion image generation model. You can run this model on your own computer, on a cloud GPU instance, or even a free colab notebook — to generate your own avatars. In this post...
Quick guide to installing Stable Diffusion
In my last post “AI primer: Image Models 101”, I recommended Midjourney and Stable Diffusion as my top two choices. If your goal is to make beautiful images and art, Midjourney is the best choice, as they have a very easy to use service and can produce high quality output with minimal effort.
However, if you are a hobbyist and tinkerer, or just want to invest a bit of time to go deeper in this space, Stable Diffusion is a great choice. It’s a bit more involved to set up, but has several advantages:
It is one of the few...AI Primer: Image Models 101
It’s spring of 2023, and if you aren’t paying attention to what’s happening in the world of AI, you really should. The world is about to change in big ways!
I’ll save the general discussion on AI for another post — I’m hoping for this article to be one of a multipart series where we dive into the practical aspects of each major area of advancement. My goal is to give readers a taste of what’s going on, what the capabilities of these AI models are, and why you should care.
Let’s start with image generation models, as they’re the oldest in...
When to comment that code
My software tends to have a surprisingly low number of comments. One of my projects, scdoc, has 25 comments among its 1,133 lines of C code, or 2%, compared to the average of 19%.1 Naturally, I insist that my code is well-written in spite of this divergence from the norm. Allow me to explain.
The philosophy and implementation of code comments varies widely in the industry, and some view comment density as a proxy for code quality.2 I’ll state my views here, but will note that yours may differ and I find that acceptable; I am not here to suggest that your strategy is wrong and I...
Redesign of Tox’s Cryptographic Handshake
In 2017, Jason A. Donenfeld (known for WireGuard®) reported an issue in Tox’s handshake [1]. This issue is called “Key Compromise Impersonation” (KCI). I will try to explain the issue as simple as possible:
In Tox you don’t register an account (e.g. with username and password), but instead your identity is solely based on (asymmetric) cryptographic information, a so-called asymmetric key pair. Such a key pair consists of a public part (public key) and a private part (private key). The public part, as the naming suggests, is public and contained in your ToxID which you share with your contacts to be...