🪡 This too shall be fixed (S2025-E03)

Don't doubt it: we've been here before, fellow dyne. And we fixed it. We might get here again, and we'll repeat. It's OK to have low bats. And Dogs know the draining is happening out there. But to dyne is to fix: challenge accepted!

Dyne 💜 Sphinx

SPHINX is a simple, elegant, & unconditionally secure zero-trust password manager. It stores random numbers, not your password, ensuring the server knows nothing. Free, brute-force resistant, self-hostable, and extensible.

Built on a well-studied cryptographic algorithm by respected experts, SPHINX brings password management into the 21st century.

We love it so much that we're hosting a public server

SPHINX password storage

SPHINX

⚛️ Tor to go PQ

Denis Berger, a dyne from planet ENU is proposing to future-proof the beloved Tor network. The future and the past are like dreams. Everything happens in the present. So it makes sense to make sure now that no one from the future, applies retrospective decryption to the past.

🏛️ New headquarters for the MIAI in Rende (Cosenza)

The new headquarters of the Interactive Museum of Computer Archaeology (MIAI) opened to the public again Friday, March 21st.

The museum has been closed to the public for the past five years, allowing dynes to engage in numerous educational and research activities, adapt to the new headquarters, and prepare for the new exhibition. More dynes had fun enriching the space with works of visual art and themed multimedia installations made specifically for the new spaces.

The museum includes hundreds of historical computer exhibits dating back to the 1960s, including mammoth mainframes, a timeline of personal computers, professional workstations, archaic game consoles, hardware peripherals of all sorts, and a large library with technical documentation, manuals, and scientific literature.

And this is all waiting for you to visit Calabria, the heel of the Italian peninsula.

🐟 Sailfish Pool

If you follow Dyne on social media or are attuned to the techie sides of Reddit, you might have heard of this minimalist component Fastalloc32.c. This lil' baby turned out so valuable it made sense to baptize it. Say hello to Sailfish Pool, world!

The gist? It is a lightweight pool manager for small memory allocations in C, optimized for speed, safety, and privacy. It mainly consists of a few functions to be used in place of standard C memory allocations.

Portable: Apple/OSX and MS/Windows, ARM and x86 as well WASM
Fast: small, fixed-size memory blocks using a preallocated memory pool
Private: memory access is locked and contents deleted on release
Transparent: Supports realloc() for transparent transition to system alloc
Steady: Hashtable lookup on allocated memory grants O(1) constant time
Fallback: Resorts to system malloc() when pool is exhausted

The advantage is that the memory allocated is protected in every way possible across different operating systems, zeroed on free and managed linearly so that memory caching works at its best.

🎧 Podcasters: FOSS got your back!

No more excuses for shitty audio! A very lean and portable plugin just dropped, and it's free as in podcast speech and beer. The controls are super easy and the results are pretty mind-blowing! Check out the demo video on the GitHub page: dude speaks in a laptop mike and ends up sounding like an FM-Radio mogul! Very cool!

Decentralize, Document, Distribute

An interesting discussion emerges in the channels. AI is at the top of the minds of many inhabitants of the galaxy. Planet dyne is no exception. One dyne steps in with a pertinent meme by Forrest Brazeal:

A sad engineer looking at the current situation: a pile of complexity between them and the apps. Bellow a happy non-engineer looking at an AI cloud hiding a pile of complexity that no longer matters, standing between them and apps. Bellow a sad engineer, contemplating a new pile of complexity (AI piplines, templates, etc) in front of an AI cloud, hiding the old pile of complexity, observed by other sad engineers. The path between the sad engineer and the app is now even longer.

And it gets worse: the added complexity is not even deterministic!

But, as so often, another dyne enters the chat and flips the whole idea on its head! What if we need people who can write prompts in natural languages better than a programmer could? Maybe we are creating MORE jobs for the human arts folks?

If AI-agents and pipelines are 40% Python code and 60%, how do you convince the model to do the right thing, use the right tools, etc? What if theater and art-direction could have circumstantial new applications, beyond the beauty of the Art itself? Who else is better equipped to organize the tasks and roles of an orchestrated group of machines pretending to be human?

Needless to say, the channels are full of delicious food for thought! You should come by sometime!

Join the discussion

🗼A Global Fedi-Village

The fediverse has been here for 16 years. And it keeps growing. Much slower than your average corporate webshits, but it grows! This newsletter is written on a FOSS -system for publication, called "Ghost", which is currently working on implementing ActivityPub, the backbone of the Fediverse. You know, Mastodon, Pixelfed, and all that jazz!

It's great news, part of a general trend. Many dynes love the Fedi for its network. (The people that make it and the culture). The tech is a bit Meh, for many reasons. It's decentralized in a federated way, which is cool. But people's identities are tied to the URL of the server they are registered to; there is a certain degree of vendor lock-in. A server admin cannot pivot to a different software without compromising their community. Some tinfoil cats are writing songs suggesting that this is why corporations like Meta are backing the Social Web Foundation.

Only time can tell. Either way, we sure like the web to be more interoperable!

🍝 Digital Tortellini

You wouldn't download a starter!... 🤌 Oh wait, you just downloaded the Primi Piatti. Ok, but what about a tortellino? Well, it turns out you might be able to soon! The taste of it anyway. The nutrients will have to wait another 20 minutes in the future.

THC is much better than DRM

Advice from a dyne

Don't give up on each other.
Take regular breaks from the mass of info coming your way, take time out.

Don't give up on yourself/fall into dangerous personal despair. Keep doing the things that give you a break, schedule it in
Normal human core beliefs start with caring for other humans, no matter what. It's a survival trait, so don't throw it away at the destructive behavior of others in pure rage and frustration.
If you're part of a community of fun, art, justice, music, or volunteering, keep doing it, and keep it going because it's a foundation to standing firm.*

*That includes not excluding those who have fallen down the rabbit hole of decades of relentless, well-researched, and immaculately designed psychologically powerful propaganda. Change their reality by being there, for example, by showing instead of telling. Those people aren't going away; what else could you be doing with them?

Text Spelling: "A Word From Our Sponsor"

[ 🇮🇹 Italy ]

La sovranità appartiene al popolo
Protagonisti per il bene comune

🗓️ 6 April, 2025
📍 Milano, Italy

The dyne on stage is once again Jaromil in this high-profile event on European digital sovereignty to share visions behind the EUROStack report.

10 years of Life After Oil International Film Festival

🗓️ 17th - 21st June, 2025
📍 Sardegna, Italy

Plenty of time to get ready for this one, and trust us: you want to go to Sardegna anyways! Either way, a dyne on the Jury for human rights is reporting that the submissions are sublime!