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Last update: June 25, 2025 02:01 AM

June 24, 2025

Victor Martínez

Debo pasarme a uno de soporte largo (LTS)

Recien vi que el 6.14 llegó a EOL y que el 6.15 será también de corta vida, bueno la semana pasada lo compile

Linux version 6.15.2 (vicm3@avalon) (gcc (Debian 12.2.0-14+deb12u1) 12.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Debian) 2.40) #2 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Jun 17 13:54:10 CST 2025

Linux tostador 6.15.2 #2 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue Jun 17 13:54:10 CST 2025 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Y por supuesto el viernes salió el 6.15.3…

También compile el 6.12.33 que es LTS [1] pero al probarlo me gustó más el manejo de USB y del GPU de el 6.15, hasta pensé en comprar dos módulos de 16GB para pasar a 32GB de los 16 que tengo, pero me hicieron notar que estoy compilando remoto y que en realidad no modifica los 22 minutos que les toma a los 32 cores que hay en la oficina los 4 que tengo en casa… o más mejor que tengo otros gastos más inmediatos…

Intenté contestar a la entrada de Gunnar [2] sobre ponerle nombre a máquinas… pero cuando llevaba media cuartilla con las 2 maquinas de cuando hice el servicio social me rendí, si creo que vale la pena hacerlo, pero lo intenté en fechas de evaluación y fue muy mala combinación

[1] https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

[2] https://gwolf.org/2025/04/naming-things-revisited.html

June 24, 2025 01:00 AM

Una interesante paradoja

Como académico se solicitan grados de estudio, pero no es sencillo hacerte el espacio… veo de manera muy interesante que como administrativo una prestación es el estudiar, que no se encuentra en mi cuadro de prestaciones…

Entonces ya me estoy cuestionando si estoy muy cargado de trabajo o muy res, porque parece que todo mundo esta terminando su doctorado…

June 24, 2025 12:39 AM

June 23, 2025

Gwolf

Private key management • Oh, the humanity...

If we ever thought a couple of years or decades of constant use would get humankind to understand how an asymetric key pair is to be handled… It’s time we moved back to square one.

I had to do an online tramit with the Mexican federal government to get a statement certifying I successfully finished my studies, and I found this jewel of user interface:

E.firma

So… I have to:

  1. Submit the asymetric key I use for tax purposes, as that’s the ID the government has registered for me. OK, I didn’t expect it to be used for this purpose as well, but I’ll accept it. Of course, in our tax system many people don’t require having a public key generated (“easier” regimes are authenticated by password only), but all professionals with a cédula profesional (everybody getting a unviersitary title) is now compelled to do this step.

  2. Not only I have to submit my certificate (public key)… But also the private part (and, of course, the password that secures it).

    I understand I’m interacting with a Javascript thingie that runs only client-side, and I trust it is not shipping my private key to their servers. But given it is an opaque script, I have no assurance about it. And, of course, this irks me because I am who I am and because I’ve spent several years thinking about cryptography. But for regular people, it just looks as a stupid inconvenience: they have to upload two weird files with odd names and provide a password. What for?

This is beyond stupid. I’m baffled.

(of course, I did it, because I need the fsckin’ document. Oh, and of course, I paid my MX$1770, ≈€80, for it… which does not make me too happy for a tramit that’s not even shuffling papers, only storing the right bits in the right corner of the right datacenter, but anyhow…)

June 23, 2025 07:40 PM

Diario de un Mexicano en Japon

La importancia de ser constante

¡Hola blog!

Originalmente este era el mensaje que quería escribir primero, puesto que estaba planeado para marzo de 2025. Sin embargo, las fechas no me ayudaron y todo terminó moviéndose 3 meses, hasta el día de ayer.

¿Qué es lo que quiero contar?

Entre otras cosas, desde finales de 2022 comencé a practicar karate por este lado del mundo. A algunos les sonará raro que, después de tanto tiempo viviendo en Japón, hasta ahora me haya entrado la curiosidad de estudiar un arte marcial, pero poniendo en contexto a quienes no hayan leído todos los mensajes de este blog, cuando recién había llegado por acá practiqué Kyudo (arquería japonesa) por cerca de 2 años, y obtuve 1er. dan. Me gustaba mucho, pero las obligaciones escolares de ese entonces, aunado con un sensei que me recordaba mucho a mi papá, se combinaron para que no pudiera continuar practicando. Desde ese entonces no había hecho nada al respecto (aunque sí practiqué deporte frecuentemente).

Como ya saben, fui diagnosticado en 2021 con trastorno de ansiedad y depresión, y viví meses en pleno terror, sin contar la desesperación que sentía al creer que nunca iba a salir del pozo donde estaba, de creer que era un inútil y de que mi doctorado, que salió gratis en un gansito, era pura pantalla. La terapia fue un proceso largo, pero me ayudó muchísimo a crear una escalera, peldaño por peldaño, que me permitió salir de ahí y ver la vida con otros ojos. Eso, aunado a que mi esposa quería que mi hijo mayor practicara karate para fomentarle la autoestima y también enseñarle disciplina, me llevaron a comenzar a practicar el arte marcial japonesa, pero desde una perspectiva más tradicionalista. Explico:

No es necesario enfatizar el hecho de que existen muchas corrientes y estilos de karate alrededor del mundo. No se trata de criticar ni de menospreciar a ninguno, porque, bien aplicados, cualquier estilo funciona y cumple su propósito. En mi caso, el estilo que encontré fue uno llamado 月心会 (gesshinkai), que sigue muy de cerca el karate tradicional de Okinawa. Hay kumite (pelea) también, y es full-contact, pero aunque se le da importancia, realmente el enfoque es en la disciplina del entrenamiento, en las katas y las técnicas para mejorar los movimientos. Por lo mismo, muchos extranjeros que encuentran este estilo terminan yéndose a otro porque no les satisface del todo, y no los culpo ni los critico puesto que cada persona debe encontrar y practicar lo que más le guste.

El caso es que este estilo también se enfoca mucho en que padres e hijos practiquen juntos como forma de crear o fortalecer la relación entre los mismos, y si nos ponemos a pensar en la cultura familiar japonesa, es una perspectiva interesante y útil, y en lo personal ha funcionado para darme otro tema de conversación con mi hijo, además de las horas en las que hemos practicado y aprendido juntos. Además, he visto de primera mano cómo la autoestima de mi hijo ha ido en aumento, y pasó de ser alguien que era miedoso y evitaba conflictos a ser alguien que evita conflictos pero no les teme, al grado de ponerse al tú por tú con el gandalla de su salón y terminar como su mejor amigo; y si bien me gustaría que mi hijo le echara más ganas a la práctica del karate, al menos puedo decir que le ha servido.

Aquí entro yo:

Una de las cualidades que he tenido desde hace mucho tiempo es que si hago algo, lo hago en forma, le dedico tiempo, y no lo abandono de repente. Mi problema es que tardo MUCHO en querer comenzar algo, más por flojera que por cualquier otra cosa. Habría podido comenzar a practicar karate mucho antes de 2022, pero nunca me sentía realmente motivado por hacerlo (y esto es personalidad, no consecuencia de la depresión). Pero cuando por fin me decidí, sabía a lo que iba, sabía que quería hacer las cosas bien y que mejoraría mi disciplina y autocontrol, porque a final de cuentas el karate no es para pelear y ganarle a la gente, ni para ser agresivo, sino para pelear contra uno mismo y vencerse. El único obstáculo eres tú. El karate es para servir, para defender a quienes no pueden, pero sobre todo, para competir contra una mismo.

No soy exactamente ajeno al karate. Cuando tenía alrededor de 7-8 años practiqué diferentes artes marciales en Guadalajara, junto con mi hermana mayor. Pasamos por Kung Lama, Tae Kwon Do, Karate Do y Amigos del Ejército. Llegué a ganar un torneo en kata y a ser segundo lugar en kumite. Pero después de esa época nunca le seguí, así que comenzar a practicar karate a los 44 años era practicamente comenzar de ceros.

El karate me atrapó, pero fue porque yo dejé que me atrapara, que me envolviera con sus conocimientos y que me diera la pauta para practicar en casa casi todos los días. Mi esposa, que difícilmente puede continuar cualquier cosa que haga o estudie, llegó a preguntarme si no me enfadaba del karate, y exclamó que no pensaba que realmente fuera a practicar de forma tan seria. Oh, grave error… y eso que me conoce desde hace muchos años. Si en mi mente ya estaba la decisión de practicar karate, lo iba a ser en serio. No voy a echar por la borda el sacrificio de levantarme temprano los domingos para ir a practicar (el entrenamiento es los domingos a las 9 AM), y si voy a hacer el esfuerzo de levantarme temprano e irme a practicar en vez de jugar videojuegos, tengo que hacer que valga la pena.

Y así ha pasado el tiempo. Gesshinkai tiene rangos que van del 10 al 1, y después, cuando obtienes la cinta negra, eres 1er. dan, y de ahí los rangos suben hasta 10mo dan. Aquí una lista de los rangos y los colores de las cintas:

¿Por qué hablar del karate justamente ahora y no antes?

Porque para mí, el verdadero punto de partida era la cinta negra, y ayer hice el laaaaaargo examen para obtenerla. El resultado se puede ver en la imagen de arriba, pero la pongo aquí también como referencia:

Cinta negra con mi nombre bordado
Cinta negra con mi nombre bordado

En teoría, quería tomarme foto con cada una de las cintas, pero nomás no se me hizo. Según yo había tomado fotos de todas las cintas, menos la morada, pero no las encontré.

Mi cinta azul marino
Mi cinta azul marino
Yo feliz con mi cinta verde
Haciendo la kata para subir a 1 kyu

Las únicas cintas que son propias son la blanca, y de la negra en delante. Todas las demás son de todos, así que te puede tocar una que no sea de tu talla. Además, un detalle importante es que las cintas que no son propias NO SE DEBEN LAVAR. Suena antihigiénico, pero la idea es que la cinta lleva el sudor y el esfuerzo de todos los que la han portado hasta ese entonces, por lo que lavarla significa quitarle todo el significado (la realidad es que sí se puede lavar, pero tiene que ser a mano, y solamente en casos en los que de plano el olor sea insoportable). La cinta blanca representa el inicio del entrenamiento y, al mismo tiempo, el concepto de nunca olvidar de dónde comenzó todo, de nunca olvidar las raíces. La cinta negra implica que ya eres capaz de entrenar por tu cuenta, y también de guiar a los que están debajo de tu rango; a partir de la cinta negra, tu nombre viene bordado en la misma.

He participado en varios torneos y eventos culturales dentro y fuera de Tokio. Gané el 2do. lugar en kata en diciembre del año pasado. El año pasado que fui a Tailandia de trabajo, busqué el dojo en Bangkok y pude entrenar también allá.

En Tailandia. A mi izquiera, el sensei Kawamoto, una eminencia en Gesshinkai

No es obsesión, sino pasión. Con todo, hay semanas en las que de plano no voy a entrenar porque me gana la flojera (o porque me quiero quedar a ver torneos de Street Fighter o a jugar videojuegos), así que el karate no ha consumido mi vida, sino más bien ha entrado a ella para ayudarme en mi guía y lucha vs mí mismo y la depresión (que ya casi está vencida).

A partir de la próxima semana comienza mi entrenamiento ahora como cinta negra. Ya he estado al frente de la clase enseñando a los demás, pero ahora me toca sentarme y estar con los otros profesores. Me falta mucho todavía, pero al igual que con el proyecto que recién salió a la luz en el trabajo, es día de darme dos palmaditas en la espalda, comer helado, y disfrutar el resultado del esfuerzo que he hecho casi diario durante 2 años y medio. Se oye como McDojo, pero no cualquiera obtiene la cinta negra en tan poco tiempo. Tengo “sempai” que tardaron 6-7 años, más que nada porque los sensei son quienes dictan si uno ya está listo para dar el siguiente paso. Ahora que yo ya lo di, es momento de responder a esa confianza y a seguir practicando. Me hace ojitos la cinta roja/blanca de 7mo. dan, pero eso me tomará muchos años, puesto que a partir de cinta negra solamente se permite hacer examen para subir de rango después de al menos haber entrenado un año y medio con el rango actual, y si consideramos que entre cada dan hay uno extra llamado 補”ho” (un paso antes del dan, literalmente “candidato”), entonces estamos hablando de, saquemos cuentas, de 12 rangos que subir, multplicado por 1.5, 18 años más de entrenamiento (por lo menos).

El camino es largo, pero ya lo comencé, y voy a hacer lo posible por continuarlo.

Las metas que valen la pena son, por lo general, a largo plazo; parece imposible lograrlo cuando se ve desde fuera, y se convierte en imposible si nunca se hace un esfuerzo por conseguirlas. Es importante tenerlas en mente y avanzar hacia ellas, pero hay que definir metas a corto plazo, que sean alcanzables, para lograrlas, y con ello para motivarnos a dar el siguiente paso. Quizá su meta tome muchos años, pero si nunca comienzan, nunca van a saber si pudieron haberla conseguido o no.

The post La importancia de ser constante first appeared on ¡Un mexicano en Japón!.

June 23, 2025 01:49 AM

June 18, 2025

Diario de un Mexicano en Japon

Día de lanzamiento: experiencia adquirida

¡Hola blog!

Quizá este no es el escrito que muchos esperaban leer después de varios meses de ausencia por acá. Hay mucho que contar, pero aproveché que tenía tiempo en el trabajo para escribir respecto a lo que está aconteciendo el día de hoy, y a las experiencias adquiridas durante el proceso. Si a alguien le sirve de algo lo que sigue, ¡qué bien!

Hoy es el lanzamiento oficial del proyecto en el que he trabajado por más de un año. Sin embargo, la verdadera prueba de fuego será la próxima semana, cuando el sistema sea ejecutado por primera vez en producción.

Nervioso no estoy. El sistema ha sido probado intensamente desde hace meses, y el cliente lo ha usado extraoficialmente durante más de un año. Ahora se trata de automatizar todo, lo cual se logró después de una intensa pelea vs AWS. He aprendido mucho del ecosistema de AWS, pero además de eso, este proyecto me ha enseñado, y también reiterado, algunas cosas que vale la pena mencionar:

1. No soy líder del proyecto, sino líder de desarrollo. Cuando me asignaron, el sistema era funcional de puro milagro. Habían puesto a un chavo con 1 año de experiencia en el mundo laboral y por ende a todo decía que sí. Una “proof of concept” era usada como sistema en producción. El chavo hizo lo que pudo, y la verdad su esfuerzo fue más que excelente, así que a él no lo culpo.


2. Los resultados no eran los esperados, por lo que el cliente iba a terminar el proyecto en julio del año pasado. ¿Qué faltó? Un análisis cualitativo para determinar qué era lo que causaba resultados insatisfactorios. Los hice, y el proyecto fue resucitado.

3. Las nuevas generaciones, al menos acá en Japón, dependen muchísimo de LLMs. Aunque es cierto que la calidad del código generado por los LLMs ha ido en aumento, todavía hay fallas y alucinaciones, que son difíciles de detectar si no se tiene experiencia.

Habiendo visto la evolución de las tareas de NLP a lo largo de 20 años, los LLMs parecen arte de magia, pero en el fondo deben ser considerados como una herramienta más, no como sustituto de empleados (al menos al día de hoy).

4. Es la primera vez en toda mi carrera en la que soy considerado como “veterano”. Sí, ya sé, estoy viejo, pero en todas mis chambas anteriores siempre era el último eslabón en la cadena. Ahora he tenido oportunidad de ser mentor de gente más joven, y ha sido muy satisfactorio. Asimismo, es la primera vez en la que una empresa reconoce mi todavía parco conocimiento y mi exigua experiencia laboral. No es presunción, pero parece mentira que a mis 46 años apenas una empresa me considera para llevar la batuta de algo.

Hasta antes de entrar a esta empresa siempre había considerado que no sabía mucho, que me faltaba todavía para ser alguien con presencia, que pudiera ser consultado cuando se tenían dudas, o que la gente alreddor sintiera confianza de que yo estaba encargado de algo. No es que lo sepa todo, pero una parte de la depresión en la que caí fue consideraba que, por mi título, debía saber más, debía entender muchos más conceptos, y me autoflagelaba por no haberlos aprendido cuando era estudiante.

Ya he comentado en muchas ocasiones que mi título de doctorado me salió en un gansito, porque fue una experiencia horrible, para olvidar, que durante años me hizo arrepentirme de haber venido a Japón. Por lo mismo siempre he recomendado investigar y tener contacto con su potencial asesor a quienes planean venir a estudiar un posgrado a la tierra del sol naciente. De ese asesor depende totalmente su experiencia académica por acá. Resumiendo para quienes no sepan la historia: el mío nunca me guió para nada. Estaba más preocupado por su retiro que por sus alumnos, y cuando se retiró al final de mi segundo año de doctorado solamente se tomó sus últimas.2 semanas para conseguir que otros profesores se hicieran cargo de nosotros (3 alumnos de doctorado). El profesor que me recibió fue muy claro al decirme que él no tenía idea de lo que estaba haciendo, que él no me podía ofrecer guía y que no había lugar físico en su laboratorio para mí, así que hice lo que pude para salir adelante, pero nunca he estado satisfecho de eso.

Con todo, y también habiendo aprendido a celebrar mis pequeñas victorias, el hecho de que haya salvado el proyecto y lo haya llevado hasta producción en un lanzamiento oficial en una gran empresa en Japón, creo que merece que me dé un par de palmaditas en la espalda, y que hoy me vaya a comer un helado a la hora de la comida.

The post Día de lanzamiento: experiencia adquirida first appeared on ¡Un mexicano en Japón!.

June 18, 2025 03:09 AM

June 11, 2025

Gwolf

Understanding Misunderstandings - Evaluating LLMs on Networking Questions

This post is a review for Computing Reviews for Understanding Misunderstandings - Evaluating LLMs on Networking Questions , a article published in Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

Large language models (LLMs) have awed the world, emerging as the fastest-growing application of all time–ChatGPT reached 100 million active users in January 2023, just two months after its launch. After an initial cycle, they have gradually been mostly accepted and incorporated into various workflows, and their basic mechanics are no longer beyond the understanding of people with moderate computer literacy. Now, given that the technology is better understood, we face the question of how convenient LLM chatbots are for different occupations. This paper embarks on the question of whether LLMs can be useful for networking applications.

This paper systematizes querying three popular LLMs (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Claude 3) with questions taken from several network management online courses and certifications, and presents a taxonomy of six axes along which the incorrect responses were classified:

The authors also measure four strategies toward improving answers:

The authors observe that, while some of those strategies were marginally useful, they sometimes resulted in degraded performance.

The authors queried the commercially available instances of Gemini and GPT, which achieved scores over 90 percent for basic subjects but fared notably worse in topics that require understanding and converting between different numeric notations, such as working with Internet protocol (IP) addresses, even if they are trivial (that is, presenting the subnet mask for a given network address expressed as the typical IPv4 dotted-quad representation).

As a last item in the paper, the authors compare performance with three popular open-source models: Llama3.1, Gemma2, and Mistral with their default settings. Although those models are almost 20 times smaller than the GPT-3.5 commercial model used, they reached comparable performance levels. Sadly, the paper does not delve deeper into these models, which can be deployed locally and adapted to specific scenarios.

The paper is easy to read and does not require deep mathematical or AI-related knowledge. It presents a clear comparison along the described axes for the 503 multiple-choice questions presented. This paper can be used as a guide for structuring similar studies over different fields.

June 11, 2025 09:58 PM

June 04, 2025

Gwolf

The subjective value of privacy • Assessing individuals' calculus of costs and benefits in the context of state surveillance

This post is an unpublished review for The subjective value of privacy • Assessing individuals' calculus of costs and benefits in the context of state surveillance

Internet users, software developers, academics, entrepreneurs – basically everybody is now aware of the importance of considering privacy as a core part of our online experience. User demand, and various national or regional laws, have made privacy a continuously present subject. And privacy is such an all-encompassing, complex topic, the angles from which it can be studied seems never to finish; I recommend computer networking-oriented newcomers to the topic to refer to Brian Kernighan’s excellent work [1]. However, how do regular people –like ourselves, in our many capacities– feel about privacy? Lukas Antoine presents a series of experiments aiming at better understanding how people throughout the world understands privacy, and when is privacy held as more or less important than security in different aspects,

Particularly, privacy is often portrayed as a value set at tension against surveillance, and particularly state surveillance, in the name of security: conventional wisdom presents the idea of privacy calculus. This is, it is often assumed that individuals continuously evaluate the costs and benefits of divulging their personal data, sharing data when they expect a positive net outcome, and denying it otherwise. This framework has been accepted for decades, and the author wishes to challenge it. This book is clearly his doctoral thesis on political sciences, and its contents are as thorough as expected in this kind of product.

The author presents three empirical studies based on cross-survey analysis. The first experiment explores the security justifications for surveillance and how they influence their support. The second one searches whether the stance on surveillance can be made dependent on personal convenience or financial cost. The third study explores whether privacy attitude is context-dependant or can be seen as a stable personality trait. The studies aim to address the shortcomings of published literature in the field, mainly, (a) the lack of comprehensive research on state surveillance, needed or better understanding privacy appreciation, (b) while several studies have tackled the subjective measure of privacy, there is a lack of cross-national studies to explain wide-ranging phenomena, (c) most studies in this regard are based on population-based surveys, which cannot establish causal relationships, (d) a seemingly blind acceptance of the privacy calculus mentioned above, with no strong evidence that it accurately measures people’s motivations for disclosing or withholding their data. The specific take, including the framing of the tension between privacy and surveillance has long been studied, as can be seen in Steven Nock’s 1993 book [2], but as Sannon’s article in 2022 shows [3], social and technological realities require our undertanding to be continuously kept up to date.

The book is full with theoretical references and does a very good job of explaining the path followed by the author. It is, though, a heavy read, and, for people not coming from the social sciences tradition, leads to the occasional feeling of being lost. The conceptual and theoretical frameworks and presented studies are thorough and clear. The author is honest in explaining when the data points at some of his hypotheses being disproven, while others are confirmed.

The aim of the book is for people digging deep into this topic. Personally, I have authored several works on different aspects of privacy (such as a book [4] and a magazine number [5]), but this book did get me thinking on many issues I had not previously considered. Looking for comparable works, I find Friedewald et al.’s 2017 book [6] chapter organization to follow a similar thought line. My only complaint would be that, for the publication as part of its highly prestigious publisher, little attention has been paid to editorial aspects: sub-subsection depth is often excessive and unclear. Also, when publishing monographs based on doctoral works, it is customary to no longer refer to the work as a “thesis” and to soften some of the formal requirements such a work often has, with the aim of producing a more gentle and readable book; this book seems just like the mass-production of an (otherwise very interesting and well made) thesis work.

References:

June 04, 2025 03:40 PM

Humanities and big data in Ibero-America • Theory, methodology and practical applications

This post is an unpublished review for Humanities and big data in Ibero-America • Theory, methodology and practical applications

Digital humanities is a young–though established–field. It deals with different expressions in which digital data manipulation techniques can be applied and used to analyze subjects that are identified as belonging to the humanities. Although most often used to analyze different aspects of literature or social network analysis, it can also be applied to other humanistic disciplines or artistic expressions. Digital humanities employs many tools, but those categorized as big data are among the most frequently employed. This book samples different takes on digital humanities, with the particularity that it focuses on Ibero-American uses. It is worth noting that this book is the second in a series of four volumes, published or set to be published between 2022 and 2026. Being the output of a field survey, I perceive this book to be targeted towards fellow Digital Humanists – people interested in applying computational methods to further understand and research topics in the humanities. It is not a technical book in the sense Computer Science people would recognize as such, but several of the presented works do benefit from understanding some technical concepts.

The 12 articles (plus an introduction) that make up this book are organized in three parts:

(1) “Theoretical Framework” presents the ideas and techniques of data science (that make up the tools for handling big data), and explores how data science can contribute to literary analysis, all while noting that many such techniques are usually frowned upon in Latin America as data science “smells neoliberal”;

(2) “Methodological Issues” looks at specific issues through the lens of how they can be applied to big data, with specific attention given to works in Spanish; and

(3) “Practical Applications” analyzes specific Spanish works and communities based on big data techniques.

Several chapters treat a recurring theme: the simultaneous resistance and appropriation of big data by humanists. For example, at least three of the chapters describe the tensions between humanism (“aesthesis”) and cold, number-oriented data analysis (“mathesis”).

The analyzed works of Parts 2 and 3 are interesting and relatively easy to follow.

Some inescapable ideological gleans from several word uses – from the book’s and series’ name, which refers to the Spanish-speaking regions as “Ibero-America”, often seen as Eurocentric, in contrast with the “Latin America” term much more widely used throughout the region.

I will end with some notes about the specific versions of the book I reviewed. I read both an EPUB version and a print copy. The EPUB did not include links for easy navigation to footnotes, that is, the typographical superindexes are not hyperlinked to the location of the notes, so it is very impractical to try to follow them. The print version (unlike the EPUB) did not have an index, that is, the six pages before the introduction are missing from the print copy I received. For a book such as this one, not having an index hampers the ease of reading and referencing.

June 04, 2025 03:40 PM

Beyond data poisoning in federated learning

This post is an unpublished review for Beyond data poisoning in federated learning

The current boom of artificial intelligence (AI) is based upon neural networks (NNs). In order for these to be useful, the network has to undergo a machine learning (ML) process: work over a series of inputs, and adjust the inner weights of the connections between neurons so that each of the data samples the network was trained on produces the right set of labels for each item. Federated learning (FL) appeared as a reaction given the data centralization power that traditional ML provides: instead of centrally controlling the whole training data, various different actors analyze disjoint subsets of data, and provide only the results of this analysis, thus increasing privacy while analyzing a large dataset. Finally, given multiple actors are involved in FL, how hard is it for a hostile actor to provide data that will confuse the NN, instead of helping it reach better performance? This kind of attack is termed a poisoning attack, and is the main focus of this paper. The authors set out to research how effective can a hyperdimensional data poisoning attack (HDPA) be to confuse a NN and cause it to misclassify both the items trained on and yet unseen items.

Data used for NN training is usually represented as a large set of orthogonal vectors, each describing a different aspect of the item, allowing for very simple vector arithmetic operations. Thus, NN training is termed as high-dimensional or hyperdimensional. The attack method described by the authors employs cosine similarity, that is, in order to preserve similarity, a target hypervector is reflected over a given dimension, yielding a cosine-similar result that will trick ML models, even if using byzantine-robust defenses.

The paper is clear, though not an easy read. It explains in detail the mathematical operations, following several related although different threat models. The authors present the results of the experimental evaluation of their proposed model, comparing it to several other well-known adversarial attacks for visual recognition tasks, over pre-labeled datasets frequently used as training data, such as MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR-10. They show that their method is not only more effective as an attack, but falls within the same time range as other surveyed attacks.

Adversarial attacks are, all in all, an important way to advance any field of knowledge; by publishing this attack, the authors will surely spark other works to detect and prevent this kind of alteration. It is important for AI implementers to understand the nature of this field and be aware of the risks that this work, as well as others cited in it, highlight: ML will train a computer system to recognize a dataset, warts and all; efficient as AI is, if noise is allowed into the training data (particularly adversarially generated noise), the trained model might present impaired performance.

June 04, 2025 03:39 PM

Computational modelling of robot personhood and relationality

This post is an unpublished review for Computational modelling of robot personhood and relationality

If humans and robots were to be able to roam around the same spaces, mutually recognizing each other for what they are, how would interaction be? How can we model such interactions in a way that we can reason about and understand the implications of a given behavior? This book aims at answering this question.

The book is split into two very different parts. Chapters 1 through 3 are mostly written with a philosophical angle. It starts by framing the possibility of having sentient androids exist in the same plane as humans, without them trying to pass as us or vice versa. The first chapters look at issues related to personhood, that is, how androids can be treated as valid interaction partners in a society with humans, and how interactions with them can be seen as meaningful. In doing so, several landmarks of the past 40 years in the AI field are reviewed. The issues of the “Significant Concerns” that make up a society and give it coherence and of “Personhood and Relationality”, describing how this permeates from a society into each of the individuals that make it up, the relations between them and the social objects that bring individuals closer together (or farther apart) are introduced and explained.

The second part of the book is written from a very different angle, and the change in pace took me somewhat by surprise. Each subsequent chapter presents a different angle of the “Affinity” system, a model that follows some aspects of human behavior over time and in a given space. Chapter 4 introduces the “Affinity” environment: a 3D simulated environment with simulated physical laws and characteristics, where a number of agents (30-50 is mentioned as usual) interact. Agents have a series of attributes (“value memory”), can adhere to different programs (“narratives”), and gain or lose on some vectors (“economy”). They can sense the world around them with sensors, and can modify the world or signal other agents using effectors.

The last two chapters round out the book, as expected: the first presents a set of results from analyzing a given set of value systems, and the second gives readers the conclusions reached by the author. However, I was expecting more–either having at least a link to download the “Affinity” system and continue exploring it or modifying some of the aspects it models to get it to model a set of agents with different stories and narratives, or extend it to yet unforseen behaviors, or at least have the author present a more complete comparison of results than the evaluation of patterns resulting from a given run. The author is a well-known, prolific author in the field, and I was expecting bigger insights from this book.

Nevertheless, the book is an interesting and fun read, with important insights in both the first and second parts. There is a certain lack of connection between their respective rhythms, and the second part indeed builds on the concepts introduced in the first one. Overall, I enjoyed reading the book despite expecting more.

June 04, 2025 03:39 PM

Will be adding yet-to-be-published reviews

Since December 2023, I have been publishing the reviews I write for Computing Reviews as they get published. I will do a slight change now: I will start pushing the reviews to my blog as I write them, and of course, will modify them with the final wording and to link to their place as soon as they are published. I’m doing this because sometimes it takes very long for reviews to be approved, and I want to share them with my blog’s readers!

So, please bear with this a bit: I’ll send a (short!) flood of my latest four pending reviews today.

Some books I have recently read

June 04, 2025 03:24 PM

May 23, 2025

Gwolf

No further discussion -- I am staying with a Thinkpad keyboard.

I have been a very happy user of my two SK-8845 keyboards (one at my office, one at home) since I bought them, in 2018 and 2021 respectively. What are they, mind you?

SK-8845 keyboard)

The beautiful keyboard every Thinkpad owner knows and loves. And although I no longer use my X230 laptop that was my workhorse for several years, my fingers are spoiled.

So, both shift keys of my home keyboard have been getting flaky, and I am basically sure it’s a failure in the controller, as it does not feel to be physical. It’s time to revisit that seven year old post where I found the SK-8845.

This time, I decided to try my luck with something different. As a Emacs user, everybody knows we ought to be happy with more and more keys. In fact, I suppose many international people are now familiar with El Eternauta, true? we Emacs users would be the natural ambassadors to deal with the hand species:

Emacs users from outer space!

So… it kind-of sort-of made sense, when I saw a Toshiba-IBM keyboard being sold for quite cheap (MX$400, just over US$20) to try my luck with it:

A truly POS keyboard

This is quite an odd piece of hardware, built in 2013 according to its label. At first I was unsure whether to buy it because of the weird interface it had, but the vendor replied they would ship a (very long!) USB cable with it, so…

A weird port inside the keyboard

And a matching weird connector

As expected, connecting it to Linux led to a swift, errorless recognition:

Nothing too odd here

Within minutes of receiving the hardware, I had it hooked up and started looking at the events it generated However… the romance soon started to wane. Some of the reasons:

Anyway… I’m returning it 🙁 I found an SK-8845 for sale in China for just MX$1814 (~US$90), and jumped for it… They are getting scarce! Nowadays it’s getting more common (and cheaper) to find the newer style Thinkpad keyboards, but without a trackpad 🙁 I don’t think I should stockpile on keyboards, but… no, I’m not doing that 😉

Anyway, so I’m sticking to a Thinkpad keyboard, third in a row.

May 23, 2025 05:39 AM

April 21, 2025

Gwolf

Want your title? Here, have some XML!

As it seems ChatGPT would phrase it… Sweet Mother of God!

I received a mail from my University’s Scholar Administrative division informing me my Doctor degree has been granted and emitted (yayyyyyy! 👨‍🎓), and before printing the corresponding documents, I should review all of the information is correct.

Attached to the mail, I found they sent me a very friendly and welcoming XML file, that stated it followed the schema at https://www.siged.sep.gob.mx/titulos/schema.xsd… Wait! There is nothing to be found in that address! Well, never mind, I can make sense out of a XML document, right?

XML sample

Of course, who needs an XSD schema? Everybody can parse through the data in a XML document, right? Of course, it took me close to five seconds to spot a minor mistake (in the finish and start dates of my previous degree), for which I mailed the relevant address…

But… What happens if I try to undestand the world as seen by 9.8 out of 10 people getting a title from UNAM, in all of its different disciplines (scientific, engineering, humanities…) Some people will have no clue about what to do with a XML file. Fortunately, the mail has a link to a very useful tutorial (roughly translated by myself):

The attached file has an XML extension, so in order to visualize it, you must open it with a text editor such as Notepad or Sublime Text. In case you have any questions on how to open the file, please refer to the following guide: https://www.dgae.unam.mx/guia_abrir_xml.html

Seriously! Asking people getting a title in just about any area of knowledge to… Install SublimeText to validate the content of a XML (that includes the oh-so-very-readable signature of some universitary bureaucrat).

Of course, for many years Mexican people have been getting XML files by mail (for any declared monetary exchange, i.e. buying goods or offering services), but they are always sent together with a render of such XML to a personalized PDF. And yes — the PDF is there only to give the human receiving the file an easier time understanding it. Who thought a bare XML was a good idea? 😠

April 21, 2025 06:33 PM

April 11, 2025

Gwolf

Culture as a positive freedom

This post is an unpublished review for La cultura libre como libertad positiva
Please note: This review is not meant to be part of my usual contributions to ACM's «Computing Reviews». I do want, though, to share it with people that follow my general interests and such stuff.

This article was published almost a year ago, and I read it just after relocating from Argentina back to Mexico. I came from a country starting to realize the shock it meant to be ruled by an autocratic, extreme right-wing president willing to overrun its Legislative and bent on destroying the State itself — not too different from what we are now witnessing on a global level.

I have been a strong proponent and defender of Free Software and of Free Culture throughout my adult life. And I have been a Socialist since my early teenage years. I cannot say there is a strict correlation between them, but there is a big intersection of people and organizations who aligns to both sides — And Ártica (and Mariana Fossatti) are clearly among them.

Freedom is a word that has brought us many misunderstanding throughout the past many decades. We will say that Freedom can only be brought hand-by-hand with Equality, Fairness and Tolerance. But the extreme-right wing (is it still bordering Fascism, or has it finally embraced it as its true self?) that has grown so much in many countries over the last years also seems to have appropriated the term, even taking it as their definition. In English (particularly, in USA English), liberty is a more patriotic term, and freedom is more personal (although the term used for the market is free market); in Spanish, we conflate them both under libre.

Mariana refers to a third blog, by Rolando Astarita, where the author introduces the concepts positive and negative freedom/liberties. Astarita characterizes negative freedom as an individual’s possibility to act without interferences or coertion, and is limited by other people’s freedom, while positive freedom is the real capacity to exercise one’s autonomy and achieve self-realization; this does not depend on a person on its own, but on different social conditions; Astarita understands the Marxist tradition to emphasize on the positive freedom.

Mariana brings this definition to our usual discussion on licensing: If we follow negative freedom, we will understand free licenses as the idea of access without interference to cultural or information goods, as long as it’s legal (in order not to infringe other’s property rights). Licensing is seen as a private content, and each individual can grant access and use to their works at will.

The previous definition might be enough for many, but she says, is missing something important. The practical effect of many individuals renouncing a bit of control over their property rights produce, collectively, the common goods. They constitute a pool of knowledge or culture that are no longer an individual, contractual issue, but grow and become social, collective. Negative freedom does not go further, but positive liberty allows broadening the horizon, and takes us to a notion of free culture that, by strengthening the commons, widens social rights.

She closes the article by stating (and I’ll happily sign as if they were my own words) that we are Free Culture militants «not only because it affirms the individual sovereignty to deliver and receive cultural resources, in an intellectual property framework guaranteed by the state. Our militancy is of widening the cultural enjoying and participation to the collective through the defense of common cultural goods» (…) «We want to build Free Culture for a Free Society. But a Free Society is not a society of free owners, but a society emancipated from the structures of economic power and social privilege that block this potential collective».

April 11, 2025 02:41 PM

April 04, 2025

Gwolf

Naming things revisited

How long has it been since you last saw a conversation over different blogs syndicated at the same planet? Well, it’s one of the good memories of the early 2010s. And there is an opportunity to re-engage! 😃

I came across Evgeni’s post “naming things is hard” in Planet Debian. So, what names have I given my computers?

I have had many since the mid-1990s I also had several during the decade before that, but before Linux, my computers didn’t hve a formal name. Naming my computers something nice Linux gave me.

I have forgotten many. Some of the names I have used:

April 04, 2025 07:17 PM

March 12, 2025

Victor Martínez

Nuestra primera clase

En confinamiento, de la optativa de educación en línea, o más bien la síntesis de la primera unidad, pero me gusto mas el otro título.

58 minutos, tiene pocas visitas, se público en abril de 2020, justo veía que tiene 27 diapositivas, ayer hicimos el mismo ejercicio con algunos de los nuevos documentos y nos tomó un poco más de hora y cuarenta minutos, pero si tuvimos antes la lectura y exposición.

Todavía por ahí del final, digo lo vamos a poder discutir cuando regresemos, y no lo hicimos más en ese curso, ni en ese año, pero lo hicimos en foros de discusión. Para la optativa fue útil el video, pero para todas las demás los videos, más cortos fueron más útiles, este formato en especial no tuvo mucho éxito

March 12, 2025 05:37 PM

March 08, 2025

Gwolf

The author has been doctored.

Almost exactly four years after I started with this project, yesterday I presented my PhD defense.

My thesis was what I’ve been presenting advances of all around since ≈2022: «A certificate-poisoning-resistant protocol for the synchronization of Web of Trust networks»

Lots of paperwork is still on the road for me. But at least in the immediate future, I can finally use this keyring my friend Raúl Gómez 3D-printed for me:

March 08, 2025 06:31 PM

February 03, 2025

Victor Martínez

Memorias, olvido y espejos

Si  seguro en ingles suena mucho mejor, bueno en español no lo hace tan mal, en fin leyendo recién un comentario y viendo que la pǵina de Anime Project la tenemos un tanto abandonada, me parece pertinente colocar por acá que tenemos un wiki.

Que en su momento nos pareció una buena idea para elaborar cosas que no teníamos en la página de AP, que quedaban grandes para el blog y se discutían en los comentarios de la página donde no parecía ser el mejor lugar, el wiki en su momento llamado documentos pareció la forma natural de tener un espacio para muchas cosas, no tuvo ni cercano al uso que esperábamos, pero si me sirvió para ordenar un montón de texto que andaban por todos lados menos donde los necesitaba.

Sirva de pretexto para mencionar que hemos realizado un espejo de un montón de cosas que no queremos que se pierdan o se vuelvan sombras que en este mundillo del Anime/Manga y tristemente en el campo de la educación pasa más seguido de lo que uno quisiera.

Mirrors y archivos
Desde que se fundó AP en 1996 hemos visto con tristeza cómo muchos recursos en la Web sobre nuestra afición desaparecen por aburrimiento, falta de compromiso, dinero o cambio de intereses, en el mejor de los casos la página e información quedan abandonadas en el peor el servicio es descontinuado, la página eliminada, el recurso olvidado o perdido, en lo posible hemos puesto nuestro grano de arena hospedando algunos mirrors de recursos que nos interesan, una lista a continuación:

February 03, 2025 05:36 PM