Weāre entering the ātoo hot to thinkā-season in 3, 2, 1 ⦠and weāre live!
I did a ālectureā/āworkshopā about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. š¾ Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. š„³
- People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
- Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
- DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
- This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
- At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
- (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.
Now that was a lot of fun. š„³ Itās very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.
Saw this on Mastodon:
https://racingbunny.com/@mookie/114718466149264471
18 rules of Software Engineering
- You will regret complexity when on-call
- Stop falling in love with your own code
- Everything is a trade-off. Thereās no ābestā 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs
- Everyone hates code they didnāt write
- Donāt use unnecessary dependencies
- Coding standards prevent arguments
- Write meaningful commit messages
- Donāt ever stop learning new things
- Code reviews spread knowledge
- Always build for maintainability
- Ask for help when youāre stuck
- Fix root causes, not symptoms
- Software is never completed
- Estimates are not promises
- Ship early, iterate often
- Keep. It. Simple.
Solid list, even though 14 is up for debate in my opinion: Software can be completed. You have a use case / problem, you solve that problem, done. Your software is completed now. There might still be bugs and they should be fixed ā but this doesnāt āaddā to the program. Donāt use āsoftware is never doneā as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.
@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I use Alt+.
all the time, itās great. š
FWIW, another thing I often use is !!
to recall the entire previous command line:
$ find -iname '*foo*'
./This is a foo file.txt
$ cat "$(!!)"
cat "$(find -iname '*foo*')"
This is just a test.
Yep!
Or:
$ ls -al subdir
ls: cannot open directory 'subdir': Permission denied
$ sudo !!
sudo ls -al subdir
total 0
drwx------ 2 root root 60 Jun 20 19:39 .
drwx------ 7 jess jess 360 Jun 20 19:39 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Jun 20 19:39 nothing-to-see
@prologic@twtxt.net Iām trying to call some libc functions (because the Rust stdlib does not have an equivalent for getpeername()
, for example, so I donāt have a choice), so I have to do some FFI stuff and deal with raw pointers and all that, which is very gnarly in Rust ā because youāre not supposed to do this. Things like that are trivial in C or even Assembler, but I have not yet understood what Rust does under the hood. How and when does it allocate or free memory ⦠is the pointer that I get even still valid by the time I do the libc call? Stuff like that.
I hope that I eventually learn this over time ⦠but I get slapped in the face at every step. Itās very frustrating and Iām always this š¤ close to giving up (only to try again a year later).
Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess I could ājustā use some 3rd party library for this. socket2 gets mentioned a lot in this context. But I donāt want to. I literally need one getpeername()
call during the lifetime of my program, I donāt even do the socket()
, bind()
, listen()
, accept()
dance, I already have a fully functional file descriptor. Using a library for that is total overkill and Iād rather do it myself. (And look at the version number: 0.5.10
. The library is 6 years old but theyāre still saying: āNah, weāre not 1.0 yet, we reserve the right to make breaking changes with every new release.ā So many Rust libs are still unstable ā¦)
⦠and I could go on and on and on ⦠š¤£
So I was using this function in Rust:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/path/struct.Path.html#method.display
Note the little 1.0.0
in the top right corner, which means that this function has been āstable since Rust version 1.0.0ā. Weāre at 1.87 now, so weāre good.
Then I compiled my program on OpenBSD with Rust 1.86, i.e. just one version behind, but well ahead of 1.0.0.
The compiler said that I was using an unstable library feature.
Turns out, that function internally uses this:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ffi/struct.OsStr.html#method.display
And that is only available since Rust 1.87.
How was I supposed to know this? š¤Øš«©
Current toy project: an image feed generated by mk(1). Still some edges to clean up but itās nice: http://a.9srv.net/img/_readme.html
@nghialele@nghia.im Man, I wish I could watch Formula 1 on a regular basis again, but it has become expensive as fuck here. š«¤
This is my highlight, really, havenāt seen this in action in a loooooooong time:
@oloke@nghia.im iām reading about this Garage today, will watch this one for sure, promising, since those folks look like familiar with YunoHost ecosystem and French things
also found another things called Riak
next up: authentication center / for both work & personal use.
for the work project, the customers (of my client) are unhappy with the account login flow and I need a fast & easy SSO for them.
for personal use: just a gateway to lock all the apps and provide access to friends.
i slowly realize the power of 1% everyday on what i am doing.
Maybe youāll enjoy this as well:
I still have one of my first modems, a Creatix LC 144 VF:
I think this was the modem that I used when I first connected to the internet, but Iām not sure.
I plugged it in again and it still works:
The firmware appears to be from 1994, which sounds about right. I donāt think we had internet access before that. We certainly did use local mailboxes, though. (Or BBSās, as you might call them.)
I now want to actually use that modem again. For the moment, I can only use a phone to dial into it, I lack a second modem to actually establish a connection. Hereās a video:
Not spectacular, but the modem does answer after me entering ATA
.
I bought another cheap old modem on eBay and am now waiting for it to arrive. Once itās here, I want to simulate an actual dial-up session, hopefully from OS/2 or Windows 3.x.
One of the nicest things about Go is the language itself, comparing Go to other popular languages in terms of the complexity to learn to be proficient in:
- Go:
25
keywords (Stack Overflow); CSP-style concurrency (goroutines & channels)
- Python 2:
30
keywords (TutorialsPoint); GIL-bound threads & multiprocessing (Wikipedia)
- Python 3:
35
keywords (Initial Commit); GIL-bound threads,asyncio
& multiprocessing (Wikipedia, DEV Community)
- Java:
50
keywords (Stack Overflow); threads +java.util.concurrent
(Wikipedia)
- C++:
82
keywords (Stack Overflow);std::thread
, atomics & futures (en.cppreference.com)
- JavaScript:
38
keywords (Stack Overflow); single-threaded event loop &async/await
, Web Workers (Wikipedia)
- Ruby:
42
keywords (Stack Overflow); GIL-bound threads (MRI), fibers & processes (Wikipedia)
@movq@www.uninformativ.de i feel like when i read go code iām reading some algebra shit where every part is 1-5 letters long and then thereās weird symbols like :=
and itās just infinitely harder for me to parse and infer meaning from lol. itās such a me problem
This is one of my attempts:
$ go build ./cmd/xor/... && ./xor
Generation 95 | Fitness: 0.999964 | Nodes: 9 | Conns: 19
Target reached!
Best network performance:
[0 0] ā got=0 exp=0 (raw=0.000) ā
[0 1] ā got=1 exp=1 (raw=0.990) ā
[1 0] ā got=1 exp=1 (raw=0.716) ā
[1 1] ā got=0 exp=0 (raw=0.045) ā
Overall accuracy: 100.0%
Wrote best.dot ā render with `dot -Tpng best.dot -o best.png`
@bender@twtxt.net Just to save some unnecessary und useless network traffic. :-) So that I can download more 1080p videos!!1
1 RPM
. This is a rather aggressive rate limit actually. This basically makes Github inaccessible and useless for basically anything unless you're logged in. You can basically kiss "pursuing" casually, anonymously goodbye.
@bender@twtxt.net 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 š¤£
@bender@twtxt.net Basically the way Iām reading this is 1 RPM
. This is a rather aggressive rate limit actually. This basically makes Github inaccessible and useless for basically anything unless youāre logged in. You can basically kiss āpursuingā casually, anonymously goodbye.
Imagine if I imposed that kind of rate limit on twtxt.net?! š¤£
The album I got by accident is starting to grow on me. Not that bad. š¤ Itās Dredg ā El Cielo, btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4JB8rmXaO8&list=PLRASiMqDV8psZSFQi7nUX4p0R8oRHbUy_&index=1
@bender@twtxt.net Iām not sure this is accurate, if you lookup mine:
$ whois shortcircuit.net.au 2>&1 | grep -i creat
created: 1986-03-05
I think this has to be the registrarās creation date no? š¤
And on a similar note, cross-post from Mastodon:
What I love about HTML and HTTP is that it can degrade rather gracefully on old browsers.
My website isnāt spectacular but I donāt think it looks horrible, either. And itās still usable just fine all the way down to WfW 3.11:
Itās not perfect, but itās usable. And that makes me happy. Almost 30 years of compatibilty.
The biggest sacrifice is probably that I donāt enforce TLS and that HTTP 1.0 has no Host:
header, so no vhosts (or rather, everything must come from the default vhost). (Yes, some old browsers send Host:
, even though they predate HTTP 1.1. Netscape does, but not IBM WebExplorer, for example.)
(On the other hand, it might completely suck on modern mobile devices. Dunno, I barely use those. š¤Ŗ)
morning yarnverse (itās 1:30pm here i slept in). iām already bored
Iāve just released version 1.0 of twtxt.el (the Emacs client), the stable and final version with the current extensions. Iāll let the community maintain it, if there are interested in using it. I will also be open to fix small bugs.
I donāt know if this twt is a goodbye or a see you later. Maybe I will never come back, or maybe I will post a new twt this afternoon. But itās always important to be grateful. Thanks to @prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de @eapl.me@eapl.me @bender@twtxt.net @aelaraji@aelaraji.com @arne@uplegger.eu @david@collantes.us @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt @xuu@txt.sour.is @sorenpeter@darch.dk for everything you have taught me. Iāve learned a lot about #twtxt, HTTP and working in community. It has been a fantastic adventure!
What will become of me? I have created a twtxt fork called Texudus (https://texudus.readthedocs.io/). I want to continue learning on my own without the legacy limitations or technologies that implement twtxt. Itās not a replacement for any technology, itās just my own little lab. I have also made a fork of my own client and will be focusing on it for a while. I donāt expect anyone to use it, but feedback is always welcome.
Best regards to everyone.
#twtxt #emacs #twtxt-el #texudus
@movq@www.uninformativ.de If weāre focusing on solving the āmissing rootsā problems. I would start to think about āclient recommendationsā. The first recommendation would be:
- Replying to a Twt that has no initial Subject must itself have a Subject of the form (hash; url).
This way itās a hint to fetching clients that follow B, but not A (in the case of no mentions) that the Subject/Root might (very likely) is in the feed url
.
7
to 12
and use the first 12
characters of the base32 encoded blake2b hash. This will solve two problems, the fact that all hashes today either end in q
or a
(oops) š
And increasing the Twt Hash size will ensure that we never run into the chance of collision for ions to come. Chances of a 50% collision with 64 bits / 12 characters is roughly ~12.44B Twts. That ought to be enough! -- I also propose that we modify all our clients and make this change from the 1st July 2025, which will be Yarn.social's 5th birthday and 5 years since I started this whole project and endeavour! š± #Twtxt #Update
@eapl.me@eapl.me I honestly believe you are overreacting here a little bit 𤣠I completely emphasize with you, it can be pretty tough to feel part of a community at times and run a project with a kind of ādemocracyā or āvote by committeeā. But one thing that life has taught me about open source projects and especially decentralised ecosystems is that this doesnāt really work.
It isnāt that Iāve not considered all the other options on the table (which can still be), itās just that Iāve made a decision as the project lead that largely helped trigger a rebirth of the use of Twtxt back in July 1 2020. There are good reasons not to change the threading model right now, as the changes being proposed are quite disruptive and donāt consider all the possible things that could go wrong.
We havet an AI assistant at work, new version came out today ānearby restaurant recommendationsā mentioned. Gotta try that!
Ask it where I can get a burger, knowing thereās 3 spots that had it on the menu, AI says thereās none. Ask it to list all the restaurants nearby it can check⦠it knows 3, of the 10 or so around, but 1/3, even has a burger, on the menu.
Ask it to list the whole menu at restaurant 1: it hallucinates random meals, none of which they had (I ate there).
Restaurant 2 (the one most people go to, so they must have at least tested it with this one): it lists the soup of the day and ¾ meals available. Incomplete, but better than false.
Restaurant 3: it says āfoodā and gives a general description of food. You have to be fucking kidding me!
āBuT cAnInE, tHe A(G)i ReVoLuTiOn Is NoWā
Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.4 released
The Trinity Desktop Environment, the modern-day continuation of the KDE 3.x series, has released version R14.1.4. This maintenance release brings new vector wallpapers and colour schemes, support for Unicode surrogate characters and planes above zero (for emoji, among other things), tabs in kpdf, transparency and other new visual effects for Dekorator, and much more. TDE R14.1.4 is already available for a variety of Linux distributions, and c ⦠ā Read more
Gaza blockade depletes World Food Programme stocks + 1 more story
North Korea confirms sending troops to Russia as a defense pact; Gaza blockade leaves World Food Programme out of supplies, risking starvation for millions. ā Read more
I just fixed a bug in ttās reply to parent feature. Previously, when the message tree looked like the following
Message
āā“Reply 1
ā āā“Subreply
āā“Reply 2
and āReply 2ā was selected, pressing A
to reply to the parent should have picked āMessageā. However, a reply to āReply 2ā was composed instead. The reason was a precausiously introduced safety guard to abort the parent search which stopped at āSubreplyā, because its subject didnāt match āReply 2āās. It was originally intended to abort on a completely different message conversation root. Just in case. Turns out that this thoght was flawed.
Fixing bugs by only removing code is always cool. :-)
Can you automate the drawing with a script? On X11, you can:
#!/bin/sh
# Position the pointer at the center of the dot, then run this script.
sleep 1
start=$(xdotool getmouselocation --shell)
eval $start
r=400
steps=100
down=0
for step in $(seq $((steps + 1)) )
do
# pi = 4 * atan(1)
new_x=$(printf '%s + %s * c(%s / %s * 2 * (4 * a(1)))\n' $X $r $step $steps | bc -l)
new_y=$(printf '%s + %s * s(%s / %s * 2 * (4 * a(1)))\n' $Y $r $step $steps | bc -l)
xte "mousemove ${new_x%%.*} ${new_y%%.*}"
if ! (( down ))
then
xte 'mousedown 1'
down=1
fi
done
xte 'mouseup 1'
xte "mousemove $X $Y"
Interestingly, you can abuse the scoring system (not manually, only with a script). Since the mouse jumps to the locations along the circle, you can just use very few steps and still get a great score because every step you make is very accurate ā but the result looks funny:
š„“
This is something for @movq@www.uninformativ.de and old OS hobbyists alike: FreeDOS 1.4! Get it while itās hot!
Regex Isnāt Hard - Tim Kellogg š this is a pretty good conscience article on regexes, and I agree, regex isnāt that hard⢠ā However I think I can make the TL;DR even shorter š
Regex core subset (portable across languages):
Character sets
⢠a matches āaā
⢠[a-z] any lowercase
⢠[a-zA-Z0-9] alphanumeric
⢠[^ab] any char but a or b
Repetition (applies to the preceding atom)
⢠? zero or one
⢠* zero or more
⢠+ one or more
Groups
⢠(ab)+ matches āabā, āababā, ā¦
⢠Capture for extract/substitute via $1 or \1
Operators
⢠foo|bar = foo or bar
⢠^ start anchor
⢠$ end anchor
Ignore nonāportable shortcuts: \w, ., {n}, *?, lookarounds.
#event:abc123 RSVP: yes +1
Hmmm thereās a bug somewhere in the way Iām ingesting archived feeds š¤
sqlite> select * from twts where content like 'The web is such garbage these days%';
hash = 37sjhla
feed_url = https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/1
content = The web is such garbage these days š Or is it the garbage search engines? š¤
created = 2024-11-14T01:53:46Z
created_dt = 2024-11-14 01:53:46
subject = #37sjhla
mentions = []
tags = []
links = []
sqlite>
@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run Ah, I just found this, didnāt see it before:
https://restic.net/#compatibility
So, yeah, they do use semver and, yes, theyāre not at 1.0.0 yet, so things might break on the next restic update ⦠but they āpromiseā to not break things too lightheartedly. Hm, well. š Probably doesnāt make a big difference (they donāt say ādonāt use this software until we reach 1.0.0ā).
AS136907 HWCLOUDS-AS-AP HUAWEI CLOUDS
@prologic@twtxt.net This shi_ is as fun as it is frustrating! š the bot is poking at me from a different ASN now, Alibabaās.
- Short term solution: Iāve geo-locked my Timeline instance since Iām the only one using it (and I only do so for reading twts when Iām away from terminal).
- Long term: I took a look at your Caddy WAF but couldnāt figure things out on my own; until then, Iāll be poking at Caddy-Defender, maybe throw in a Crowdsec for lols⦠#FUN
Google is a monopolist in online advertising tech, judge says
Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely ⦠ā Read more
Signs of life detected on distant planet + 1 more story
Plus, WHO finalizes pandemic treaty ā Read more
@david@collantes.us If I run
printf '%s\n%s\n%s' 'https://aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt' '2025-04-16T22:49:11+00:00' "Am I tripping or `rsync` is actually THIS effing faster than `scp`!!? š«Ø" | b2sum -l 256 | awk '{ print $1 }' | xxd -r -p | base32 | tr -d '=' | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' | tail -c 8
I have xqfsv6a
. It is raw text
But⦠If I change de date to 2025-04-16T22:49:11Z
I have si4er3q
.
Even though I really do like the shell, I always use Dolphin to mount my digicam SD card and copy the photos onto my computer. I finally added a context menu item in Dolphin to create a forest stroll directory with the current date in order to save some typing:
The following goes in ~/.local/share/kservices5/ServiceMenus/galmkdir.desktop:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
X-KDE-ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin,inode/directory
Actions=Waldspaziergang;
[Desktop Action Waldspaziergang]
Name=Heutigen Waldspaziergang anlegenā¦
Icon=folder-green
Exec=~/src/gelbariab/galmkdir "%f"
In order to update the KDE desktop cache and make this action menu item available in Dolphin, I ran:
kbuildsycoca5
The referenced galmkdir
script looks like that:
#!/bin/sh
set -e
current_dir="$1"
if [ -z "$current_dir" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 DIRECTORY" >&2
exit 1
fi
dir="$(kdialog \
--geometry 350x50 \
--title "Heutigen Waldspaziergang anlegen" \
--inputbox "Neues Verzeichnis in ā$current_dirā anlegen:" \
"waldspaziergang-$(date +%Y-%m-%d)")"
mkdir "$current_dir/$dir"
dolphin "$current_dir/$dir"
This solution is far from perfect, though. Ideally, Iād love to have it in the āCreate Newā menu instead of the āActionsā menu. But that doesnāt really work. I cannot define a default directory name, not to mention even a dynamic one with the current date. (I would have to update the .desktop file every day or so.) I also failed to create an empty directory. I somehow managed to create a directory with some other templates in it for some reason I do not really understand.
Letās see how that works out in the next days. If I like it, I might define a few more default directory names.
@andros@twtxt.andros.dev how often do you send a private message on the Fediverse? How often do you send PGP/SMIME encrypted emails? Are there other tools that are more suitable for the task? If implementing direct/private messages on twtxt
scratches an itch (you know, that hobbyist itch we all get from time to time), then donāt give up so easily. Worse comes to worse, and your feed becomes too noisy, people can simply unfollow/mute.
I really donāt care about direct messages here, but I might be on that bottom 1%!