We’re entering the “too hot to think”-season in 3, 2, 1 … and we’re live!

Saw this on Mastodon:

https://racingbunny.com/@mookie/114718466149264471

18 rules of Software Engineering

1. You will regret complexity when on-call
   
2. Stop falling in love with your own code
   
3. Everything is a trade-off. There’s no “best” 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs
   
4. Everyone hates code they didn’t write
   
5. Don’t use unnecessary dependencies
   
6. Coding standards prevent arguments
   
7. Write meaningful commit messages
   
8. Don’t ever stop learning new things
   
9. Code reviews spread knowledge
   
10. Always build for maintainability
    
11. Ask for help when you’re stuck
    
12. Fix root causes, not symptoms
    
13. Software is never completed
    
14. Estimates are not promises
    
15. Ship early, iterate often
    
16. 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 – but this doesn’t “add” to the program. Don’t use “software is never done” as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I use Alt+. all the time, it’s great. 👌

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 … or just bullshit.

I’m Alex, COO at ColdIQ. Built a $4.5M ARR business in under 2 years.

Some “C-level” guy telling people what to do, yeah, I have my doubts.

@oloke@nghia.im i’m 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

https://docs.riak.com/riak/cs/2.1.1.1.html

@prologic@twtxt.net Mosaic (2.7) works fine, I maintain that package in the AUR and test my website regularly. 😅

https://movq.de/v/d7787d6fb1/s.png

Maybe you’ll enjoy this as well:

I still have one of my first modems, a Creatix LC 144 VF:

Image

I think this was the modem that I used when I first connected to the internet, but I’m not sure.

I plugged it in again and it still works:

Image

Image

The firmware appears to be from 1994, which sounds about right. I don’t think we had internet access before that. We certainly did use local mailboxes, though. (Or BBS’s, 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. Here’s a video:

Image

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 it’s 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)
  

Buying a TV these days, means trying to avoid endless enshitification:
-Spyware and adware
-Shitty AI upscaling/ frame interpolation
-HW that breaks after 2 - 3 years
-One off OS, dead on arrival
-Android OS, that starts lagging after the third update
-8 buttons worth of ads, on your remote

You probably have to make some kind of a compromise. I thought that was buying from some other brand like Hyundai, but that one also felt into some of those categories and just broke, after less than 3 years of use. At this point I’ll probably go back to LG and hope their HW is still reliable and the rest manageable… It has AI bullshit and knowing LG, probably some spyware you have to try your best to get rid of, can buy a remote with “only” 2 ads on it, some web-based OS shared between all their TVs, that usually gets 4 - 5 years worth of updates and works decently enough afterwards.

At this point, I’ll probably settle for anything that doesn’t literally fall apart, not even 3 years in, like the Hyundai did.

@bender@twtxt.net 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net I’m 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 registrar’s creation date no? 🤔

🚨 «O selo de “Falso” aplica-se também ao momento em que Montenegro disse ser “mentira” o que Santos estava a dizer sobre o “corte na verba” para 2025. De facto, no OE2025, a verba para a FCT sofreu um corte de cerca de 70 milhões de euros (-10%) em comparação com o ano transato, baixando de 675 milhões para 607 milhões de euros. É o valor mais baixo desde 2018»: https://poligrafo.sapo.pt/politica/pedro-nuno-santos-vs-luis-montenegro-quem-faltou-mais-a-verdade-no-frente-a-frente-2/

We havet an AI assistant at work, new version came out today “nearby restaurant recommendations” mentioned. Gotta try that!

Ask it where I can get a burger, knowing there’s 3 spots that had it on the menu, AI says there’s 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 “food” and gives a general description of food. You have to be fucking kidding me!

“BuT cAnInE, tHe A(G)i ReVoLuTiOn Is NoW”

Je voudrais synchroniser 2 disques : l’un contient des musiques au format .opus, il faut les convertir sur le second disque au format mp3. J’utilise déjà beets pour importer les musiques sur le premier disque. Comment vous feriez ça? Merci! #question

9front “CLAUSE 15 COMMON ELEMENTS OF MAUS AND STAR TYPE” released
Few things in life make me happier than a new 9front release. This new release, 9front “CLAUSE 15 COMMON ELEMENTS OF MAUS AND STAR TYPE”, comes with a variety of fixes and new features, such as temperature sensor support for Ryzen processors, a new Intel i225 2.5 GbE driver, a number of low-level kernel improvements, and so, so many more small fixes and changes. If you use 9front, you already know all o … ⌘ Read more

I just fixed a bug in tt’s reply to parent feature. Previously, when the message tree looked like the following

Message
├╴Reply 1
│ └╴Subreply
└╴Reply 2

and “Reply 2” was selected, pressing A to reply to the parent should have picked “Message”. However, a reply to “Reply 2” was composed instead. The reason was a precausiously introduced safety guard to abort the parent search which stopped at “Subreply”, because its subject didn’t match “Reply 2”’s. 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"

Image

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 – but the result looks funny:

Image

🥴

The lost secrets of Palm webOS (2014)
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DeepMind releases Lyria 2 music generation model
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China plans to build a nuclear power plant on the Moon + 2 more stories
China urges Korea to restrict rare earth exports to U.S.; global coral bleaching spreads due to record ocean heat; China plans a nuclear power plant on the Moon. ⌘ Read more

@xuu@txt.sour.is or @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Do either of you have time this weekend to test upgrading your pod to the new cacher branch? 🤔 It is recommended you take a full backup of you pod beforehand, just in case. Keen to get this branch merged and to cut a new release finally after >2 years 🤣

Moon photovoltaics utilizing lunar regolith and halide perovskites
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@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I use to be a pot or more a day but have cut that back in the last 4 or so years to just 2-3 cups. Main reason was because I was getting jittery which didn’t happen before. I do think it is good to go without periodically (probably applies to more things than coffee) to just reset the system.

I don’t drink it often but decaf’s taste has gotten better too.

Cekura (Formerly Vocera) (YC F24) Is Hiring
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This code displays the last 10 lines of a twtxt feed without a full dowload.

FEED_URL="https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt"
MAX_RANGE=$(curl -sI $FEED_URL | grep -i 'content-length' | awk '{print $2}' | tr -d '\r')
MIN_RANGE=$((MAX_RANGE - 5000))

curl -s --range "$MIN_RANGE-$MAX_RANGE" "$FEED_URL" | grep -v -e '^#' -e '^$' | head -n 10

My self-response!

@prologic@twtxt.net @david@collantes.us

#twtxt

2,031-HP Hennessey Venom F5 Evolution Claims 0 to 200 MPH in 10 Seconds
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Cyberpunk 2077 on Switch 2 uses DLSS, making it the first Switch 2 game
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@prologic@twtxt.net This shi_ is as fun as it is frustrating! 😆 the bot is poking at me from a different ASN now, Alibaba’s.

1. Short term solution: I’ve geo-locked my Timeline instance since I’m the only one using it (and I only do so for reading twts when I’m away from terminal).
   
2. Long term: I took a look at your Caddy WAF but couldn’t figure things out on my own; until then, I’ll be poking at Caddy-Defender, maybe throw in a Crowdsec for lols… #FUN

Judge declares Google’s ad network an illegal monopoly + 2 more stories
Plus, climate change may elevate arsenic in rice and new cellular discovery boosts cancer drugs. ⌘ Read more

LXQt 2.2.0 released
LXQt, the Qt-based alternative to KDE as Xfce is the GTK-based alternative to GNOME, has released version 2.2.0. LXQt is in the middle of its transition to Wayland, and as such, this release brings a number of fixes and improvements for Wayland, like improved multi-display support and updated compatibility with Wayland compositors. Beyond all the Wayland work, LXQt Power Management now supports power profiles, text rendering in QTerminal and QTermWidget has been improved, the file manager PC … ⌘ Read more

I use restic and Backblaze B2 for offline backup storage at a cost of $6/TB/month. I don’t backup my entire ~20TB NAS and its datasets however, so I’m only paying about ~$2/month right now. I only backup the most important things I cannot afford to lose or annot re-created.

Ink and Switch Constraint System (2023)
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Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and share the results
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Gemini 2.5 Flash
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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:

Image

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 anlegen…
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="$(kdialog \
    --geometry 350x50 \
    --title "Heutigen Waldspaziergang anlegen" \
    --inputbox "Neues Verzeichnis in „$current_dir“ anlegen:" \
    "waldspaziergang-$(date +%Y-%m-%d)")"
mkdir "$current_dir/$dir"
dolphin "$current_dir/$dir"

This solution is far from perfect, though. Ideally, I’d love to have it in the “Create New” menu instead of the “Actions” menu. But that doesn’t 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.

Let’s see how that works out in the next days. If I like it, I might define a few more default directory names.

How Long Can SSD Store Data Unpowered? Year 2 Update (2024) [video]
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Generate videos in Gemini and Whisk with Veo 2
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OpenAI Is a Systemic Risk to the Tech Industry
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AI problems, top to bottom:

1: Open AI nerds, believe fine tuning a language model algorithm, will eventually produce an AGI god.

2: Subpar artists and techbros who can’t code, convinced AI image bashing and vibe coding, will help convince the dumber parts of Internet, they are a real deal.

3: Parasites, using AI to scam people, because they just want passive income, selling crap, made by an automated process.

Side: Adobe&co, killing Flash/old web, pricing new artists and developers out, to face learning curves of free tools, or use AI, peddled as solution.

Mosaic (YC W25) is building a general purpose agent for video editing
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@anth@a.9srv.net Hahaha, for a second I thought that you implemented word splitting according to Swiss (.ch) rules. :-D

Btw, both manpage links string(2) and getields(2) (it’s missing an f) point into nothingness: http://a.9srv.net/src/wordwrap.2.html

I can’t help but notice line 9: http://a.9srv.net/src/wordwrap.c

And I reckon your finger slipped one key to the right for quore: http://a.9srv.net/src/litclock.1.html

Cool stuff! :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net in this case it isn’t vendor lock-in. I believe they do it because the carrier “eats” the costs (the interest part of the instalments). The phones are fully unlocked.

I will return the two we got for parents, and re-buy them again, this time on an instalment plan. Why pay $2,000 up front when you can split the cost in convenient monthly payments, all interest free, right?

Amiga OS 3.2 Update 3 released
I’ve long lost the ability to keep track of whatever’s happening in the Amiga community, and personally I tend to just focus on tracking MorphOS and AROS as best I can. The remnants of the real AmigaOS, and especially who owns, maintains, and develops which version, are mired in legal battles and ownership limbo, and since I can think of about a trillion things I’d rather do than keep track of the interpersonal drama by reading various Amiga forums, I honestly didn’t ev … ⌘ Read more

I updated wordwrap.[ch] to more closely match the interface for string(2); it’s now just that plus a margin. I also updated litclock and marquee to match. http://a.9srv.net/src/index.html

Scientists map part of mouse brain with unprecedented detail + 2 more stories
Scientists map great ape genomes, revealing human links; experts achieve unprecedented mouse brain mapping detail; Trump cuts most tariffs but raises China’s steeply. ⌘ Read more

IBM unveils z17 mainframe, z/OS 3.2
IBM today announced the IBM z17, the next generation of the company’s iconic mainframe, fully engineered with AI capabilities across hardware, software, and systems operations. Powered by the new IBM Telum II processor, IBM z17 expands the system’s capabilities beyond transactional AI capabilities to enable new workloads. ↫ IBM z17 press release Alongside this brand new behemoth of a computer, IBM also announced z/OS 3.2, the next version of its mainframe opera … ⌘ Read more

FreeDOS 1.4 released
With FreeDOS being, well, DOS, you’d think there wasn’t much point in putting out major releases and making big changes, and you’d mostly be right. However, being a DOS clone doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement within the confines of the various parts and tools that make up DOS, and that’s exactly where FreeDOS focuses its attention. FreeDOS 1.4 comes about three years after 1.2. This version includes an updated FreeCOM, Install program, and HTML Help system. This also includes i … ⌘ Read more

hello friends i spent a couple hours today using a random string generator by charm CLI called hotdiva2000 to make a script that 1) generates a static index.html page 2) the page is a prompt generator where all the prompts are from hotdiva2000!!!!!

this makes more sense if you look at it check it out

https://prompts.4-walls.net/hotdiva2004/

IBM Announces the Z17 Mainframe Powered by Telum II Processors
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@prologic@twtxt.net, from IRC:

1. Saving preferences is failing. Specifically trying to save “Open Links” on the same window. For sure it isn’t happening. Check errors on browser’s console.
   
2. Search results pagination is broken. Search for “twtxt.net” and see it. Also, picking oldest/newest makes no difference on that search query.