@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Just before the pandemic, we watched Uncle Bob videos once a week in the lunch break. While almost all of my old teammates agreed with his views, I partially found them to be very odd and even counterproductive.

I didn’t come across John Ousterhout or any of his work before, at least not deliberately. So, this document is my first contact.

I only finished the chapter on comments and I totally agree with John so far. This document just manifests to me how weird Bob’s view is on certain subjects.

I always disagreed with the concept of a maximum method length. Sure, generally, shorter functions are probably better, but it always depends. And I’ve certainly seen super short methods that just made the code flow even worse to follow. While “one function should only do one thing” is a nice general rule, I’m 100% in team John with the shown examples. There are cases, where this doesn’t help readability at all. Not even close.

To me, a function always has to justify its existence. Either by reusing it at least at another place or by coming up with dedicated tests for it. But if it is just called once and there are no tests, I almost always decide against it. Personally, I don’t mind longer methods. We just recently had a discussion about that and I lost against two other workmates who are more in Uncle Bob’s camp, they refactored one medium sized method into three very short ones. Luckily, we agree on most other topics.

Lol, what!? The shorter the method, the longer the variables inside? I first thought I misread or the writeup mixed it up. I’ll always do it the other way around.

I’ve been also bitten badly by outdated comments in the past, but Bob must have worked on really terrible projects to end up with such an attitude to dislike comments. Oh well. No doubt, I’ve come across by several orders of magnitude more useless comments, in my experience (autogenerated) JavaDocs fall in the category more frequently than not. So, I know that there are different types of comments. A comment doesn’t automatically mean that it is good and justified.

But I also partially agree with Bob and John and think that a good name has a proper chance to save a comment. Though, when in doubt, I go John’s route and use a shorter name with a comment rather than use a kilometer long identifier. Writing good comments typically takes some time, sometimes much longer than writing the code. It regularly takes me several minutes. It’s a hard art.

I perhaps should read up on John’s work. He seems to be more reasonable and likeminded. :-) Let me continue to complete this document.

Reading into the so-called CLEAN architecture reminds me of the work I did nearly two decades earlier called circuits hmmm 🧐

This document is the result of a series of discussions between Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin and John Ousterhout, held between September 2024 and February 2025. The text addresses three main topics: method length, comments, and Test Driven Development (TDD).
https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code/blob/main/README.md
This is something to read and reflect on for days.

I read a lot about Clean Code, SOLID, TDD, DDD… now I’m discovering «A Philosophy of Software Design»… but nobody talks about the importance of the project architecture. Do we depend on the framework to do the work for us?
You know I’m a big fan of Clean Architecture, but I feel alone when I share my thoughts on social media or at work.
You have to think outside the framework.

Mozilla reaffirms it won’t remove Manifest v2 support from Firefox
Mozilla has officially reiterated that it’s going to keep offering support for both Manifest v2 and Manifest v3 extensions in Firefox. Google is removing support for Manifest v2 from Chrome, and with it a feature called blockingWebRequest that is used by ad blockers like uBlock Origin. Google’s replacement for that feature is more restrictive and less capable, and as such, uBlock Origin no longer wor … ⌘ Read more

12 years of incubating Wayland color management
The Wayland color-management protocol extension has landed on Feb 13th, 2025, in upstream wayland-protocols repository in the staging directory. It was released with wayland-protocols 1.41. The extension enables proper interactions between traditional (sRGB), Wide Color Gamut (WCG), and High Dynamic Range (HDR) image sources and displays once implemented in Wayland compositors and used in applications. Of course, a protocol is just a la … ⌘ Read more

RNA
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Europe launches advanced AI weather forecasting system + 1 more story
Europe launches an advanced AI weather forecasting system for improved predictions; Israel demands demilitarization of southern Syria amid rising tensions. ⌘ Read more

Xcode phones home a lot, and that should worry you
I’ve saved the worst for last. For some reason, Xcode phones home to appstoreconnect.apple.com every time I open an Xcode project. This also appears to be unnecessary, and I experience no problems after denying the connections in Little Snitch, so I do! I assume that the connections send identifying information about the Xcode project to Apple, otherwise why even make the connections when opening a project? And all of these connect … ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm gives OEMs the option of 8 years of Android updates
Starting with Android smartphones running on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform, Qualcomm Technologies now offers device manufacturers the ability to provide support for up to eight consecutive years of Android software and security updates. Smartphones launching on new Snapdragon 8 and 7-series mobile platforms will also be eligible to receive this extended support. ↫ Mike Genewich I mean, good news of cou … ⌘ Read more

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds
We now have the bizarre situation that anyone with any sense can see that America is no longer a reliable partner, and that the entire US business world bows to Trump’s dictatorial will, but we STILL are doing everything we can to transfer entire governments and most of our own businesses to their clouds. Not only is it scary to have all your data available to US spying, it is also a huge … ⌘ Read more

Sailfish OS 5.0 released for all supported devices
Sailfish OS 5.0, originally released late last year as part of the new Jolla C2 Community Phone, will now be pushed to all Sailfish OS devices. There have been several other minor releases since the original release, so if you’re running Sailfish OS on something other than the C2, you’re getting a release with some more bugfixes and improvements. The main improvement is an upgrade to Gecko ESR91, with work underway to move to ESR1 … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft improves Windows 11’s Start menu somewhat
Microsoft seems to be addressing some of the oddities with the Windows 11 Start menu, finally adding basic views that should’ve been in Windows 11 since the very start. We’re introducing two new views to the “All” page in the Start menu: grid and category view. Grid and list view shows your apps in alphabetical order and category view groups all your apps into categories, ordered by usage. This change is gradually rolling out so … ⌘ Read more

The DOS 3.3 SYS.COM bug hunt!
Last year somebody reported a problem with the DOS 3.3 SYS.COM command when used with NetDrive. They started with a valid FAT12 image, ran SYS.COM to make it bootable, and then they were not able to mount the image using NetDrive again. Running SYS.COM against the image had broken something. Besides copying the operating system’s hidden files to the target drive letter, SYS.COM also copies some boot code into the first sector of the disk. In general it does not make sense … ⌘ Read more

Giants
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Illumos on SPARC: possible, but problematic
While SPARC may no longer be supported by the main Illumos project, it still works and is still viable. This page brings together a variety of information regarding Illumos on SPARC, not necessarily limited to Tribblix. ↫ Tribblix website It seems running Tribblix – and other Illumos-based distributions – on SPARC is still possible, but there are some serious limitations anyone who has tried to use even slightly older operating systems will be fai … ⌘ Read more

Flathub safety: a layered approach from source to user
About two weeks ago we talked about why Fedora manages its own Flatpak repository, and why that sometimes leads to problems with upstream projects. Most recently, Fedora’s own OBS Flatpak was broken, leading to legal threats from the OBS project, demanding Fedora remove any and all branding from its OBS Flatpak. In response, Fedora’s outgoing project leader Matthew Miller gave an interview on YouTube to Brodie Robertson, in … ⌘ Read more

Philadelpia - Long run: 14.22 miles, 00:10:02 average pace, 02:22:39 duration
great long run. had a few places in mind to try and visit (tun tavern, rocky steps, the river thing) and hit them all with not really any idea where they were. pretty much just went tourist mode taking pictures and reading signs. it was so freaking cold! 22F i think. took the beanie off and the sweat had turned to ice, and my torso was all red from the rubbing of my clothes.
#running

Microsoft is paywalling features in Notepad and Paint
There’s some bad news for Windows users who want to use all of the built-in features of the operating system and its integrated apps. Going forward, Microsoft is restricting features in two iconic apps, which you’ll need to unlock with a paid subscription. The two apps in question? Notepad and Paint. Windows Insiders were previously able to use these app features free of charge. However, Microsoft is now making it necessary … ⌘ Read more

Chromium Ozone/Wayland: the last mile stretch
Lets start with some context, the project consists of implementing, shipping and maintaining native Wayland support in the Chromium project. Our team at Igalia has been leading the effort since it was first merged upstream back in 2016. For more historical context, there are a few blog posts and this amazing talk, by my colleagues Antonio Gomes and Max Ihlenfeldt, presented at last year’s Web Engines Hackfest. Especially due to the Lacros pr … ⌘ Read more

Scream Cipher
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1972 UNIX V2 “beta” resurrected from old tapes
There’s a number of backups of old DECtapes from Dennis Ritchie, which he gave to Warren Toomey in 1997. The tapes were eventually uploaded, and through analysis performed by Yufeng Gao, a lot of additional details, code, and software were recovered from them. A few days ago, Gao came back with the results from their analys of two more tapes, and on it, they found something quite special. Getting this recovered version to run was a bit of a … ⌘ Read more

here is my progress so far: https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/twtxt-direct-message-php
The encryption part seems to work, if I decrypt it the message with OpenSSL.
I think it can help you for some key parts not well explained in OpenSSL documentation.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev reading your spec I wrote a few notes here: https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/twtxt-direct-message-php/blob/main/direct_message_spec.md

@arne@uplegger.eu I haven’t check your repo yet, although you are using sodium, right?

Microsoft unveils experimental quantum chip using new state of matter + 1 more story
Microsoft unveils a new chip that accelerates quantum computing; Nvidia launches Evo 2, largest AI system for genetic research ⌘ Read more

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Could you share (perhaps in the extension document) the private key for alice?

I want to compare that I can read the encrypted message both from OpenSSL CLI and from the PHP OpenSSL library, following the spec.

Mozilla once again confirms it’s all about ads and “AI” now
We’ve recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that … ⌘ Read more

NES86: x86 emulation on the NES
The goal of this project is to emulate an Intel 8086 processor and supporting PC hardware well enough to run the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS), including a shell and utilities. It should be possible to run other x86 software as long as it doesn’t require more than a simple serial terminal. ↫ NES86 GitHub page Is this useful in any meaningful sense? No. Will this change the word? No. Does it have any other purpose than just being fun and cool? Nope. None of that … ⌘ Read more

The generative AI con
Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they’re building “advanced artificial intelligence” that can take “human-like actions,” but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds it’s abundantly clear that it absolutely isn’t and absolutely can’t. Despite the hype, the marketing, the tens of thousands of media articles, the trillions of dollars in market capitalization, none of this feels real, or at least real enough to s … ⌘ Read more

Broadcom, TSMC weigh possible Intel deals that would split storied chip maker
Broadcom has been closely examining Intel’s chip-design and marketing business, according to people familiar with the matter. It has informally discussed with its advisers making a bid but would likely only do so if it finds a partner for Intel’s manufacturing business, the people said.  Nothing has been submitted to Intel, the people cautioned, and Broadcom could decide not to … ⌘ Read more

Humane is shutting down the AI Pin and selling its remnants to HP
Humane is selling most of its company to HP for $116 million and will stop selling AI Pin, the company announced today. AI Pins that have already been purchased will continue to function normally until 3PM ET on February 28th, Humane says in a support document. After that date, Pins will “no longer connect to Humane’s servers.” As a result, AI Pin features will “no longer include calling, messaging, A … ⌘ Read more

KM3NeT
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AIDA64 drops support for Windows 95, 98, and ME
AIDA64, the popular benchmarking tool for Windows, released a new version today. I don’t particularly care about benchmarking – even less so benchmarking on Windows – but this new release comes with an interesting line in the release notes. Discontinued support for Windows 95, 98, Me ↫ AIDA64 v7.60 release notes Seeing a widely-used, popular piece of software drop support for Windows 95, 98, and ME only in this, the year of our lord, 2025 … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I am a big fan of “obvious” math facts that turn out to be wrong. If you want to understand how reusing space actually works, you are mostly stuck reading complexity theory papers right now. Ian wrote a good survey: https://iuuk.mff.cuni.cz/~iwmertz/papers/m23.reusing_space.pdf . It’s written for complexity theorists, but some of will make sense to programmers comfortable with math. Alternatively, I wrote an essay a few years ago explaining one technique, with (math-loving) programmers as the intended audience: https://www.falsifian.org/blog/2021/06/04/catalytic/ .

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Oh, that’s neat! Interesting how “obviously” isn’t all that obvious at all, even to the contrary. I reckon I have to read up on that subject on the weekend. :-)

I like how Ian’s and your photo complement each other, winter and summer join forces for something special. :-)

Researchers found gene linked to origins of human speech + 2 more stories
Scientists identify gene responsible for speech development; North Korea rejects US denuclearization pledge as absurd; Japan increases nuclear energy target to meet rising demands ⌘ Read more

ArcaOS 5.1.1 released
It’s been two years since the release of ArcaOS 5.1, which was a hugely important release because it brought UEFI support to this continuation of IBM’s OS/2, ensuring longevity for the project for years to come. Since I don’t think much is known about what, exactly, Arca Noae, and eComStation before it, has access to within the licensing agreement with IBM, it’s difficult to ascertain just how much room they actually have to make changes to the code at the core of the old OS/2. Regardles … ⌘ Read more

UNIX man pages
What might be somewhat more surprising though considering its research origins is that Unix almost since the very beginning had a comprehensive set of online reference documentation for all its commands, system calls, file formats, etc. These are the the manual- or man-pages. On Unix systems used interactively, the man-pages have historically always been installed, space permitting. The way the manual pages have evolved and how they are used has changed over the decades. This set of posts is intended … ⌘ Read more

Did the Windows 95 setup team forget that MS-DOS can do graphics?
One of the reactions to my discussion of why Windows 95 setup used three operating systems (and oh there were many) was my explanation that an MS-DOS based setup program would be text-mode. But c’mon, MS-DOS could do graphics! Are you just a bunch of morons? Yes, MS-DOS could do graphics, in the sense that it didn’t actively prevent you from doing graphics. You were still responsible for everything you … ⌘ Read more

Bloody hell 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

$ jq -r --arg host "gopher.mills.io" '. | select(.request.host==$host) | "\(.request.client_ip) \(.request.uri) \(.request.headers["User-Agent"])"' mills.io.log-au | while IFS=$' ' read -r ip uri ua; do asn="$(geoip -a "$ip")"; echo "$asn $ip $uri $ua"; done | grep -E '^45102.*' | sort | head
45102 47.251.70.245 /gopher.floodgap.com/0/feeds/democracynow/2015/Oct/14/0 ["Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"]
45102 47.251.84.25 /gopher.floodgap.com/0/feeds/voaheadlines/2014/Mar/09/voanews.com-content-article-1867433.html ["Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"]
45102 47.82.10.106 /gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi%3F0692937396569A52972EB2 ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43"]
45102 47.82.10.106 /gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi%3F9657307A96569A52974634 ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43"]
45102 47.82.10.106 /gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi%3FB7571C7896569A529E6603 ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43"]
45102 47.82.10.106 /gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi%3FB75EF81296569A529E6617 ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43"]
45102 47.82.10.106 /gopher.viste.fr/1/OnlineTools/hangman.cgi%3FC6564ADB96569A5A9E660C ["Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43"]

Archive Request
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Thinking about trying tt. If it really usable i will abandon twtxtdon (service to read twtxt feeds from mastodon client), which currently has only authorization implemented

Trump announces new tariffs on major trading partners + 1 more story
Trump announces new global tariffs impacting India, Japan, and the EU; Zelenskyy calls for a unified European army amid rising Russian threats ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Of course you don’t notice it when yarnd only shows at most the last n messages of a feed. As an example, check out mckinley’s message from 2023-01-09T22:42:37Z. It has “[Scheduled][Scheduled][Scheduled]“… in it. This text in square brackets is repeated numerous times. If you search his feed for closing square bracket followed by an opening square bracket (][) you will find a bunch more of these. It goes without question he never typed that in his feed. My client saves each twt hash I’ve explicitly marked read. A few days ago, I got plenty of apparently years old, yet suddenly unread messages. Each and every single one of them containing this repeated bracketed text thing. The only conclusion is that something messed up the feed again.

The project is a POC (Proof of Concept) that went into production and the company has customers who are using it. The developers had been working for several years, without testing, structure, isolation and so on. The company hired me to transform the project into a real product. There are in my hands 422 python files to transform that they beg me a refactore, architecture and testing. Every developer’s bad dream.
My first step is to read and understand the tree because there are apps inside other apps call each other. I am very determined to work on a new repository.

JotaleaOS: a very tiny hobby operating system
JotaleaOS is an open source, minimalistic, experimental operating system made by Jotalea, designed for extreme low-resource environments. It does not support external programs or games, as it lacks a standard application execution environment. The system is entirely self-contained, running only its built-in commands. ↫ JotaleaOS website Exactly what is says on the tin: a tiny operating system created entirely as a learning experience. That’s … ⌘ Read more

Hardwood
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Fedora should not push its users to its own Flatpak repository
Unlike most (all?) other distributions with built-in Flatpak support, Fedora maintains its own repository of Flatpak applications. Everyone else defaults to using Flathub, where developers of applications themselves tend to publish their Flatpaks. Fedora’s ‘shadow Flathub’ sometimes leads to problems, with Fedora-made Flatpaks containing bugs and brokenness, while presenting themselves as official, develope … ⌘ Read more

@eapl.me@eapl.me Yeah, you need some kind of storage for that. But chances are that there’s already a cache in place. Ideally, the client remembers etags or last modified timestamps in order to reduce unnecessary network traffic when fetching feeds over HTTP(S).

A newsreader without read flags would be totally useless to me. But I also do not subscribe to fire hose feeds, so maybe that’s a different story with these. I don’t know.

To me, filtering read messages out and only showing new messages is the obvious solution. No need for notifications in my opinion.

There are different approaches with read flags. Personally, I like to explicitly mark messages read or unread. This way, I can think about something and easily come back later to reply. Of course, marking messages read could also happen automatically. All decent mail clients I’ve used in my life offered even more advanced features, like delayed automatic marking.

All I can say is that I’m super happy with that for years. It works absolutely great for me. The only downside is that I see heaps of new, despite years old messages when a bug causes a feed to be incorrectly updated (https://twtxt.net/twt/tnsuifa). ;-)

I think it is not easy to implement, you need a database. Timeline is an elegant solution: read and sort.

that’s a fair point.

Perhaps, since Twitter in 2006 never implemented read flags, every derivative microblogging system never saw that as an expected feature. This is curious because Twitter started with SMS, where on our phones we can mark messages as read or unread.
I think it all comes from the difference between reading an email (directed to you) vs. reading public posts (like a blog or a ‘wall,’ where you don’t mark posts as read). It’s not necessary to mark it as ‘read’, you just jump over it.

Reading microblogging posts in an email program is not common, I think, and I haven’t really used it, so I cannot say how it works, and whether it would be better for me or not.
However, I’ve used Thunderbird as a feed reader, and I understand the advantages when reading blog posts.

About read flags being simple, well… we just had a discussion this morning about how tracking read messages would require a lot of rethinking for clients such as timeline where no state is stored. Even considering some kind of ‘notification of unread messages or mentions’ is not expected for those minimalist client, so it’s an interesting compromise to think about.