Comparing Fuchsia components and Linux containers
Fuchsia is a new (non-Linux) operating system from Google, and one of the key pieces of Fuchsia’s design is the component framework. Components on Fuchsia have many similarities with some of the container solutions on Linux (such as Docker): they both fetch content addressed blobs from the network, assemble those blobs into an isolated filesystem structure that holds all the dependencies necessary to run some piece of software, and … ⌘ Read more

Google, DuckDuckGo massively expand “AI” search results
Clearly, online search isn’t bad enough yet, so Google is intensifying its efforts to continue speedrunning the downfall of Google Search. They’ve announced they’re going to show even more “AI”-generated answers in Search results, to more people. Today, we’re sharing that we’ve launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries, with mor … ⌘ Read more

NetBSD on a JavaStation
Back when Java was still a new programming language, Sun had the idea of building a computer specifically designed for Java, unique processor running byte-code as its native machine code and all. This whole endeavour proved to be more complicated than Sun had hoped, and as such, they eventually abandoned the idea of a Java processor in favour of plain SPARC. When the JavaStation shipped, it was a regular SPARC workstation without a hard drive, running something called JavaOS from fla … ⌘ Read more

Zen and the art of microcode hacking
Now that we have examined the vulnerability that enables arbitrary microcode patches to be installed on all (un-patched) Zen 1 through Zen 4 CPUs, let’s discuss how you can use and expand our tools to author your own patches. We have been working on developing a collection of tools combined into a single project we’re calling zentool. The long-term goal is to provide a suite of capabilities similar to binutils, but targeting AMD microcode instead of CPU mach … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026
In October 2026, Microsoft Publisher will reach its end of life. After that time, it will no longer be included in Microsoft 365 and existing on-premises suites will no longer be supported. Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher. Until then, support for Publisher will continue and users can expect the same experience as today. ↫ Microsoft’s Supp … ⌘ Read more

Water Damage
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Why fastDOOM is fast
How much faster is fastDOOM than regular Doom on a decked-out 486 from 1993? 30% faster without cutting any features! On a demanding map like doom2’s demo1, the gain is even higher, from 16.8 fps to 24.9 fps. That is 48% faster! I did not suspect that DOOM had left that much on the table. Obviously shipping within one year left little time to optimize. I had to understand how this magic trick happened. ↫ Fabien Sanglard What follows is an incredibly detailed exploration of why, exactly, fa … ⌘ Read more

Redox continues adding dynamic linking support
These months are coming and going way too fast, for a whole variety of reasons, so we’ve got another month of improvements for Redox, the operating system written in Rust. I February, January’s work on dynamic linking continued, adding support for it to the recipes for Cargo, LLVM, Rust, libssh2, OpenSSL, zlib, COSMIC Terminal, NetSurf, libpng, bzip2, DevilutionX, and LuaJIT, as well as to the project’s Rust and OpenSSL forks. Relibc also … ⌘ Read more

Over half of adults predicted to be obese by 2050 + 1 more story
Study predicts over half of adults will be obese by 2050; Trump imposes steep tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China ⌘ Read more

Google multibillionaire Brin demands employees work 60 hours a week on autocomplete tools
Over the past few years, the tech industry has gone from cushy landing pad for STEM grads to a cesspit of corporate greed, where grueling hours are commonplace, and layoffs could strike at any moment. Unfortunately for employees of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the squeeze is just getting started. ↫ Joe Wilkins at Futurism Sergey Brin, one of t … ⌘ Read more

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from ‘serious attacks’
Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, has issued a call for the C++ community to defend the programming language, which has been shunned by cybersecurity agencies and technical experts in recent years for its memory safety shortcomings. C and C++ are built around manual memory management, which can result in memory safety errors, such as out of bounds reads and writes, though bo … ⌘ Read more

I really like the proposal and your ideas. I have been reading your articles and several points seem very interesting to me.

Blender-Rendered Movie ‘Flow’ Wins Oscar for Best Animated Feature, Beating Pixar
It’s a feature-length film “rendered on a free and open-source software platform called Blender,” reports Reuters. And it just won the Oscar for best animated feature film, beating movies from major studios like Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks.

In January Blender.org called Flow “the manifestation of Blender’s mission, … ⌘ Read more

Tall Structures
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Microsoft is not ending Windows 11 support for Intel’s 8th, 9th, and 10th Gen processors
About two weeks ago, there was a bit of confusion about the system requirements for Windows 11 24H2, because Intel’s 8th Gen, 9th Gen, and 10th Gen processors had disappeared from the list of supported hardware. This seemed rather drastic, even by Windows 11 standards. I skipped posting about it on OSNews because I kind of assumed it must’ve been an error ins … ⌘ Read more

Ukraine, UK, and France to draft a ceasefire plan to present to US
Britain, France, and Ukraine draft ceasefire; Iowa bans gender identity rights; Israel blocks aid deliveries into Gaza Strip. ⌘ Read more

@bmallred@staystrong.run I forgot one more effect of edits. If clients remember the read status of massages by hash, an edit will mark the updated message as unread again. To some degree that is even the right behavior, because the message was updated, so the user might want to have a look at the updated version. On the other hand, if it’s just a small typo fix, it’s maybe not worth to tell the user about. But the client doesn’t know, at least not with additional logic.

Having said that, it appears that this only affects me personally, noone else. I don’t know of any other client that saves read statuses. But don’t worry about me, all good. Just keep doing what you’ve done so far. I wanted to mention that only for the sake of completeness. :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net I formed my opinion about this before reading/watching any additional media coverage. And yes, this is extremely bad. These two have no place on the “world stage”. They are deciding on our future. (And I am well aware that my country is heading into a similar direction – unless we stop it.)

I like this syntax, you have my vote, although I’d change it a bit like
#<Alice https://example.com/twtxt.com#2024-12-18T14:18:26+01:00>

Hashes are not a problem on PHP, I dont know why it’s slow to calculate them from your side, but I agree with your points.

BTW, did you have the chance to read my proposal on twtxt 2.0? I shared a few ideas about possible improvements to discuss:
https://text.eapl.mx/a-few-ideas-for-a-next-twtxt-version
https://text.eapl.mx/reply-to-lyse-about-twtxt

Genode OS Framework 25.02 released
The prime feature is the continuation of the multi-monitor topic of the previous release, covering multi-monitor window management and going as far as seamlessly integrating multi-monitor virtual machines (Section Multi-monitor window management and virtual machines). The second and long anticipated feature is the Chromium engine version 112 in combination with Qt 6.6.2, which brings our port of the Falkon web browser on par with the modern web (Section Qt, WebE … ⌘ Read more

Netboot Windows 11 with iSCSI and iPXE
For the past several years my desktop has also had a disk dedicated to maintaining a Windows install. I’d prefer to use the space in my PC case for disks for Linux. Since I already run a home NAS, and my Windows usage is infrequent, I wondered if I could offload the Windows install to my NAS instead. This lead me down the course of netbooting Windows 11 and writing up these notes on how to do a simplified “modern” version. ↫ Terin Stock The setup Terin S … ⌘ Read more

This is the addressing I want to read:

“Your dignity honors the bravery of the Ukrainian people.

Be strong, be brave, be fearless.
You are never alone, dear President Zelensky.

We will continue working with you for a just and lasting peace.”

Europe needs to back this up, as they can’t trust the United States.

Mozilla deletes promise not to sell Firefox users’ data
The hits just keep on coming. Mozilla not only changed its Privacy Notice and introduced a Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time with some pretty onerous terms, they also removed a rather specific question and answer pair from their page with frequently asked questions about Firefox, as discovered by David Gerard. The following question and answer were removed: Does Firefox sell your personal data? Nope. Never have, … ⌘ Read more

Excusing Yourself
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What would happen if we didn’t use TCP or UDP?
At some point, I wondered—what if I sent a packet using a transport protocol that didn’t exist? Not TCP, not UDP, not even ICMP—something completely made up. Would the OS let it through? Would it get stopped before it even left my machine? Would routers ignore it, or would some middlebox kill it on sight? Could it actually move faster by slipping past common firewall rules? No idea. So I had to try. ↫ Hawzen Okay so the end result is that i … ⌘ Read more

A love letter to Void Linux
I installed Void on my current laptop on the 10th of December 2021, and there has never been any reinstall. The distro is absurdly stable. It’s a rolling release, and yet, the worst update I had in those years was one time, GTK 4 apps took a little longer to open on GNOME. Which was reverted after a few hours. Not only that, I sometimes spent months without any update, and yet, whenever I did update, absolutely nothing went wrong. Granted, I pretty much only did full upgrades … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de woah! MV, for what I read on Wikipedia, is a fantastic, almost fantasy like state. Very low density on population. Matter of fact, they seem to be having issues with population growth, and will certainly welcome a bass player addicted, esoteric programmer, that would otherwise be a pretty quiet person. A win-win! :-D

Trump threatens 25% tariffs on EU imports + 1 more story
Trump proposes 25% tariffs on EU imports; Ukraine and the U.S. approach a mineral rights deal ⌘ Read more

I agree. finding good writings on architecture is hard to find. I used to read architecture reviews over on the high scalability blog. i suspect the reason why is that the arch is how the big tech companies can build moats around their bases. I know in AWS world it only goes as far as how to nickle and dime you to death.

I have the books but they don’t grow much more past interview level.

Understanding surrogate pairs: why some Windows filenames can’t be read
Windows was an early adopter of Unicode, and its file APIs use UTF‑16 internally since Windows 2000-used to be UCS-2 in Windows 95 era, when Unicode standard was only a draft on paper, but that’s another topic. Using UTF-16 means that filenames, text strings, and other data are stored as sequences of 16‑bit units. For Windows, a properly formed surrogate pair is perfectly acceptable. However … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla is going to collect a lot more data from Firefox users
I guess my praise for Mozilla’s and Firefox’ continued support for Manifest v2 had to be balanced out by Mozilla doing something stupid. Mozilla just published Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time, as well as an updated Privacy Notice, that come into effect immediately and include some questionable terms. The Terms of Use state: When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant u … ⌘ Read more

PowerPC Windows NT made to run on GameCube and Wii
Remember about half a year ago, when the PowerPC versions of Windows NT were made to run on certain models of PowerPC Macs? The same developer responsible for that work, Rairii, took all of this to the next level, and it’s now possible to run the PowerPC version of Windows NT on the GameCube, Wii, Wii U, and a few related development boards. NT 3.51 RTM and higher. NT 3.51 betas (build 944 and below) will need kernel patches to ru … ⌘ Read more

zlib-rs is faster than C
I’m sure we can all have a calm, rational discussion about this, so here it goes: zlib-rs, the Rust re-implementation of the zlib library, is now faster than its C counterparts in both decompression and compression. We’ve released version 0.4.2 of zlib-rs, featuring a number of substantial performance improvements. We are now (to our knowledge) the fastest api-compatible zlib implementation for decompression, and beat the competition in the most important compression cases too. ↫ F … ⌘ Read more

@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