@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt 💯 👏👏👏👏👏👏

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (I think of pointers as “memory location + type”, but I have done so much C and Assembler by now that the whole thing feels almost trivial to me. And I would have trouble explaining these concepts, I guess. 😅 Maybe I’ll cover this topic with our new Azubis/trainees some day …)

@prologic@twtxt.net What is “ciwtuau”? I don’t understand, sorry haha

@prologic@twtxt.net So it seems!

yes @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 😅

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Pointers can be a bit tricky. I know it took me also quite some time to wrap my head around them. Let my try to explain. It’s a pretty simple, yet very powerful concept with many facets to it.

A pointer is an indirection. At a lower level, when you have some chunk of memory, you can have some actual values sitting in there, ready for direct use. A pointer, on the other hand, points to some other location where to look for the values one’s actually after. Following that pointer is also called dereferencing the pointer.

I can’t come up with a good real-world example, so this poor comparison has to do. It’s a bit like you have a book (the real value that is being pointed to) and an ISBN referencing that book (the pointer). So, instead of sending you all these many pages from that book, I could give you just a small tag containing the ISBN. With that small piece of information, you’re able to locate the book. Probably a copy of that book and that’s where this analogy falls apart.

In contrast to that flawed comparision, it’s actually the other way around. Many different pointers can point to the same value. But there are many books (values) and just one ISBN (pointer).

The pointer’s target might actually be another pointer. You typically then would follow both of them. There are no limits on how long your pointer chains can become.

One important property of pointers is that they can also point into nothingness, signalling a dead end. This is typically called a null pointer. Following such a null pointer calls for big trouble, it typically crashes your program. Hence, you must never follow any null pointer.

Pointers are important for example in linked lists, trees or graphs. Let’s look at a doubly linked list. One entry could be a triple consisting of (actual value, pointer to next entry, pointer to previous entry).

  _______________________
 /               ________\_______________
↓               ↓         |              \
+---+---+---+   +---+---+-|-+   +---+---+-|-+
| 7 | n | x |   | 23| n | p |   | 42| x | p |
+---+-|-+---+   +---+-|-+---+   +---+---+---+
      |         ↑     |         ↑
       \_______/       \_______/

The “x” indicates a null pointer. So, the first element of the doubly linked list with value 7 does not have any reference to a previous element. The same is true for the next element pointer in the last element with value 42.

In the middle element with value 23, both pointers to the next (labeled “n”) and previous (labeled “p”) elements are pointing to the respective elements.

You can also see that the middle element is pointed to by two pointers. By the “next” pointer in the first element and the “previous” pointer in the last element.

That’s it for now. There are heaps ;-) more things to tell about pointers. But it might help you a tiny bit.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev @prologic@twtxt.net Exactly. The screenshots of the last few days show it in action. But I do not consider it ready for the world yet. @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt appears to have a high pain tolerance, though. :-)

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev You use your real name as login name, too?

@prologic@twtxt.net I see this with the scouts. Luckily, not at work. But at work, I’m surrounded by techies.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh my goodness! I’m so glad that I don’t have to deal with that in my family. But yeah, I guess you’re onto something with your theory. This article is also quite horrific. O_o

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wooaah, that is cool! \o/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Maybe it’s a lyrebird. 😏

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, it was one of those. 95, 98, and Me were all built on top of DOS, as far as I know.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I guess the thing is that usernames are no longer needed for many popular things, like WhatsApp. “Just install the app”, done. When I ran my Matrix server for our family, this was the first thing that people were bummed out about: “Oh, this needs a username and a password? Why doesn’t it just work? That’s annoying.”

People are less and less exposed to “low-level” details like this. There was also this story in 2021 about the concept of a “file”: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt What is tt2?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I had no idea. However, I think we’re losing our sense of anonymity. I even started using my real name!

@doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt Heck yeah! Worky, worky! \o/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, that name is certainly fitting! :-D

Yeah, I should revert that and try to figure out which programs misbehaved. But that’s something for future Lyse. 8-) Right now, I just redefine TERM in my Makefile when the USER happens to be me.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah and I don’t get why … There’s no copyrighted music in it, no ads (at least I don’t see any) … Just weird. 🥴

@prologic@twtxt.net Lol, I give up. 🥴

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org There’s a reason it’s called “(n)curses”. 😏 The only advice I can give is to never fiddle with reassigning control sequences and $TERM variables. Leave $TERM at whatever value the terminal itself sets and use an appropriate terminfo file for it. If there are programs misbehaving, they probably blindly assume XTerm and should be fixed (or have XTerm as a hard requirement). If you try to fix this on your end, it’ll likely just break other programs. 🥴

@david@collantes.us Ah, I just went to bed, great to see you figured it out. 😅 I probably would have ended up with something similar (but I’m not a Vimscript guru). 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net

Chapter 14:

Audio

Epilogue:

Audio

@prologic@twtxt.net

Chapter 12:

Audio

Chapter 13:

Audio

@david@collantes.us Tada, the reply context is now also shown above. It’s slowly coming together and reaching a state where I can actually use this as my daily driver I think. :-)

Image

@david@collantes.us Thanks, yes, absolutely! ;-)

I now notice that I should also show the original message(s) to which I reply. That was super useful in the original tt. But one after the other. The mentions are now automatically filled in. \o/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de wow, that almost works as I want it! Only think missing is the first time stamp, on opening. Hmm…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de the idea is to be able to write documents in which I have auto time stamps on each line. Similar to this, which was posted on Hacker News today.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oooooh! I like how that’s shaping up! Now you need a jobless vacation (not moneyless), so that the project goes from baby crawling, to toddler steps. :-)

@david@collantes.us While you’re typing? I guess this could be used as a starting point (doesn’t work on the very first line):

inoremap <CR> <Esc>:r!date +"\%F \%T"<CR>A 

What’s the end goal here? 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de hear hear! LOL. Give me the jobless, please, just leave the incoming monies intact. :-P

@movq@www.uninformativ.de hahahah i for one hate sleeping and need to be busy 24/7 or else i go insane so server stuff is awesome for my ADHD ass!!!

IaaS does seem kinda interesting to me, i think i could vibe with that more than full on cloud stuff

i hope i can be one of those people who does the barebones stuff bc i am a rare sicko who finds it fun and cloud stuff scares me LMAOOOO

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh yeah i use the CLI sometimes it’s fun af

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Allegedly, there’s at least a CLI for that, yarnc. I neither used nor looked at it, though.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh for sure, I fully agree!

@arne@uplegger.eu I AM THE KING OF AGE OF EMPIRES!!1elf 👑

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Using full-blown Cloud services is good for old people like me who don’t want to do on-call duty when a disk fails. 😂 I like sleep! 😂

Jokes aside, I like IaaS as a middle ground. There are IaaS hosters who allow you to spin up VMs as you wish and connect them in a network as you wish. You get direct access to all those Linux boxes and to a layer 2 network, so you can do all the fun networking stuff like BGP, VRRP, IPSec/Wireguard, whatever. And you never have to worry about failing disks, server racks getting full, cable management, all that. 😅

I’m confident that we will always need people who do bare-bones or “low-level” stuff instead of just click some Cloud service. I guess that smaller companies don’t use Cloud services very often (because it’s way too expensive for them).

@prologic@twtxt.net yesss ty for listening and engaging with my kpop nonsense it’s really beautiful!

@prologic@twtxt.net i have seen some posts on this! that’s definitely reassuring. i don’t know cloud stuff at all and don’t want to. servers forever….

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz UPDATE I DID IT!!!!!!! you will now see a cute anime girl that is behind the scenes testing if you are a bot or not in a matter of seconds before being redirected to the site :) https://superlove.sayitditto.net/

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz think i’ll wait and see if the caddy module proposal gets anywhere bc that sounds like it’d make my life easier lol

https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/16

@prologic@twtxt.net oh yeah it’s absolutely epic i love how fast it is. it would be extra peak if it sent a message to every bot that it denies access to that just says “get fucked” or something idk

@david@collantes.us You are right! I need to check this problem. Thank you very much!

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, as you mentioned in the other thread, @andros@twtxt.andros.dev’s hashes appear to be not quite right. 🤔

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I guess we all whish we were jobless. Not moneyless, just jobless. 😅

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev your client is breaking things, I am afraid. This hash (ptxsca), which you seem to be using to reply to @movq@www.uninformativ.de is not the right one.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i could build that myself but also i can’t because i don’t know code!!!!!!!!! her ass only knows ruby on rails!!!!!!!!!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I have no doubt that you’re not seeing the images correctly 😀. It’s just that it’s broken when viewing them, in my case, and analyzing the URLs, I’ve seen everything I mentioned.
Regarding the hash, you’re right. I’ll have to investigate what’s going on. I’m having a hard time getting the hash generation to work properly.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de ancient……. i love old linux it’s so janky

@movq@www.uninformativ.de me being the one jobless bitch on here is not helping my case LOL

@prologic@twtxt.net Can we add a table in twtxt.dev with features of each client?

• Is active?
  
• Extensions compatibility
  
• Language
  
• Multiaccount.
  
• Mutiuser
  And so on…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de The urls of the images are strange! My client crashes to display them, and when I tried some urls, I found a redirect. Ah! And the images had two extensions.