More widget system progress:

https://movq.de/v/87e2bce376/vid-1767467193.mp4

I like the oldschool shadow effect. 😅 Not sure if I’ll keep it, but it’s neat.

The menu bar is still fake.

Had to spend quite a bit of time optimizing the rendering today. This can get really slow really quickly.

Unicode is Pain.

I might be able to start porting my first program (currently uses urwid) soon. 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Cool! :-) I just implemented a workaround for the time being.

New year new… year; And That’s about it. No M(ent)alware upgrade needed this time.

With RAM crazy prices being what they are, I guess my PC is gonna be stuck on 16GB RAM for some time. I originally bought the DDR4 16GB kit for like $49 AUD, and I thought I’d just buy another 16GB or more later down the track (this was like a year and a half ago), thinking it would be similarly priced or even cheaper…

Boy was that a mistake in hindsight LOL. The same kit is like $229 AUD now….

Opinion / Question time…

Do you think Mu (µ)’s native compiler and therefore emitted machine code “runtime” (which obviously adds a bit of weight to the resulting binary, and runtime overheads) needs to support “runtime stack traces”, or would it be enough to only support that in the bytecode VM interpreter for debuggability / quick feedback loops and instead just rely on flat (no stacktraces) errors in natively built compiled executables?

So in effect:

Stack Traces:

• Bytecode VM Interpreter: ✅
  
• Native Code Executables: ❌

Hurray, I finally fixed another rendering bug in tt that was bugging me for a long time. Previously, when there were empty lines in a markdown multiline code block, the background color of the code block had not been used for the empty lines. So, this then looked as if there were actually several code blocks instead of a single one.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/tt-bugfix-empty-lines-in-multiline-code-blocks.png

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Mu (µ)’s startup latency appears to be ~10ms on my machine:

$ time ./bin/mu ./foo.mu 

real    0m0.011s
user    0m0.004s
sys     0m0.006s

The baseline here is about 55 ms for nothing, btw. Python ain’t fast to start up.

$ time python -c 'exit(0)'

real    0m0.055s
user    0m0.046s
sys     0m0.007s

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

I assume you made the thing load quickly, didn’t you?

That’s the problem with Python. If you have a couple of files to import, it will take time.

I want this to be reasonably fast on my old Intel NUC from 2016 (Celeron N3050 @ 1.60GHz) and I already notice that the program startup takes about 95 ms (or 125 ms when there are no .pyc files yet). That’s still fine, but it shows that I’ll have to be careful and keep this thing very small …

Python 3.14 will bring lazy imports, maybe that can help in some cases.

Phew, it was just a one-time thing. Ta! :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, I used SnipMate years ago (until 2012). IIRC, it’s more than just “insert a bit of text here”, it can also jump to the correct next location(s) and stuff like that. Don’t remember why I stopped using it.

Then I used nothing for a long time. Just before Christmas, I made my own plugin (… of course …), which does everything I need at the moment (and nothing more).

It can insert simple templates and then jump to the next location:

https://movq.de/v/67cdf7c827/sisni%2Dpython.mp4

And replace a string after insertion:

https://movq.de/v/67cdf7c827/sisni%2Dheader.mp4

(It’s not public (yet?) and it also uses vim9script, so I guess it wouldn’t work on your system.)

This was the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time, jesus. 🤣 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_(2022_film)

@zvava@twtxt.net By hashing definition, if you edit your message, it simply becomes a new message. It’s just not the same message anymore. At least from a technical point of view. As a human, personally I disagree, but that’s what I’m stuck with. There’s no reliable way to detect and “correct” for that.

Storing the hash in your database doesn’t prevent you from switching to another hashing implementation later on. As of now, message creation timestamps earlier than some magical point in time use twt hash v1, messages on or after that magical timestamp use twt hash v2. So, a message either has a v1 or a v2 hash, but not both. At least one of them is never meaningful.

Once you “upgrade” your database schema, you can check for stored messages from the future which should have been hashed using v2, but were actually v1-hashed and simply fix them.

If there will ever be another addressing scheme, you could reuse the existing hash column if it supersedes the v1/v2 hashes. Otherwise, a new column might be useful, or perhaps no column at all (looking at location-based addressing or how it was called). The old v1/v2 hashes are still needed for all past conversation trees.

In my opinion, always recalculating the hashes is a big waste of time and energy. But if it serves you well, then go for it.

It’s this time of the year again, where people burn money on the streets.

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I take my 0°C over the 36°C anytime! Even with yesterday’s gray and windy sleet in my face. However, there are definitely more pleasant times to walk in town, I’ll give you that. For example on 0°C sunny today: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-12-25/

very good blog post that reminded me why it’s taking so long to ship bbycll — previously i had computed the hashes of every post before storing them in the database, after realizing it’s a much better idea to compute the hashes during runtime and only store the post content & timestamp i’m now having to rewrite every function that reads & writes data. i hope the reason as to why i lost motivation is obvious — thankfully i caught it early enough so that once i’m done rewriting just those functions i should™ be able to finalize 1.0-rc with little hassle

⇒ the cardinal sin of software architecture: the unnecessary distribution, replication, or restructuring of state, both in space and time.

I just had a closer look at https://git.mills.io/prologic/mu and it motivated me to do some compiler building myself again. Hopefully, I find some time in the next free days. I’m bad at it, but it’s always great fun.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve been awake at that time, didn’t notice anything. 🤔 Where was that BGP analyzer again … 😅 There’s a tool that keeps track of these things, right? I forgot what it was.

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de A crocodile had bitten the big submarine internet cable that connects Australia to Europe. The investigations revealed that some construction work last week accidentally tore up the protective layer around it. That went unnoticed, unfortunately, so marine life had an easy job today. For just 40 minutes, they were quite fast in repairing the damage if you ask me! These communication cables are fricking large.

Just kidding, I completely made that up. :-D I didn’t notice any outage either. But I didn’t try to connect to Down Under at the time span in question.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Very nice! I often wish other languages had something similar. Sometimes, I use lambdas, but that also looks ugly and feels a bit like a misuse. Other times, just the normal blocks are enough, but it’s not the same. Especially with the mutability aspects as the article explains. Typically, I just put it in a function or ignore it if it’s just a few lines.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ah, cool! :-) Yeah, it’s very wild what is happening under the hood all the time.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org These tables get shuffled around every time your OS switches to another process. It’s crazy that so much is going on behind the scenes.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, well, given that I didn’t need this for such a long time, it’s probably not an essential tool. 😅

I’ve often wanted to have an outline of text documents, though, and tagbar/ctags can do that as well:

https://movq.de/v/3c6d1a13d6/tagbar-md.png

https://movq.de/v/abc58e6d66/tagbar-latex.png

This isn’t as powerful as the “Navigator” tool in StarOffice/LibreOffice (which can be used to rearrange the document), but still pretty useful:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/so31.mp4

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is the total amount of cpu time consumed right?

alright, hopefully this time it behaves?

Got a nice conspiracy theory for you:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115670290552252848

Actually wait I just thought about this and realized that the precise timing of the ACTUAL GitHub seed bank, by which I mean the Arctic Code Vault, on 2020-02-02, makes it more or less a perfect snapshot of pre-Copilot GitHub. Also precisely timed before we all got brain damage from COVID. This is the only remaining archive of source code by people with a fully working sense of smell

(Bonus points because the Arctic World Archive is located in Svaldbard and that’s the name of the AI in Stacey Kade’s “Cold Eternity”.)

Day 9 also required some optimizations, if you aren’t careful, you end up with really inefficient algorithms with time/memory complexity beyond what a typical machine has 🤣

Day 7 was pretty tough, I initially ended up implementing an exponential in both time and memory solution that I killed because it was eating all the resources on my Mac Studio, and this poor little machine only has 32GB of memory (I stopped it at 118GB of memory, swapping badly!), This is what I ended up doing before/after:

• Before: Time O(2^k · L), memory O(2^k), where k is the number of splitters along a reachable path and L is path length. Exponential in k.
  
• After: Time O(R·C) (or O(R·C + s) with s split events), memory O©, where R = rows, C = columns. Polynomial/linear in grid size.

I’m seeing crashes in the 3D subsystem. (Gallium? Glamor? Whatever other Mesa thing they have? No idea.) In the logs I find this:

malloc(): unaligned tcache chunk detected

And that’s why I still care about Rust and want to learn more about it, even though it’s giving me so much headache and I’ve given up so many times. Because Rust currently seems to be the only popular systems programming language that tries to eliminate these error classes.

And of course “the Rust experiment” in the Linux kernel has recently been concluded as “successful”, so that alone is reason enough for me:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/

Alright, Advent of Code is over:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-12/0/POSTING-en.html

It’s been quite the time sink, especially with the DOS games on top, but it was fun. 🥳

In case you’re wondering: All puzzles (except for part 2 of day 10) were doable in Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4 and ran in a finite time on the Pentium 133. Puzzle 10/2 might have been doable as well if I had better education. 🤣

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Time to become a trixie or forky!

hello, just trying Gopher out for the first time.

Webp, though it has been around for a long while, wasn’t fully supported on all browsers until recently. The other formats have been in use for such a long time, proving to work just fine, that the advantages Webp provides haven’t been seemingly enough to merit a switch.

Google is also the one behind Webp, and, well, people don’t trust, nor like, them much.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @zvava@twtxt.net I think people get sick of everything changing all the time and so don’t bother adopting things to change when things are already good enough 🤷

@bender@twtxt.net on the way o7  spent enough time away from the codebase

Fuck me, soooooooo beautiful! Awwww! :‘-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYfKgi133qo

This focuses more on the landscape part, other episodes also have amazing interactions with the locals. I cannot recommend the Itchy Boots channel enough. It’s in my top three channels of all time I believe. I hardly get the travel bug, but this has now changed. Watching Noraly’s videos brings me great joy. It also shows humanity is not lost, contrary to what one might think in this crazy world. :-)

Caution, this channel gets very addictive!

@prologic@twtxt.net Bwahahaha! I tried to establish some form of “convention” for commit messages at work (not exactly what you linked to, though), but it’s a lost cause. 😂 Nobody is following any of that. Nobody wants to invest time in good commit messages. People just want to get stuff done.

I’m just glad that 80% are at least somewhat useful – instead of “wip” or “shit i screwed up”.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org no wonder I picked that cake (albeit coincidentally), I adore almonds, and hazelnuts! Your teammates are absolutely amazing, dude! A very nice project farewell! On leaving places I have a small anecdote.

I know someone who on 3 February 2004 left his job to go elsewhere. At the time his teammates threw a party, and gave him a very nice portable storage. Twenty days later, he returned, and jokingly they asked him for the storage, and money spent on farewell party back. I heard, from a close source, that he gave them his middle finger, but don’t quote me on that. 😂😂😂

Apparently MTD of uknowingly toggling mouse on in tmux for the first time is 1.5 agonizing days

@kiwu@twtxt.net I’ve no idea about regulations in your area, but over here there are different taxation rules for video and photo cameras. Hence, manufacturers limit the video recording time of photo cameras typically to half an hour, so that they don’t classify as video cameras with their higher taxes.

@prologic@twtxt.net Tada! There you once hope for your flight and ride to be delayed and then of course they are right on time! :-D You gotta wait either way. ;-) Looks like you got some good drinks, though.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I want to record vlogs. it doesn’t have to be a super high quality one, just something that records for longer periods of time!!

@bender@twtxt.net a mobile phone camera doesn’t cut it because it cant take long videos. I would say like the cheapest possible tbh! it doesn’t have to be an amazing grade a camera, just something that will record in decent quality for long periods of time! I mostly want it to make vlogs :p

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Thanks for the account! I figured out one thing at least so far, my WAF was blocking some of the AP requests. Fixed that. Anyway, holiday time 🤣 Back in ~2 weeks.

The funny thing is, Yarn moving to Twt Hash v2 sounds a tad more optimistic than Git adopting SHA-256.

Git is several years too late, while Yarn is pretty much on time.

Better Technology, Worse Motivation: GenAI’s Mediocrity Trap

While generative AI (GenAI) promises productive efficiency, it can paradoxically lead to lower-quality work. We conducted an experiment with professional illustrators and found that AI assistance flattens the quality curve—it accelerates initial gains but sharply diminishes the returns on sustained effort. Faced with this, a significant number of professionals made a strategic choice: they sacrificed the final quality to save time.

From http://www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/4/5/114595093/ai_and_motivation.pdf

I haven’t read this and can’t vouch for it; seems vaguely AI-boostery. Still, the conclusions are interesting. This seems to be the picture that is emerging about generative AI generally: most people don’t like it and find that degrades the quality of work. Coders seem to like it and think that it helps them, but in fact it makes the slower, less productive, and more bug prone.

By all measures it’s a bad technology. We should just be honest about it. There is no need to make excuses for multi-trillion-dollar corporations.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Ahhh! That would be even funnier and even more brilliant! 🤣 If you can find this, I would happily employ this tactic next time and make ‘em pay 💰 Bahahahaha 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net it would have been so much easy to run your own. I guess we all like to suffer every once and then, and this time is your turn. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I personally use twtAgent over here on Thunix (Also managed by deepend I believe) and then from time to time run wk -F ' ' '/\.txt/ {print $NF" "$(NF-1)}' $HOME/public_html/twtAgent.log | sed -e 's/\((\|)\|+\|;\|@\)//g' | sed '/^$/d'| sort -u to check for who’s pulling this feed (Too lazy to alias it :‘] ) .

Leaving this here just in case it might help a fellow Townie, Cheers!

@prologic@twtxt.net AI is slot machines for coders:

• “Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%–AI tooling slowed developers down.” https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
  
• “Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code”: https://venturebeat.com/ai/stack-overflow-data-reveals-the-hidden-productivity-tax-of-almost-right-ai-code
  

The same intermittent reward operant conditioning that gets people addicted to gambling and thinking that if they follow certain rituals they’ll win “next time” drives people’s beliefs that AI tools are making them more productive when they’re making them less productive. I’m going to guess that a side effect of this is that people think they’re typing less when in the longer term they’re typing the same amount or more when you factor in the productivity loss (as far as I’ve read the studies don’t measure this so I’m only guessing).

People are also being rapidly de-skilled by this technology: the more they use it, the more their actual skills atrophy. “Continuous exposure to AI might reduce the ADR (adesoma detection rate) of standard non-AI assisted colonoscopy, suggesting a negative effect on endoscopist behaviour.” (science speak for saying that radiologists get worse at seeing tumors in scans once they’ve used AI): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract

Nobody who cares about the future should be using this stuff for anything.