Flight bookings from Canada to the US plummet over 70%
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US Securities and Exchange Commission beginning to bring on DOGE staff
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Signal Chat Leak Angers U.S. Military Pilots
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US no longer a reliable partner, old relationship is over: Canadian PM Carney
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Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada
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👋 Hello @am@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz, welcome to yarn, a Yarn.social Pod! To get started you may want to check out the pod’s Discover feed to find users to follow and interact with. To follow new users, use the ⨁ Follow button on their profile page or use the Follow form and enter a Twtxt URL. You may also find other feeds of interest via Feeds. Welcome! 🤗

👋 Hello @mana@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz, welcome to yarn, a Yarn.social Pod! To get started you may want to check out the pod’s Discover feed to find users to follow and interact with. To follow new users, use the ⨁ Follow button on their profile page or use the Follow form and enter a Twtxt URL. You may also find other feeds of interest via Feeds. Welcome! 🤗

How to Use Em Dashes (–), En Dashes (–), and Hyphens (-)
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👋 Hello @luka@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz, welcome to yarn, a Yarn.social Pod! To get started you may want to check out the pod’s Discover feed to find users to follow and interact with. To follow new users, use the ⨁ Follow button on their profile page or use the Follow form and enter a Twtxt URL. You may also find other feeds of interest via Feeds. Welcome! 🤗

SignalGate Is Driving the Most US Downloads of Signal Ever
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@eapl.me@eapl.me According to an update of the article, others have suggested the same.

Your explanation seems fitting. I just don’t get why people don’t use feed readers anymore. Anyway.

thanks andros!

instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning
The PHP client did that originally, although I didn’t see a real benefit if you use… a client.
It could help if you read the .txt file through a browser or something. Also, not many clients are prepared to cut the request, and you can’t rely on the file being organized that way, so finally we dropped that feature.

2 is a great idea, you should suggest it in that blog post.

About 1, well, I think anyone has an email address and only about 5% use a Feed, so it makes sense to offer what most people use 🤔

@eapl.me@eapl.me Interesting! Two points stood right out to me:

1. Why the hell are e-mail newsletters considered a valid option in the first place? Just offer an Atom feed and be done with it! Especially for a blog of this very type. This doesn’t even involve a third party service. Although, in addition he also links to Feedburner, what the fuck!? No e-mail address or the like is needed and subject to being disclosed.

2. When these spam mailers want to prevent resubscribing, then for fuck’s sake, why don’t they use a hash of the e-mail address (I saw that in yarnd) for that purpose? Storing the e-mail address in clear text after unsubscribing is illegal in my book.

US government’s attack on free speech, science, and research is causing a brain drain
How do you create a brain drain and lose your status as eminent destination for scientists and researchers? The United States seems to be sending out questionnaires to researchers at universities and research institutes outside of the United States, asking them about their political leanings. Dutch universities are strongly advising Dutch researches not to respond … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net In all seriousness: Don’t worry, I’m not going to host some Fediverse thingy at the moment, probably never will. 😅

But I do use it quite a lot. Although, I don’t really use it as a social network (as in: following people). I follow some tags like #retrocomputing, which fills my timeline with interesting content. If there was a traditional web forum or mailing list or even a usenet group that covered this topic, I’d use that instead. But that’s all (mostly) dead by now. ☹️

@david@collantes.us Ah shit, sorry, you’re right! :-D

I want to present the twtxt feed from Python Valencia: https://twtxt.python-valencia.es/
Technical curiosity: It is generated using n8n, using the official rss.
#welcome

@prologic@twtxt.net Gemini has an answer for you:

This is a conversation thread from a twtxt network, detailing a user’s (movq) frustration with the Mastodon “export data” feature and their consideration of self-hosting a fediverse alternative. Here’s a summary:

• movq’s initial issue:
  
  • movq is concerned about the volatility of their data on their current Mastodon instance due to a broken “export data” feature.
    
  • They contacted the admins, but the issue remains unresolved.
    
  • This led them to contemplate self-hosting.
    
• Alternative fediverse software suggestions:
  
  • kat suggests gotosocial as a lightweight alternative to Mastodon.
    
  • movq agrees, and also mentions snac as a potential option.
    
• movq’s change of heart:
  
  • movq ultimately decides that self-hosting any fediverse software, besides twtxt, is too much effort.
    
• Resolution and compromise:
  
  • The Mastodon admins attribute the export failure to the size of movq’s account.
    
  • movq decides to set their Mastodon account to auto-delete posts after approximately 180 days to manage data size.
    
  • Movq also mentions that they use auto-expiring links on twtxt to reduce data storage.

The Mastodon admins say that it’s probably because of the size of my account (~600 MB), so the export process times out. And I understand that. Here on twtxt, I always use auto-expiring links when I post images or videos. It just gets too much data otherwise. I think I’ll just set my Mastodon account to auto-delete posts after ~180 days or something like that. Nobody cares about old posts anyway.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org for a brief moment I was confused, and puzzled, on how were you able to count read statuses, and messages on cache, with such high precision. Then I remembered you are using German numerical notation. LOL.

DOGE staffer,‘Big Balls’, provided tech support to cybercrime ring, records show
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How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border
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Thanks, @movq@www.uninformativ.de!

My backing SQLite database with indices is 8.7 MiB in size right now.

The twtxt cache is 7.6 MiB, it uses Python’s pickle module. And next to it there is a 16.0 MiB second database with all the read statuses for the old tt. Wow, super inefficient, it shouldn’t contain anything else, it’s a giant, pickled {"$hash": {"read": True/False}, …}. What the heck, why is it so big?! O_o

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You could also just use a tiling window manager. :-) As a bonus, it doesn’t waste dead space, the window utilizes the entire screen. To also get rid of panels and stuff, put the window in fullscreen mode.

I now subscribed to most feeds in my Go tt reimplementation that I already followed with the old Python tt. Previously, I just had a few feeds for testing purposes in my new config. While transfering, I “dropped” heaps of feeds that appeared to be inactive.

This might motivate me to actually “finish” the new client, so that it could become my daily driver. No need to use the old software stack any longer. Let’s see how bad this goes.

BigQuery pricing model cost us $10k in 22 seconds
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@david@collantes.us @prologic@twtxt.net Sorry! https://cascii.app/

A collection of postgreSQL patterns that you can use in other databases
https://mccue.dev/pages/3-11-25-life-altering-postgresql-patterns
#postgresql #databases

Playing multimedia with Dillo
What if you want to use a web browser like Dillo, which lacks JavaScript support and can’t play audio or video inside the browser? Dillo doesn’t have the capability to play audio or video directly from the browser, however it can easily offload this task to other programs. This page collects some examples of how to do watch videos and listen to audio tracks or podcasts by using an external player program. In particular we will cover mpv with yt-dlp which supports YouTube … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, most of the graphical applications are actually KDE programs:

• KMail – e-mail client
  
• Okular – PDF viewer
  
• Gwenview – image viewer
  
• Dolphin – file browser
  
• KWallet – password manager (I want to check out pass one day. The most annoying thing is that when I copy a password, it says that the password has been modified and asks me whether I want to save the changes. I never do, because the password is still the same. I don’t get it.)
  
• KPatience – card game
  
• Kdenlive – video editor
  
• Kleopatra – certificate manager
  

Qt:

• VLC – video player
  
• Psi – Jabber client (I happily used Kopete in the past, but that is not supported anymore or so. I don’t remember.)
  
• sqlitebrowser – SQLite browser
  

Gtk:

• Firefox – web browser
  
• Quod Libet – music player (I should look for a better alternative. Can’t remember why I had to move away from Amarok, was it dead? There was a fork Clementine or so, but I had to drop that for some unknown reason, too.)
  
• Audacity – audio editor
  
• GIMP – image editor
  

These are the things that are open right now or that I could think of. Most other stuff I actually do in the terminal.

In the past™, I used the Python KDE4 bindings. That was really nice. I could pass most stuff directly in the constructor and didn’t have to call gazillions of setters improving the experience significantly. If I ever wanted to do GUI programming again, I’d definitely go that route. There are also great Qt bindings for Python if one wanted to avoid the KDE stuff on top. The vast majority I do for myself, though, is either CLI or maybe TUI. A few web shit things, but no GUIs anymore. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Although, most software I use is decentish in that regard.

Is that because you mostly use Qt programs? 🤔

I wish Qt had a C API. Programming in C++ is pain. 😢

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Where can I join your club? Although, most software I use is decentish in that regard.

I just noted today that JetBrains improv^Wcompletely fucked up their new commit dialog. There’s no diff anymore where I would also be able to select which changes to stage. I guess from now on I’m going to exclusively commit from only the shell. No bloody git integration anymore. >:-( This is so useless now, unbelievable.

SawStart
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@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 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

@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!

It’s extremely surprising to me that younger non-technical people just type in their full name (properly cased first and last name with a space in between) for a technical username in account registration or login forms. I’ve seen that happening several times in the past few years. The field name is “Benutzername” in German, literally “username”. Even adding a placeholder text to signal that they could simply use their nickname in lowercase did not change anything at all. Well, one person used at least an e-mail address.

This wasn’t the case six, seven years ago, everybody had some “real” username. Even non-techies. It looks like some “common knowledge” is getting lost. Strange. Very weird. It trips me every time I see it.

Have you experienced something similar?

@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). 🤔

@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/

@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? 😅

@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.

Memory safety for web fonts in Chrome: Google replaces FreeType with Rust-based alternative
There’s no escaping Rust, and the language is leaving its mark everywhere. This time around, Chrome has replaced its use of FreeType with Skrifa, a Rust-based replacement. Skrifa is written in Rust, and created as a replacement for FreeType to make font processing in Chrome secure for all our users. Skifra takes advantage of Rust’s memory safety, and … ⌘ Read more

@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).

I saw 100% I/O wait in htop today but couldn’t find a process which actually does I/O. Turns out, I/O wait isn’t what it used to be anymore:

https://lwn.net/Articles/989272/

In my case, it was mpd which triggered this:

https://github.com/MusicPlayerDaemon/MPD/issues/2241

mpd doesn’t actually do anything, it just sits there and waits for events. To my understanding, this is similar to something blocking on read(). I’m not quite sure yet if displaying this as I/O wait (or “PSI some io”) is intentional or not – but it sure is confusing.

Image

my biggest fear of starting to work with servers professionally is realizing that no one uses servers anymore and having to do some cloud bullshit instead

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