@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @movq@www.uninformativ.de Sorry, I neither finished it nor in time. :-( That’s as good as it’s gonna get for the moment: https://git.isobeef.org/lyse/gelbariab/-/tree/master/rss-proxys?ref_type=heads

The README should hopefully provide a crude introduction. The example configuration file is documented fairly well, I believe (but maybe not). You probably still have to consult and maybe also modify the source code to fit your needs.

Let me know if you run into issues, have questions, wishes etc.

In 1996, they came up with the X11 “SECURITY” extension:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4w548u/what_is_up_with_the_x11_security_extension/

This is what could have (eventually) solved the security issues that we’re currently seeing with X11. Those issues are cited as one of the reasons for switching to Wayland.

That extension never took off. The person on reddit wonders why – I think it’s simple: Containers and sandboxes weren’t a thing in 1996. It hardly mattered if X11 was “insecure”. If you could run an X11 client, you probably already had access to the machine and could just do all kinds of other nasty things.

Today, sandboxing is a thing. Today, this matters.

I’ve heard so many times that “X11 is beyond fixable, it’s hopeless.” I don’t believe that. I believe that these problems are solveable with X11 and some devs have said “yeah, we could have kept working on it”. It’s that people don’t want to do it:

Why not extend the X server?

Because for the first time we have a realistic chance of not having to do that.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html

I’m not in a position to judge the devs. Maybe the X.Org code really is so bad that you want to run away, screaming in horror. I don’t know.

But all this was a choice. I don’t buy the argument that we never would have gotten rid of things like core fonts.

All the toolkits and programs had to be ported to Wayland. A huge, still unfinished effort. If that was an acceptable thing to do, then it would have been acceptable to make an “X12” that keeps all the good things about X11, remains compatible where feasible, eliminates the problems, and requires some clients to be adjusted. (You could have still made “X11X12” like “XWayland” for actual legacy programs.)

Since Fastly acquired and recently shut down glitch.com, some of my ancient webapps are no longer available, nor do I have any plans to make them available again - all had either zero, or very few monthly visits, used outdated libraries and would be a waste of money, to continue hosting and updating elsewhere.

All art archives remain unaffected and all projects shut down before 2025, were already permanently deleted, but if there’s someone out there, still relying on the recently discontinued projects, somehow - you can reach out and request their source code.

These requests will only be honoured, until the end of this year, when we plan to permanently delete, all of this data (both webapps and files only hosted on Amazons CDN).

Canine out °_°

Heck yeah, that’s damn cool: Reading QR codes without a computer! https://qr.blinry.org/

Stuff that nobody needs:

systemctl uses ANSI escape codes to underline text (\e[4m) and then it also uses special escape codes – that Wikipedia classifies as “not in the standard”, but I haven’t looked it up – to change the color of the underline. That color change is barely noticeable in the first place.

Some terminals don’t support this and now my systemctl output is blinking because of that.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org “Advanced”, well, probably more “mature”. There aren’t a ton of crazy features and that icon thing is the largest code addition in the last 10 years. %)

Speaking of OS/2 … I just realized that Windows 3.x didn’t have icons, either. If I’m not mistaken, this only got added in Windows 95. In other words, OS/2 had this feature before Windows did, because at least OS/2 2.1 from 1993 had icons. Who would have thunk.

(Now I kind of want to know which system really introduced this feature.)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz NVM i stole other peoples code to make a dictionary lookup script https://bytes.4-walls.net/kat/dotfiles/src/branch/main/config/.local/bin/dict

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I spent so much time in the past figuring out if something is a dict or a list in YAML, for example.

What are the types in this example?

items:
- part_no:   A4786
  descrip:   Water Bucket (Filled)
  price:     1.47
  quantity:  4
- part_no:   E1628
  descrip:   High Heeled "Ruby" Slippers
  size:      8
  price:     133.7
  quantity:  1

items is a dict containing … a list of two other dicts? Right?

It is quite hard for me to grasp the structure of YAML docs. 😢

The big advantage of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is that it’s much easier to write code for those formats, than it is with XML. json.loads() and you’re done.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, it’s a shitshow. MS overconfirms all my prejudices constantly.

Ignoring e-mail after lunch works great, though. :-)

Our timetracking is offline for over a week because of reasons. The responsible bunglers are falling by the skin of their teeth: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/timetracking.png

1. The error message neither includes the timeframe nor a link to an announcement article.
   
2. The HTML page needs to download JS in order to display the fucking error message.
   
3. Proper HTTP status codes are clearly only for big losers.
   
4. Despite being down, heaps of resources are still fetched.
   

I find it really fascinating how one can screw up on so many levels. This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, I wouldn’t say that. Go code could fall into that category as well.

Maybe this topic could use a blog post / article, that explains what it’s about. I’m finding it hard to really define what “suckless-like software” is. 🤔 (Their own philosophy focuses too much on elitism, if you ask me.)

In all fairness, GOG says that Forsaken is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – not current Arch Linux. If you ask me, this just goes to show that Linux is not a good platform for proprietary binary software.

Is it free software, do you have the source code? Then you’re good to go, things can be patched/updated (that can still be a lot of work). But proprietary binary blobs? Very bad idea.

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org lol – I explicitly kept them in there so that the code is easier to understand for non-Rust people 🤪😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de All the returns tell me that you’re not a real Rust programmer. :-D Personally, I would never omit them either. They make code 100 times more readable.

Saw this on Mastodon:

https://racingbunny.com/@mookie/114718466149264471

18 rules of Software Engineering

1. You will regret complexity when on-call
   
2. Stop falling in love with your own code
   
3. Everything is a trade-off. There’s no “best” 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs
   
4. Everyone hates code they didn’t write
   
5. Don’t use unnecessary dependencies
   
6. Coding standards prevent arguments
   
7. Write meaningful commit messages
   
8. Don’t ever stop learning new things
   
9. Code reviews spread knowledge
   
10. Always build for maintainability
    
11. Ask for help when you’re stuck
    
12. Fix root causes, not symptoms
    
13. Software is never completed
    
14. Estimates are not promises
    
15. Ship early, iterate often
    
16. Keep. It. Simple.
    

Solid list, even though 14 is up for debate in my opinion: Software can be completed. You have a use case / problem, you solve that problem, done. Your software is completed now. There might still be bugs and they should be fixed – but this doesn’t “add” to the program. Don’t use “software is never done” as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.

That’s the code, it’s surprisingly simple: https://movq.de/v/81dd5649be/

When I chose the MIT license for all of my software, I thought:

“Should I use GPL, which I don’t really understand? Is that worth it? Yeah, there is a theoretical possibility that some company might use my code in their proprietary product … and then what? Should I sue them to enforce the GPL? I’m not going to do that anyway, so I’ll just use the MIT license.”

And now we have those LLM scrapers and now it’s suddenly a reality that these companies (ab)use my code. I can see it in my logs. I didn’t expect that back then.

GPL wouldn’t help, either, of course. (Regardless, I now think that GPL would have been the better choice anyway.)

I’m honestly considering taking my code and website offline. Maybe make it accessible through some obscure protocol like Gopher or Gemini, but no more HTTP.

(Yes, Anubis might help. Temporarily.)

I’m just tired.

that isn’t mine, a newly made friend bought the domain & code that simple site for me, i find it’s hilarious to have so i put it in the front

thank you!!!

QR codes, already posted about them in the last two posts, but I want to hear your hot takes: Should they only be black and white, are they even worth doing in 2025, incorporating them into things,..?
Also, finally getting full screen view for avatars in XMPP - a better integrated one, after 25 years. Y@ay!

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, that will work perfectly. Because you are using “please”—which we all know is a magic talisman word of obedience—all uploads of your code to Github will be automatically paused, until such magic word is removed. 😂

No Github

Please don’t upload my code on Github!

I’m thinking about putting this up on all my projects and even on the front page of my Gitea instance 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de i feel like when i read go code i’m reading some algebra shit where every part is 1-5 letters long and then there’s weird symbols like := and it’s just infinitely harder for me to parse and infer meaning from lol. it’s such a me problem

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i’m so fucking bad at this shit man i can’t even comprehend JS most of the time coding is not in my future

i wish it was realistic for me to learn golang but every single time i try to comprehend any go code i’m like What the fuck am i looking at. why is all of this so short and condensed GIVE ME VERBOSE CODE

I sent you my QR code, please respond!

*for context: long ago, there were some complaints, about some of my sitting drawings, where the legs are apart, not using dithering/more shading and one of my favourite artists, made a video, exploring the use of QR codes, in art
P.S.: the code just redirects to my websites

#<2025-05-10T19:34:00+00:00 https://andros.dev/texudus.txt> Nice:) And is this implemented in your client as well? I’ve started to brainstorm on how to parse texudus in php, but I guess it could snatch some code from you?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I actually use sift a lot these days for most “searching” – at least code and text searching. For finding files by name I still use find | grep.

i got so emo about my site not being statically generated and instead hand coded but it’s like i don’t even know if i want that because i feel most SSGs are built for blogging and continuous posting and i don’t want that i just want to make my silly pages….

that being said, the one i’d use if i did switch to one would be astro and that one is so flexible i could really do anything with it including keeping my pages as is mostly without doing the blog stuff. idk! something to consider

ya girl’s officially a credited code contributor for the biggest fanfiction site in the world! (i did the gif icon fix) https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/31720

What do you think I just learned about in this awesome Computerphile video with Matt Godbolt called “Subroutines in Low Level Code”? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1su3lAh-k4o

Here’s the plot twist, the phrase “till the cows come home”. Hahaha, I never heard this before, but I love it! It’s always interesting to me to hear English sayings. Sometimes we have the same in German, sometimes – like in this case – entirely different ones. It’s fascinating that even though one hasn’t come across proverbs, it’s typically still clear from the context what’s meant.

Yep, some unexpected language stuff. ;-)

Thanks, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! That seems to be much easier. It’s already implemented in the Python docs as examples of recvmsg(…) and sendmsg(…):

• https://docs.python.org/3/library/socket.html#socket.socket.recvmsg
  
• https://docs.python.org/3/library/socket.html#socket.socket.sendmsg
  

I looked at them sooo many times in order to figure out why my SCM_CREDENTIALS sending code didn’t work. :-D

Nobody want to be a shitty programmer. The question is: Do you do anything not to not be one?
Reading blogs or social media and watching YouTube videos is fun. After them, your code may be a little better, of course. But you need a lot. You need to study! Read good books and study the code of other programmers, for example. Maybe work with a new language, architectures and paradigms. You need break the routine.

If you know Object-oriented programming, you learn functional programming.
If you know Model-View-Controller, you learn Model-View-ViewModel.
If you don’t know anything about architectures, you learn Clean Architecture, Hexagonal Architecture, etc.
If you know Python, you learn Ruby or Go.
If you know Clojure or Lisp… you don’t need to learn anything else. You are already a good programmer. Just kidding. You can learn Elixir or Scala.

Be a good programmer my friend.

slowing working away at my latest code project: learning PHP by recreating the 2000s fandom mainstay known as a fanlisting! it’s been super fun i added a dynamic nav bar and other modifications in the latest commit

fanlistings even to this day rely on old PHP scripts dating back to the early 2000s that need whole ass mySQL or postgres DBs and are incredibly insecure. you can look at them here they’re like super jank lol it’s sad that new fanlistings have to use them because there’s no other options….

@prologic@twtxt.net ODD, lol. I don’t wanna be rude, but this sounds more like Code And Fix.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I’ve almost fixed this btw 🤗 Just testing it thoroughly and polihsing the code. In case you’re curious, I do this style of development called “Observability Driven Development” (ODD) whereby I make observations of the system via metrics and internal observations and adjust the system’s overall behavior to the desired outcome 😅

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev I set up a test feed here:

https://www.uninformativ.de/texudus.txt

I made some preliminary adjustments to my client so that it can work with the different threading model. (And I totally get the concerns, this can be quite a bit of work. Especially in a large code base like Yarn.)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz yes, both the newsletter and the podcast, from time to time.

@prologic@twtxt.net I was not expecting much, but since the list of restaurants near company buildings, was hard coded into it, I did expect it to at least copy the menu text, from the websites, in its database. Ironically, the only restaurant where it got something right, is the only one, where the websites has the text as a transparent PNG, the AI has to convert to text.

Show HN: Memex is a Claude Code alternative built on Rust+Tauri for vibe coding
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de You better push new code sooner!!

As @bender@twtxt.net says, that sounds like a bot. I’d just block the IP address, hoping it doesn’t change all the time. But then you know for sure that it’s the AI fuckwits.

Also, the devil in me thinks it’s funny to swap out the repo in question for something entirely different. :-D

Someone has started to run git pull on one of my repos – once every two minutes. This is a very pointless endeavour. I push new code a couple of times per month.

So far, this isn’t causing any issues. I think this is just a regular human being who misconfigured some automation. And I hope this doesn’t mean that the “AI” bots have finally discovered my page …

I will be adding the code in for yarnd very soon™ for this change, with a if the date is >= 2025-07-01 then compute_new_hashes else compute_old_hashes

@bender@twtxt.net Hehe good sleuthing 🤣 I swear it was an edit ✍️ Haha 😂 yarnd now “sees” both every single time, where-as before it would just obliterate the old Twt, but remain in archive. Now you get to see both 😅 Not sure if that’s a good thing or not, but it certainly makes it much clearer how to write “code logic” for detecting edits and doing something more UX(y) about ‘em 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org hey pascal bro! My first coding class was with an old Borland Turbo Pascal. I made my own little window manager for the assignments for class.

The teacher didn’t appreciate it much since I had to print out the code to turn it in. My Yatzee game was a stack of pages. 🤪

Crucial Wii homebrew library contains code stolen from Nintendo, RTEMS
The Wii homebrew community has been dealt a pretty serious blow, as developers of The Homebrew Channel for the Wii have discovered that not only does an important library most Wii homebrew software rely on use code stolen straight from Nintendo, that same library also uses code taken from an open source real-time operating system without giving proper attribution. Most Wii homebrew software i … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I started with Delphi in school, the book (that we never ever used even once and I also never looked at) taught Pascal. The UI part felt easy at first but prevented me from understanding fundamental stuff like procedures or functions or even begin and end blocks for ifs or loops. For example I always thought that I needed to have a button somewhere, even if hidden. That gave me a handler procedure where I could put code and somehow call it. Two or three years later, a new mate from the parallel class finally told me that this wasn’t necessary and how to do thing better.

You know all too well that back in the day there was not a whole lot of information out there. And the bits that did exist were well hidden. At least from me. Eventually discovering planet-quellcodes.de (I don’t remember if that was the original forum or if that got split off from some other board) via my best schoolmate was like finding the Amber Room. Yeah, reading the ITG book would have been a very good idea for sure. :-)

In hindsight, a console program without the UI overhead might have been better. At least for the very start. Much less things to worry about or get lost.

Hence, I’d recommend to start programming with a console program. As for the language, not sure. But Python is probably a good choice, it doesn’t require a lot of surrounding boilerplate like, say Java or Go. It also does exceptionally well in the principle of least surprise.

I just fixed a bug in tt’s reply to parent feature. Previously, when the message tree looked like the following

Message
├╴Reply 1
│ └╴Subreply
└╴Reply 2

and “Reply 2” was selected, pressing A to reply to the parent should have picked “Message”. However, a reply to “Reply 2” was composed instead. The reason was a precausiously introduced safety guard to abort the parent search which stopped at “Subreply”, because its subject didn’t match “Reply 2”’s. It was originally intended to abort on a completely different message conversation root. Just in case. Turns out that this thoght was flawed.

Fixing bugs by only removing code is always cool. :-)

University of Waterloo withholds coding contest results over suspected AI use
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I Designed My LED Matrix PCB with Code Instead of Traditional EDA Tools
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