@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Programming is art. You become good at art by practising your art. You learn artistic patterns by being inspired by and reading others art works. The most importance however is that you practise your art.

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.

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, you right. But is premium for more than that.
I use a feature I love a lot: customising different searches with different themes or links.
It’s easy to understand with an example. I have a search with the name “Django”. I set sources: Django documentation, stack overflow, topic “programming” and so on. It’s very quick to find Django solutions.
I also have another way to find my stuff: search my blog and repositories.
I had problems paying for the first mouths, now it’s a working tool for me.

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, no, this is vastly exaggerated. Neil deGrass Tyson says, the earth is smoother than a cue ball (billiard): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMP5dNsZ-6k That would make for a very dull OpenGL program, though. 😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Agreed, finding the right motivation can be tricky. You sometimes have to torture yourself in order to later then realize, yeah, that was actually totally worth it. It’s often hard.

I think if you find a project or goal in general that these kids want to achieve, that is the best and maybe only choice with a good chance of positive outcome. I don’t know, like building a price scraper, a weather station or whatever. Yeah, these are already too advanced if they never programmed, but you get the idea. If they have something they want to build for themselves for their private life, that can be a great motivator I’ve experienced. Or you could assign ‘em the task to build their own twtxt client if they don’t have any own suitable ideas. :-)

Showing them that you do a lot of your daily work in the shell can maybe also help to get them interested in text-based boring stuff. Or at least break the ice. Lead by example. The more I think about it, the more I believe this to be very important. That’s how I still learn and improve from my favorite workmate today in general. Which I’m very thankful of.

Remembered a fun little “hello world” program I made in 2018:

https://movq.de/v/a1c4a819e6/vid.mp4

(It runs smoothly. My computer just isn’t fast enough for a smooth X11 screengrab at that resolution.)

We’re all old farts. When we started, there weren’t a lot of options. But today? I’d be completely overwhelmed, I think.

Hence, I’d recommend to start programming with a console program. As for the language, not sure. But Python is probably a good choice

That’s what I usually do (when we have young people at work who never really programmed before), but it doesn’t really “hit” them. They’ve seen so much, crazy graphics, web pages, it’s all fancy. Just some text output is utterly boring these days. ☹️ And that’s my problem: I have no idea how I could possibly spark some interest in things like pointers or something “low-level” like that. And I truly believe that you need to understand things like pointers in order to program, in general.

@xuu@txt.sour.is Hahaha, that’s cool! You were (and still are) way ahead of me. :-)

We started with a simple traffic light phase and then added pedestrian crossing buttons. But only painting it on the canvas. In our computer room there was an actual traffic light on the wall and at the very end of the school year our IT basics teacher then modified the program to actually control the physical traffic light. That was very impressive and completely out of reach for me at the time. That teacher pulled the first lever for me ending up where I am now.

@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 should probably clarify: Which language/platform? Something graphical or web-based right from the beginning or do you start with a console program?

To the parents or teachers: How do you teach kids to program these days? 🤔

The End of Programming
Comments ⌘ Read more

Programming in D: Tutorial and Reference
Comments ⌘ Read more

Curry: A Functional Logic Programming Language
Comments ⌘ Read more

TacOS: an x86_64 UNIX-like OS from scratch
TacOS is a UNIX-like kernel which is able to run DOOM, among various other smaller userspace programs. It has things like a VFS, scheduler, TempFS, devices, context switching, virtual memory management, physical page frame allocation, and a port of Doom. It runs both on real hardware (tested on my laptop) and in the Qemu emulator. ↫ TacOS GitHub page TacOS – great name – is written in C, and explicitly a hobby and toy project. The code’s licensed … ⌘ Read more

“How I use Kate Editor”
I love the Kate Text editor. I use it for pretty much all the programming projects I do. Kate has been around for long time now, about 20 years! At least earliest blog post for it I could find was written in 2004. I wanted to go over my workflow with it, why I like it so much and hopefully get more people to try it out. ↫ Akseli Lahtinen Programmers and developers tend to be very set in their ways and have their preferred workflows – which profession doesn’t, honestly – and since there … ⌘ Read more

Pipelining might be my favorite programming language feature
Comments ⌘ Read more

CISA extends funding to ensure ‘no lapse in critical CVE services’
CISA says the U.S. government has extended MITRE’s funding to ensure no continuity issues with the critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program. The announcement follows a warning from MITRE Vice President Yosry Barsoum that government funding for the CVE and CWE programs was set to expire today, April 16, potentially leading to widespread disruption across the cybersecurity industry. ↫ … ⌘ Read more

CVE Foundation Launched to Secure the Future of the CVE Program
Comments ⌘ Read more

Mitre-backed cyber vulnerability program to lose funding
Comments ⌘ Read more

USL – A Universal Scripting Language That Outputs to 111 Programming Languages
Comments ⌘ Read more

Elliptical Python programming
One thing I love about Python is how it comes with its very own built-in zen. In moments of tribulations, when I am wrestling with crooked code and tangled thoughts, I often find solace in its timeless wisdom. ↫ Susam Pal I can’t program and know nothing about Python, but this still made me laugh. ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Pioneers Program
Comments ⌘ Read more

Learning to Program with Haiku
Comments ⌘ Read more

FreeDOS 1.4 released
With FreeDOS being, well, DOS, you’d think there wasn’t much point in putting out major releases and making big changes, and you’d mostly be right. However, being a DOS clone doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement within the confines of the various parts and tools that make up DOS, and that’s exactly where FreeDOS focuses its attention. FreeDOS 1.4 comes about three years after 1.2. This version includes an updated FreeCOM, Install program, and HTML Help system. This also includes i … ⌘ Read more

Sometimes, we spend months stuck in inertia, distracted by screens and routine. So I’d like to give you a simple reminder: creating-in whatever form-is what makes you feel alive.

The beauty of working on projects is not in their ‘success’, but in the simple act of working on them. Whether it’s writing, cooking, programming or redecorating the house: play with ideas without pressure, engage in an activity to test, fail and discover without judgement.

In the end, what remains is not a perfect product, but the satisfaction of completion and valuable lessons.

Find a project, no matter how small, and let it take you without expectations.

John Carmack on AI in game programming
Comments ⌘ Read more

Hasochism: The pleasure and pain of dependently typed Haskell programming pdf
Comments ⌘ Read more

Show HN: OCR pipeline for ML training (tables, diagrams, math, multilingual)
Comments ⌘ Read more

Koto Programming Language
Comments ⌘ Read more

I’m a long-term mpd user (some 16+ years), but for $reasons I have to compile it myself now – and, boy, that is one heavy program. Takes several minutes to build. 😳

Executive order on Smithsonian targets funding programs with ‘improper ideology’
Comments ⌘ Read more

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. 😢

@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.

@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.

@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. 🥴

Well, some time ago I put this in my ~/.Xdefaults:

URxvt.keysym.Control-Up:    \033[1;5A
    URxvt.keysym.Control-Down:  \033[1;5B
URxvt.keysym.Control-Left:  \033[1;5D
    URxvt.keysym.Control-Right: \033[1;5C

Probably to behave more like XTerm and fix a few other issues I had with other programs. But, it turns out, tcell expects the original sequence: https://github.com/gdamore/tcell/blob/main/terminfo/r/rxvt/term.go#L487

Hmm.

Java 24 released
Oracle, the company owned by a guy who purchased a huge chunk of the Kingdom of Hawaii from the Americans, has released Java 24. I’ll be honest and upfront: I just don’t care very much at all about this, as the only interaction I’ve had with Java over the past, I don’t know, 15 years or so, is either because of Minecraft, or because of my obsession with ancient UNIX workstations where Java programs pop up in the weirdest of places. I know Java is massive and used everywhere, but going through the … ⌘ Read more

i love everything pico.sh i wish i had more of a use for their services but the paste service is SUPER handy omg i finally had a reason to use it (to send a friend my unfinished failed marvel API bash program lol) and it’s epic. i love SSH i love TUI apps they are the best

spreadsheet program for terminal https://github.com/andmarti1424/sc-im

A more robust raw OpenBSD syscall demo
Ted Unangst published dude, where are your syscalls? on flak yesterday, with a neat demonstration of OpenBSD’s pinsyscall security feature, whereby only pre-registered addresses are allowed to make system calls. Whether it strengthens or weakens security is up for debate, but regardless it’s an interesting, low-level programming challenge. The original demo is fragile for multiple reasons, and requires manually locating and entering addresses for each bu … ⌘ 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

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

Short summary of Project2025 and Trump’s plans for the US:

• Abolish the Federal Reserve
  Why? To end what is seen as an unelected, centralized body that exerts too much influence over the economy and monetary policy, replacing it with a more transparent, market-driven approach.

• Implement a national consumption tax
  Why? To replace the current federal income tax system, simplify taxation, and increase government revenue through a broader base that includes all consumers.

• Lower corporate tax rates
  Why? To promote business growth, increase investment, and stimulate job creation by reducing the financial burden on companies.

• Deregulate environmental policies
  Why? To reduce government intervention in the economy, particularly in energy and natural resources sectors, and to foster a more business-friendly environment.

• Restrict abortion access
  Why? To align with conservative pro-life values and overturn or limit abortion rights, seeking to restrict the practice at a federal level.

• Dismantle LGBTQ+ protections
  Why? To roll back protections viewed as promoting LGBTQ+ rights in areas like employment and education, in line with traditional family values.

• Eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs
  Why? To end policies that are seen as divisive and to promote a merit-based system that prioritizes individual achievements over group identity.

• Enforce stricter immigration policies, including mass deportations and detentions
  Why? To prioritize border security, reduce illegal immigration, and enforce existing laws more aggressively, as part of a broader strategy to safeguard U.S. sovereignty.

• Eliminate the Department of Education
  Why? To reduce federal control over education and shift responsibilities back to local governments and private sectors, arguing that education decisions should be made closer to the community level.

• Restructure the Department of Justice
  Why? To ensure the department aligns more closely with the administration’s priorities, potentially reducing its scope or focus on areas like civil rights in favor of law-and-order policies.

• Appoint political loyalists to key federal positions
  Why? To ensure that government agencies are headed by individuals who are committed to advancing the administration’s policies, and to reduce the influence of career bureaucrats.

• Develop training programs for appointees to execute reforms effectively
  Why? To ensure that political appointees are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to implement the proposed changes quickly and effectively.

• Provide a 180-day transition plan with immediate executive orders
  Why? To ensure that the incoming administration can swiftly implement its agenda and make major changes early in its term without delay.

Do y’all agree with any/all/some of these poliices? Hmmm 🤔

#Project2025 #US #Trump

Does anybody know a right mouse click save and reduce a screen saver image to a smaller file, say 50KB?
My usual method is slow, place in image program and re-save it smaller.

I used to have a Window’s way to reduce file images from 1MB to 50 KB with right mouse click.

I finally got Ubuntu Software to find Kolourpaint and it installed, now when I run the APP nothing happens.
Dead, zip narda.

Stupid program , what is wrong?

Did the Windows 95 setup team forget that MS-DOS can do graphics?
One of the reactions to my discussion of why Windows 95 setup used three operating systems (and oh there were many) was my explanation that an MS-DOS based setup program would be text-mode. But c’mon, MS-DOS could do graphics! Are you just a bunch of morons? Yes, MS-DOS could do graphics, in the sense that it didn’t actively prevent you from doing graphics. You were still responsible for everything you … ⌘ Read more