Btw @movq@www.uninformativ.de you’ve inspired me to try and have a good ‘ol crack at writing a bootloader, stage1 and customer microkernel (µKernel) that will eventually load up a Mu (µ) program and run it! 🤣 I will teach Mu (µ) to have a ./bin/mu -B -o ... -p muos/amd64 ... target.

Took me nearly all week (in my spare time), but Mu (µ) finally officially support linux/amd64 🥳 I completely refactored the native code backend and borrowed a lot of the structure from another project called wazero (the zero dependency Go WASM runtime/compiler). This is amazing stuff because now Mu (µ) runs in more places natively, as well as running everywhere Go runs via the bytecode VM interpreter 🤞

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s not super comfortable, that’s right.

But these mouse events come with a caveat anyway:

ncurses uses the XM terminfo entry to enable mouse events, but it looks like this entry does not enable motion events for most terminal emulators. Reporting motion events is supported by, say, XTerm, xiate, st, or urxvt, it just isn’t activated by XM. This makes all this dragging stuff useless.

For the moment, I edited the terminfo entry for my terminal to include motion events. That can’t be a proper solution. I’m not sure yet if I’m supposed to send the appropriate sequence manually …

And the terminfo entries for tmux or screen don’t include XM at all. tmux itself supports the mouse, but I’m not sure yet how to make it pass on the events to the programs running inside of it (maybe that’s just not supported).

To make things worse, on the Linux VT (outside of X11 or Wayland), the whole thing works differently: You have to use good old gpm to get mouse events (gpm has been around forever, I already used this on SuSE Linux). ncurses does support this, but this is a build flag and Arch Linux doesn’t set this flag. So, at the moment, I’m running a custom build of ncurses as a quick hack. 😅 And this doesn’t report motion events either! Just clicks. (I don’t know if gpm itself can report motion events, I never used the library directly.)

tl;dr: The whole thing will probably be “keyboard first” and then the mouse stuff is a gimmick on top. As much as I’d like to, this isn’t going to be like TUI applications on DOS. I’ll use “Windows” for popups or a multi-window view (with the “WindowManager” being a tiny little tiling WM).

Most of it should work on other platforms, the bytecode VM that is. You may run into some platform quirks though that rely on syscall() – Let me know what you run into and I’ll try to fix them nw. The problem right now is I haven’t even begun to start work on another platform/architecture yet.

@bender@twtxt.net They’re not completely impossible, but C makes it much easier to run into them. I think the key point is that in those “safe” languages, buffer overflows are caught and immediately crash the program (if not handled otherwise) instead of silently corrupting memory, not being noticed right away and maybe only later crashing at a different location, where it can be very hard to find the actual root cause. This is a big improvement in my book.

Some programmers are indeed horrible. I’m guilty myself. :-)

I like the article.

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club

Steps to world domination:

1. “Invent” “AI” (by using other people’s data).
   
2. Get people hyped about it and ideally hooked on it.
   
3. Only provide it as a cloud service. But hey, if you want to, you can run it locally!
   
4. Buy all hardware available on the market, so that nobody but you can build more systems.
   
5. All PCs of consumers and competitors are too weak now and can’t be upgraded anymore.
   
6. Everybody depends on your cloud service! Win!
   

All of that is possible because corporations don’t have a “conscience” in capitalism. Nobody forces the RAM manufacturers to sell all their stuff to just one or two buyers, but since the only goal of that manufacturer is to make money, they do it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks! I’ll have a look at SnipMate. Currently, I’m (mis)using the abbreviation mechanism to expand a code snippet inplace, e.g.

autocmd FileType go inoreab <buffer> testfunc func Test(t *testing.T) {<CR>}<ESC>k0wwi

or this monstrosity:

autocmd FileType go inoreab <buffer> tabletest for _, tt := range []struct {<CR>    name string<CR><CR><BS>}{<CR>   {<CR>   name: "",<CR><BS>},<CR><BS>} {<CR>  t.Run(tt.name, func(t *testing.T) {<CR><CR>})<CR><BS>}<ESC>9ki<TAB>

But this of course has the disadvantage that I still have to remove the last space or tab to trigger the expansion by hand again. It’s a bit annoying, but better than typing it out by hand.

@prologic@twtxt.net That might be a challenge, at least in 16-bit Real Mode: The OS follows the model of COM files on DOS, i.e. the size of the binary cannot exceed 64 KiB and heap+stack of the running program will have to fit into that same 64 KiB. 😅 (The memory layout is very rigid, each process gets such a 64 KiB slice.)

And in 64-bit Long Mode, there is no “kernel” yet. The thing in the video is literally just a small bare-metal program.

But some day, maybe. 😃

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’d be cool if you could get µ (Mu) running in your little toyOS 🤣 You’d technically only have to swap out the syscall() builtin for whatever your toy OS supports 🤔

Seeing this run on real hardware is so satisfying, even if it’s just a small example. 😅

https://movq.de/v/ec46b8cf99/netbook.mp4

My little toy operating system from last year runs in 16-bit Real Mode (like DOS). Since I’ve recently figured out how to switch to 64-bit Long Mode right after BIOS boot, I now have a little program that performs this switch on my toy OS. It will load and run any x86-64 program, assuming it’s freestanding, a flat binary, and small enough (< 128 KiB code, only uses the first 2 MiB of memory).

Here I’m running a little C program (compiled using normal GCC, no Watcom trickery):

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/los86%2D64.mp4

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/c.png

Next steps could include:

• Use Rust instead of C for that 64-bit program?
  
• Provide interrupt service routines. (At the moment, it just keeps interrupts disabled.)

Ooops, I’ve run into a bug or limitation with mu for Day 9 🤔

Come back from my trip, run my AoC 2025 Day 1 solution in my own language (mu) and find it didn’t run correctly 🤣 Ooops!

$ ./bin/mu examples/aoc2025/day1.mu
closure[0x140001544e0]

@prologic@twtxt.net Awwww, I wanna run my hands through this fur so badly! :-)

completely untested as i have no remote way of running mu code from Vietnam 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm. 🤔 Well, I don’t run that server myself, so I can’t peek into the logs to see what’s going wrong … 🥴

cat /etc/mokou/yarnd.conf
exec=/usr/pkg/sbin/daemonize -c/var/db/yarnd -u www -p /var/run/yarnd.pid /usr/pkg/sbin/chpst -e /usr/local/etc/yarnd /usr/local/sbin/yarnd -b 127.0.0.1:[classified information]

I know this might seem a bit overengineered, but the previous command until now had the secrets exposed on the process list

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe there you go! What I am trying to say is, if @prologic@twtxt.net truly wants to be able to diagnose something as difficult to diagnose as ActivityPub, he ought to run his own. There is no workaround.

PSA: Just in case you start getting 5xxs on my end, I’m not dead 😂 (well, unless I am). Well be changing ISPs and hopefully get the new line up and running before the old provider cuts us off.

@bender@twtxt.net That’s not the problem. The problem is the complex DNS setup and delegation. I’ve gotten it working once before, but it’s not that easy if you don’t intend to run it on the APEX Domain.

@prologic@twtxt.net How so? even I (the caveman) am running one 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net running Mastodon? I’d pick anything else

@bender@twtxt.net Maybe so. But running Mastodon or GotoSocial is actually not as easy as you’d think 😂

@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. 😅

I just noticed this pattern:

uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Let me add some spaces to make it more clear:

    uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET                       /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Some IP (from Brazil) requests some (non-existing, completely broken) URL from my webserver. But they use the hostname uninformativ.de, so they get redirected to www.uninformativ.de.

In the next step, just a second later, some other IP (from Nepal) issues an HTTP proxy request for the same URL.

Clearly, someone has no idea how HTTP redirects work. And clearly, they’re running their broken code on some kind of botnet all over the world.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, same startup delay. (Go is not an option for me anyway.)

It’s hard to tell why all this is so slow. Maybe in this particular case it has something to do with fonts: strace shows the program loading the fontconfig configs several times, and that takes up a bulk of the startup time. 🤔 (Qt6 or Java don’t do that, but they’re still slow to start up – for other reasons, apparently.)

To be fair, it’s “just” the initial program startup (with warm I/O caches). Once it’s running, it’s fine. All toolkits I’ve tried are. But I don’t want to accept such delays, not in the year 2025. 😅 Imagine every terminal window needing half a second to appear on the screen … nah, man.

I like to read through old RPG books and zines for inspiration for my games, and lately I’ve been enjoying the Arduin Grimoire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduin), one of the earliest 3rd-party zines (coming out during the initial run of OD&D). It’s filled with a bunch of unique ideas (some better than others), entirely too many charts, and is very much a product of its time, but there’s something about its “raw”-ness (and its variety) that I still find appealing.

Be it Java with Swing or PyQt6, it takes ~300 ms until a basic window with a treeview and a listbox appears. That is a very noticeable delay.

Is it unrealistic to expect faster startup times these days? 🤔

Once the program is running, a new second window (in the same process) appears very quickly. So it’s all just the initialization stuff that takes so long. I could, of course, do what “fat” programs have done for ages: Pre-launch the process during boot, windowless. But I was hoping that this wasn’t needed. 😞 (And it’s a bad model anyway. When the main process crashes, all windows crash with it.)

@bender@twtxt.net Haha 😆

GtS is easier than running Yarn, by the way. Word

This is total bullshit 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net no, I really meant small. I only have a handful of GiBs left of storage. If you can wait until mid-December, then no probleml. Right now it is kind of running on fumes. For testing, and to do not disturb anyone timelines, I recommend you run a small test instance. Running GtS is easier than running Yarn, by the way. Word.

@bender@twtxt.net You don’t run one anymore do you? 🤔

Anyone run a Mastodon serve rI can have an account on to help test the Twtxt <-> Activity Pub bridge? 🙏

I wound up running 2 out of 3 of the one-shots, both Halloween games based on Ravenloft / Curse of Strahd, and both rousing successes (for the players, not so much for Strahd).

Since I’m on something of a gaming kick, I think I’m going to try and finish plotting out the rest of the fae adventure I’m running for my kids, while also (hopefully) finishing my super secret astral gaming project.

Can I do it? Stay tuned and find out!

I used to run office hours at Google and the number of people who came into my office absolutely convinced that there was no way to search a dataset without having the entire thing in memory for every process was too damn high.

Done ✅ Will be available on this pod as soon as the publish workflow finished successfully.

@bender@twtxt.net No plus-aliases, just aliases. The mailserver runs on my OpenBSB box and is managed using BundleWrap (we use that at work), so to create a new alias, I push a new BundleWrap config to the server.

Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way I’m not sure of their feed uris 💕 I’ll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I don’t have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, it’s so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non “tech savvy” person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs we’ve built/extended over time that aren’t “perfect”™, they’re “good enough”™ that they’ve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs “in order” to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s help) where I hope they’ll stand the test of time – like SMTP.

Thank you all ! 🙏

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s possible to run the validator locally (my blog generator scripts do that):

https://validator.w3.org/nu/about.html

That way you don’t forget. 🥳

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club What version are you running btw? It’s probably time you upgraded and time I released a new version finally 😂 If you’re running a version that’s pre-SQLite-cache, then yeah I’m not surprised. The SQLite cache version is honestly much better 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net never heard of it before. I wouldn’t call lightweight to anything that needs Docker to run, though. 😅

What is this about? I don’t run my Gopher proxy anymore 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Uh, that actually looks not that terrible. Somehow, I remember Swing GUIs being way uglier.

As for Visual Basic, I only had to use VBA once in my life. That was in the beginning of my career when I inherited a project from a leaving coworker. Fuck me, was that awful. Just alone the damn compiler error dialog box popping up in my face all the time while editing and the compiler already trying to parse the unfinished and hence of course uncompilable code. Boy, that left a lasting impression on me. I ported everything to Java very quickly. Luckily, the code base wasn’t all that large at that point in time. I had to add a bunch of new features after that, so I was very glad that I convinced my workmate/project manager to do that first. We didn’t even need a GUI, the button in Excel was transformed to a command line program that just generated the large file.

But I cannot comment on the VB GUI designer, I never used that. Your screenshot looks very similar to the Delphi one, though. Only towards the end of my Delphi days I found out about the possibility to make the widgets snap to window edges and corners (I don’t remember how that was called), so that resizing the windows was actually possible without messing up their entire contents.

Switching to Linux, Delphi wasn’t an option anymore. For some reason I couldn’t use Kylix. Maybe it was already dead by the time I changed OSes. Or I couldn’t get it to run. I just don’t remember. I just recall that the unavailability of Delphi was the reason it took me a while to actually settle on Linux. I then fully switched to Java. The GridBagLayout was my absolutely favorite Swing layout manager. I reckon I used it 98% of the time, because it was so powerful and made the windows resize properly, just as I had learned to do in Delphi shortly before.

Up until discovering Swing, I used Java’s AWT for a short amount of time. That was very limited I think and I hit the limits fairly quickly. Later at uni, we had one project making use of SWT. Didn’t convince me either. I could be wrong, but I think there was also a SWT GUI designer plugin for Eclipse. If there really was, that one wasn’t in the same street as Delphi’s (there must be a reason I forgot about it ;-)).

Because OP twtxt seems to be a cross-post from the Fediverse, I am bringing some context here. It refers to this GitHub issue. This comment explains why the issue described is happening:

This is usually due to notarization checks. E.g. the binaries are checked by the notarization service (‘XProtect’) which phones home to Apple. Depending on your network environment, this can take a long time. Once the executable has been run the results are usually cached, so any subsequent startup should be fast.

OP network must be running on 1,200 Baud modem, or less. 🤭 I have never, ever, experienced any distinguishable delays.

@bender@twtxt.net is macOS 26 running smoothly? I’ve heard some issues with memory for the first release (docker related IIRC)

The most infuriating 3 seconds of using this Mac every day are the first time I run man and it calls home to see if I’m allowed to do that.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hm, that might actually be (partially) true. Some external CD drives (without such a weight) start to spin/wiggle when the drive spins up and down … Although I guess that’s not really the case for Audio CDs as they are run at a fixed low RPM value, I think. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah. The actual services don’t run on AWS, apparently, but often it’s just the login service?! The whole Atlassian suite was “down” today because you couldn’t log in. But if you already were logged in, it wasn’t much a problem.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Too many things˚ running on AWS eh?

@dce@hashnix.club Arch is the most stress-free OS I’ve ever run (I last reinstalled it 14 years ago, only rolling updates since then) – but to be honest, I sometimes wonder what role my general choice of software plays. I mostly run minimalistic software or programs that I wrote myself. I guess that greatly reduces the chance of breakage. 🤔

After taking most of the year off from role-playing, I’ve got 3 one-shots coming up in the next month, all of which need some tweaking before I can run them (as do my homebrew rules).

Plus there’s a “build a game” code challenge at work, a pair of media boxes I need to rebuild, a pair of dead machines I need to diagnose, and I’d like to (eventually) get my twtxt apps to a “releasable” state.

So many projects, so little (free) time…