@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I’d love to have a positive, optimistic reply to that, but … uhm … I don’t. 🤣

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ooh, I’ve got to bookmark that page. 😃

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I wish I had the luxury of not reading that junk. 😅 But instead, I have a Mutt hotkey that pipes an HTML mail through elinks … Bah.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m trying to call some libc functions (because the Rust stdlib does not have an equivalent for getpeername(), for example, so I don’t have a choice), so I have to do some FFI stuff and deal with raw pointers and all that, which is very gnarly in Rust – because you’re not supposed to do this. Things like that are trivial in C or even Assembler, but I have not yet understood what Rust does under the hood. How and when does it allocate or free memory … is the pointer that I get even still valid by the time I do the libc call? Stuff like that.

I hope that I eventually learn this over time … but I get slapped in the face at every step. It’s very frustrating and I’m always this 🤏 close to giving up (only to try again a year later).

Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess I could “just” use some 3rd party library for this. socket2 gets mentioned a lot in this context. But I don’t want to. I literally need one getpeername() call during the lifetime of my program, I don’t even do the socket(), bind(), listen(), accept() dance, I already have a fully functional file descriptor. Using a library for that is total overkill and I’d rather do it myself. (And look at the version number: 0.5.10. The library is 6 years old but they’re still saying: “Nah, we’re not 1.0 yet, we reserve the right to make breaking changes with every new release.” So many Rust libs are still unstable …)

… and I could go on and on and on … 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org :‘-(

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … because you, me, and that guy over there in the corner are the only three people left using plain-text email. 🫤 (And probably Stallman.)

Fuck me sideways, Rust is so hard. Will we ever be friends?

OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

“Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XV: KEYB Is Half of Keyboard BIOS”

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/learn-something-old-every-day-part-xv-keyb-is-half-of-keyboard-bios/

fn sub(foo: &String) {
    println!("We got this string: [{}]", foo);
}

fn main() {
    // "Hello", 0x00, 0x00, "!"
    let buf: [u8; 8] = [0x48, 0x65, 0x6C, 0x6C, 0x6F, 0x00, 0x00, 0x21];

    // Create a string from the byte array above, interpret as UTF-8, ignore decoding errors.
    let lossy_unicode = String::from_utf8_lossy(&buf).to_string();

    sub(&lossy_unicode);
}

Create a string from a byte array, but the result isn’t a string, it’s a cow 🐮, so you need another to_string() to convert your “string” into a string.

• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html#method.from_utf8_lossy
  
• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/borrow/enum.Cow.html
  

I still have a lot to learn.

(into_owned() instead of to_string() also works and makes more sense to me, it’s just that the compiler suggested to_string() first, which led to this funny example.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Rust is so different and, at the same time, so complex – it’s not far fetched to assume that I simply don’t understand what’s going on here. The docs appear to be clear, but alas … is it a bugs in the docs? Is it a lack of experience on my part? Who knows.

By the way, looks like there was a bit of a discussion regarding that name:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/120048

So I was using this function in Rust:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/path/struct.Path.html#method.display

Note the little 1.0.0 in the top right corner, which means that this function has been “stable since Rust version 1.0.0”. We’re at 1.87 now, so we’re good.

Then I compiled my program on OpenBSD with Rust 1.86, i.e. just one version behind, but well ahead of 1.0.0.

The compiler said that I was using an unstable library feature.

Turns out, that function internally uses this:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ffi/struct.OsStr.html#method.display

And that is only available since Rust 1.87.

How was I supposed to know this? 🤨🫩

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, well, it’s a bit like twtxt. There is a Gopher community, but it’s small. I actually don’t like that HTTP is so easily accessible. I don’t like it that much when people post links to my site on HackerNews or something like that. Too much exposure.

Gopher is a small world. It’s slow and cozy.

And much like twtxt, the protocol is simple®, so it’s easier to tinker with it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I’m very glad twtxt/Yarn doesn’t have this. ✌️

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh, ah, I didn’t even know they sold boxes. 🤯 I hope it still works!

@quark@ferengi.one It’s as close as coffee as you can get. 😅 They take the beans, apply magic, and then most of the caffeine is gone. You can also buy whole decaf’d beans and then grind them yourself. It does kill some of the flavor – but it’s not like you’re drinking black water.

@prologic@twtxt.net That isn’t really my strong suit. 😅

@thecanine@twtxt.net … all these stupid, pointless “apps” are stuff that I eventually have to remove from family devices … Sigh.

@bender@twtxt.net Both Gopher and Mastodon are a way for me to “babble”. 😅 I basically shut down Gopher in favor of Mastodon/Fedi last year. But the Fediverse doesn’t really work for me. It’s too focused on people (I prefer topics) and I dislike the addictive nature of likes and boosts (I’m not disciplined enough to ignore them). Self-hosting some Fedi thing is also out of the question (the minimalistic daemons don’t really support following hashtags, which is a must-have for me).

I’ll probably keep reading Fedi stuff, I just won’t post that much, I think.

Gopher server is back online and I’ll be phasing out Mastodon.

gopher://uninformativ.de

(No, I won’t do multi-protocol twtxt again. 😅)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s difficult, you often don’t get what you’d expect. They also make heavy use of 3rd party libraries. IIUC, for random numbers, they refer to this library. I’ve read many times that the Rust stdlib is intentionally minimalistic (to make it easier to maintain and port and all that).

I’m struggling with this, using 3rd party libs for so many things isn’t really my cup of tea. I’ll probably make my own tiny little “standard library”. It’s silly, but I don’t see any other options. 🤷

@bender@twtxt.net “Mhhhhhhh, hehehe, gonna poop on that car. 😏”

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That’s interesting, I see them (Teichrallen) everywhere I look. 🤯 It feels like they’re about as common as mallards (Stockenten) over here. 🤔

@quark@ferengi.one Plot twist: I only drink decaf. 🤯🤯🤯

Sitting on the balcony with a fucking cup of coffee. https://movq.de/v/463f1f9d03/s.png

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I’m sure he’s doing a good job! 😊

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Looks pretty nice! Enjoy the mild temperatures while you can. 😅

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Thanks mate. 👌 (In the grand scheme of things I’m still doing great. World news are a horrible shit show nowadays, ffs. 😭)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Welcome back. 👋 (It’s a bit quiet here in general. 🤔)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks. 😅 Quite a few of them waddle around at the pond in our village. But those two individuals were seen in a nearby zoo. They’re not zoo animals, they just live there. 😅

Bird photos of the day:

• Egyptian Goose
  
• Common Moorhen (half asleep)
  
• Rock Dove
  

https://movq.de/v/4fe0207d31/

I wanted to port this to Rust as an excercise, but they still have no random number generator in the core library: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/130703

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

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Only 10% of the German population had Internet access in 1998: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Deutschland#/media/Datei:Diagramm_Internetnutzer_in_Deutschland.svg I guess I was lucky in that regard.

(If today’s tech wasn’t constantly trying to track and scam you, I might still be an early adopter.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nice! The final desk looks like it’s right out of Skyrim. 😃

Having some fun with SIRDS this morning.

What you should see: https://movq.de/v/dae785e733/disp.png

And the tutorial I used for my C program: https://www.ime.usp.br/~otuyama/stereogram/basic/index.html

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oooooh, never seen that before. 😲 Either white-balance doing funny stuff or unusual “filtering” through those clouds. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ctrl-U in Vim does something similar (“Delete all entered characters before the cursor in the current line”), but it does not put them into the “clipboard”. I sometimes hit Ctrl-U by accident and then my text is gone. 😡😂

A bill from our ISP in 1998.

We’re talking about a month here, 1998-07-27 to 1998-08-26.

Basic fee: 7.50 DM (about 6€ today).

Online time: 516 minutes, 23.53 DM (about 20€ today).

That’s just the ISP costs, if I’m not mistaken. The underlying phone calls were pretty pricey as well.

Just as a little courtesy call (is that the right term?): 2025 continues to be annoying and exhausting, and I won’t really have the energy to work on twtxt/Yarn or texudus. Other than the occasional retrocomputing thingy (which gives a nice boost of nostalgia), I’m not doing much of anything lately.

cc @prologic@twtxt.net @andros@twtxt.andros.dev

SuSE Linux 6.4 and Arachne on DOS also work (with Windows 2000 as a call target):

• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#suse-linux-64
  
• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#arachne-on-dos

@bender@twtxt.net Hm, I was just surprised to see so many non-english feeds in there. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Like this? 😅

Source: https://mastodon.social/@islieb/114635884398567253