FFmpeg To Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs
FFmpeg, the open source multimedia framework that powers video processing in Google Chrome, Firefox, YouTube and other major platforms, has called on Google to either fund the project or stop burdening its volunteer maintainers with security vulnerabilities found by the company’s AI tools. The maintainers patched a bug that Google’s AI agent discovered in code for decoding a 1995 vi … ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Linux Driver Working Toward UALink & High Speed Fabrics Support
The YouTube video recordings for the X.Org Developers’ Conference 2025 that took place at the end of September in Austria are finally available. Among the many interesting XDC2025 presentations was Intel engineer Matthew Brost talking about the GPU Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) within Intel’s modern Xe kernel graphics driver… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Have we reached peak enshittification yet?

YouTube is completely broken for me for a week or more. The player doesn’t even load anymore. Trying to limit the search results to real videos doesn’t do shit, etc. It’s useless. But downloading the videos with yt-dlp still works like a dream.

I have now permitted the following media types:

image/*
audio/*
video/*
text/*

Hilarious Unused Audio From 2003 Baseball Game Rediscovered by Video Game History Foundation
After popular arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Spy Hunter, Midway Games jumped into the home console market, and in 2003 launched their baseball game franchise “MLB Slugfest” for Xbox, PS2, and GameCube. But at times it was almost a parody of baseball, including announcers filling the lo … ⌘ Read more

Video Games’ Hottest New Platform is an Old One
Web-based video games are experiencing an unexpected revival as the broader $189 billion industry stagnates. Sales for browser-based titles like GeoGuessr and chess were expected to triple from 2021 to 2028, reaching $3.09 billion, according to Google and Kantar. Playgama hosted more than 15,000 new web games in the first half of 2025, exceeding the combined total from 2021 throug … ⌘ Read more

The Louvre’s Video Surveillance Password Was ‘Louvre’
A bungled October 18 heist that saw $102 million of crown jewels stolen from the Louvre in broad daylight has exposed years of lax security at the national art museum. From trivial passwords like ‘LOUVRE’ to decades-old, unsupported systems and easy rooftop access, the job was made surprisingly easy. PC Gamer reports: As Rogue cofounder and former Polygon arch-jester Cass … ⌘ Read more

I want a good parallel language [video]
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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org now that I could finally read you RSVP message (or, should I say, essay, LOL), I had to see the video, and well, https://netbros.com/1761846417/. Hahahahaha!

Streaming live video as a macOS screensaver using AVFoundation and yt-dlp
I built this to play live HLS streams as a screensaver on macOS. It supports both direct .m3u8 URLs and YouTube
links (via yt-dlp extraction with caching).

The interesting bits:

• Cross-screen synchronization: All displays show the same frame of the video by syncing to a shared timestamp,
  making it feel like one continuous stream across monitors
  
• Handles the unreliable macOS screensaver lifecycle (stopAnimation doesn’t always get called when … ⌘ Read more

“I remember taking a screen shot of a video, and when I opened it in Paint, the video was playing in it!”
In older versions of Windows, if you had a video playing, took a screenshot, and pasted that screenshot into Paint, you could sometimes see the video continue to play inside Paint. What kind of sorcery enabled this to happen? A few of you will realise instantly why this used to happen: rener surfaces. Back in at least the Windo … ⌘ Read more

Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI
TIL OpenAI uses (used?) one primary write instance for their PostgreSQL cluster with dozens of read replicas. This powers the core ChatGPT service which has hundreds of millions of users and, needless to say, is a critical backbone to it.

The talk implies they shard now, but the whole video emphasises all the optimizations they did in order to support their workload through a single primary. It isn’t mentioned at what time they switched to sharding, but it’s heavily implied that … ⌘ Read more

When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it
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I don’t care much for the video, but damn, that is one catchy song. 🎶 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko70cExuzZM

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh, that’s cool! :-) Feeding magpies seems to be an Aussie thing, the Cutting Edge Engineering Australia videos usually also include a cute magpie feeding clip.

@bender@twtxt.net Off you go to the magpie hunt! We wanna see Florida pies!

@bender@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Thank you! Not sure what I end up putting in there, but I’m sure I will find some tools to go in. :-)

Yes, this was a flat piece of sheet metal. It went together like a cardboard box, just much slower and with timbers clamped down to get a straight folding line. I don’t have a sheet metal brake, so I just carefully hammered the piece bit by bit. Like in this video by the Sheet Metal Dude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYgEfWEMXk0

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I give up. Just doesn’t give me a 360° video. 🥴 Maybe I’m just having bad luck with YouTube’s randomized stuff (maybe I’m getting “experiments”, who knows) …

yt-dlp will soon require a full JS runtime to overcome YouTube’s JS challenges
If you download YouTube videos, there’s a real chance you’re using yt-dlp, the long-running and widely-used command-line program for downloading YouTube videos. Even if you’re not using it directly, many other tools for downloading YouTube videos are built on top of yt-dlp, and even some media players which offer YouTube playback use it in the background. Now, yt-dlp has alway … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org that’s pretty cool! The first video I see on YouTube of that kind. Thanks!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can’t remember the last time I came across a 360° video. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org is it a 360 degree video online, or a local one?

Whooooaaaah, I just accidentally found out that VLC can play 360° videos and I am able to pan around! Crazy shit. I actually scrolled in order to adjust the volume like it usually works, but it zoomed in and out instead. Then I saw the title hinting at the 360° stuff. Even though this is not my cup of tea, it’s nice that VLC supports it.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, removing the cover will probably help. I’ll have to try. 😅 And, yes, the scrolling is pretty annoying (and kind of ruins the experience a little bit).

The printer isn’t that loud – at least not for a dot matrix printer. 😅 It’s been ~30 years since I’ve last seen them in person, but I remembered these things to be louder. I’m typing on my Model M, maybe that contributes to the perceived noise on this video. Here’s an isolated recording of that keyboard: https://movq.de/v/ddc98b03d8/2022-02-21–model-m-goes-brrr.ogg 🤣 It really sounds like that when you’re typing fast. Brrrrt.

@thecanine@twtxt.net Oh! 🤯 Hadn’t heard of this before. And 100% agree with that video.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I just got a bit curious after watching your video and reading your OP 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org When/if I can pull it off, there will be videos! 😅

I never used hardcopy terminals, either. We did have a dotmatrix printer, but that was just used as a regular printer.

Inkjets, I don’t know. They were pretty fascinating and cool when they came out. A lot faster than dotmatrix and obviously quiter. They never gave me much trouble, actually. But I switched to a laser printer long before crap like DRM’ed ink cartridges became a thing.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Heck yeah, have fun! :-) We never had a matrix printer, started off with a cathode ray tube and an inkjet pisser.

I’m happy to see you compose your first twtxt message using ed on your new output device. We definitely need video proof of that! ;-)

I have a Python script that transforms the original YouTube channel Atom feed into a more useful Atom feed by removing the spam description and replacing it with the video duration, filtering out videos by title, duration, etc. I just updated it to exclude the damn Shorts garbage more efficiently. Finally, YouTube updated their Atom feed generation, so that the video URL contains /short/ if it’s of this useless kind. Never thought that they ever actually will improve their Atom feeds. Thank you, much appreciated!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I have absolutely no idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it uses the closest full image after your cut point and not the one before. Hence, the deltas between the two full images have nothing to really refer to. So, the video player just shows the first full image it finds and “freezes” the image until the video stream actually hits it.

Let me try to visualize it, | represent full images, . just subsequent deltas:

Original start of video
↓
|......|.....|........|......|..
   ↑                      ↑
   Cut point      Cut point

Resulting video:

   ....|.....|........|....
   ↑↑↑↑
   This is where it freezes         

Could be complete bullshit, though. Wouldn’t be the first time that I’m wrong. :-)

I’m just curious, what exact command line do you use to cut the video?

I bought the “remastered” versions of Grim Fandango and Forsaken on GOG, because they’re super cheap at the moment. Both have native Linux versions.

And both these Linux version crap their pants. 🫤 The bundled SDL2 of Forsaken says it “can’t find a matching GLX visual” and I couldn’t figure out how to fix that. I didn’t spend a lot of time on Grim Fandango.

Both work great in Wine. 🤦

(I do have the original version of Grim Fandango from the 1990ies, but that one does not work so well in Wine. I figured, if it’s so cheap, why not. And I now get to play the english version. 😃 The german dub is pretty damn good, actually, but I always prefer the original these days.)

‘Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google’
If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be an engineer at Google during the early to late 2000s, here you go. Now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of its revenue is advertising; the proportion was even higher back then), we Engineers were kept carefully away from that reality, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don’t think about it, jus … ⌘ Read more

memvid: Video-based AI memory library
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Formalizing a proof in lean using GitHub Copilot and canonical
Terrance Tao recently posted a few videos to his YouTube channel in which he experiments with proof solving using LLM assistance.

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10 Secret Abilities of Well-Known Animals
As kids, we all learned about the world’s most famous animals from books, TV, video games, or the Rainforest Cafe and its incredibly biodiverse gift shop. However, Big Animal is keeping certain secrets from you, and the animals you’ve known and loved since childhood harbor some weird and obscure secret abilities, features, and effects. Read […]

The post [10 Secret Abilities of Well-Known Animals](https://listverse.com/2025/05/30/10-secret-abilities … ⌘ Read more

Maybe you’ll enjoy this as well:

I still have one of my first modems, a Creatix LC 144 VF:

I think this was the modem that I used when I first connected to the internet, but I’m not sure.

I plugged it in again and it still works:

The firmware appears to be from 1994, which sounds about right. I don’t think we had internet access before that. We certainly did use local mailboxes, though. (Or BBS’s, as you might call them.)

I now want to actually use that modem again. For the moment, I can only use a phone to dial into it, I lack a second modem to actually establish a connection. Here’s a video:

Not spectacular, but the modem does answer after me entering ATA.

I bought another cheap old modem on eBay and am now waiting for it to arrive. Once it’s here, I want to simulate an actual dial-up session, hopefully from OS/2 or Windows 3.x.

Making the rav1d Video Decoder 1% Faster
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Making video games in 2025 (without an engine)
I genuinely believe making games without a big “do everything” engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead. I am not making a “do everything” game and I do not need 90% of the features these engines provide. I am very particular about how my games feel and look, and how I interact with my tools. I often find the default feature implementations in large engines like Unity so lacking I end up writing my own anyway. Eventually, my … ⌘ Read more

Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
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Using AI to build a tactical shooter
This video demonstrates a nice mental model of how to structure AI assisted programming for building prototypes (planning stage and implementation stage), how to increase speed by varying the input (audio vs. text), along with different smaller tactics to improve the process.

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EU fines TikTok token amount of €530 million for gross privacy violations
A European Union privacy watchdog fined TikTok 530 million euros ($600 million) on Friday after a four-year investigation found that the video sharing app’s data transfers to China put users at risk of spying, in breach of strict EU data privacy rules. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users about where their personal data was be … ⌘ Read more

I’m with @andros@twtxt.andros.dev and @eapl.me@eapl.me on this one. But I have also lost interest in twtxt lately and currently rethinking what digital tools truly add value to my life. So I will not spending my time on adding more complexity to Timeline. Still a big thanks to you @prologic@twtxt.net for all the great work you have done and all the nice conversations both here and on our video calls.

The VTech Socratic method
We’ve had a lot of fun with VTech’s computers in the past on this blog. Usually, they’re relatively spartan computers with limited functionality, but they did make something very interesting in the late 80s. The Socrates is their hybrid video game console/computer design from 1988, and today we’ll start tearing into it. ↫ Leaded Solder web log Now we’re in for the good stuff. A weird educational computer/game console/toy thing from the late ’80s, by VTech. I have a massive soft s … ⌘ Read more

A tour inside the IBM z17
Welcome to a photo-driven tour of the IBM z17. I’ve scoured the image library to pull dig deep inside these machines that most people don’t get an opportunity to see inside, and I’ll share some of the specifications gleaned from the announcement and related Redbooks. ↫ Elizabeth K. Joseph at the IBM community website These IBM mainframes don’t have to be beautiful, but they always are. I wish I could see a z17 up close – hopefully IBM will release a detailed video walkthrough of … ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz OMG! You used the video capabilities of yarnd 🤣 Nice! 😊

@movq@www.uninformativ.de So cool! 😎 Where’s the time lapse video you used to have of this tree? 🌳 Hmm 🧐

SDL2 ported to Mac OS 9
Well, this you certainly don’t see every day. This is a “rough draft” of SDL2 for MacOS 9, using CodeWarrior Pro 6 and 7. Enough was done to get it building in CW, and the start of a “macosclassic” video driver was created. It DOES seem to basically work, but much still needs to be done. Event handling is just enough to handling Command-Q, there is no audio, etc etc etc. ↫ A cast of thousands The hardest part was a video driver for the classic Mac OS, which had to be created mostly f … ⌘ Read more

I’m playing with ratterplatter again: It’s a toy that watches disk I/O and emulates the noise of a real hard disk. (Linux only.) It uses sound samples from one of my older disks.

I tried a different approach at estimating the disk activity and I think I finally got it right (after almost 10 years … 🤦).

Demo, booting a Windows 2000 VM: https://movq.de/v/1400544cc6/2kboot-ratterplatter-2.mp4

(For this purpose alone, I put a couple of mini speakers into my PC case, so that the noise comes from the right place: https://movq.de/v/a3b2dc0932/speakers.jpg)

The results aren’t too bad, but this thing can’t be super accurate due to the huge I/O caches that we have these days. For the video, I dropped the caches before booting Windows, otherwise you would have heard almost nothing.

FWIW, if you don’t know it yet, this is the equivalent for proper keyboard sound: https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring

10 Fictional Bands with Real Hit Songs
Several movies and television shows feature bands we fall in love with, but some fictional bands find real success. Once these bands started gaining traction, they released albums, created music videos, and sometimes even embarked on a tour. Their hits and soundtracks rank high on music charts, and some even reached the top spots. Some […]

The post [10 Fictional Bands with Real Hit Songs](https://listverse.com/2025/03/31/10-fictional-bands-with-real-hit- … ⌘ Read more

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.

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