@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com today I learned about “disc golf”. I had no idea that existed. I am assuming the “MRV” is a model/brand for a disc? Any physical activity is good, specially one you enjoy!

Quadratic Gravity Theory Reshapes Quantum View of Big Bang
Researchers at the University of Waterloo say a new “quadratic quantum gravity” framework could explain the universe’s rapid early expansion without adding extra ingredients to Einstein’s theory by hand. The idea is especially notable because it makes testable predictions, including a minimum level of primordial gravitational waves that future experiments … ⌘ Read more

@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com Nice. I just wanted to let you know that the black text color on nearly black button background color in the twtHash tab is basically unreadable. I’ve no idea why the dark theme is preferred over the light one in my browser anyway. :-D

What Made Bell Labs So Successful?
Bell Labs “created many of the foundational innovations of the modern age,” writes Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation — from transistors and telecommunications satellites to Unix and the C programming language.

But what was the secret to its success? he asks in a new article for the Wall Street Journal. Start with its lucky arrival in a “problem-ri … ⌘ Read more

I thought that YouTube finally destroyed all the feeds, because I didn’t get any new entries in my newsreader for days. Now I realized that Newsboat somehow just froze. No idea what happened. This is the very first time ever in all those years. Haven’t updated the version for literally years. I reckon I will compile the upcoming version then. This will require a new Rust toolchain, that’s going to be great fun, I’m sure. Already looking forward to that…

Virtual Swap Space Patches Updated For Improving Linux’s Swap Design
The fourth iteration of patches implementing Virtual Swap Space for Linux were sent out on Wednesday. This stems from ideas going back years for an abstraction to better separate a swap entry from its physical backing storage… ⌘ Read more

Virtual Swap Space Patches Updated For Improving Linux’s Swap Design
The fourth iteration of patches implementing Virtual Swap Space for Linux were sent out on Wednesday. This stems from ideas going back years for an abstraction to better separate a swap entry from its physical backing storage… ⌘ Read more

Experiments Show Potatoes Can Survive In Lunar Solar (With Lots of Help)
sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: In The Martian, fictional astronaut Mark Watney survives the wasteland of Mars by growing potatoes in lunar soil – with a bit of help from human poop. The idea may not be so far-fetched. In a preprint posted this month on bioRxiv, researchers show potatoes can indeed grow in the equ … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de No idea why this didn’t occur to me. But you’re absolutely right.

Asteroid Ryugu Has All of the Main Ingredients For Life
Samples from the asteroid Ryugu contain all five nucleobases – the key building blocks of DNA and RNA. “This strengthens the idea that asteroids may have brought the ingredients for the first living organisms to Earth long ago,” reports New Scientist. From the report: Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft visited Ryugu in 2018, where it shot two projectiles – one sma … ⌘ Read more

RADV Driver Lands Another Optimization: “Missing In RADV For A Very Long Time”
A four year old optimization idea for the RADV driver was scratched off the TODO list last week for next quarter’s Mesa 26.1 release… ⌘ Read more

To whoever is operating this “xt” client, there might be a misconfiguration. My feed is often, but not always, pulled twice within a few seconds:

2026-03-14T15:31:02+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"
2026-03-14T15:31:31+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"

2026-03-14T15:41:19+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"
2026-03-14T15:41:31+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"

2026-03-14T15:51:04+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"

2026-03-14T16:01:25+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"
2026-03-14T16:01:27+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"

2026-03-14T16:11:51+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"
2026-03-14T16:11:54+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"

2026-03-14T16:21:53+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"

2026-03-14T16:32:19+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"
2026-03-14T16:32:22+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"

2026-03-14T16:52:28+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"
2026-03-14T16:52:31+01:00 "GET /twtxt.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 "xt/0.0.1"

Maybe this is caused by a development and a production setup, no idea. Since this client is sending the If-Modified-Since or If-None-Match request header, I’m good with that, though. Looking forward to discover a new feed hopefully soon. :-)

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Correct, the two smaller versions are loading perfectly fine. The hickup is only for the originals. But in all reality, the middle ones are sufficient for me personally. Please don’t get me wrong, at least for the people photos, the subjects are large enough. The Japanese landscapes, however, would definitely benefit from a bit more detail. ;-)

I just tried it once more, and now, the tree with the sign (/photo/5Zy4pqVIt0oP/IMG_20251106_035048_448.jpg) fully loaded very quickly. Same with the Japanese dish (/photo/tJbmg8oleYbh/IMG_20251030_091719_086.jpg) and shopping center (/photo/qXG5ucIjpPju/IMG_20251029_045002_778.jpg). But the previous and next ones all ran into the same problems again. When I’m very lucky, I eventually get the upper half. Typically not even that much, a third, a fifth, or even less.

Waiting a bit before making an attempt, the wooden walkway through the forest or park (/photo/ojQpDLfBoGN4/IMG_20251023_043829_011.jpg) eventually also made it. But unlike the other successful attempts, it took a long time.

The more photos you add, the more beneficial it might be to separate the index into several different albums. I didn’t measure it, but it felt like 10 to 20 seconds for all the thumbnails to load. That traffic adds up.

Another idea would be to strip the EXIF data from the thumbnails and reducing quality to 90% or even 80%. Using the famous tree with the sign, I cannot tell the difference between the original thumbnail and the 80% quality one. I’m sure it depends on the subject. Here are the numbers:

$ convert -strip IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg stripped.jpg
$ convert -quality 90 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 90.jpg
$ convert -quality 80 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 80.jpg
$ convert -strip -quality 90 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 90-stripped.jpg
$ convert -strip -quality 80 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 80-stripped.jpg
$ ls -lh *jpg | awk '{print $5 " " $9}' 
46K 80.jpg
45K 80-stripped.jpg
64K 90.jpg
63K 90-stripped.jpg
132K IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg
127K stripped.jpg
$ ls -l *jpg | awk '{print $5 " " $9}'
46160 80.jpg
45064 80-stripped.jpg
65012 90.jpg
63916 90-stripped.jpg
135070 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg
129647 stripped.jpg

Don’t tease me with a crazy idea! I was only half-joking. Less than half, if I’m being honest.

Fedora Evaluating New Idea For For Experimental Concepts & Fostering New Innovations
Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta announced a new proposal for “A Technology Innovation Lifecycle Process for Fedora.” With the help of Google’s Gemini AI, Spaleta laid out a proposal to help Fedora make greater accommodations for experimental concepts and building more interest around innovative ideas without a firm commitment to integrate them into Fedora proper until they can be assured of sustainability… ⌘ Read more

Silicon Valley Is Buzzing About This New Idea: AI Compute As Compensation
sziring shares a report from Business Insider: Silicon Valley has long competed for talent with ever-richer pay packages built around salary, bonus, and equity. Now, a fourth line item is creeping into the mix: AI inference. As generative AI tools become embedded in software development, the cost of running the underlying models - … ⌘ Read more

Valve/RADV Developers Look At More Per-Game Tuning/Optimizations For Mesa Drivers
RADV Radeon Vulkan driver developers on Valve’s Linux graphics team are evaluating the idea of greater use of per-game/app profiles within this open-source driver and for Mesa drivers at large. Currently for Mesa drivers with DriConf there is the ability to provide per-game/app workarounds while the consideration now is extending that to allow for more per-game optimizations… ⌘ Read more

Startup Wants To Launch a Space Mirror
A startup called Reflect Orbital wants to launch thousands of mirror-bearing satellites to reflect sunlight onto Earth at night and “power solar farms after sunset, provide lighting for rescue workers and illuminate city streets, among other things,” reports the New York Times. From the report: It is an idea seemingly out of a sci-fi movie, but the company, Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., … ⌘ Read more

The National Videogame Museum Acquires the Mythical Nintendo Playstation
The National Videogame Museum has acquired an extremely rare MSF-1 development kit, believed to be the oldest surviving prototype of the canceled Nintendo PlayStation. Engadget reports: Nicknamed the Nintendo PlayStation, the idea was that a new CD-ROM format backed by Sony would be added to the cartridge-based Super NES, resultin … ⌘ Read more

I call it a success! (Please excuse the terrible background noise and bad audio in general. I’m not a sound engineer at all. Also, no idea why I use plural in the beginning. :-?) https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/5mm-dowels/

Silicon Valley’s Ideas Mocked Over Penchant for Favoring Young Entrepreneurs with ‘Agency’
In a 9,000-word expose, a writer for Harper’s visited San Francisco’s young entrepreneurs in September to mockingly profile “tech’s new generation and the end of thinking.”
There’s Cluely founder Roy Lee. (“His grand contribution to the world was a piece of software that told people what to do.”) And the … ⌘ Read more

Startup Plans April Launch for a Satellite Reflect Sunlight to Earth at Night
A start-up called Reflect Orbital “proposes to use large, mirrored satellites to redirect sunlight to Earth at night,” reports the Washington Post, “with plans to bathe solar farms, industrial sites and even entire cities in light that could, if desired, reach the intensity of daylight….”

Slashdot noted their idea i … ⌘ Read more

Your Smart TV May Be Crawling the Web for AI
Bright Data, a company that operates one of the world’s largest residential proxy networks, has been running an SDK inside smart TV apps that turns those devices into nodes for web crawling – collecting data used by AI companies, among other clients – and most consumers have had no idea it was happening.

The company has published more than 200 first-party apps to LG’s app s … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net so…

An isomorphic TypeScript library is a codebase, written in TypeScript, that can run in multiple JavaScript environments, most commonly both the web browser (client-side) and a server (like Node.js). The core idea is to share the exact same code across the frontend and backend, avoiding duplication and improving efficiency.

@bender@twtxt.net Here is a properly formatted version of your message:

Not yet — but that’s probably a good idea.

Instructions:

1. Clone the repository
   

git clone https://git.mills.io/saltyim/saltyim.git
cd saltyim

1. Check out the v2 branch
   

git checkout v2

1. Build and install the CLI/TUI
   

make DESTDIR=$HOME/bin install

After installation, run:

salty-chat

Idea Raised For Nicer DRM Panic Screen Integration On Fedora Linux
A proposal within the Fedora Linux community suggests improving the kernel’s DRM Panic screen to a more user-friendly, BSOD-style experience. Phoronix reports: Open-source developer Jose Exposito proposed today a nicer experience for DRM Panic integration on Fedora. Rather than using DRM Panic with just the kernel log contents being encoded … ⌘ Read more

China Once Stole Foreign Ideas. Now It Wants To Protect Its Own
China’s courts are now handling more than 550,000 intellectual-property cases a year – making it the world’s most litigious country for IP disputes – as the nation’s own companies, once notorious for copying foreign designs and technology, find themselves on the defensive against a domestic counterfeiting epidemic fueled by excess factory capacity.

Th … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They certainly don’t. 🫤

Had an idea earlier: How about going all in on sustainability and saving money/energy, so how about telling your customers “AI is a bad idea $because_long_list_of_reasons, here are our alternatives, you’ll thank us in 5 years”? (I bet the customers wouldn’t listen either … 🙄)

Unable To Stop AI, SAG-AFTRA Mulls a Studio Tax On Digital Performers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: In the future, studios that use synthetic actors in place of humans might have to pay a royalty into a union fund. That’s one of the ideas kicking around as SAG-AFTRA prepares to sit down with the studios on Feb. 9. Artificial intelligence was central to the 2023 actors strike, and it’s only g … ⌘ Read more

Cory Doctorow On Tariffs and the DMCA In Canada
Longtime Slashdot reader devnulljapan writes: In 2012, Canada passed anti-circumvention law Bill C-11, cut-and-pasted from the U.S. DMCA, in return for access to U.S. markets without tariffs. Trump has tariffed Canada anyway, so Cory Doctorow suggests it sounds like like a good idea to ditch Bill C-11 and turn Canada into a “Disenshittification Nation” and go into the business of … ⌘ Read more

cURL Removes Bug Bounties
Ancient Slashdot reader jantangring shares a report from Swedish electronics industry news site Elektroniktidningen (translated to English), writing: “Open source code library cURL is removing the possibility to earn money by reporting bugs, hoping that this will reduce the volume of AI slop reports,” reports etn.se. “Joshua Rogers – AI wielding bug hunter of fame – thinks it’s a great idea.” cURL maintainer Daniel Stenber … ⌘ Read more

‘Just Because Linus Torvalds Vibe Codes Doesn’t Mean It’s a Good Idea’
In an opinion piece for The Register, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that while “vibe coding” can be fun and occasionally useful for small, throwaway projects, it produces brittle, low-quality code that doesn’t scale and ultimately burdens real developers with cleanup and maintenance. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Vibe co … ⌘ Read more

Is the Possibility of Conscious AI a Dangerous Myth?
This week Noema magazine published a 7,000-word exploration of our modern “Mythology Of Conscious AI” written by a neuroscience professor who directs the University of Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science:
The very idea of conscious AI rests on the assumption that consciousness is a matter of computation. More specifically, that implementing the right kind of computation, … ⌘ Read more

So, are you guys up for an experiment?

I’m really not happy with the domain “uninformativ.de” anymore. I’m going to switch to “movq.de” soon (or maybe something else if I get another fancy idea).

If I keep the url = field in my twtxt file, nothing should break, right? Right? 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d love to take a look at the code. 😅

I’m kind of curious to know how much Assembly I need vs. How much of a microkernel can I build purely in Mu (µ)? 🤔

Can’t really answer that, because I only made a working kernel for 16-bit real mode yet. That is 99% C, though, only syscall entry points are Assembly. (The OpenWatcom compiler provides C wrappers for triggering software interrupts, which makes things easier.)

But in long mode? No idea yet. 😅 At least changing the page tables will require a tiny little bit of Assembly.

Whohoo! 🥳 You have no idea how great a feeling this is! This includes the Mu stdlib and runtime as well, not just some simple stupid program, this means a significant portion of the runtime and stdlib “just works”™ 🤣

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe the whole bridge idea is a mistake done twice (I encouraged the first time, it was a mistake to do so). In this case, the “Babel Tower” works; there is no need to interact with “others”, let it be just twtxt.

I think this is finally a good metaphor to talk about “simple” software:

https://oldbytes.space/@psf/115846939202097661

Distilled software.

I quote in full:

principles of software distillation:

Old software is usually small and new software is usually large. A distilled program can be old or new, but is always small, and is powerful by its choice of ideas, not its implementation size.

A distilled program has the conciseness of an initial version and the refinement of a final version.

A distilled program is a finished work, but remains hackable due to its small size, allowing it to serve as the starting point for new works.

Many people write programs, but few stick with a program long enough to distill it.

I often tried to tell people about “simple” or “minimalistic” software, “KISS”, stuff like that, but they never understand – because everybody has a different idea of “simple”. The term “simple” is too abstract.

This is worth thinking about some more. 🤔

At around 19 seconds in the video, you can see some minor graphical glitches.

Text mode applications in Unix terminals are such a mess. It’s a miracle that this works at all.

In the old DOS days, you could get text (and colors) on the screen just by writing to memory, because the VGA memory was mapped to a fixed address. We don’t have that model anymore. To write a character to a certain position, you have to send an escape sequence to move the cursor to that position, then more escape sequences to set the color/attributes, then more escape sequences to get the cursor to where you actually want it. And then of course UTF-8 on top, i.e. you have no idea what the terminal will actually do when you send it a “🙂”.

Mouse events work by the terminal sending escape sequences to you (https://www.xfree86.org/current/ctlseqs.html#Mouse%20Tracking).

ncurses does an amazing job here. It’s fast (by having off-screen buffers and tracking changes, so it rarely has to actually send full screen updates to the terminal) and reliable and works across terminals. Without the terminfo database that keeps track of which terminal supports/requires which escape sequences, we’d be lost.

But gosh, what a mess this is under the hood … Makes you really miss memory mapped VGA and mouse drivers.

Heart Association Revives Theory That Light Drinking May Be Good For You
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For a while, it seemed the notion that light drinking was good for the heart had gone by the wayside, debunked by new studies and overshadowed by warnings that alcohol causes cancer. Now the American Heart Association has revived the idea in a scientific review that i … ⌘ Read more

Btw, @shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe, that’s a super cool logo on your yarnd. I like it a lot!

It just doesn’t look aligned properly: Could be a yarnd issue, though, it might not expect a logo this large. Just wildguessing, no idea.

Russian Enthusiasts Planning DIY DDR5 Memory Amidst Worldwide Shortage
Amid a global DDR5 shortage and soaring prices, Russian hardware enthusiasts are experimenting with do-it-yourself DDR5 RAM by sourcing empty PCBs and soldering memory chips by hand. Tom’s Hardware reports: The idea comes from Russian YouTuber PRO Hi-Tech’s Telegram channel, where a local enthusiast known as “Vik-on” already perfo … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m toying with the idea of making a widget/window system on top of Python’s ncurses. I’ve never really been happy with the existing ones (like urwid, textual, pytermgui, …). I mean, they’re not horrible, it’s mostly the performance that’s bugging me – I don’t want to wait an entire second for a terminal program to start up.

Not sure if I’ll actually see it through, though. Unicode makes this kind of thing extremely hard. 🫤

Safety Panel Says NASA Should Have Taken Starliner Incident More Seriously
joshuark shares a report from Ars Technica: For the better part of two months last year, most of us had no idea how serious the problems were with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. A safety advisory panel found this uncertainty also filtered through NASA’s workforce. […] The Starli … ⌘ Read more

Wow, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, so many tables. No idea what I expected (I’m totally clueless on this low-level stuff), but that was quite an interesting surprise to me. https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-21/0/POSTING-en.html

YouTuber’s Livestream Appears On White House Website
The White House says it’s investigating how a personal-finance YouTuber’s livestream briefly appeared on the White House’s official live video page. The creator says he has no idea how his video ended up there. The Associated Press reports: The livestream appeared for at least eight minutes late Thursday on whitehouse.gov/live, where the White House usually streams live v … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, a table of contents is indeed a great idea!

I’m seeing crashes in the 3D subsystem. (Gallium? Glamor? Whatever other Mesa thing they have? No idea.) In the logs I find this:

malloc(): unaligned tcache chunk detected

And that’s why I still care about Rust and want to learn more about it, even though it’s giving me so much headache and I’ve given up so many times. Because Rust currently seems to be the only popular systems programming language that tries to eliminate these error classes.

And of course “the Rust experiment” in the Linux kernel has recently been concluded as “successful”, so that alone is reason enough for me:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/

Why Switzerland Is Weighing a 10 Million Population Limit
An anonymous reader shares a report: Growing support for far-right parties is pressuring European governments to introduce stricter controls on immigration. Switzerland is set to vote on a proposal that would take the idea to the next level – imposing a cap on its population [non-paywalled link]. The initiative could lead eventually to a blanket ban on new … ⌘ Read more

Man, I have no idea where the last build of the Yarn android client went to (even though it wasn’t all that good when I first used it, but it was relatively useful otherwise)