How narcissism ruins teamwork, and why it matters in the workplace
Teamwork can bring out both the best and the worst in people. Working together means sharing ideas and coordinating actions. But sometimes, it can also involve swallowing pride, particularly when people with strong personalities, such as those with narcissism, take charge. ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net hey, not random! How dare you! (with Greta accent, and emphasis). LOL. Old man here doing, well, like old man do. Wait until you are old, and that will give you a better idea. :-P

Java’s Swing is allegedly in “maintenance mode”, so I doubt it’s a good idea to use it for new programs. For example, I very much doubt that it will ever support Wayland.

The replacement is supposed to be JavaFX, but that’s not included in JREs – anymore! It used to be, now it’s not, even though it’s well over 15 years old now.

This whole thing (“Java GUIs”) appears to have stagnated a lot. Probably because everything is web stuff these days …

https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javafx/faq-javafx.html#6

The gut microbiome may play a role in shaping our personality
Rats given a faecal transplant from exuberant toddlers showed more exploratory behaviour, supporting the idea that gut bacteria might affect children’s emotional development ⌘ Read more

Pentagon Admits It Has No Idea Who’s on “Drug Boats” Being Bombed ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: ​​Expert Insights from Our Latest Webinars
The Erlang Solutions team has been creating webinars that share knowledge, spark ideas, and celebrate the BEAM community. Each one offers a chance to explore new tools, hear fresh perspectives, and learn from the people building scalable and reliable systems every day.

If you haven’t tuned in yet, here’s a look at some of our recent sessions, full of practical insights and new thinking shaping the future of the BEAM.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, I’ll have to take a look. Appears to be Go only, doesn’t it?

I’m not quite sold yet on the idea of “immediate mode” GUIs. 🤔

NATO secretary general says Putin is “running out of money, troops and ideas” ⌘ Read more

Antidepressants vary widely in their physical side effects
Antidepressants can be very effective, but they also come with side effects that vary from one drug to the next, supporting the idea of more personalised prescriptions ⌘ Read more

ICE tickets Chicago man with legal residency $130 for not having his papers on him: ‘It’s not fair…I’m a resident’
Gregory Royal Pratt,  Reporter  -  Chicago Tribune

_Stephan: Do you always have your papers on your person? If you immigrated from another country, even if you are a White person, it might be a good idea to do so. Like everything else dictator Trump is doing, having his Gestapo stop people and demanding t … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de he sure does! LOL. It is more like incomprehensible stuff that comes out. Sometimes I manage to get what he was trying to say, but more often than not I have no idea. 🤣

Intranets have been around since Jesus times (well, not quite 😂, but you get the idea). They are fun to play with, but that’s about it. I mean, the “fun” of the Internet comes from its variety.

It happened.

“Can you help me debug this program? I vibe coded it and I have no idea what’s going on. I had no choice – learning this new language and frameworks would have taken ages, and I have severe time constraints.”

Did I say “no”? Of course not, I’m a “nice guy”. So I’m at fault as well, because I endorsed this whole thing. The other guy is also guilty, because he didn’t communicate clearly to his boss what can be done and how much time it takes. And the boss and his bosses are guilty a lot, because they’re all pushing for “AI”.

The end result is garbage software.

This particular project is still relatively small, so it might be okay at the moment. But normalizing this will yield nothing but garbage. And actually, especially if this small project works out fine, this contributes to the shittiness because management will interpret this as “hey, AI works”, so they will keep asking for it in future projects.

How utterly frustrating. This is not what I want to do every day from now on.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s satisfying. :-) Not all my clocks are radio-controlled, though.

I’ve got a digital alarm clock from the Netherlands (no idea where I got this) and it always runs an hour late. No clue. I put it on a shelf in the workshop where it causes the least amount of confusion.

@prologic@twtxt.net Where do I stand on “Chat Control”? How long of a response/rant do you want? 😅 It’s a disaster. As I understand it, they want to spy on me directly on my devices before encryption even happens – jfc, no, fuck off. And since there are so many devices, they want to automate the scanning, which is the worst idea you could possibly have.

10 Inventors Who Died Before Seeing Their Creations Succeed
In the course of time, inventors, engineers, clever thinkers, and business-minded individuals have propelled humanity forward. Their unique ideas and remarkable creations have helped improve mankind and make society more seamless in countless ways. These advancements have ranged from incremental improvements to monumental leaps—and they span industries and inventions from medical breakthroughs to technological marve … ⌘ Read more

That small sliver of time where a QNX desktop was a real thing we did
Bradford Morgan White has published an excellent retrospective of QNX, the realtime microkernel operating system focused on embedded use cases. The final paragraph made me sad, though. QNX is a fascinating operating system. It was extremely well designed from the start, and while it has been rewritten, the core ideas that allowed it survive for 45 years persist to this day. While I am sad that … ⌘ Read more

Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come
Comments ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, it’s probably not black and white. (I have no idea why you would connect a bloody light bulb to your WiFi …) But I do get the impression that there are way more “neo-luddites” that 20 years ago. 😅

Vim Config Generator Idea ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net No, this is a Linux manpage from the man-pages project: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/man/man7/ascii.7

I do have an idea what’s going on. Could be an unfortunate interaction between the table preprocessor tbl and the man macro package. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, I don’t know. Over here, we have parties that we would call “left” or “right”, one of them even calls themselves “The Left”. No idea about your political landscape, but it still makes sense for us. 🤔 For me, at least.

@prologic@twtxt.net yup, that’s what I meant. The lack of it on the URL is fine, but on the post itself it is always a good idea. Time frames matter.

Oh man, if the EU actually rolled out this horribd idea called ChatControl that actually threatens the security and privacy of secure e2e encrypted messaging like Signal™, fuck me, I’m out 🤦‍♂️ I’ll just rage quit the IT industry and become a luddite. I’m out.

@bender@twtxt.net A renewed vision test might be a good idea for some people. 😅 I mean, it is kind of curious that you get this license as a young person and then it lasts a lifetime, without any further tests. As long as you don’t screw up really bad, it remains valid …

Does anyone know of an OsmAnd rendering style that resembles OpenCycleMap? It should highlight cycle networks with vibrant colors and fade everything else. Currently, I plan bike tours by first opening OpenCycleMap on my PC to get an idea and then using OsmAnd on my phone to actually plan the tour. Ideally, I would just use OsmAnd. ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks for asking!

So, I’ve been working on 2 main twtxt-related projects.

The first is small Node / express application that serves up a twtxt file while allowing its owner to add twts to it (or edit it outright), and I’ve been testing it on my site since the night I made that post. It’s still very much an MVP, and I’ve been intermittently adding features, improving security, and streamlining the code, with an eye to release it after I get an MVP done of project #2 (the reader).

But that’s where I’ve been struggling. The idea seems simple enough - another Node / express app (this one with a Vite-powered front-end) that reads a public twtxt file, parses the “follow” list, grabs (and parses) those twtxt files, and then creates a river of twts out of the result. The pieces work fine in seclusion (and with dummy data), but I keep running into weird issues when reading real-live twtxt files, so some twts come through, while others get lost in the ether. I’ll figure it out eventually, but for now, I’ve been spending far more time than I anticipated just trying to get it to work end-to-end.

On top of it, the 2 projects wound up turning into 4 (so far), as I’ve been spinning out little libraries to use across both apps (like https://jsr.io/@itsericwoodward/fluent-dom-esm, and a forthcoming twtxt helper library).

In the end, I’m hoping to have project 1 (the editor) into beta by the end of October, and project 2 (the reader) into beta sometime after that, but we’ll see.

I hope this has satisfied your curiosity, but if you’d like to know more, please reach out!

Removing the empty cache file and it works again. No idea about the PATH glitch, though. Very strange.

We’ve been discussing the idea of changing the threading model from Content-based Addressing to Location-based addressing for years now. The problem is quite complex, but I feel I have to keep reminding y’all of the potential perils of changing this and the pros/cons of each model:

With content-addressed threading, a reply points at something that’s intrinsically identified (hash of author/feed URI + timestamp + content). That ID never changes as long as the content doesn’t. Switching to location-based anchors makes the reply target extrinsic—it now depends on where the post currently lives. In a pull-based, decentralised network, locations drift. The moment they do, thread identity fragments.

@bender@twtxt.net Seriously I have zero clue 🤣 I don’t read or watch any news so I have no idea 🤦‍♂️

The worst thing you can do is make your infrastructure (switches, wifi, …) depend on some cloud service. Because someone else is maintaining that service; you have no control over it. You 100% depend on that other person now. Very stupid idea.

Now guess what manufacturers are pushing for …

Now guess who couldn’t complete a task at work this Saturday morning, because a certain cloud service was down …

IT is fucked. Throw it all away and start over.

@dce@hashnix.club Apart from the crap produced in Redmond two decades ago, I only ever used and still happily use Linux, mainly Debian and Ubuntu. I’ve no idea, but maybe something in there catches your eye: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_operating_systems (I know, what a silly recommendation.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, great idea! :-D I never saw the Epson Image Scan logo before.

I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

https://movq.de/v/56feb53912/s.png

https://movq.de/v/235c1eabac/MVI_8810.MOV.mp4

The biiiiiiiiiig problem is that the print head and plastic cover make it impossible to see what’s currently being printed, because this is not a typewriter. This means: In order to see what I just entered, I have to feed the paper back and forth and back and forth … it’s not ideal.

I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who – as it turned out – did something similar a few years back. (I tried hard to read as little as possible of his blog post, because figuring things out myself is more fun. But that could mean I missed a great idea here or there.)

But hey, at least this is running on my Pentium 133 on SuSE Linux 6.4, printer connected with a parallel cable. 😍

(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1) wrong at one point. 🤪 And ls insisted on using colors …)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Cool! I just got an idea for work tomorrow: Use dmenu to quickly start different SSH tunnels I routinely need.

Status 2025-07-21
Morning, computer! Spending my days off trying to figure things out.
Some of them will occur in this post. I think best when I’m writing,
after all.

I’m back from a short vacation since a couple of weeks. I’m still
going to take a few days off every week for a while. I need the break.
It’s been way too many 12-16 hour workdays. I’m nominally working 80%
(~6 hour days), so I figure I’ve been working a lot for free.

Yeah, well, I like the TKey project to succeed. The ideas behind it
have implicatio … ⌘ Read more

@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?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yesss it’s not my idea but it’s sooo fun here ngl like i should use it more!!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s an interesting idea. For privacy, I’d just omit the Referer altogether. But maybe this helps talking to misconfigured HTTP servers that reject requests without such a header. No clue.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hm, I don’t think so, the requested page was a Linux-specific post. 🤔 I sometimes wonder if privacy-oriented browsers might do this on purpose, to create garbage data? 🤔 No idea.

Something happened with the frame rate of terminal emulators lately. It looks like there’s a trend to run at a high framerate now? I’m not sure exactly. This can be seen in VTE-based terminals like my xiate or XTerm on Wayland. foot and st, on the other hand, are fine.

My shell prompt and cursor look like this:

$ █

When I keep Enter pressed, I expect to see several lines like so:

$
$
$
$
$
$
$ █

With the affected terminal emulators, the lines actually show up in the following sequence. First, we have the original line:

$ █

Pressing Enter yields this as the next frame:

$
█

And then eventually this:

$
$ █

In other words, you can see the cursor jumping around very quickly, all the time.

Another example: Vim actually shows which key you just pressed in the bottom right corner. Keeping j pressed to scroll through a file means I get to see a j flashing rapidly now.

(I have no idea yet, why exactly XTerm in X11 is fine but flickering in Wayland.)

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net That’s what I thought as well, sounds way too expensive to me. But I have no idea what the prices are over here. Probably also astronomical. Campers sit around most of the time, one really would need to use them a lot to justify spending so much money on them.

But yeah, each to their own (expensive) hobbies. :-) I, for example, burn my money on tools that I don’t really™ need. :-P

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah that’s why I’m striking this conversation with you 😅 Not only do I respect your opinion quite highly 🤣 But like you say (and I’ve read their philipshpy) it can be a bit “elitism” for sure. I’m genuinely interested in what we think of as software that “doesn’t suck”. Tb be honest I haven’t really put thought to paper myself, but I reckon if I did, I’d have some opinions/ideas…

In all fairness, GOG says that Forsaken is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – not current Arch Linux. If you ask me, this just goes to show that Linux is not a good platform for proprietary binary software.

Is it free software, do you have the source code? Then you’re good to go, things can be patched/updated (that can still be a lot of work). But proprietary binary blobs? Very bad idea.

Okay, here’s a thing I like about Rust: Returning things as Option and error handling. (Or the more complex Result, but it’s easier to explain with Option.)

fn mydiv(num: f64, denom: f64) -> Option<f64> {
    // (Let’s ignore precision issues for a second.)
    if denom == 0.0 {
        return None;
    } else {
        return Some(num / denom);
    }
}

fn main() {
    // Explicit, verbose version:
    let num: f64 = 123.0;
    let denom: f64 = 456.0;
    let wrapped_res = mydiv(num, denom);
    if wrapped_res.is_some() {
        println!("Unwrapped result: {}", wrapped_res.unwrap());
    }

    // Shorter version using "if let":
    if let Some(res) = mydiv(123.0, 456.0) {
        println!("Here’s a result: {}", res);
    }

    if let Some(res) = mydiv(123.0, 0.0) {
        println!("Huh, we divided by zero? This never happens. {}", res);
    }
}

You can’t divide by zero, so the function returns an “error” in that case. (Option isn’t really used for errors, IIUC, but the basic idea is the same for Result.)

Option is an enum. It can have the value Some or None. In the case of Some, you can attach additional data to the enum. In this case, we are attaching a floating point value.

The caller then has to decide: Is the value None or Some? Did the function succeed or not? If it is Some, the caller can do .unwrap() on this enum to get the inner value (the floating point value). If you do .unwrap() on a None value, the program will panic and die.

The if let version using destructuring is much shorter and, once you got used to it, actually quite nice.

Now the trick is that you must somehow handle these two cases. You must either call something like .unwrap() or do destructuring or something, otherwise you can’t access the attached value at all. As I understand it, it is impossible to just completely ignore error cases. And the compiler enforces it.

(In case of Result, the compiler would warn you if you ignore the return value entirely. So something like doing write() and then ignoring the return value would be caught as well.)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I might give it a shot. 😃

Skimming through the manual: I had no idea that keeping the “up” cursor pressed actually slows you down at some point. 🤦

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I like this idea 👌 Very neat!

@prologic@twtxt.net will do. No worries, not a show stopper. I will suggest that the muted numbered list not be sorted, but latest muted first. That way we have a better idea. Maybe adding timestamps to those too? Just a thought.

Newbie No More: Lessons from My First KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as a Speaker
Introduction April in London has never felt so electric. From the first footstep in the ExCeL halls to the hallway conversations, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 was a whirlwind of new ideas, familiar faces, and those… ⌘ Read more