systemd 259-rc1 Released With Musl libc Support, New run0 “Empower” Mode
Released a short time ago was systemd 259-rc1 as the first test release toward this next version of this dominant Linux init system and service manager… ⌘ Read more

Amyl and the Sniffers gig cancelled last minute due to ‘crowd safety concerns’
The Australian rock band’s free Federation Square gig was cancelled at short notice, causing major upset in the crowd. ⌘ Read more

Amyl and the Sniffers gig cancelled last minute due to ‘crowd safety concerns’
The Australian rock band’s free Federation Square gig was cancelled at short notice, causing major upset in the crowd. ⌘ Read more

Amyl and the Sniffers gig cancelled last minute due to ‘crowd safety concerns’
The Australian rock band’s free Federation Square gig was cancelled at short notice, causing major upset in the crowd. ⌘ Read more

Amyl and the Sniffers gig cancelled last minute due to ‘crowd safety concerns’
The Australian rock band’s free Federation Square gig was cancelled at short notice, causing major upset in the crowd. ⌘ Read more

‘Big Short’ Investor Michael Burry To Close Hedge Fund as He Warns on Valuations
Michael Burry, the investor made famous for his bet against the US housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, is closing his hedge fund [non-paywalled source] as he warned that market valuations had become unhinged from fundamentals. From a report: Scion Asset Management this week terminated its registration wit … ⌘ Read more

Green falls short of Shield century
Cameron Green is given out lbw on 94 in Western Australia’s clash with Queensland. ⌘ Read more

Green falls short of Shield century
Cameron Green is given out lbw on 94 in Western Australia’s clash with Queensland. ⌘ Read more

Airbnb Rival Sonder Abruptly Shuts Down, Orders Guests To Leave
Sonder, a short-term rental company and former Airbnb rival, abruptly went out of business after Marriott ended its licensing deal on Nov. 9 – leaving guests scrambling as they were told to vacate their rooms immediately. From a report: Paul Strack, 63, visiting Boston from Little Rock, Arkansas, told CBS News he received an email from Marriott on Sunda … ⌘ Read more

AI Bubble Is Ignoring Michael Burry’s Fears
An anonymous reader shares a report: Costing tens of thousands of dollars each, Nvidia’s pioneering AI chips make up a hefty chunk of the $400 billion that Big Tech plans to invest this year – a bill expected to hit $3 trillion by 2029. But unlike 19th-century railroads, or the Dotcom boom’s fiber-optic cables, the GPUs fueling today’s AI mania are short-lived assets with a shelf life of perh … ⌘ Read more

Film „The Big Short“ und die KI-Bubble: Manchmal sehen wir Blasen
Der Hedgefondsmanager Burry wettet 1,1 Milliarden Dollar gegen die KI. Vor der Finanzkrise 2008 lag er richtig, wie der Film „The Big Short“ erzählt. mehr… ⌘ Read more

Apple Launches ‘iPhone Pocket’ Limited Edition Accessory
Apple has teamed up with Japanese fashion house ISSEY MIYAKE to launch iPhone Pocket, a 3D-knitted limited edition accessory designed to carry an iPhone and other everyday items.

Image

The accessory features a ribbed, s … ⌘ Read more

World’s First Green Fuel Levy To Add Almost $32 To Air Fares
Air passengers departing Singapore will pay a green fuel levy of as much as S$41.60 ($31.95) from next year as the city-state locks in a key step in its effort to cut the aviation industry’s emissions. From a report: Travelers flying in economy and premium economy, as well as those on short-haul routes, will be charged far less. Those customers will pay an … ⌘ Read more

Did ChatGPT Conversations Leak… Into Google Search Console Results?
“For months, extremely personal and sensitive ChatGPT conversations have been leaking into an unexpected destination,” reports Ars Technica: the search-traffic tool for webmasters , Google Search Console.

Though it normally shows the short phrases or keywords typed into Google which led someone to their site, “starting this September, odd q … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net to work through both https and gemini, the site is not written in HTML, but in Gemtext, automatically converted to HTML, when needed. Gemtext is nicely explained for example here: https://garden.bouncepaw.com/hypha/gemtext . In short, it is so limited, no line can be more than one thing, so no links in a list are possible, othar than doing it through something like this primitive workaround.

Revealing how cells adhere to the surface of plastic scaffolds
Short ultraviolet/ozone (UVO) treatment optimizes cell adhesion on plastic culture substrates by selectively enriching adhesion proteins, as reported by researchers from Institute of Science Tokyo. Their latest study explains the underlying reason why there is an optimal UVO treatment time, with the optimal surface condition arising when the ability to selectively adsorb and immobilize key adhesion proteins is maximized. This study … ⌘ Read more

A Short Survey of Compiler Backends
Comments ⌘ Read more

I just adopted my first cat! Everyone, please say hello to “Nick Fury”, or “Fury” for short! He’s had a rough little life on the street, but now he has a nice warm home! ⌘ Read more

This little creature started meowing at my door on Halloween night… long story short I have a cat now. ⌘ Read more

We’re putting lots of transition metals into the stratosphere. That’s not good.
We successfully plugged the hole in the ozone layer that was discovered in the 1980s by banning ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But, it seems we might be unintentionally creating another potential atmospheric calamity by using the upper atmosphere to destroy huge constellations of satellites after a very short (i.e. 5 year) lifetime. ⌘ Read more

@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 ;-)).

Bringing trains back: Rail’s surprising role in a sustainable future
Chelsea Haney,  Staff Writer  -  New Atlas

_Stephan: While China, Europe, and Japan have developed very sophisticated high speed-passenger rail, in fiscal year 2022, Amtrak’s long-distance trains averaged only 48 mph between stations. There are a few lines running short distances in the Northeast U.S. that get up to 150, but there is nothing like China’s long range passenger rail that avera … ⌘ Read more

Vacation in the Rhön
Yesterday, we came back from some much-needed vacation. We spent 9 nights in Fulda, went hiking a few times, visited some museums, and sometimes also just relaxed. On the way to Fulda, we also made a short break in Kassel and revived some memories. ⌘ Read more

Hunters or collectors? New evidence challenges claim Australia’s First Peoples sent large animals extinct
Tens of thousands of years ago, Australia was still home to enigmatic megafauna—large land animals such as giant marsupial wombats, flightless birds, and short-faced giant kangaroos known as sthenurines. ⌘ Read more

Understanding driver updates through Windows Update
Microsoft has published a set of short questions and answers about driver updates through Windows Update, and there’s one tidbit in there I found interesting. Driver dates might look old, but that is not true. The driver date is descriptive info set by the driver provider and can be any date they choose. When determining which driver to install, Windows Update uses targeting information set by the provider inside the driver file … ⌘ Read more

Shielding Chart
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Shielding Chart
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What’s your go-to strategy for giving engineers access to production?
I’ve been in this field for almost 15 years, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen two companies handle this the same way

Some other places just hand out just-in-time database access with short-lived credentials, others rely on rigid role-based permission, and others go all in on anonymized data dumps or shadow environments to avoid prod access altogether

What’s your go-to when it comes to giving access to engineers to access production app … ⌘ Read more

Moist tales about the fire bomber ⌘ Read more

Crypto Whale Opens New $163M Bitcoin Short After $192M Win
Comments ⌘ Read more

Labor is close to a deal on environmental law reforms, but there are troubling signs these will fall short
The Albanese government has hinted it is close to a deal with the Coalition over the long-awaited overhaul of Australia’s environment laws. Environment Minister Murray Watt plans to introduce new legislation to parliament in November. ⌘ Read more

A Rare Sequel W ⌘ Read more

Swirly lasers can control an ungovernable cousin of magnetism
Short pulses of light that impart rotation on a material’s atoms can be used to switch a property called ferroaxiality, which could let us build very stable and efficient memory devices ⌘ Read more

I went on a short stroll in the woods and came across two great spotted woodpeckers. They were busy with their courtship display, I reckon, so it took them a while to notice me and escape into thicker parts out of sight. That was really awesome. There are a lot of apples and sloes now, looking really good. The cam issues still persist, though, I wish the photos were sharper. Also, I got the error that the function wheel was not adjusted correctly and alledgedly pointed between two options numerous times. And no, it was bang on a setting. https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-10-07/

Hiring in high-growth firms: Exploring the timing of organizational changes
High-growth firms (HGFs) refer to businesses that achieve rapid growth in terms of employees or revenue. Based on the established definition, HGFs are businesses with at least 10 employees and annual growth rates of 20% or more, observed over a period of three years. This three-year span is considered the high-growth (HG) period of the company. Even though this growth is often short-lived and difficult to sustain, it plays … ⌘ Read more

The Customer is ALWAYS Right ⌘ Read more

Even short school breaks can affect student learning unevenly across socioeconomic backgrounds
The COVID-19 pandemic affected people worldwide disproportionately, with economically disadvantaged households facing a heavier burden. Children were also affected since schools and classes were closed to contain the virus. ⌘ Read more

@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Hahaha, that made me laugh real good. :-D I find it always surprising what collects in a short amount of time.

There are a couple of add-ons to block YouTube Shorts in the browser, but if you are using Firefox with uBlock Origin, you do not need to install anything extra. Just add this filter list to the uBO settings, and you are free from those annoying short videos! At least on the PC… Sadly, even with YouTube Premium, there is no option to just ban Shorts from the mobile app. ⌘ Read more

** Read the Book **
There’s a whole lot going on, and I’ve been feeling myself develop bad habits concerning doom scrolling. I can’t reconfigure my life to not have a phone, so, instead, I made a thing to replace those things that invite me to doomy scroll. Meet Read the Book.

Read the book is a relatively simple website where you can read a book. The books are presented in short chunks so you’re never faced with a big scrolling wall of text. It has support for dark mode and light mode, and you can u … ⌘ Read more

Thank you, @alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it! It’s not sealed at all. If you were pouring in a liquid, it would run out on all four corners. It’s just folded over and carefully hammered shut as best as possible. 03 is a bit blurred, but you can see the tab from the right (the short side) tucking in on the left (the long side). The hem on top clamps it in place fairly decently.

I decided against blind rivets, because they leave ugly looking and sharp backsides, which can also interfer with the contents of the box. However, they would be an easy solution to make the corners more rigid and prevent any movement from the short sides.

Unfortunately, I can’t weld or solder, so that’s not an option. It would be the by far best solution. I wanna learn it one day, though.

Yes, Ken is a really great dude. He’s the reason I gave this a shot in the first place. :-)

💩 on Company Time ⌘ Read more

I bought an iPhone (as my third smartphone)
I never thought I would do this, but I bought an iPhone. It’s a pretty cheap iPhone SE 2. Gen (2020) used from eBay, like the device I got issued from my work. It’s so tiny and it’s really difficult to type even a short text like this. ⌘ Read more

Honest Government Ad | Global Sumud Flotilla ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net it is amazing how much you have accomplished in such a short time. Take time to sleep, though! :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yeah it’s not all that tall hahah! but yeah i am totally blinded to any sense of tall/short buildings lmao

the end of friendlyjordies ⌘ Read more

Here’s an example of X11/Xlib being old and archaic.

X11 knows the data type “cardinal”. For example, the window property _NET_WM_ICON (which holds image data for icons) is an array of “cardinal”. I am already not really familiar with that word and I’m assuming that it comes from mathematics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_number

(It could also be a bird, but probably not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinalidae)

We would probably call this an “integer” today.

EWMH says that icons are arrays of cardinals and that they’re 32-bit numbers:

https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/latest-single/#id-1.6.13

So it’s something like 0x11223344 with 0x11 being the alpha channel, 0x22 is red, and so on.

You would assume that, when you retrieve such an array from the X11 server, you’d get an array of uint32_t, right?

Nope.

Xlib is so old, they use char for 8-bit stuff, short int for 16-bit, and long int for 32-bit:

https://x.org/releases/current/doc/libX11/libX11/libX11.html#Obtaining_and_Changing_Window_Properties

That is congruent with the general C data types, so it does make sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_data_types

Now the funny thing is, on modern x86_64, the type long int is actually 64 bits wide.

The result is that every pixel in a Pixmap, for example, is twice as large in memory as it would need to be. Just because Xlib uses long int, because uint32_t didn’t exist, yet.

And this is something that I wouldn’t know how to fix without breaking clients.

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!

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