CPU Kernel Mode - Computerphile ⌘ Read more
How to Mount a Balcony Awning
Hi Kris,
I’ve been reading your website for quite a while. It’s one of my favourite blogs. Thank you for what you are doing!
We are currently experiencing a heat wave in Germany, so I drew inspiration from Low-tech Magazine’s article “ How to Dress and Undress your Home” and built an awning on my balcony. I documented the process so that other readers can install one themselves.
The ov … ⌘ Read more
↳
In-reply-to
»
The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.
⤋ Read More
@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.
↳
In-reply-to
»
The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.
⤋ Read More
@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…
Ignite Realtime Blog: Empowering Digital Sovereignty with Openfire: A Secure and Customizable Communication Platform
In today’s interconnected world, digital sovereignty has become increasingly important for individuals and organizations seeking to maintain control over their data, infrastructure, and technologies. Openfire, an open-source, real-time collaboration (RTC) server that uses the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence … ⌘ Read more
Kære Windows bruger,
Næste gang du skal vælge en computer, så send en kærlig tanke til de udviklere der arbejder hårdt for at lave fri software til dig.
Vælg noget andet, så vi ikke længere behøver banke hovedet mod muren for at imødekomme sjælslugende operativsystemer.
På forhånd tak. ⌘ Read more
Det er den slags problemløsning, hvor jeg faktisk har det væsentligt dårligere efter problemet er løst. ⌘ Read more
Løsningen? At flytte repo’et helt op i C:/, OG omnavngive alle de mapper jeg kan styre til enkelt-bogstavs-navne.
Ahh… nu virker det.
🤦♂️ 🤦♂️ ⌘ Read more
Løsningen? At flytte mit repo helt op i C:/. Hov, det var faktisk ikke nok. Stien er stadig over 260 bytes…
🤦♂️ ⌘ Read more
Jojojo, man kan give /FS til MSVC for at enforce sekventielle writes til pdb filer. ELLER bare give -j1 for ikke at lave parallelle builds; MEN de indstillinger bliver ikke sendt ordenligt igennem llama.cpp’s CMakeLists, fordi de nester med noget whack `ExternalProject_Add`, som ikke lige samler mine CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS op. ⌘ Read more
Jojojo man kan slå det der FileTracker fis fra (og miste inkrementelle builds, men w/e), men så kommer den til gengæld til at lave concurrent writes til en PDB fil, og crasher dér. ⌘ Read more
Jojojo man kan hæve længdebegrænsningen. Men MSVC’s FileTracker dims respekterer ikke registry, og fejler stadig ved 260. ⌘ Read more
Windows’ stilængdebegrænsning på 260 bytes er noget af det voldeligt dummeste design jeg nogensinde har stødt på. ⌘ Read more
↳
In-reply-to
»
A good blog post that makes some good points: Can I ethically use LLMs?
⤋ Read More
@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This was an interesting read for sure! 👍 I don’t think it had anything I hadn’t already considered in terms of the ethical/moral points of view. I’m not sure where I stand myself either to be honest. I’ve forced myself to get familiar with the ecosystem and tooling, because in my line of work as a tech lead (staff engineer in sre) you don’t want to be that one guy that ya know 😉 Ethically/Morally though, I’m definitely with the sentiment of this post 😅 Much like the whole Crypto hype yaers back (if y’all remember?!) this is also one of the most energy hungry pieces of “tech” (if you can call it that?) in a while. Then there’s these other issues “stealing people’s work”, “reliance is causing humans to become cognitively weak and neural connections to shrink”, to name a few…
World Foundation Models - Computerphile ⌘ Read more
** Om nom nom LLMs, in which I respond to Simon Willison’s analogy **
I am hesitant to wade into the tumultuous waters that are the discourse around generative AI and LLMs, but this morning I came across a thing that so thoroughly melted my brain I feel uncontrollably compelled to respond.
This morning, at evidently 4:10 AM (no mention of timezone), Simon Willison shared the following blog post, quoted here in full:
Quitting programming as … ⌘ Read more
Why I’m still a minimalist after 14 years ⌘ Read more
Vimconf 2025 Small Tickets ⌘ Read more
↳
In-reply-to
»
As promised, here's some photos of love you!! camping trip to Canarcon George in QLD, Australia. Media Media Media
⤋ Read More
@prologic@twtxt.net I like the last two, on the first three you sent. I looked up “Canarvon Gorge”, and read more about it. Thanks for introducing me to it!
Reinforcement Learning - Computerphile ⌘ Read more
** Of fairies, compost, and computers **
Lately I’ve buried myself in reading fiction. Stand outs from among the crowd are, of course, Middlemarch but also a lot of sort of scholarly fairy fiction; works that follow the scholastic adventures of studious professorial types in vaugely magical settings. Namely Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries’, Heather Fawcett and The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow.
I’ve also been working on a handful of personal utility programs. I … ⌘ Read more
** My measurer **
My dad is an electrical engineer and physicist. Measuring things is a core part of his professional life, and something he seems to spend a lot of time doing around the house. This is all to say my dad is relatively expert in the ways of measuring things so I think it’s hilarious that he calls absolutely anything he is using to measure anything else“my measurer.” Measuring tape, oscilloscope, scale, volt meter, bubble level, table spoons, whatever. They’re all“my measurer.” ⌘ Read more
** growing good **
“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch ⌘ Read more
Unless your Terms of use update email looks and reads the same as the one I got yesterday from mastodon.social, I don’t wanna know about it, nor do I agree to it.
@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.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de > That guy over there in the corner…
I’m literally sitting in a corner chuckles. I rarely get any emails nowadays. But if I do and it is not plain-text, then my Mutt gets to bark at it and I, just… won’t read it. 🤷🏽♂️
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():
↳
In-reply-to
»
Gopher server is back online and I’ll be phasing out Mastodon.
⤋ Read More
@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.
↳
In-reply-to
»
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
⤋ Read More
@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. 🤷
My Journey to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024: A Story of Volunteering and Growth
My name is Oscar Ayra and I am from Lima, Peru. In 2024, I had the privilege of being part of the volunteer team at Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) Lima. It was an enriching experience where… ⌘ Read more
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
Passing of Jean-Raymond Abrial
Jean-Raymond Abrial, father (in particular!) of the Z notation, but also of the B method, and then Event-B, passed away on May 26. I was surprised to see that this piece of news, which may be of some interest to formal method folks, doesn’t seem to be very well known (there’s not much material on the web).
Here are some links (on LinkedIn, sorry):
[by Bertrand Meyer](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bertrandmeyer_i-am-saddened-to-report-from-todays-print-activity-7335684948974034944-SJf1? … ⌘ Read more
Russian intelligence document calls China ‘the enemy’, leak exposes Moscow’s deep fear | Today News ⌘ Read more
MacOS 26 is the final Intel version, sucks to be a 2023 Intel Mac Pro owner
macOS Tahoe is the final software update that Intel-based Macs will get, as Apple works to phase them out following its transition to Apple silicon. During its Platforms State of the Union event, Apple said that Intel Macs won’t get macOS 27, coming next year, though there could still be updates that add security fixes. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors Not particularly surprising, but def … ⌘ Read more
Windowing, menu bar, and background processes come to iPadOS
For years now – it feels more like decades, honestly – Apple has been trying a variety of approaches to make the iPad more friendly to power users, most notably by introducing, and subsequently abandoning, various multitasking models. After its most recent attempts – Stage Manager – fell on deaf ears, the company has thrown its hands up in the air and just implemented what we all wanted on the iPad anyway: a norm … ⌘ Read more
‘Russians are too weak’ — Orban questions Moscow’s ability to attack NATO ⌘ Read more
How do I perform partial acceptance of Copilot recommendations? ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD 14.3 released
FreeBSD 14.3 has been released, an important point release for those of us using the FreeBSD 14.x branch. This release brings 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) support to many modern laptop wireless chips, OCI container images are now available in Docker and GitHub repositories, and a number of cornerstone packages have been updated to their latest versions. ⌘ Read more
‘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