Ultra-thin sodium films offer low-cost alternative to gold and silver in optical technologies
From solar panels to next-generation medical devices, many emerging technologies rely on materials that can manipulate light with extreme precision. These materials—called plasmonic materials—are typically made from expensive metals like gold or silver. But what if a cheaper, more abundant metal could do the job just as well or better? ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de can’t you use generic drivers? I did that for an enterprise copier/printer/scanner we used to have at work, and it worked just fine!

💻 Issue 489 - Scala learning, tutorials, references and general related info. ScalaTut resource. ⌘ Read more

Spec-driven development: Using Markdown as a programming language when building with AI
I coded my latest app entirely in Markdown and let GitHub Copilot compile it into Go. This resulted in cleaner specs, faster iteration, and no more context loss. ✨

The post [Spec-driven development: Using Markdown as a programming language when building with AI](https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/spec-driven-development-using-markdown-as-a-p … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net That zs looks pretty cool! I love simple static site generators, and look forward to trying it on my next web site project. Kudos!

@prologic@twtxt.net I know we won’t ever convince each other of the other’s favorite addressing scheme. :-D But I wanna address (haha) your concerns:

1. I don’t see any difference between the two schemes regarding link rot and migration. If the URL changes, both approaches are equally terrible as the feed URL is part of the hashed value and reference of some sort in the location-based scheme. It doesn’t matter.

2. The same is true for duplication and forks. Even today, the “cannonical URL” has to be chosen to build the hash. That’s exactly the same with location-based addressing. Why would a mirror only duplicate stuff with location- but not content-based addressing? I really fail to see that. Also, who is using mirrors or relays anyway? I don’t know of any such software to be honest.

3. If there is a spam feed, I just unfollow it. Done. Not a concern for me at all. Not the slightest bit. And the byte verification is THE source of all broken threads when the conversation start is edited. Yes, this can be viewed as a feature, but how many times was it actually a feature and not more behaving as an anti-feature in terms of user experience?

4. I don’t get your argument. If the feed in question is offline, one can simply look in local caches and see if there is a message at that particular time, just like looking up a hash. Where’s the difference? Except that the lookup key is longer or compound or whatever depending on the cache format.

5. Even a new hashing algorithm requires work on clients etc. It’s not that you get some backwards-compatibility for free. It just cannot be backwards-compatible in my opinion, no matter which approach we take. That’s why I believe some magic time for the switch causes the least amount of trouble. You leave the old world untouched and working.

If these are general concerns, I’m completely with you. But I don’t think that they only apply to location-based addressing. That’s how I interpreted your message. I could be wrong. Happy to read your explanations. :-)

How Generative AI Video Works - Computerphile ⌘ Read more

Why do I care about this?

1. The load will become a problem at some point.
   
2. These crawlers and the current “AI” in general are breaking the rules. I am supposed to be paying for every little thing, I get sued for “piracy”. But apparently, these rules only apply to me. If I had more money, I could break them. Fuck that.
   
3. I simply don’t want it. Period.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de having to go to a gopher proxy to see a text document better served on readily available web servers… 🤭, but I digress. Verbatim text:

What's Missing from "Retro"
~softwarepagan
------------------------------------------------------------------
You know, often, when I say I miss older ways of computing or
connecting online, people tell me "there's nothing stopping you
from doing that now!" and they are technicay correct in most cases
(though I can't, for example, chat with friends on MSN ever
again...) However, let me explain that while this type of thing can
*sort of* fill that hole in my heart, it isn't *the same.*

Say, for example, I wanted to connect with others over a BBS. This
wouldn't offer the same types of connections it used to. While
there are BBSes around with active users, they're no longer there
to discuss movies, Star Trek, D&D, games, etc. They're there to
discuss *BBSes.* The same can be said for Gopher, old-school forums
and all sorts of revival projects (such as Escargot, Spacehey,
etc.) Retrocomputing enthusiasts, while they have a variety of
interests, are often in these spaces to discuss the medium itself
and not other topics. This exists at a stark contrast from how
things were in the past, where a non-tech-inclined person may learn
the tech to connect with likeminded others (as I did as a
Zelda-obsessed kid.)

The same can be said of old media. People will say "well, nobody is
stopping you from watching old shows/movies now!" Again, they are
technically correct. I can go home right now and watch *Star Trek:
The Next Generation* to my heart's content. It will never again,
however, be current, or new. When something is new, it serves as a
shared cultural experience. Remember how "Game of Thrones* felt in
the mid-to-late 2010s? Yeah, that.

It's sad. I sustain myself on a mixed diet of old things, new
things, and new things intended for old millenials like me who like
old things. It can be bittersweet. 

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!

I give up.

Let’s try again next year. I don’t have the stamina. Death by a thousand paper cuts.

Can’t set up a meaningful taskbar: https://github.com/labwc/labwc/discussions/2924 (This is not a labwc issue, it’s a generic issue in the broader Wayland ecosystem.)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Welcome back. 👋 (It’s a bit quiet here in general. 🤔)

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

On my blog: Generative AI Wish List https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/08/ai-wish-list.html #artificialintelligence #harm #rant

Current toy project: an image feed generated by mk(1). Still some edges to clean up but it’s nice: http://a.9srv.net/img/_readme.html

I Read All Of Cloudflare’s Claude-Generated Commits
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Conventional Commit message generator using local LLMs
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10 Epic Construction Projects That Took Centuries to Complete
These ten cathedrals and basilicas around Europe (and beyond) were built over many generations, reflecting changes in style, politics, and technology. From the Sagrada Família in Barcelona to the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, each project faced delays due to wars, funding shortages, and shifts in power. Some took more than six centuries to […]

The post [10 Epic Construction Projects That Took Centuries … ⌘ Read more

Ten Outlandish Ideas to Deal with Nuclear Waste
Toxic waste is an urgent issue. Nuclear power plants provide nearly 20% of all electricity in the United States, and many of us rely on them around the world. The reactors can generate a colossal amount of energy, but with that comes a colossal amount of radioactive slurry. These leftovers pose a huge danger to […]

The post [Ten Outlandish Ideas to Deal with Nuclear Waste](https://listverse.com/2025/05/31/ten-outlandish-ideas-to-deal-wi … ⌘ Read more

Passkeys: The Waterproof Defense Against Phishing Attacks

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The Passkeys — a next-generation authentication technology poised to be a game-changer, offering what many describe as a truly waterproof…

[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups … ⌘ Read more

I am disappointed in the AI discourse
Yeah I know this place is generally super anti-AI. But I figured it’s dishonest to not also post it here. I’d love to see more nuanced posts on this topic here.

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LiveStore is a next-generation state management framework based on reactive SQLite and git-inspired syncing (via event-sourcing)
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love-hate and otel: using it while avoiding complexity
I quite appreciated his workflow for keeping OTel’s complexity at arm’s length. Also, he’s got a generic tool that can parse logs and turn them into otel spans that combines well will canonical logs and “wide events”: https://github.com/jonjohnsonjr/logspan

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Relocation generation in assemblers
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prologic@JamessMacStudio
Sun May 25 21:44:41
~/tmp/neurog
 (main) 130
$ go build ./cmd/ttt/... && ./ttt
Generation  27 | Fitness: 0.486111 | Nodes: 44  | Conns: 82

… experimenting with building and training a tic-tac-toe game, which evolves a. neural net that learn to paly the game against the best evolved champions 😅

10 Times the Christian Church Took on the Animal Kingdom
Christianity has had a choppy relationship with the animal kingdom over the years, from the sacrifices of the Old Testament to the generally favorable status animals enjoy in the modern Christian mindset. Along the way, the Christian Church has had a particularly tough time deciding where it stands, caught between respecting God’s creations on the […]

The post [10 Times the Christian Church Took on the Animal Kingdom]( … ⌘ Read more

TrueNAS uses “AI” for customer support, and of course it goes horribly wrong
Let’s check in on TrueNAS, who apparently employ “AI” to handle customer service tickets. Kyle Kingsbury had to have dealings with TrueNAS’ customer support, and it was a complete trashfire of irrelevance and obviously wrong answers, spiraling all the way into utter lies. The “AI” couldn’t generate its way out of a paper bag, and for a paying customer who is entitled to support, tha … ⌘ Read more

This is one of my attempts:

$ go build ./cmd/xor/... && ./xor
Generation  95 | Fitness: 0.999964 | Nodes: 9   | Conns: 19
Target reached!

Best network performance:
  [0 0] → got=0 exp=0 (raw=0.000) ✅
  [0 1] → got=1 exp=1 (raw=0.990) ✅
  [1 0] → got=1 exp=1 (raw=0.716) ✅
  [1 1] → got=0 exp=0 (raw=0.045) ✅
Overall accuracy: 100.0%
Wrote best.dot – render with `dot -Tpng best.dot -o best.png`

Machinist and Machine
Reading and “accepting/rejecting” so much AI generated code in the last months has made me a bit burned out and have somewhat of an identity crisis.

I have been making more and more time at night to reconnect with the craft.

I think more people in the community might be struggling, so I just wanted to share my way of dealing with it.

Please share how you are dealing with the tokens.

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10 Terrifying Facts You Never Wanted to Know
Many people love general knowledge quizzes or even quiz nights. They get to share interesting facts and show off in front of their friends, while having a great time. (Not in a Sheldon Cooper kind of way, mind you). Then you get those who love weird or downright terrifying facts. They revel in reading about […]

The post [10 Terrifying Facts You Never Wanted to Know](https://listverse.com/2025/05/22/10-terrifying-facts-you-never-wanted-to-know … ⌘ Read more

Using Large Language Models for Commit Message Generation: A Preliminary Study
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I Built a Tool to Hack AI Models — Here’s What It Uncovered

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A few months ago, I was auditing a chatbot deployed inside a financial services platform. It used a mix of retrieval-augmented generation…

[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](http … ⌘ Read more

New Life Hack: Using LLMs to Generate Constraint Solver Programs for Personal Logistics Tasks
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Rust celebrates ten year anniversary with Rust 1.87.0 release
I generally don’t pay attention to the releases of programming languages unless they’re notable for some reason or another, and I think this one qualifies. Rust is celebrating its ten year anniversary with a brand new release, Rust 1.87.0. This release adds anonymous pipes to the standard library, inline assembly can now jump to labeled blocks in Rust code, and support for the i586 Windows target has been rem … ⌘ Read more

Accessibility on Linux sucks, but GNOME and KDE are making progress
Accessibility in the software world is a problem in general, but it’s an even bigger problem on open source desktops, as painfully highlighted by this excellent article detailing the utterly broken state of accessibility on Linux. Reading the article is soul-crushing as it starts to dawn on you just how bad the situation really is for those among us who require accessibility features, making it vir … ⌘ Read more

autogenlib - Python lib for “vibe importing”, generates the code based on its call site
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Silicon Valley developers need to unionise
I don’t know anything about hiring processes in Silicon Valley, or about hiring processes in general since I’ve always worked for myself (and still do, running OSNews, relying on your generous Patreon and Ko-Fi support), so when I ran into this horror story of applying for a position at a Silicon Valley startup, I was horrified. Apparently it’s not unheard of – it might even be common? – to ask applicants for a coding position to develop a comple … ⌘ Read more

static site generators make website-ing so fun like i wanna do so much with my site now

@prologic@twtxt.net that will not be a problem; as long as it doesn’t affect authenticated users it wouldn’t make a difference. But we are comparing apples and eggs here. I don’t access GitHub while unauthenticated, but I can see how others might. It comes across as anti-web in general.

that site of mine i mentioned earlier? well it’s now statically generated with astro, AND it automatically builds and deploys after i push changes to my own git instance, with the power of sourcehut builds! this is so cool

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @prologic@twtxt.net Given that all these programs are super old (tar is from the late 1970ies), while trying to retain backwards-compatibilty, I’m not surprised that the UI isn’t too great. 🤔

find has quite a few pitfalls, that is very true. At work, we don’t even use it anymore in more complex scenarios but write Python scripts instead. find can be fast and efficient, but fewer and fewer people lack the knowledge to use it … The same goes for Shell scripting in general, actually.

i got so emo about my site not being statically generated and instead hand coded but it’s like i don’t even know if i want that because i feel most SSGs are built for blogging and continuous posting and i don’t want that i just want to make my silly pages….

that being said, the one i’d use if i did switch to one would be astro and that one is so flexible i could really do anything with it including keeping my pages as is mostly without doing the blog stuff. idk! something to consider

Avoid #each_with_object (generally)
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SSRF via PDF Generator? Yes, and It Led to EC2 Metadata Access

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👨‍💻Free Article Link

[Continue reading on InfoSec Write-ups »](https://infosecwriteups.com/ssrf-via-pdf-generator-yes-and-it-led-to-ec2-metadata-access-39b8e5b41840 … ⌘ Read more

Lume 3 was released
After several months of work, I’d like to share with you the release of a new major of Lume, a static site generator for Deno. Apologies for the autopromotion 🙏

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Beating the fastest lexer generator in Rust (2023)
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curl bans “AI” security reports as Zuckerberg claims we’ll all have more “AI” friends than real ones
Daniel Stenberg, creator and maintainer of curl, has had enough of the neverending torrent of “AI”-generated security reports the curl project has to deal with. That’s it. I’ve had it. I’m putting my foot down on this craziness. 1. Every reporter submitting security reports on Hackerone for curl now needs to answer this question: “Did you … ⌘ Read more

AI Agents Unleashed: The Rise of Autonomous Systems Transforming Industries

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The emergence of AI agents signifies a transformative shift in generative AI, evolving from simple chatbots to sophisticated … ⌘ Read more

Critical CSS Generator
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