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 … 🙄)

‘Absolute nightmare’: The social network where AI chatbots exchange ideas and gossip about humans
There’s a new social media platform capturing the imagination of millions but also ringing alarm bells. The real danger is not what you might think. ⌘ Read more

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)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, no idea why that is. 🤔

Are we living in a simulation? This experiment could tell us
The idea that we might be living in a simulated reality has worried us for centuries. Now physicists have found some tantalising clues – and devised an experiment that might reveal the truth ⌘ Read more

India Reviews Telecom Industry Proposal For Always-On Satellite Location Tracking
India is weighing a proposal to mandate always-on satellite tracking in smartphones for precise government surveillance – an idea strongly opposed by Apple, Google, Samsung, and industry groups. Reuters reports: For years, the [Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s] administration has been concerned its agencies do no … ⌘ Read more

Curling’s most unlikely fairytale on the cusp of Olympic spot
The idea of the Philippines curling team reaching the Winter Olympics has a hint of Cool Runnings about it, while one team member, Alan Frei, has more than a suggestion of Eddie the Eagle. But at the heart of this story is a genuine sporting fairytale that is one step away from becoming an Olympic legend. ⌘ Read more

I meant were. You get the idea.

Also, I just realized that simple links like that turn into inline images on twtxt.net. Nice! 🥳

I’m contemplating the idea of switching my activity pub instance from Gootosocial to a Pleroma one. While GTS is kinda cute (lightweight and easy to manage) of a software, the inability to fetch/scroll through people’s past toots when visiting a profile or having access to a federated timeline and a proper search functionality …etc felt like handicap for the past N months.

Linux 6.19 Merges “klp-build” As New Livepatch Module Generation Solution
Merged as part of the objtool changes for the Linux 6.19 kernel is introducing the “klp-build” script as a new solution to generate livepatch modules using a source .patch file as the input. This klp-build effort was spearheaded by Josh Poimboeuf with ideas learned from the out-of-tree Kpatch project over the past decade… ⌘ Read more

Black hole entropy hints at a surprising truth about our universe
Two clashing ideas about disorder inside black holes now point to the same strange conclusions, and it could reshape the foundations of how we think about space and time ⌘ Read more

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

This year, I’m going to use Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4, writing the code on my trusty old Pentium 133 with its 64 MB of RAM. No idea if that old version of Python will be fast enough for later puzzles. We’ll see.

The Battle Over Africa’s Great Untapped Resource: IP Addresses
In his mid-20s, Lu Heng “got an idea that has made him a lot richer,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

He scooped up 10 million unused IP addresses, mostly form Africa, and then leases them to companies, mostly outside Africa, “that need them badly.”

[A]round half of internet traffic continues to use IPv4, because changing to IPv6 can be expensive a … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net I’ve no idea about regulations in your area, but over here there are different taxation rules for video and photo cameras. Hence, manufacturers limit the video recording time of photo cameras typically to half an hour, so that they don’t classify as video cameras with their higher taxes.

Oh fuck me! I had basically turned off the route to git.mills.io last night and went ot bed at ~2AM after unsuccessfully trying to control the attacks (bad bots) that were behaving like a DDoS attack. Tried to re-enable the route this monring and *BOOM, they’re back! As-if they never stopped?! what da actual fuq?! Anyone have any clever ideas of what I can do here to allows normal users, like you nice folk and block ths obnoxious traffic?!

We might have just seen the first hints of dark matter
Unexplained gamma ray radiation coming from the edge of the Milky Way galaxy could be produced by self-annihilating dark matter particles – but the idea requires further investigation ⌘ Read more

I just noticed this pattern:

uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Let me add some spaces to make it more clear:

    uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET                       /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Some IP (from Brazil) requests some (non-existing, completely broken) URL from my webserver. But they use the hostname uninformativ.de, so they get redirected to www.uninformativ.de.

In the next step, just a second later, some other IP (from Nepal) issues an HTTP proxy request for the same URL.

Clearly, someone has no idea how HTTP redirects work. And clearly, they’re running their broken code on some kind of botnet all over the world.

Linus Torvalds Says Vibe Coding is Fine For Getting Started, ‘Horrible Idea’ For Maintenance
Linus Torvalds is “fairly positive” about vibe coding as a way for people to get computers to do things they otherwise could not. The Linux kernel maintainer made the comments during an interview at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Seoul earlier this month. But he cautioned that … ⌘ Read more

I was looking at some ancient code and then thought: Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to see more details in this error message. Which of the values don’t line up. On the other hand, that feature isn’t probably used anyway, because it’s a bit ugly to use (historically evolved). And on top of that, most teams need something slightly different, if they deal with that sort of thing.

I still told my workmates about it, so they could also have a look at it and we can decide tomorrow what to do about it. Speaking of the devil, no kidding, not even half an hour later, a puzzled tester contacted me. She received exactly that rather useless error message. Looks like I had an afflatus. ;-)

It’s interesting, though, that in all those years, nobody stumbled across this before. At least we now know for sure that this is not dead code. :-)

found this guy in a parking lot, but he has no idea that im going to give him the best life possible ⌘ Read more

The afternoon didn’t start better: we got a talk about the EUDI, with the implied idea that an “European ID” is automatically an example of digital sovereignty, when in fact what is being implemented isn’t.

I could go further into it, but instead I’ll leave here a link to the comment I was impelled to write on the EUDI project after the presentation:

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technical-specification/discussions/19#discussioncomment-15001433

The #EUDI panel was followed by Caroline Stage Olsen, Minister for Digital Affairs of Denmark. The tldr; of her keynote - which had two points of note: 1) “I support AI gigafactories” (because all that is shiny and new is something we should invest in), and “innovation is sovereignty” which is her way of saying that she wants to use the sovereignty topic not to talk about sovereignty but as an excuse to promote “innovation” - in that ideology brand that supports the idea that in order to innovate more we need to simplify and de-regulate…