Fixing Retail With Land Value Capture
The independent coffee shops and quirky boutiques that make neighborhoods like Hayes Valley in San Francisco or Williamsburg in Brooklyn desirable are caught in a frustrating economic trap: they create value that ends up in the pockets of nearby homeowners rather than their own cash registers.

An essay in Works in Progress magazine argues that when an interesting new store or restaurant opens, commercia … ⌘ Read more

LG Gram Style 14 Laptop To See Working Speaker Support With Linux 7.0
For the Intel-powered LG Gram Style 14 laptop one of the Linux support caveats is the internal speakers not working properly under Linux, but with a patch expected for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle it will finally fix the laptop speaker support for one of the laptop models in this series… ⌘ Read more

New Patches Aim To Lower Linux Memory Use For Swap, Slightly Improve Performance
Kairui Song of Tencent sent out a new patch series overnight working on enhancing the Linux kernel’s swap code. With the patches there are some memory savings – and more on the way – while also providing for slightly faster performance… ⌘ Read more

Just showelled 20cm of snow for half an hour, fuck me! I’m totally shattered. But it’s worth it. Looks so beautiful. And all the disbelief and terror in the eyes of the people. Well, that’s what our winters were like three decades ago. I’m just glad that I can work from home.

Gasoline Out of Thin Air? It’s a Reality!
Can Aircela’s machine “create gasoline using little more than electricity and the air that we breathe”? Jalopnik reports…

The Aircela machine works through a three-step process. It captures carbon dioxide directly from the air… The machine also traps water vapor, and uses electrolysis to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen… The oxygen is released, leaving hydrogen and carbon di … ⌘ Read more

Has a bit of a long history story behind this, where last year at work we were reading this book called Engineering a Safer World and initially came across a service called Speech Reply that allowed me to upload a PDF copy of the book and start to read it, but unfortunately, the free trial right now before I can finish reading it turns out that Speech Reply service cost a whopping US$30 a month and expected me to pay a full year upfront, which was well over US$300 just for one fucking book! So I sent their sales and support staff a message kindly asking if it were possible to just pay for the audio transcription of just a single book or to change to a monthly subscription fee, to which they refused, so basically in the end I got very angry and told them to go fuck themselves and built my own service. A year later here we are :-)

Work-From-Office Mandate? Expect Top Talent Turnover, Culture Rot
CIO magazine reports that “the push toward in-person work environments will make it more difficult for IT leaders to retain and recruit staff, some experts say.”

“In addition to resistance, there would also be the risk of talent turnover,” [says Lawrence Wolfe, CTO at marketing firm Converge]… “The truth is, both physical and virtual collabora … ⌘ Read more

Another project where I’m going to use my terminal widget toolkit is a hex editor. This is still very young, obviously, and there’s a lot of work to do (both in the toolkit and this particular application), but I’m making some progress:

https://movq.de/v/2bae14ed16/vid-1769283187.mp4

Since this program is UTF-8 clean (I hope), you can do things like enter multi-byte UTF-8 sequences or paste them from the system clipboard (another hex editor I just tried failed to do this correctly):

https://movq.de/v/e9241034c1/vid-1769283755.mp4

Under the hood, I’m using mmap() with MAP_PRIVATE, which is really cool: I get the entire file as a byte array, no matter how large it is, no need to actually read it upfront; and MAP_PRIVATE means that I can write to this area however I like without changing the underlying file. The kernel does copy-on-write for me. Only when you hit Save, it will write to the filesystem. And it’s just a couple lines of code. The kernel does all the magic. 🥳

A Decade In The Making, Time Slice Extension Could Be Merged For Linux 7.0
With the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle it looks like the time slice extension work could finally been merged, which has seen various attempts over the past decade. Time slice extension for the Linux kernel implemented using Restartable Sequences “RSEQ” allows user-space processes to request a temporary, opportunistic extension of their CPU time slice without being preempted… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma Saw At Least 9 Crash Fixes This Week
KDE Plasma 6.6 feature development work continues winding down while Plasma 6.7 has begun seeing more feature work. This week also saw at least nine different crash fixes affecting Plasma/KWin… ⌘ Read more

Wall Street Pushes Solo 401(k)s as More Americans Work for Themselves
An anonymous reader shares a report: A niche retirement plan favored by freelancers is quickly becoming a hot Wall Street sales pitch, as more and more Americans look for ways to shelter a bigger chunk of their paychecks from taxes. Known as solo 401(k)s, they allow the self-employed to contribute $72,000 a year into tax-advantaged retire … ⌘ Read more

When Two Years of Academic Work Vanished With a Single Click
Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, lost two years of carefully structured academic work in an instant when he temporarily disabled ChatGPT’s “data consent” option in August to test whether the AI tool’s functions would still work without providing OpenAI his data. All his chats were permanently delete … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone: Variable Rate Shading, Host Image Copies & More
In addition to the release today of Vulkan 1.4.340 with the new descriptor heap “VK_EXT_descriptor_heap” extension and three other new extensions, The Khronos Group’s Vulkan Working Group has also published the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone… ⌘ Read more

Prominent Intel Compiler Engineer Heads Off To AMD
James Brodman worked for the last 15 years at Intel on their ISPC SIMD compiler and then in more recent years on the Intel DPC++ compiler and SYCL support as part of Intel’s oneAPI initiative. Rather interestingly, this compiler expert has now joined AMD… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS Celebrates 30 Years In Striving To Be An Open-Source Windows Implementation
The ReactOS project is celebrating today that it marks 30 years since their first code commit in the ReactOS source tree. During the past 30 years now the project has seen more than 88k commits from more than 300 developers as it seeks to be a robust open-source Windows implementation. In their 30 year birthday blog post they also provide a look ahead at what they’re working on… ⌘ Read more

Comic-Con Bans AI Art After Artist Pushback
San Diego Comic-Con changed an AI art friendly policy following an artist-led backlash last week. From a report: It was a small victory for working artists in an industry where jobs are slipping away as movie and video game studios adopt generative AI tools to save time and money. Every year, tens of thousands of people descend on San Diego for Comic-Con, the world’s premier comic book conven … ⌘ Read more

CEOs Say AI is Making Work More Efficient. Employees Tell a Different Story.
Companies are spending vast sums on AI expecting the technology to boost efficiency, but a new survey from AI consulting firm Section found that two-thirds of non-management workers among 5,000 white-collar respondents say they save less than two hours a week or no time at all, while more than 40% of executives report the technolo … ⌘ Read more

New Patches Aim To Make x86 Linux EFI Stub & Relocatable Kernel Support Unconditional
Prominent Intel Linux engineer H. Peter Anvin has posted a new patch series working to clean-up the Linux x86/x86_64 kernel boot code. Besides cleaning up the code, the kernel configuration would drop options around EFI stub mode and relocatable kernels in making those features now always enabled… ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net No embedding works! I’ll have a look at what you did here 👌

Developer Rescues Stadia Bluetooth Tool That Google Killed
This week, Google finally shut down the official Stadia Bluetooth conversion tool… but there’s no need to panic! Developer Christopher Klay preserved a copy on his personal GitHub and is hosting a fully working version of the tool on a dedicated website to make it even easier to find. The Verge’s Sean Hollister reports: I haven’t tried Klay’s mirror, as bo … ⌘ Read more

New Linux Patch Improved NVMe Performance +15% With CPU Cluster-Aware Handling
Intel Linux engineers have been working on enhancing the NVMe storage performance with today’s high core count processors. Due to situations where multiple CPUs could end up sharing the same NVMe IRQ(s), performance penalties can arise if the IRQ affinity and the CPU’s cluster do not align. There is a pending patch to address this situation. A 15% performance improvement was reported with the pending patch… ⌘ Read more

System76 Continues Driving More Improvements Into The COSMIC Desktop
Following the December launch of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS and the first major COSMIC desktop release, System76 software engineers have continued making improvements to their Rust-based desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

AMD Making It Easier To Install vLLM For ROCm
Deploying vLLM for LLM inference and serving on NVIDIA hardware can be as easy as pip3 install vllm. Beautifully simple just as many of the AI/LLM Python libraries can deploy straight-away and typically “just work” on NVIDIA. Running vLLM atop AMD Radeon/Instinct hardware though has traditionally meant either compiling vLLM from source yourself or AMD’s recommended approach of using Docker containers that contain pre-built versions of vLLM. Finally there is now a blessed P … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Only missing roots would trigger that kind of sync IIRC. And that only works if another peering pod has the root twt. What you’re remembering, possibly, is an attempt to do what you were thinking of… But I tried it, turned out to be too expensive of an operation to do auotmatically.

New Patches Provide HDMI VRR & Auto Low Latency Mode Gaming Features For AMD Linux GPU Driver
Support for newer HDMI features in the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver have been limited due to being blocked by the HDMI Forum. There are though some new HDMI gaming features being enabled via new AMDGPU kernel driver patches that are coming outside of AMD and based on public knowledge and/or “trying things out until they work/break” for functionality like HDMI Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and Auto Low Latency M … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc6 Released With More Bug Fixes
Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 6.19-rc6 kernel in working toward the stable Linux 6.19 kernel release likely on 8 February… ⌘ Read more

Spent basically the entire day (except for the mandatory walk) fighting with Python’s type hints. But, the result is that my widget toolkit now passes mypy --strict.

I really, really don’t want to write larger pieces of software without static typing anymore. With dynamic typing, you must test every code path in your program to catch even the most basic errors. pylint helps a bit (doesn’t need type hints), but that’s really not enough.

Also, somewhere along the way, I picked up a very bad (Python) programming style. (Actually, I know exactly where I picked that up, but I don’t want to point the finger now.) This style makes heavy use of dicts and tuples instead of proper classes. That works for small scripts, but it very quickly turns into an absolute mess once the program grows. Prime example: jenny. 😩

I have a love-hate relationship with Python’s type hints, because they are meaningless at runtime, so they can be utterly misleading. I’m beginning to like them as an additional safety-net, though.

(But really, if correctness is the goal, you either need to invest a ton of time to get 100% test coverage – or don’t use Python.)

ChaosBSD Is A New BSD For “Broken Drivers, Half-Working Hardware, Vendor Trash” Test Bed
A new BSD on the block is ChaosBSD that intends to serve as a testing distribution for unfinished and broken drivers not suitable for upstreaming to FreeBSD proper… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de What worked? 😆

Two More Offshore Wind Projects in the US Allowed to Continue Construction
Friday a federal judge “cleared U.S. power company Dominion Energy to resume work on its Virginia offshore wind project.” But a U.S. federal judge also ruled Thursday that another major offshore wind farm is allowed to resume construction, reports the Hill. “The project, which would supply power to New York, was one of five th … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I still think that your original domain is cool as fuck! :-)

I didn’t change any subscriptions, and I still see your messages, so whatever you did worked fine. :-)

As US Officials Showed Off a Self-Driving Robo-Bus - It Got Hit By a Tesla Driver
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:

The U.S. Department of Transportation brought an automated bus to D.C. this week to showcase its work on self-driving vehicles, taking officials from around the country on a ride between agency headquarters at Navy Yard and Union Station. One of th … ⌘ Read more

Did it work? Am I still here? 🤣

FreeBSD 15.1 Aims To Have KDE Desktop Installer Option
FreeBSD 15.0 had been aiming to offer a KDE desktop installation option as part of the FreeBSD OS installer. This initiative as part of the FreeBSD laptop support enhancements project didn’t pan out in time for FreeBSD 15.0 but now they are working on getting the installer option ready for FreeBSD 15.1. Adding a NVIDIA GPU driver option to the FreeBSD installer was also recently carried out… ⌘ Read more

Adobe Photoshop 2025 Installer Now Working On Linux With Patched Wine
An open-source developer has worked through the last of the issues preventing the Adobe Creative Cloud installers for Windows from running on Linux via Wine. With pending patches, Adobe Photoshop 2021 and Photoshop 2025 are expected to install and run on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Ruby on Rails Creator Says AI Coding Tools Still Can’t Match Most Junior Programmers
AI still can’t produce code as well as most junior programmers he’s worked with, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37 Signals, said on a recent podcast [video link], which is why he continues to write most of his code by hand. Hansson compared AI’s current coding … ⌘ Read more

@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.

I’ve only got a handful of syscalls working right now. Taking inspiration from the calling convention of the Linux kernel and even made the service/interrupt handler int 0x80h 🤣 I’ve only got read, write, alloc and exit working righ tnow 🥲

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”™ 🤣

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club haha! I read as Golang the first time too. It is just the way our minds work. :-P

‘Star Wars’ Boss Kathleen Kennedy Steps Down From Lucasfilm
After more than 13 years leading Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down. “When George Lucas asked me to take over Lucasfilm upon his retirement, I couldn’t have imagined what lay ahead,” said Kennedy. “It has been a true privilege to spend more than a decade working alongside the extraordinary talent at Lucasfilm.” The Associated Press reports … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, I know that terminals are super weird and messy. In both the KDE Konsole (identifying itself as TERM=xterm-256color) and xterm (TERM=xterm) it just works flawlessly. My urxvt (TERM=rxvt-unicode-256color) just doesn’t. I also tried messing with TERM in urxvt, but no luck so far.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Unix terminals are quite limited in that regard. 🫤 You know how Ctrl works? The XOR 0x40 thing? And Alt doesn’t exist at all, it’s just a prefixed ESC byte.

I was surprised to see curses knowing about “Shift+Tab”, wondering how that is supposed to work. Well, it’s an escape sequence, of course (depending on the terminal, of course).

Well, in Xterm, I actually do get key combinations with the Shift modifier. Also, combinations of several modifiers just work exactly as I expect. But not in URXvt. Hmm.

Some work on the menu system to brighten my mood a little bit. No mouse support yet.

https://movq.de/v/932773e8c7/vid-1768500519.mp4

The United States Needs Fewer Bus Stops
American buses in cities like New York and San Francisco crawl along at about eight miles per hour – barely faster than a brisk walk – and one surprisingly simple fix could make them faster without requiring new infrastructure or controversial policy changes. The issue, according to a Works in Progress analysis, is that US bus stops sit far too close together.

Mean spacing in American cities … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s Index Shows Job Evolution Over Replacement
Anthropic’s fourth installment of its Economic Index, drawing on an anonymized sample of two million Claude conversations from November 2025, finds that AI is changing how people work rather than whether they work at all. The study tracked usage across the company’s consumer-facing Claude.ai platform and its API, categorizing interactions as either automation (where AI co … ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Bring Mainline Kernel Support For The ASUS IPMI Expansion Card
DeviceTree patches worked on recently allow for the mainline Linux kernel to run on the ASUS “Kommando” IPMI Expansion Card. This is interesting for opening up new possibilities for this external IPMI/BMC expansion card but too bad that less than three years after launching it’s difficult to find… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Work and the general state of (gestures broadly) everything.

House Sysadmin Stole 200 Phones, Caught By House IT Desk
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: According to the government’s version of events, 43-year-old Christopher Southerland was working in 2023 as a sysadmin for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. In his role, Southerland had the authority to order cell phones for committee staffers, of which there are around 80. But during th … ⌘ Read more