Dell Admits It Made a Huge Mistake When It Abandoned XPS
Dell has reversed course and resurrected the XPS brand as its “premium consumer” brand of laptops, admitting it was a mistake to kill it in the first place. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from Gizmodo: At last year’s CES, Dell made the eyebrow-raising decision to ax all its legacy laptop brand names and instead opt for Apple-like conventions. Inste … ⌘ Read more

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. 🤔

Viral Reddit Post About Food Delivery Apps Was an AI Scam
A viral Reddit “whistleblower” post accusing a major food delivery app of systemic exploitation is “most likely AI-generated,” reports the Verge. From the report: The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers “human assets,” and exploits their “desperation” for cas … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yiha! Even autoscroll, very nice! The naming certainly drew inspiration from Urwid. I like it. Looking forward to eventually checking out its inner workings. :-)

People of Dubious Character Are More Likely To Enter Public Service
A new working paper from researchers at the University of Hong Kong has found that Chinese graduate students who plagiarized more heavily in their master’s theses were significantly more likely to pursue careers in the civil service and to climb the ranks faster once inside.

John Liu and co-authors analyzed 6 million dissertations from CNKI, a … ⌘ Read more

The US Effort to Break China’s Rare-Earth Monopoly
The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility:

There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup … ⌘ Read more

Looks like someone loves Depth First Search.

Has Microsoft Discontinued Offline Activation of Windows?
An anonymous reader shared
this report from Neowin:

Offline Windows activation has been possible to do using the phone. However, it looks like Microsoft has quietly killed off that method as users online have found that they are no longer able to activate the OS using it… [As documented by Windows user Ben Kleinberg on his YouTube channel], Now when trying … ⌘ Read more

More widget system progress:

https://movq.de/v/87e2bce376/vid-1767467193.mp4

I like the oldschool shadow effect. 😅 Not sure if I’ll keep it, but it’s neat.

The menu bar is still fake.

Had to spend quite a bit of time optimizing the rendering today. This can get really slow really quickly.

Unicode is Pain.

I might be able to start porting my first program (currently uses urwid) soon. 🤔

Box64 v0.4 Improves Support For DRM Protected Games, Steam Is Now More Stable
While Fex-Emu has been getting a lot of attention lately for being Valve-sponsored and powering the upcoming Steam Frame, Box64 continues making progress as another great open-source project for running x86_64 Linux binaries on AArch64 Linux as well as an eye on other architectures like RISC-V… ⌘ Read more

Discos em 2025:

Quando defini que ia comprar apenas 12 discos em 2025, achava que estava a ser muito exigente. Afinal, acabei por só comprar 7 (ainda que a minha wishlist tenha crescido). O “concerto do ano” para mim foi Marilyn Manson em Lisboa, e durante o ano ouvi 386 discos da minha coleção - o que também significa que ainda não a acabei de organizar. Dos discos lançados em 2025, há menções muito especiais para dois que incluem música feita por mim: idiossINcracias vol. I, que é um disco entre o meu projecto #kokori e Floating Ashes, e 25.12, que é uma compilação onde kokori também participou com uma faixa. Três discos que comprei são de Marilyn Manson, um oficial e dois bootlegs, e o oficial (o single “In The Air Tonight”) não foi o mais interessante dos três, mas sim o “I Want To Kill You Like They Do In The Movies”, disco duplo de lados B. O IdiossINcrasias vol. 2 tem uma excelente participação de Casa Ukrania, de quem também comprei um disco. 20 anos depois do lançamento do “Clear Hearts Grey Flowers” de Jack Off Jill, foi re-editado com um lado extra ao vivo, onde se pode ouvir-me a cantar os parabéns à Jessicka (com toda a audiência). Quanto ao streaming, parece que ouvi 689 artistas diferentes, 53% deles pela primeira vez. E tenho um novo tote bag!

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Bah. Yeah, that looks like a bug. Let’s see if this already reported upstream. 🤔

Linux Addressing Out-Of-Memory Killer Inaccuracy On Large Core Count Systems
A patch is on the way to the Linux kernel and looks like it could be ready for the 6.20~7.0 kernel for addressing out-of-memory “OOM” killer inaccuracy behavior when dealing with large core count systems… ⌘ Read more

With RAM crazy prices being what they are, I guess my PC is gonna be stuck on 16GB RAM for some time. I originally bought the DDR4 16GB kit for like $49 AUD, and I thought I’d just buy another 16GB or more later down the track (this was like a year and a half ago), thinking it would be similarly priced or even cheaper…

Boy was that a mistake in hindsight LOL. The same kit is like $229 AUD now….

Mesa 25.3.3 Ships Latest Bug Fixes, Intel Vulkan GTK4 Toolkit Workarounds
Mesa 25.3.3 shipped on Thursday as the newest stable point release for Q4’s Mesa 25.3 feature series. Now being into the new quarter, we have Mesa 26.0 to look forward to as stable likely by late February, but for now Mesa 25.3.3 is the latest and greatest stable version… ⌘ Read more

On my way to having windows and mouse support:

https://movq.de/v/95bbbbd3e8/basic-windows.mp4

It would be cool to have something like Turbo Vision eventually.

(I considered just using Turbo Vision, but it’s a C++ library and that’s not quite what I’m looking for. But it’s not yet completely off the table.)

The only good thing about this absolute craziness is that I can restock my rocket sticks. I picked up twelve along the way. Unfortunately, it looks like 99.999% of ammunition is bombs instead of rockets. Some sections of my street look exactly like an arbitrary Pakistanian town that I’ve seen online.

There was surprisingly much snow in the woods. Also, all ponds have frozen over. I didn’t expect that. Not at all. There were even illegal ice skating tracks in the natural reserve. We came across a large puddle and it was at least 10cm solid ice to the ground. Crazy!

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-01-01/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is fuck’n great shit™ Where did you find this? 🤔 Got any more shit™ like this? 🙏

Asahi Linux Has Experimental Code For DisplayPort, Apple M3/M4/M5 Bring-Up Still Ongoing
Prominent Asahi Linux developer Sven Peter spoke at this week’s 39th Chaos Communication Congress “39C3” in Hamburg, Germany. He provided an update around the still-in-the-works Apple M3 / M4 / M5 SoC and device support as well as other outstanding features like getting DisplayPort working on Apple Macs under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Intel Meteor Lake On Linux Two Years Post-Launch: 93% The Original Performance
As part of the various end-of-year annual benchmarking comparisons and the like on Phoronix, today is a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H “Meteor Lake” performance has evolved under Ubuntu Linux in the two years since launching. Plus with next-gen Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to be showcased next week at CES, it’s a good time for revisiting the Meteor Lake performance to see the difference two years have made for Intel Met … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Well, just a very limited subset thereof:

1. inline and multiline code blocks using single/double/triple backticks (but no code blocks with just indentation)
   
2. markdown links using using [text](url)
   
3. markdown media links using ![alt](url)
   

And that’s it. No bold, italics, lists, quotes, headlines, etc.

Just like mentions, plain URLs, markdown links and markdown media URLs are highlighted and available in the URLs View. They’re also colored differently, similarly to code segments.

I definitely should write some documentation and provide screenshots.

It totally sounds like an active warzone around here. So, I just went on a very, very, very quick stroll to check out our sunset from ontop our hill (were all the bangs are way more horrible): https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-12-31/

NYC Inauguration Bans Raspberry Pi, Flipper Zero Devices
Longtime Slashdot reader ptorrone writes: The January 1, 2026, NYC mayoral inauguration prohibits attendees from bringing specific brand-name devices, explicitly banning Raspberry Pi single-board computers and the Flipper Zero, listed alongside weapons, explosives, and drones. Rather than restricting behaviors or capabilities like signal interference or unauth … ⌘ Read more

GCC & The GNU Toolchain’s Exciting 2025 With New Languages, More Optimizations
The GCC compiler and the GNU toolchain ecosystem at large had a great year. From new language front-ends for the likes of Algol 68 and COBOL to maturing support for GCC Rust, new performance optimizations from GCC to Glibc, initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” support merged for GCC 16, and much more. It’s pretty safe to say GCC and the broader GNU ecosystem enjoyed a very successful 2025… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s cool! I also like the name of your library. :-) I assume you made the thing load quickly, didn’t you?

Well, you girls and guys are making cool things, and I have some progress to show as well. 😅

https://movq.de/v/c0408a80b1/movwin.mp4

Scrolling widgets appears to work now. This is (mostly) Unicode-aware: Note how emojis like “😅” are double-width “characters” and the widget system knows this. It doesn’t try to place a “😅” in a location where there’s only one cell available.

Same goes for that weird “ä” thingie, which is actually “a” followed by U+0308 (a combining diacritic). Python itself thinks of this as two “characters”, but they only occupy one cell on the screen. (Assuming your terminal supports this …)

This library does the heavy Unicode lifting: https://github.com/jquast/wcwidth (Take a look at its implementation to learn how horrible Unicode and human languages are.)

The program itself looks like this, it’s a proper widget hierarchy:

(There is no input handling yet, hence some things are hardwired for the moment.)

I just fixed another bug in tt where the language hint in multiline markdown code blocks had not been stripped before rendering. It just looked like it was part of the actual code, which was ugly. I now throw it away. Actually, it’s already extracted into the data model for possible future syntax highlighting.

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.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Because you might not want to commit all changed files in a single commit. I very often make use of this and create several commits. In fact, I like to git add --patch to interactively select which parts of a file go in the next commit. This happens most likely when refactoring during a feature implementation or bug fix. I couldn’t live without that anymore. :-)

If you have a much more organized way of working where this does not come up, you can just git commit --all to include all changed files in the next commit without git adding them first. But new files still have to be git added manually once.

It’s very likely I might have to host Mai again, simplytranslate.org isn’t cutting it anymore.

Meta Just Bought Manus, an AI Startup Everyone Has Been Talking About
Meta has agreed to acquire viral AI agent startup Manus, “a Singapore-based AI startup that’s become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral,” reports TechCrunch. “The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyz … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, I used SnipMate years ago (until 2012). IIRC, it’s more than just “insert a bit of text here”, it can also jump to the correct next location(s) and stuff like that. Don’t remember why I stopped using it.

Then I used nothing for a long time. Just before Christmas, I made my own plugin (… of course …), which does everything I need at the moment (and nothing more).

It can insert simple templates and then jump to the next location:

https://movq.de/v/67cdf7c827/sisni%2Dpython.mp4

And replace a string after insertion:

https://movq.de/v/67cdf7c827/sisni%2Dheader.mp4

(It’s not public (yet?) and it also uses vim9script, so I guess it wouldn’t work on your system.)

It Took 6+ Years For Linux’s “New” Mount API To Be Properly Documented In Man Pages
In demonstrating one of the gaps of man pages in modern times and likely having hindered the adoption of the Linux kernel’s new mount API, it took more than six years for those system calls to be properly documented within man pages. The Linux “new” mount API was introduced back in mid-2019 with Linux 5.2 and since supported by key file-systems after several years but not until weeks ago was this file descriptor based mount API sco … ⌘ Read more

Fedora Continued At The Forefront Of Upstream Linux Innovations In 2025
Phoronix’s Michael Larabel is “reliving some of the best moments for Fedora Linux in 2025” by highlighting the year’s most popular news around the distro. Throughout 2025, Fedora continued to lead upstream Linux innovation with bold changes like Wayland-only GNOME, newer kernels, architecture cleanups, and experimental features – … ⌘ Read more

Great article about how #Wikimedia runs on metal and not someone else’s cloud - and why. Includes other interesting tidbits, like software decisions, AI, et cetera…

https://wikimedia.brussels/wikipedia-is-running-on-its-own-metal-the-power-and-limits-of-self-hosted-infrastructure/

VC Sees AI-generated Video Gutting the Creator Economy
AI-generated video tools like OpenAI’s Sora will make individual content creators “far, far, far less valuable” as social media platforms shift toward algorithmically generated content tailored to each viewer, according to Michael Mignano, a partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed and who cofounded the podcasting platform Anchor before Spotify acquired it.

Speaki … ⌘ 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. 🫤

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can tell you this right now, writing assembly / machine code is fucking hard work™ 😓 I’m sure @movq@www.uninformativ.de can affirm 🤣 And when it all goes to shit™ (which it does often), man is debugging fucking hard as hell! Without debug symbols I can’t use the regular tools like lldb or gdb 😂

Linux 7.0 Expected To Bring IO_uring IOPOLL Polling Improvements
The next Linux kernel cycle, which will be known as Linux 6.20 or more than likely Linux 7.0, is expected to land some IO_uring improvements for better IOPOLL polling… ⌘ Read more

SuperTux 0.7 Reaches Beta For Reviving An Open-Source Classic
Longtime Linux users likely have fond memories of SuperTux as the open-source jump-n-run game that used to be included on some early Linux live CD/DVDs for this Super Mario Bros inspired game. There hasn’t been a new release of SuperTux in over four years but out today is the beta of SuperTux 0.7 as a major overhaul to the free software, family-friendly game title… ⌘ Read more

New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed for Linux Like Microsoft Windows’ ‘Modern Standby’
Phoronix reports on “an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list” proposing “a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the ‘Modern Standby’ functionality found with Microsoft Windows…”

Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain co … ⌘ Read more

HarfBuzz 12.3 Released - Nice Performance Improvements To This Text Shaping Engine
HarfBuzz 12.3 was just released for ending out 2025 with some nice performance improvements to this widely-used text shaping engine. HarfBuzz in turn is used by the prominent Linux desktop environments, Java, Flutter, various game engines, and apps like Chrome and Firefox for text shaping needs with OpenType fonts and more… ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Nah it’s more like there’s a lot of repeated code, because when you go from source language to intermediate representation to machine code, well you just end up writing a lot of the same patterns over and over again. I need to dedupe this I think.

Taiwan’s iPass Releases Floppy Disk Pre-Paid Cash Card
Taiwan’s iPass has released a limited-edition prepaid payment card shaped exactly like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The company, perhaps rightly so, felt the need to include a warning on the product listing: “This product only has a card function and does not have a 3.5mm [sic] disk function, please note before purchasing.”

The NFC-enabled novelty card went on sale start … ⌘ Read more

My little toy operating system from last year runs in 16-bit Real Mode (like DOS). Since I’ve recently figured out how to switch to 64-bit Long Mode right after BIOS boot, I now have a little program that performs this switch on my toy OS. It will load and run any x86-64 program, assuming it’s freestanding, a flat binary, and small enough (< 128 KiB code, only uses the first 2 MiB of memory).

Here I’m running a little C program (compiled using normal GCC, no Watcom trickery):

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/los86%2D64.mp4

Next steps could include:

• Use Rust instead of C for that 64-bit program?
  
• Provide interrupt service routines. (At the moment, it just keeps interrupts disabled.)

Ubuntu’s Rust Infatuation, New Optimizations & Other Ubuntu Linux 2025 Highlights
It was a very interesting year for Ubuntu Linux. Ahead of the important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out this coming April, Ubuntu Linux this year was expeditiously migrating to new Rust-based system tools like sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils, new performance optimizations continued to be explored for bettering the out-of-the-box Ubuntu performance, better ARM64 support with its desktop ISO, and enhancing the Snapdragon X Elite laptop supp … ⌘ Read more

New Linux Patches Improve exFAT Read Performance Via Multi-Cluster Mapping
For those using Microsoft’s exFAT file-system under Linux for the likes of flash drives and SD cards, a new patch series posted today aims to enhance the read performance. The new patches are shown to improve performance by about 10% while also heaving lower overhead… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Not even entirely sure how I did it myself, but likely a lucky combination of the new tail swirl, the legs closer to the screen being bigger and the head looking slightly to the side (eye & ear position), with bottom part of the hair, going behind the snout. The white is just an outline, around most of my works, so I don’t think that plays a part.

The Phone-Based Retirement Is Here
Adult children across the United States are increasingly reporting that their aging parents have developed what looks remarkably like the smartphone addiction [non-paywalled source] typically associated with teenagers, a phenomenon The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel has dubbed “phone-based retirement.” A 2019 Pew Research Center study found people 60 and older spend more than half their daily leisure time – … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.20~7.0 To Bring Prep Changes For CXL Soft Reserve Recovery & Accelerator Memory
The next kernel cycle that will be known as either Linux 6.20 or Linux 7.0 depending upon how Linus Torvalds handles the versioning for this next x.20 milestone. More than likely it will be Linux 7.0 given his historical versioning scheme, but whatever the case, ahead of this next kernel cycle some initialization changes for the CXL subsystem are building up… ⌘ Read more