Ukrainian assault units advance up to 1.6 km in Donetsk region – Armed Forces chief ⌘ Read more

LineageOS 23 released
The LineageOS project has released version 23 of their AOSP-based Android variant. LineageOS 23 is based on the initial release of Android 16 – so not the QPR1 release that came later – because Google has not made the source code for that release available yet. Like other, similar projects, LineageOS also suffers from Google’s recent further lockdown of Android; not only do they not have access to Android 16 QPR1’s source code, they also can’t follow along with the latest security patche … ⌘ Read more

Indiana City Doesn’t Have to Pay Innocent Mom $16,000 After Police Wrecked Home
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Snapchat’s always been free. Suddenly parents face a $16 monthly bill
Users who have been using Snapchat as a free source of unlimited storage have been put on notice – it’s not going to be free any more. ⌘ Read more

Snapchat’s always been free. So why would you have to pay $16 a month?
Users who have been using Snapchat as a free source of unlimited storage have been put on notice – it’s not going to be free any more. ⌘ Read more

Deals: AirTags 4-pack for $65, M3 iPad Air from $449, & More
AirTags are super useful personal trackers with many uses from tracking a bag, purse, dog, cat, luggage, backpack, car keys, package, bike, car, or just about anything else you can imagine wanting to keep an eye on through the Find My network. Amazon is currently offering the AirTag 4-pack for just $65 ($16 per AirTag), … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/10/06/deals-airtags-4-pack-for-65-m3-ipad-air-from-449-m … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss
Article URL: https://www.techinasia.com/news/openais-revenue-rises-16-to-4-3b-in-h1-2025

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45453586

Points: 552

# Comments: 688 ⌘ Read more

6.16.10: stable
Version:6.16.10 (stable)Released:2025-10-02Source:linux-6.16.10.tar.xzPGP Signature:linux-6.16.10.tar.signPatch:full ( incremental)ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.16.10 ⌘ Read more

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com, I mean to follow up here on the brief exchange we had on irc.mills.io, but I forgot. Never too late, so here it goes:

18:16 <aelaraji> quark 🙏 much appreciated but it won't be necessary, since there isn't much to miss out on in most of  where I hang out, so I could just disconnect and spare everyone else the noise 
18:17 *** aelaraji (aelaraji@776014f5a3edd32f1ed19658b7b85c8c655945b0feacaedd92fe60e61a3c0ae2) has quit (/ME goes "yeeeeet..!")
18:18 <quark> No noise for me. 
18:18 <quark> It’s all good. 
18:18 <quark> What would IRC be without on/offs?
18:19 <quark> Preeeety boring!
18:19 <quark> Ah, he was gone. 
18:19 <quark> Well, I will twtxt this to him.  LOL. 

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @dce@hashnix.club It’s pretty cool, I won’t argue that, but also really simple, to be completely honest. 😅 The BIOS already provides all you need to send data to the printer:

https://helppc.netcore2k.net/interrupt/bios-printer-services

The BIOS actually does provide a great deal of things, which, to me, was one of the most surprising learnings of this project (the project of writing a little 16-bit real-mode OS, that is). It often doesn’t feel like I was writing an operating system – it felt more like writing a normal program that just uses BIOS calls like we would use syscalls these days.

(I’ve also read a lot of warnings, like “don’t use the BIOS for this or that”. Mostly because it tends to be very slow.)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz after 5 years or so with Linode, I started having little—but annoying—issues with them. Moved to Vultr and have been very happy with them since Ubuntu 16.04, so 9 years, and a little bit more.

Global update: Trump in Scotland says EU trade deal has 50-50 chance as tariff row grows. Gaza sees 9 more starvation deaths (122 total); UN says famine is deliberate. Thai-Cambodia clashes kill 16, displace 135k. US raid in Syria kills top ISIS leader & sons.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons:

Image

And GNOME used to have them, too:

Image

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really don’t get it how people can work like that. You can’t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then there’s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! There’s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a “regularish” 16:10 monitor and don’t see shit, because it’s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesn’t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (

Image

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.

Status 2025-07-21
Morning, computer! Spending my days off trying to figure things out.
Some of them will occur in this post. I think best when I’m writing,
after all.

I’m back from a short vacation since a couple of weeks. I’m still
going to take a few days off every week for a while. I need the break.
It’s been way too many 12-16 hour workdays. I’m nominally working 80%
(~6 hour days), so I figure I’ve been working a lot for free.

Yeah, well, I like the TKey project to succeed. The ideas behind it
have implicatio … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net That was one of the inputs into my research 🧐 So that’s already factored in. We bought our new truck (2025 GWM Canon) recently to replace the ‘ol 2nd hand Nissan Navara we bought that just had too many things go wrong with it, and I don’t have time or energy to learn to be a diesel mechanic haha 🤣 – So yes, the SCT-16 has a Tare (unladen weight) of 2150Kg and a maximum legal (ATM) weight of 2,800Kg.

The WM_CLASS Property is used on X11 to assign rules to certain windows, e.g. “this is a GIMP window, it should appear on workspace number 16.” It consists of two fields, name and class.

Wayland (or rather, the XDG shell protocol – core Wayland knows nothing about this) only has a single field called app_id.

When you run X11 programs under Wayland, you use XWayland, which is baked into most compositors. Then you have to deal with all three fields.

Some compositors map name to app_id, others map class to app_id, and even others directly expose the original name and class.

Apparently, there is no consensus.

@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 all fairness, GOG says that Forsaken is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – not current Arch Linux. If you ask me, this just goes to show that Linux is not a good platform for proprietary binary software.

Is it free software, do you have the source code? Then you’re good to go, things can be patched/updated (that can still be a lot of work). But proprietary binary blobs? Very bad idea.

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

Saw this on Mastodon:

https://racingbunny.com/@mookie/114718466149264471

18 rules of Software Engineering

1. You will regret complexity when on-call
   
2. Stop falling in love with your own code
   
3. Everything is a trade-off. There’s no “best” 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs
   
4. Everyone hates code they didn’t write
   
5. Don’t use unnecessary dependencies
   
6. Coding standards prevent arguments
   
7. Write meaningful commit messages
   
8. Don’t ever stop learning new things
   
9. Code reviews spread knowledge
   
10. Always build for maintainability
    
11. Ask for help when you’re stuck
    
12. Fix root causes, not symptoms
    
13. Software is never completed
    
14. Estimates are not promises
    
15. Ship early, iterate often
    
16. Keep. It. Simple.
    

Solid list, even though 14 is up for debate in my opinion: Software can be completed. You have a use case / problem, you solve that problem, done. Your software is completed now. There might still be bugs and they should be fixed – but this doesn’t “add” to the program. Don’t use “software is never done” as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.

On my blog: Toots 🦣 from 06/16 to 06/20 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/20/week.html #linkdump #socialmedia #quotes #week

Speaking of Wine, Arch Linux completely fucked up Wine for me with the latest update.

• 16-bit support is gone.
  
• Performance of 3D games is horrible and unplayable.
  

Arch is shipping a WoW64 build now, which is not yet ready for prime time.

And then I realized that there’s actually only one stable Wine release per year but Arch has been shipping development releases all the time. That’s quite unusual. I’m used to Arch only shipping stable packages … huh.

Hopefully things will improve again. I’m not eager to build Wine from source. I’d rather ditch it and resort to my real Windows XP box for the little (retro)gaming that I do … 🫤

On my blog: Developer Diary, Day of the African Child https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/16/african-child.html #programming #project #devjournal

Ukraine’s F-16 Took Down Russian Fighter Jet in ‘Historic First’: Report ⌘ Read more

6.16-rc1: mainline
Version:6.16-rc1 (mainline)Released:2025-06-08Source:linux-6.16-rc1.tar.gzPatch:full ⌘ Read more

Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11
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my childhood cat of 16 years is being put down tomorrow ⌘ Read more

Deals: M4 MacBook Air for $812! MacBook Pro 16″ M4 Max 48GB/1TB for $3440, & More
Amazon isn’t letting up on the great deals, with the M4 Macbook Air 13″ model now being offered at just $812 for the base 13″ model with 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, and Midnight color. You can also get great deals on other colors, but the cheapest by far is the dark Midnight color at the … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/06/03/deals-m4-macbook-air-for-812-macbook-pro-16 … ⌘ Read more

Just said goodbye to my handsome boy Jack- 16 years of happiness ⌘ Read more

Relocation generation in assemblers
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Interview: Chief maintainer of Qt project on language independence, KDE, and the pain of Qt 5 to Qt 6 •
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This is my wife’s cat. He’s 16 and we’ve lived together for the last 9 or so years. He’s always liked me but never wanted to “hang out” with me. For some reason that changed a couple days ago. 🤷🏻‍♂️ ⌘ Read more

V Kysáči otvorili Dom umenia Punktum a výstavu Márie Gaškovej
V piatok 16. mája 2025 v Kysáči slávnostne otvorili Dom umenia Punktum – nový galerijný a kultúrny priestor, ktorý vznikol vďaka iniciatíve rodiny Gaškovej a rovnomenného občianskeho združenia. Slávnosť sa konala v zrekonštruovanom rodinnom dome akademickej maliarky Márie Gaškovej, ktorý od tohto dňa dostáva nový význam ako centrum umenia a kultúry pre miestnu i širšiu komunitu. Prítomných host … ⌘ Read more

CHERIoT: The last ten years
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Get Network Utility for MacOS Sequoia with Neo Network Utility
Remember Network Utility, the handy tool for Mac that was bundled with the operating system since the origins of Mac OS X? With Network Utility, you had an easy graphical interface to commonly used network tools like ping, netstat, nslookup, traceroute, finger, port scanning, and whois. But for reasons unknown, Apple removed Network Utility from … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/05/16/get-network-utilit … ⌘ Read more

https://galusik.fr/fridayrockmetal/2025-05-16-frm.m3u Tonight #FridayRockMetal playlist

On my blog: Toots 🦣 from 05/12 to 05/16 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/05/16/week.html #linkdump #socialmedia #quotes #week

A Ledger In PostgreSQL Is Fast
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Historia patriótica de España: El Siglo de Oro
Dieter conversa con José Mª Marco sobre la cultura, la lengua y el arte de esta época, sobre Garcilaso de la Vega y sobre la Escuela de Salamanca. ⌘ Read more

Tertulia de Dieter: Óscar López y las fiestas de Ábalos
Dieter analiza con Tomás Cuesta y Cayetano González la publicación de las conversaciones entre Pedro Sánchez y José Luis Ábalos. ⌘ Read more

Pido la paz y la palabra: El renacimiento de los toros en Argentina
Agapito Maestre nos ofrece su columna radiofónica sobre un asunto cultural. ⌘ Read more

Evolution of Rust compiler errors
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Detecting malicious Unicode
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Cloud Native Bangkok launched as the official chapter for Thailand
We’re happy to announce that, following the growing interest in and adoption of Cloud Native technologies in Thailand, an official chapter was just launched within the CNCF platform: Cloud Native Bangkok. Local enthusiasts from various companies… ⌘ Read more

Leeks and leaks
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next-20250516: linux-next
Version:next-20250516 (linux-next)Released:2025-05-16 ⌘ Read more

Nicolas, 35 ans, clashe du boomer
Un article à 4 mains écrit par h16 & Citronne Ah, voilà que se présente un week-end agréable pour Nicolas, 35 ans, marié et deux enfants (de 8 et 5 ans) : ses parents viennent lui rendre visite dans la maison nouvellement acquise ! C’est un samedi matin qui s’annonce guilleret mais alors que Nicolas est en […] ⌘ Read more

10 Horror Films That Failed to Launch Their Franchise
Horror, more than any other cinematic genre, is obsessed with franchise building, owing to the low-cost, high-reward potential. But movie making is big business, and financiers and studios are not afraid to pull the plug if they don’t see a big payday ahead, no matter the project. These movies were set up for sequels and […]

The post [10 Horror Films That Failed to Launch Their Franchise](https://listverse.com/2025/05/16/10- … ⌘ Read more

Private Internet (2024)
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