@prologic@twtxt.net yeah I should probably update. Version 0.15.1@31958f89 2025-06-29T20:35:20+10:00 go1.23.1

Corporate Profits Surge as Companies Cut Nearly 1 Million Jobs
U.S. corporate profits have risen to record levels this year as companies eliminated nearly 1 million jobs. Chen Zhao of Alpine Macro calls the disconnect a “jobless boom.” Companies typically cut workers when profits decline. Amazon laid off 30,000 employees despite strong earnings. Zhao attributes the pattern to AI adoption boosting productivity across … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

Mark Zuckerberg Opened an Illegal School At His Palo Alto Compound. His Neighbor Revolted
Mark Zuckerberg opened an unlicensed school named after the family’s pet chicken – and it was the final straw for his neighbors, writes Slashdot reader joshuark, citing a report from Wired. The magazine obtained 1,665 pages of documents about the neighborhood dispute – “including 311 records, leg … ⌘ Read more

Magika 1.0 Goes Stable As Google Rebuilds Its File Detection Tool In Rust
BrianFagioli writes: Google has released Magika 1.0, a stable version of its AI-based file type detection tool, and rebuilt the entire engine in Rust for speed and memory safety. The system now recognizes more than 200 file types, up from about 100, and is better at distinguishing look-alike formats such as JSON vs JSONL, TS … ⌘ Read more

Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Finally Exposes Pipeline Binary “VK_KHR_pipeline_binary”
Introduced back in August of 2024 with Vulkan 1.3.294 was VK_KHR_pipeline_binary as a pipeline binary extension to retrieve binary data associated with individual pipelines. The focus of this is to bypass the Vulkan pipeline caching mechanism and so applications can manage caches themselves. Finally today for Mesa 26.0-devel the Intel “ANV” open-source Vulkan driver has enabled this extension… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de this I find more worrisome, and saw no mention of it on your text: Right-Wing Chatbots Turbocharge America’s Political and Cultural Wars (gift article).

Enoch, one of the newer chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, promises “to ‘mind wipe’ the pro-pharma bias” from its answers. Another, Arya, produces content based on instructions that tell it to be an “unapologetic right-wing nationalist Christian A.I. model.”

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

• AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  
• The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
  

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

• Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  
• Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
  

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

• Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

systemd-appd Is A New Component Being Planned By Flatpak Developers
Given this week’s release of Flatpak 1.17 for app sandboxing, open-source developer Sebastian Wick published a blog post on Tuesday around the latest Flatpak developments and a look ahead at some of the feature development planned. Arguably most significant of that is the plans for systemd-appd… ⌘ Read more

I’m building a service that lets you:

create and manage disposable, brandable email aliases so you can track leaks, forward important messages, and keep your real inbox clean.

I’ve just finishing building it for the most part, and have cut a v0.1.0 release. It’s currently closed source (to be decided later) and now open to beta testers. cc @bender@twtxt.net 🙏 I fully intend to monetize and offer this as a paid service in teh coming weeks/months, but beta/invite-only testers and early adopters/users first 🤟

Open Container Initiative “OCI” Runtime Spec v1.3 Released With FreeBSD Support
The Open Container Initiative unveiled today the OCI Runtime Specification v1.3 update for this standard around operating system process and application containers. This runtime specification continues to evolve for outlining the configuration, execution environment, and lifecycle of a container. Notable with the v1.3 revision is introducing official FreeBSD support… ⌘ Read more

Specimen 1: A caveman marking his territory:

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org back to this, I think @prologic@twtxt.net meant 1 November 12:00 UTC. I won’t hold it against him. 🤭

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s way more expensive and time-consuming in the end. If only somebody had warned us!!1

The triangle reminds me of zalgo text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalgo_text

Because OP twtxt seems to be a cross-post from the Fediverse, I am bringing some context here. It refers to this GitHub issue. This comment explains why the issue described is happening:

This is usually due to notarization checks. E.g. the binaries are checked by the notarization service (‘XProtect’) which phones home to Apple. Depending on your network environment, this can take a long time. Once the executable has been run the results are usually cached, so any subsequent startup should be fast.

OP network must be running on 1,200 Baud modem, or less. 🤭 I have never, ever, experienced any distinguishable delays.

Advent of Code will be different this year:

https://old.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1ocwh04/changes_to_advent_of_code_starting_this_december/

There will only be 12 puzzles, i.e. only December 1 to December 12. This might make it more interesting for some people, because it’s (probably) less work and a lower chance of people getting burned out. 🤔

Personally, I’ll probably stretch it out over 24 days. Giving myself more time to solve each puzzle and I really want this event to last the entire month. 😅

Maybe this makes it more interesting for some people around here as well?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de streamlining jenny.vim?

index adc0db9..cb54abc 100644
--- a/vim/ftdetect/jenny.vim
+++ b/vim/ftdetect/jenny.vim
@@ -1 +1,2 @@
 au BufNewFile,BufRead jenny-posting.eml setl completefunc=jenny#CompleteMentions fo-=t wrap
+au BufRead,BufNewFile jenny-posting.eml normal $

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com No worries, all good, mate! We all have to start somewhere. Other software requests my feed several orders of magnitude more often.

I can confirm, the User-Agent header appears to be fixed. \o/

Two other things I noticed, though:

1. There’s now an OPTIONS request for my feed coming from something that claims to be Firefox, pointing to your feed URL in the query. No clue what this is about. In any case, it’s rejected with a 405 Method Not Allowed.

2. Not that these few requests bother me at all, but you might wanna implement caching next with either the If-Modified-Since or If-None-Match request headers. This way, if the feed hasn’t changed, the web server can reply with a 304 Not Modified and no body at all, saving unnecessary traffic. But again, this is really not an issue for me at all. I just wanted to make sure you’re aware of it, that’s all. It might be even already on your agenda. Or you might decide to never do anything about it, which is also fine for me. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s an ancient 1.22.4. :-)

@melyanna@tilde.club Exit! Exit!!1! https://movq.de/v/c51aa76926/exit-exit-exit.jpg

@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. :-)

Here is just a small list of things™ that I’m aware will break, some quite badly, others in minor ways:

1. Link rot & migrations: domain changes, path reshuffles, CDN/mirror use, or moving from txt → jsonfeed will orphan replies unless every reader implements perfect 301/410 history, which they won’t.
   
2. Duplication & forks: mirrors/relays produce multiple valid locations for the same post; readers see several “parents” and split the thread.
   
3. Verification & spam-resistance: content addressing lets you dedupe and verify you’re pointing at exactly the post you meant (hash matches bytes). Location anchors can be replayed or spoofed more easily unless you add signing and canonicalization.
   
4. Offline/cached reading: without the original URL being reachable, readers can’t resolve anchors; with hashes they can match against local caches/archives.
   
5. Ecosystem churn: all existing clients, archives, and tools that assume content-derived IDs need migrations, mapping layers, and fallback logic. Expect long-lived threads to fracture across implementations.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Mine shows 1/1 of 14 Twts 😆 I think this is a bug 🤯

Made this a few weeks ago, just listened to it again and I quite like it:

https://www.uninformativ.de/music/2025-1-ebow/Fog.ogg

This is just one instrument: Electric bass guitar + EBow. And echo/delay on top. But it’s a single track, single take. It amazes me quite a bit how much you can do with that little thing. 🤯

https://movq.de/v/2496f8ba36/s.png

The chemtrails have fallen down!!1 https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-09-05/

Hmm, gnu.org is slow as heck. Shorter HTML pages load in about ten seconds. This complete AWK manual all in one large HTML page took a full minute: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html Is there maybe some anti AI shenanigans going on?

In any case, I find the user guide super interesting. My AWK skills are basically non-existent, so I finally decided to change that. This document is incredibly well written and makes it really fun to keep reading and learning. I’m very impressed. So far, I made it to section 1.6, happy to continue.

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.

I’ve got a prototype of my hardcopy simulator going. I’m typing on the keyboard and the “display” goes to the printer:

https://movq.de/v/56feb53912/s.png

https://movq.de/v/235c1eabac/MVI_8810.MOV.mp4

The biiiiiiiiiig problem is that the print head and plastic cover make it impossible to see what’s currently being printed, because this is not a typewriter. This means: In order to see what I just entered, I have to feed the paper back and forth and back and forth … it’s not ideal.

I got that idea of moving back/forth from Drew DeVault, who – as it turned out – did something similar a few years back. (I tried hard to read as little as possible of his blog post, because figuring things out myself is more fun. But that could mean I missed a great idea here or there.)

But hey, at least this is running on my Pentium 133 on SuSE Linux 6.4, printer connected with a parallel cable. 😍

(Also, yes, you can see the printouts of earlier tests and, yes, I used ed(1) wrong at one point. 🤪 And ls insisted on using colors …)

Here’s an interesting thought/angle on this topic:

gemini://gemini.conman.org/boston/2025/08/21.1

A further check showed that all the network blocks are owned by one organization—Tencent [4]. I’m seriously thinking that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) encourage this with maybe the hope of externalizing the cost of the Great Firewall [5] to the rest of the world.

Sooooooooo, things happened, and I now have a dot matrix printer again. 😍😂

(One of the end goals is to simulate a hardcopy terminal on my old box. I’m waiting for another cable to arrive, I don’t have USB there. And then use ed(1) like it was meant to be used! 😅)

https://movq.de/v/850e04ba36/VID_20250821_180801.mp4.mp4

https://movq.de/v/850e04ba36/closeup.jpg

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Colorized manpages have been a thing for a very long time:

https://movq.de/v/81219d7f7a/s.png

Problem is, hardly anybody knows this, because you configure this by … drumroll … overwriting TERMCAP entries of less in your ~/.bashrc:

export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[38;5;3m'      # Bold
    export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\e[0m'           # End Bold
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\e[4;38;5;6m'    # Underline
    export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\e[0m'           # End Underline
export GROFF_NO_SGR=1                     # Needed since groff 1.23

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org “Advanced”, well, probably more “mature”. There aren’t a ton of crazy features and that icon thing is the largest code addition in the last 10 years. %)

Speaking of OS/2 … I just realized that Windows 3.x didn’t have icons, either. If I’m not mistaken, this only got added in Windows 95. In other words, OS/2 had this feature before Windows did, because at least OS/2 2.1 from 1993 had icons. Who would have thunk.

(Now I kind of want to know which system really introduced this feature.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, huh, maybe it was just my GNOME 2 themes back then that didn’t show the icon. 🤔

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right?

Oh, no. It’s still X11. All my recent Wayland comments resulted from me trying to switch, but I think it’s still too early. Being unable to use QEMU (because it can’t capture the mouse pointer) is a pretty big blocker for me. This is completely broken, it just happens to be unnoticeable with modern guest OSes, so it’s probably not a priority for devs.

(Not to mention that I would have to fork and substantially extend dwl in order to “replicate” my X11 WM. And then, after having done that, I’d have to follow upstream Wayland development, for which I don’t have the resources. Things would need to slow down before I can do that.)

all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1

Heh. I’ve been using tiling WMs for ~15 years now, so it’s actually kind of refreshing to see something different for a change. 😅

Probably close to the older Windowses.

That particular theme is a ripoff of OS/2 Warp 3: https://movq.de/v/6c2a948882/s.png 😅

We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98

Oh god. Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of those, either. 🥴

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/KDE_Plasma_5.21_Breeze_Twilight_screenshot.png

And GNOME used to have them, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gnome-2-22_%284%29.png

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 (https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/leafpads.png) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

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.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They are optional dependencies and listed as such:

$ pacman -Qi pinentry
Name            : pinentry
Version         : 1.3.1-5
Description     : Collection of simple PIN or passphrase entry dialogs which
                  utilize the Assuan protocol
Optional Deps   : gcr: GNOME backend [installed]
                  gtk3: GTK backend [installed]
                  qt5-x11extras: Qt5 backend [installed]
                  kwayland5: Qt5 backend
                  kguiaddons: Qt6 backend
                  kwindowsystem: Qt6 backend

And it’s probably a good thing that they’re optional. I wouldn’t want to have all that installed all the time.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I spent so much time in the past figuring out if something is a dict or a list in YAML, for example.

What are the types in this example?

items:
- part_no:   A4786
  descrip:   Water Bucket (Filled)
  price:     1.47
  quantity:  4
- part_no:   E1628
  descrip:   High Heeled "Ruby" Slippers
  size:      8
  price:     133.7
  quantity:  1

items is a dict containing … a list of two other dicts? Right?

It is quite hard for me to grasp the structure of YAML docs. 😢

The big advantage of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is that it’s much easier to write code for those formats, than it is with XML. json.loads() and you’re done.

Only figured this out yesterday:

pinentry, which is used to safely enter a password on Linux, has several frontends. There’s a GTK one, a Qt one, even an ncurses one, and so on.

GnuPG also uses pinentry. And you can configure your frontend of choice here in gpg-agent.conf.

But what happens when you don’t configure it? What’s the default?

Turns out, pinentry is a shellscript wrapper and it’s not even that long. Here it is in full:

#!/bin/bash

# Run user-defined and site-defined pre-exec hooks.
[[ -r "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec ]] && \
        . "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/pinentry/preexec
[[ -r /etc/pinentry/preexec ]] && . /etc/pinentry/preexec

# Guess preferred backend based on environment.
backends=(curses tty)
if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" || -n "$WAYLAND_DISPLAY" ]]; then
        case "$XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" in
        KDE|LXQT|LXQt)
                backends=(qt qt5 gnome3 gtk curses tty)
                ;;
        *)
                backends=(gnome3 gtk qt qt5 curses tty)
                ;;
        esac
fi

for backend in "${backends[@]}"
do
        lddout=$(ldd "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" 2>/dev/null) || continue
        [[ "$lddout" == *'not found'* ]] && continue
        exec "/usr/bin/pinentry-$backend" "$@"
done

exit 1

Preexec, okay, then some auto-detection to use a toolkit matching your desktop environment …

… and then it invokes ldd? To find out if all the required libraries are installed for the auto-detected frontend?

Oof. I was sitting here wondering why it would use pinentry-gtk on one machine and pinentry-gnome3 on another, when both machines had the exact same configs. Yeah, but different libraries were installed. One machine was missing gcr, which is needed for pinentry-gnome3, so that machine (and that one alone) spawned pinentry-gtk …

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I fully agree with you on https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/POSTING-en.html!

Although, in the first screenshot, the window title background is much darker in the new version than the old one!1!1 :-P Kidding aside, the contrast in the old one is still better.

Also, note the missing underlines for the Alt hotkeys now. I just think that the underline in the old one is too thick.

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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, it’s a shitshow. MS overconfirms all my prejudices constantly.

Ignoring e-mail after lunch works great, though. :-)

Our timetracking is offline for over a week because of reasons. The responsible bunglers are falling by the skin of their teeth: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/timetracking.png

1. The error message neither includes the timeframe nor a link to an announcement article.
   
2. The HTML page needs to download JS in order to display the fucking error message.
   
3. Proper HTTP status codes are clearly only for big losers.
   
4. Despite being down, heaps of resources are still fetched.
   

I find it really fascinating how one can screw up on so many levels. This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

The Linux installation on my main PC turned 14 today:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

We’re entering the “too hot to think”-season in 3, 2, 1 … and we’re live!

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.

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — First Woman — Dream to Reality https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/21/first-woman-1.html #freeculture #bookclub

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.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I use Alt+. all the time, it’s great. 👌

FWIW, another thing I often use is !! to recall the entire previous command line:

$ find -iname '*foo*'
./This is a foo file.txt

$ cat "$(!!)"
cat "$(find -iname '*foo*')"
This is just a test.

Yep!

Or:

$ ls -al subdir
ls: cannot open directory 'subdir': Permission denied

$ sudo !!
sudo ls -al subdir
total 0
drwx------ 2 root root  60 Jun 20 19:39 .
drwx------ 7 jess jess 360 Jun 20 19:39 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   0 Jun 20 19:39 nothing-to-see

On my blog: Real Life in Star Trek, Gambit part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/06/19/gambit-part-1.html #scifi #startrek #closereading

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m trying to call some libc functions (because the Rust stdlib does not have an equivalent for getpeername(), for example, so I don’t have a choice), so I have to do some FFI stuff and deal with raw pointers and all that, which is very gnarly in Rust – because you’re not supposed to do this. Things like that are trivial in C or even Assembler, but I have not yet understood what Rust does under the hood. How and when does it allocate or free memory … is the pointer that I get even still valid by the time I do the libc call? Stuff like that.

I hope that I eventually learn this over time … but I get slapped in the face at every step. It’s very frustrating and I’m always this 🤏 close to giving up (only to try again a year later).

Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess I could “just” use some 3rd party library for this. socket2 gets mentioned a lot in this context. But I don’t want to. I literally need one getpeername() call during the lifetime of my program, I don’t even do the socket(), bind(), listen(), accept() dance, I already have a fully functional file descriptor. Using a library for that is total overkill and I’d rather do it myself. (And look at the version number: 0.5.10. The library is 6 years old but they’re still saying: “Nah, we’re not 1.0 yet, we reserve the right to make breaking changes with every new release.” So many Rust libs are still unstable …)

… and I could go on and on and on … 🤣

So I was using this function in Rust:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/path/struct.Path.html#method.display

Note the little 1.0.0 in the top right corner, which means that this function has been “stable since Rust version 1.0.0”. We’re at 1.87 now, so we’re good.

Then I compiled my program on OpenBSD with Rust 1.86, i.e. just one version behind, but well ahead of 1.0.0.

The compiler said that I was using an unstable library feature.

Turns out, that function internally uses this:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ffi/struct.OsStr.html#method.display

And that is only available since Rust 1.87.

How was I supposed to know this? 🤨🫩