Kids Bypass Age Verification With Fake Moustaches
A new Internet Matters survey suggests the UK’s Online Safety Act age checks are easy for many children to bypass. Reported workarounds include fake birthdays, borrowed IDs, video game characters, and even drawing on a fake mustache. The Register reports: The group surveyed over 1,000 UK children and their parents, and while it did report some positive effects from changes ma … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oops, I guess the new text is a bit obscure. If you follow the link, the text is a bit more explicit, but you still need to know what a lexical scope is. Anyway, this is part of Perl moving very carefully toward being UTF-8 by default while also not breaking code written in the 90s. If you name a recent version like “use v5.42;” then Perl stops letting you use non-ASCII characters unless you also say “use utf8;”. The “lexically” part basically means that strictness continues until the next “}”, or the end of the program. That lets you fix up old code one block at a time, if you aren’t ready to apply the new strictness to a whole file at once.

I’m supporting incremental SQLite schema changes to just upgrade from an older database version to whatever the current software version supports. In the past, I already noticed that this is quite expensive in unit tests when each test case runs through the entire schema patches and applies them one by one.

To speed up test execution I now decided that I finally go through the troubles of maintaining both a set of incremental patches and a full schema setup in one go. A unit test verifies that both ways end up with the same structure. This gives me a set of SQLs to check the structures:

SELECT type, name, tbl_name, sql
FROM sqlite_schema
ORDER BY type, name, tbl_name

Unfortunately, the resulting CREATE TABLE SQL queries are formatted differently, depending on whether the full schema was set up in one big step or the structure had been modified with ALTER TABLE. Mainly, added columns are not on their own lines but appended in one physical line. That’s why I wanted an SQL formatting tool. Since I didn’t find one that works decently, I’m now doing some simple string manipulation. Joining consecutive whitespace into a single space character, removing spaces before commas and closing parentheses and spaces after opening parentheses. This works surpringly good enough. Of course, if it fails, the “diff” is absolutely horrendous.

Now for the cool part, my test execution dropped from around 5:05 minutes to just 1:32 minutes! I call that a win.

I just stumbled across PRAGMA table_info('tablename') https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info, PRAGMA foreign_key_list('tablename') and friends. I guess, I have to play with that, now. It’s probably much better to use than the SQL text approach.

Six of my last eight posts were about twtxt itself. As much as it’s understandable between all the excitement and confusion with finding out and using a new technology, I really don’t want this feed to become something like this:

Image

Python ‘Chardet’ Package Replaced With LLM-Generated Clone, Re-Licensed
Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: The maintainers of the Python package `chardet`, which attempts to automatically detect the character encoding of a string, announced the release of version 7 this week, claiming a speedup factor of 43x over version 6. In the release notes, the maintainers claim that version 7 is, “a ground … ⌘ Read more

sudo-rs Breaks Historical Norms With Now Enabling Password Feedback By Default
On recent builds of Ubuntu 26.04 when being prompted by sudo for the password, password feedback is now enabled by default to show asterisk (*) characters when inputting your password. Traditionally sudo has not provided password feedback in the name of security to not divulge the length of your password in case anyone is looking/capturing your screen. But upstream sudo-rs has now changed the default behavior in the name of an improv … ⌘ Read more

‘How Many AIs Does It Take To Read a PDF?’
Despite AI’s progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge – a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them wil … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Abed is a character from Community and “cool cool cool” was one of his “things”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMXYjejIup4

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I see. Unfortunately, there seems to be no box drawing character for a corner with a diagonal line. Indeed, this is probably the best you can do.

Is the single character enough to hit it comfortably with the mouse, though? Maybe one additional to the left and above could be something to think about. Not sure. Of course this complicates it a bit more. Personally, I like fullscreen windows, so I’m definitely the wrong guy to judge this or even comment on. :-)

Google and Character.AI Agree To Settle Lawsuits Over Teen Suicides
Google and Character.AI have agreed to settle multiple lawsuits from families alleging the chatbot encouraged self-harm and suicide among teens. “The settlements would mark the first resolutions in the wave of lawsuits against tech companies whose AI chatbots encouraged teens to hurt or kill themselves,” notes Axios. From the report: Families … ⌘ Read more

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

Fleischer Studios Criticized for Claiming Betty Boop is Not Public Domain
Here it is — Betty Boop’s first appearance, which became public domain on Thursday. It’s a 60-second song halfway through a longer cartoon about a restaurant titled Dizzy Dishes. (The first scene makes it clear this is a restaurant of anthropomorphized animals — which explains why the as-yet-unnamed character has floppy dog ears…)
… ⌘ Read more

At around 19 seconds in the video, you can see some minor graphical glitches.

Text mode applications in Unix terminals are such a mess. It’s a miracle that this works at all.

In the old DOS days, you could get text (and colors) on the screen just by writing to memory, because the VGA memory was mapped to a fixed address. We don’t have that model anymore. To write a character to a certain position, you have to send an escape sequence to move the cursor to that position, then more escape sequences to set the color/attributes, then more escape sequences to get the cursor to where you actually want it. And then of course UTF-8 on top, i.e. you have no idea what the terminal will actually do when you send it a “🙂”.

Mouse events work by the terminal sending escape sequences to you (https://www.xfree86.org/current/ctlseqs.html#Mouse%20Tracking).

ncurses does an amazing job here. It’s fast (by having off-screen buffers and tracking changes, so it rarely has to actually send full screen updates to the terminal) and reliable and works across terminals. Without the terminfo database that keeps track of which terminal supports/requires which escape sequences, we’d be lost.

But gosh, what a mess this is under the hood … Makes you really miss memory mapped VGA and mouse drivers.

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.)

Oh, that’s cute: DuckDuckGo puts a little helmet on the duck when you search for Skyrim. (Katria is a Skyrim character.)

Disney Says Google AI Infringes Copyright ‘On a Massive Scale’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Wild West of copyrighted characters in AI may be coming to an end. There has been legal wrangling over the role of copyright in the AI era, but the mother of all legal teams may now be gearing up for a fight. Disney has sent a cease and desist to Google, alleging the company’s AI tools are infr … ⌘ Read more

Disney and OpenAI have made a surprise deal – what happens next?
In a stunning reversal, Disney has changed tack with regard to safeguarding its copyrighted characters from incorporation into AI tools – perhaps a sign that no one can stem the tide of AI ⌘ Read more

Disney Puts $1 Billion Into OpenAI, Licenses 200+ Characters for AI-Generated Videos and Images
Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and has entered into a three-year licensing deal that will let users generate AI-powered short videos and images featuring more than 200 characters from its Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar franchises.

The new features are expected to launch in 2026 … ⌘ Read more

**1girl 3d alluring armwear artist_name ass ass_focus athletic_female beanie big_ass big_breasts bitch blizzard_entertainment blonde_hair bottomless breasts bubble_butt caucasian cold curvy dat_ass fat_ass fitfemale freckles freja(overwatch) from_behind full_lips gloves headphones high_res huge_ass indoors large_ass legs looking_at_viewer looking_back mostly_nude open_mouth overwatch overwatch_2 pawg posing sexy sideboob slut snow standing thiccomantis thick_ass thick_thighs toned tongue video_game_character wide … ⌘ Read more

2boys annoyed backwards_cap before_fellatio before_oral black_pants cap english_text facial_hair fangs green_penis green_shirt green_skin hat kneel male/male male_only nervous oc ocs original_character pink_shirt purple_pants red_eye roblox robloxian spawn sunglasses tagme tentacle_penis tiredplantz yaoi yaoi yellow_skin
2boys annoyed backwards_cap before_fellatio before_oral black_pants cap english_text facial_hair fangs green_penis green_shirt green_skin hat kneel male/male male_only nervous oc ocs … ⌘ Read more

RoboCop Statue Rises In Detroit
alternative_right quotes a report from the Guardian: The statue looms and glints at more than 11 feet tall and weighing 3,500 pounds, looking out at the city with, how to put it … a characteristically stern expression? Despite its daunting appearance and history as a crimefighter of last resort, the giant new bronze figure of the movie character RoboCop is being seen as a symbol of hope, drawing fan … ⌘ Read more

Fuzzy Zoeller, who beat Greg Norman to win 1984 US Open playoff, dies
Fuzzy Zoeller, a two-time major champion and one of golf’s most gregarious characters whose career was tainted by a racially insensitive joke about Tiger Woods, has died aged 74. ⌘ Read more

using f key for finding “ character not working ⌘ Read more

All my newly added test cases failed, that movq thankfully provided in https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/28#issuecomment-20801 for the draft of the twt hash v2 extension. The first error was easy to see in the diff. The hashes were way too long. You’ve already guessed it, I had cut the hash from the twelfth character towards the end instead of taking the first twelve characters: hash[12:] instead of hash[:12].

After fixing this rookie mistake, the tests still all failed. Hmmm. Did I still cut the wrong twelve characters? :-? I even checked the Go reference implementation in the document itself. But it read basically the same as mine. Strange, what the heck is going on here?

Turns out that my vim replacements to transform the Python code into Go code butchered all the URLs. ;-) The order of operations matters. I first replaced the equals with colons for the subtest struct fields and then wanted to transform the RFC 3339 timestamp strings to time.Date(…) calls. So, I replaced the colons in the time with commas and spaces. Hence, my URLs then also all read https, //example.com/twtxt.txt.

But that was it. All test green. \o/

Unicode characters in iskeyword ⌘ Read more

How can I add a character to the beginning and the end of the first word in visual line mode? ⌘ Read more

If you could upload your mind to a virtual utopia, would you?
Grace Chan, author of Every Version of You, the November read for the New Scientist Book Club, explores the philosophical implications of the choices her characters make ⌘ Read more

How to display non-printable unicode characters? ⌘ Read more

How to display non-printable unicode characters? ⌘ Read more

My cat and the characters that Reddit thinks my cat looks like ⌘ Read more

Bind vim commands to keys instead of characters? ⌘ Read more

Play Super Mario Bros Remastered for Some Retro Gaming Fun
Gamers and Mario enthusiasts in particular are sure to get a kick out of Super Mario Brothers Remastered, a fan-made unofficial remake of the original Nintendo Super Mario Bros game that includes new levels, new options and game modes, new characters, a level editor, physics improvements, and more. Super Mario Bros Remastered is not meant … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/09/28/play-super-mario-bros-remastered-for-r … ⌘ Read more

10 Movie Characters Who Make Us Laugh at Unemployment
For one reason or another, most people have been between jobs at some point and experienced the frustration, uncertainty, and various problems that come with unemployment. That’s why movies that deal with being out of work in a lighthearted way can be so appealing. Humorous depictions of what is normally such a stressful time may […]

The post [10 Movie Characters Who Make Us Laugh at Unemployment](https://listverse.com/2025/ … ⌘ Read more

Tesseract Open Source OCR [optical character recognition] Engine
Comments ⌘ Read more

** More stink **
I read A Court of Throne and Roses this weekend. Not my usual fare but what the heck it was there so I read it. I found it to be an unremarkable, relatively conservative romantasy.

What stood out to me, though, is that everyone is so stinky. The main character is always describing how folks smell, smelling them before they round a corner and stuff. Even if they don’t like smell bad, this setting seems overwhelming perfumed. ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ctrl-U in Vim does something similar (“Delete all entered characters before the cursor in the current line”), but it does not put them into the “clipboard”. I sometimes hit Ctrl-U by accident and then my text is gone. 😡😂

hacking jetbrains mono to include CJK characters from a noto font for stupid purposes (i listen to asian music and my conky sidebar has a lastfm widget so sometimes it shows asian text and jetbrains doesn’t render those. so i am frankensteining my way into making it do that)

10 Movies That Missed the Point of Their Source Material
When adapting books and comics into movies, certain changes must be made to accommodate the new medium. While fans sometimes bristle at plotlines and characters being altered—or even cut out completely—there’s no way for adaptations to be entirely faithful. However, some film adaptations seem to entirely miss the point of their source material. That isn’t […]

The post [10 Movies That Missed the Point of Their Source Ma … ⌘ Read more

Calling my fellow Vimmers for a question of utmost importance. Moving the cursor one character in Insert Mode. ⌘ Read more

10 Games Milked for All Their Worth
Sticking with what works is nothing new, especially in gaming. New stories, characters, and mechanics are increasingly rare. Long development times and ballooning budgets only compound the issue, as studios must take a larger gamble with every project. Why take that risk when going with a guaranteed success is safer? That mindset prompts developers to […]

The post [10 Games Milked for All Their Worth](https://listverse.com/2025/05/25/10-games-milked-for-all-th … ⌘ Read more

Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames: Control Characters (such as Newline), Leading Dashes, and Other Problems (2009, 2024)
Comments ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net hahahahaha! No, no, no. Every word has its use. But for things like these I like certain reactions. For example, I would have given a “thumbs down” to the original twtxt, and done with it. Now, composing a reply, to simply say “no, thank you.”, that I don’t like. It seems a waste of space, and it doesn’t “look good”. I like to see at least 140 characters! Ha!

Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.4 released
The Trinity Desktop Environment, the modern-day continuation of the KDE 3.x series, has released version R14.1.4. This maintenance release brings new vector wallpapers and colour schemes, support for Unicode surrogate characters and planes above zero (for emoji, among other things), tabs in kpdf, transparency and other new visual effects for Dekorator, and much more. TDE R14.1.4 is already available for a variety of Linux distributions, and c … ⌘ Read more

Finally I propose that we increase the Twt Hash length from 7 to 12 and use the first 12 characters of the base32 encoded blake2b hash. This will solve two problems, the fact that all hashes today either end in q or a (oops) 😅 And increasing the Twt Hash size will ensure that we never run into the chance of collision for ions to come. Chances of a 50% collision with 64 bits / 12 characters is roughly ~12.44B Twts. That ought to be enough! – I also propose that we modify all our clients and make this change from the 1st July 2025, which will be Yarn.social’s 5th birthday and 5 years since I started this whole project and endeavour! 😱 #Twtxt #Update

Why is it that the cursor can’t be placed on the new line character in mormal mode. but it can be done in visual mode ? ⌘ Read more

10 Comic Book Film Characters Based on Something Else Entirely
The comic book-to-movie adaptation is far from a fine art. In this hero-centric cinematic world, moviemakers and actors are inclined to bend the rules and break away from the source material when bringing characters to the big screen. Indeed, many writers, directors, and stars have all but ignored the comics they are adapting to suit […]

The post [10 Comic Book Film Characters Based on Something Else Entire … ⌘ Read more

Regex Isn’t Hard - Tim Kellogg 👈 this is a pretty good conscience article on regexes, and I agree, regex isn’t that hard™ – However I think I can make the TL;DR even shorter 😅

Regex core subset (portable across languages):

Character sets
• a matches “a”
• [a-z] any lowercase
• [a-zA-Z0-9] alphanumeric
• [^ab] any char but a or b

Repetition (applies to the preceding atom)
• ? zero or one
• * zero or more
• + one or more

Groups
• (ab)+ matches “ab”, “abab”, …
• Capture for extract/substitute via $1 or \1

Operators
• foo|bar = foo or bar
• ^ start anchor
• $ end anchor

Ignore non‑portable shortcuts: \w, ., {n}, *?, lookarounds.

#regex101

10 Pop Culture Figures Who Actually Existed
From Darth Vader to Mary Poppins, pop culture icons can excite, enrage, or inspire us. And though most characters tend to be wholly fictional in nature, some famous ones are actually based on real-life people. Here’s our list of 10 pop culture figures who existed IRL. Related: Top 10 Underrated Minor Characters from Pop Culture […]

The post [10 Pop Culture Figures Who Actually Existed](https://listverse.com/2025/04/21/10-pop-culture-figures-who … ⌘ Read more

Why is there a “small house” in IBM’s Code Page 437?
There’s a small house ( ⌂ ) in the middle of IBM’s infamous character set Code Page 437. “Small house”—that’s the official IBM name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for “Delete” (DEL) should logically exist. It’s cute, but a little strange. I wonder, how did it get there? Why did IBM represent DEL as a house, of all things? ↫ Heikki Lotvonen Don’t waste any time here, and go read the article. It’ … ⌘ Read more

10 Great Comic Book Castings Wasted on Bad Scripts
Casting comic book characters onto the big (or small) screen is tricky. Unlike regular novels, these superpowered stories come with vivid illustrations of every plot beat. As such, fans have clear pictures of how the characters should look and act. Maybe that’s why they scrutinize these adaptations so closely. It’s painfully apparent when the wrong […]

The post [10 Great Comic Book Castings Wasted on Bad Scripts](https://listverse … ⌘ Read more