Denial WM: New Wayland Compositor With Flutter Directly Embedded
The newest Wayland compositor to talk about and discuss is Denial, a Wayland compositor focused on optimal Arch Linux integration and that embeds the Flutter engine directly into the codebase. Denial makes use of the Rust programming language and leverages Smithay to help in the compositor responsibilities… ⌘ Read more

Wild Linker 0.10 Released With GDB Index Support, Mitigation For Btrfs Performance
Wild 0.10 released overnight as this very fast linker for Linux that is written in the Rust programming language and focused on iterative development… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Bringing Xbox 360 Games to PC
Microsoft reportedly plans to let developers bring Xbox 360 games to PC and next-generation Xbox devices, with a gradual rollout expected between 2027 and 2028. A separate disc-to-digital program would also give players transferable digital licenses tied to their physical Xbox discs, preserving the ability to resell or trade them. The Verge reports: With 360 games, developers can opt into … ⌘ Read more

zlib-rs 0.6.7 Released With LoongArch LSX Optimizations, Use-After-Free Fix
zlib-rs 0.6.7 is out today as the newest version of this “safer zlib” implementation making use of the Rust programming language and aiming to deliver performance on-par with zlib-ng… ⌘ Read more

Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project
Google has dismantled the original AlphaFold team, according to Financial Times (paywalled), reassigning many researchers to Gemini and Isomorphic Labs. Several other key members, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, left for Anthropic. Engadget reports: AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from t … ⌘ Read more

DoorDash Is Building Its Own Drone Delivery Business
DoorDash has launched DoorDash Air, an in-house drone-delivery program that has just received FAA certification for commercial operations. “This does not mean DoorDash’s custom-built drones will be delivering burritos tomorrow, or even next month,” notes TechCrunch. “The company didn’t provide a detailed timeline for when its aircraft would be used in operations.” From the re … ⌘ Read more

Apple Retires iPhone Upgrade Program For Klarna-Backed Leases
Apple has replaced its iPhone Upgrade Program with Apple Upgrade, a Klarna-backed U.S. leasing service covering most iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches. MacRumors reports: Apple Upgrade has lower base prices than the iPhone Upgrade Program, with iPhones available starting at $17.99 per month and the Apple Watch available starting at $11.99 per m … ⌘ Read more

Starling: A New Linux Desktop Written In Swift, Own Wayland Compositor & Written With AI
There’s yet another new open-source desktop option for Linux users in the era of new open-source projects largely written via AI/LLMs. Starling is this new project largely written via Claude and using the Swift programming language for the desktop while having its own Wayland compositor implemented in C. It also includes a built-in X11 server for handling X11 clients… ⌘ Read more

Bwahahaha, these security folks have a great sense of humor! :-D Got a phishing test e-mail disguised as an overdue anti-phishing training e-mail:

We receive these test phishing e-mails every now and then at work. When you follow the links and log in at the fake login, you probably get assigned another (real) training.

When I got this e-mail, I immediately thought of such a test. Since I actually do have some stupid training deadlines coming up soon, I wasn’t 100% sure, but still doubted that this was one of them. To make the timing even better, in the team meeting last week, our bosses reminded us to complete outstanding trainings before the deadlines. Ideally well in advance. Notifications about deadlines coming closer are sometimes not only sent to the individuals but also to the bosses and their bosses. And then things can get out of hands when somebody doesn’t read the e-mails properly and mistakes them for deadline exceeded reports.

Anyway, the URL also looked kinda legit. It really doesn’t help a single bit that domain names change all the fucking time. So, still with the test program in mind, I thought, I just give it a quick shot out of curiosity. Since I just had logged in before, the empty SSO username field was totally obvious then. Looking at the e-mail headers confirmed that this was indeed one of security’s field checks. :-)

Arizona State Launches Influencer Degree Where Students Must Gain Real Followers
Arizona State University has launched a 120-credit bachelor’s degree in content creation that teaches video, podcasting, branding, analytics, media law, and social strategy. For their capstone, students are “expected to build a real social media account and demonstrate audience growth during the program,” reports De … ⌘ Read more

KDE Developer Fixing Long-Standing Bug Over Very Long Small-File Copy Times
Since 2014 there has been a KDE bug report titled Ridiculously slow file copy (multiple small files). With the Dolphin file manager or other KIO-based KDE programs, copying many small files can be much slower than using the cp command directly or other copying programs like rsync, Finally that issue is in the process of being resolved for addressing very slow copy times when dealing with many small files on the KDE Plasma desktop… ⌘ Read more

KDE Developer Fixing Long-Standing Bug Over Very Long Small-File Copy Times
Since 2014 there has been a KDE bug report titled Ridiculously slow file copy (multiple small files). With the Dolphin file manager or other KIO-based KDE programs, copying many small files can be much slower than using the cp command directly or other copying programs like rsync, Finally that issue is in the process of being resolved for addressing very slow copy times when dealing with many small files on the KDE Plasma desktop… ⌘ Read more

I just taught the scc SLOC tool I use how to detect and recognize the Mu programming language. So it’s actually a bit worse than your estimate. It’s more like ~60/30 at the moment:

>>> mu = 1445
>>> asm = 2365
>>> T = mu + asm
>>> mu / T * 100
37.9265091863517
>>> asm / T * 100
62.07349081364829

Dunno if anyone will find this interesting… But some ~6 months or so ago I experimented briefly with creating a whole bootloader + kernel + userland – Basically an entire OS in the Mu programming language (which as you know I also designed and created) – 6 months later I’ve worked on it some more after spending the last week working on improvements to Mu itself, which is now able to compile itself with its own Mu implemented compiler and now have an os/arch backend called muos/amd64 that boots into a running shell, with a tiny little vfs, UNIX-like semantics, syscalls, read/write, etc. It works pretty nicely, and aside from a small Assembly “nucleus”, most of the Kernel and Userspace is written in Mu.

https://git.mills.io/prologic/muos

I am sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooo tired of “fast-moving” software. ruff changed a ton of stuff and now all my code bases “need fixing”. Blah.

And SemVer is worth nothing if your 4 year old program with over 16’000 commits is still at “version 0.x”. Blah!

Everything is horrible.

OpenAI’s Rogue Agent Went Unnoticed For a Week
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn’t notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according to people familiar with the investigation. The agent – a program capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no huma … ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Looks To Begin Phasing Out In-Kernel Crypto Userspace API
Going along with the upstream Linux 7.2 kernel deprecation of AF_ALG and Linux 7.3 to further restrict this interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API, Fedora 45 is looking to follow and help support this transition… ⌘ Read more

Dang it, @david@daiwei.me, you blew my cover!

I was raised without a TV, so I don’t miss it one bit. My parents just didn’t by a new one after their super old black and white device died. Looking after a baby was maybe spare time activity enough for them. :-P

When there was some super cool program I wanted to watch, like a James Bond movie, I visited my grandma. Sure, it sometimes was a pity that I could not join yesterday’s TV series discussions with my classmates, but oh well. I survived that. Building stuff with Lego or playing outside was all I really wanted.

Apart from a few really good programs, there’s sooooo much trash, non-stop ads and the like. Even as a kid, I was very disgusted by all that. But I have to admit that visting somebody with a TV and watching a good show was usually a highlight. These days, I can easily waste all my time and more on YouTube. :-/

I really think I should go back to Java.

Writing programs in Python is so exhausting. I want a compiler and I want static typing. No, linters and type checkers and IDEs are not good enough. Compilers catch way more errors in advance.

Rust is also exhausting. They’re constantly adding language features and, at the same time, the runtime library remains tiny and you need 3rd party libraries for everything. Many of those are still at version 0.x (SemVer!) and you can’t rely on anything. Often times, you need the latest Rust nightly compiler.

Go is … I don’t like it. And huge binaries.

I like C as a language, but it’s too fragile. I want to have a proper HashMap every now and then.

None of the above have good GUI libraries, at least not on Linux.

And then there’s Java. This is my fractal renderer that I wrote over 17 years ago:

https://movq.de/v/fcd3c4e557/vid-1784121825.mp4

It’s fast. It has a GUI with custom widgets and those weren’t even hard to make. It still works without changing a single line of code. The source code files have timestamps from 2009 and I just noticed that the JAR file I’m using in the video was compiled in 2010.

Java as a language is relatively easy to learn and to master. There are few surprises. The source code organization with packages is good. Java API docs are clear and well written.

The JVM ramp-up times have improved considerably:

https://movq.de/v/e7314e521e/vid-1784121998.mp4

This isn’t like the Dark Ages anymore. Might even be usable for some CLI tools.

The only thing where Java really sucks is anything close-ish to the kernel. Try issuing an ioctl() … I couldn’t have made my TUI framework in Java, but then again, I wouldn’t have needed to because Swing already exists and it just works.

Windows NT 4 didn’t have a Device Manager. You know, this thing right here that got introduced with Windows 95:

And that’s super awkward in NT4.

You know what doesn’t have a Device Manager, either? Linux. Why? 🤔 Isn’t this one of the most useful system tools? It gives you an overview of the devices in your system and tells you which driver is used for them. Linux could really use such a tool, I think? 🤔

(There are programs like “hardinfo” and I remember ancient KDE providing such a tool, but they’re all an afterthought. Hardly integrated into the overall system.)

I just read @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz’s blog post over here:

https://bubblegum.girlonthemoon.xyz/articles/learning-to-code-like-it-s-the-90s

Jesus, it must be so overwhelming for young people to get started with programming.

When I started programming, there was the built-in ROM BASIC of that PC and probably a bit of BASIC on a floppy, and that was it. Nowadays? Millions of libraries and frameworks and languages and what not – and, much worse, there’s the expectation that you need to make something fancy. When I started, printing something and understanding IF was good enough.

Installing software was (is?) such an incomprehensible mess on Windows … Why did you allow any program to install files anywhere in the system? Why was this considered normal and okay? With no chance of ever cleanly removing that stuff again?

And now we’re back to the trend of curl | bash these days … same thing.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org This apparently depends on the program now … Some Qt6 programs still allow that, others don’t. I can’t remember if GTK ever had that feature. 🤔 But yeah, this whole “move stuff around as you please”-mentality is mostly gone.

I know I keep referring to StarOffice 3.1 a lot, but it’s just such a good example for all these things. All the toolbars and panels could be rearranged:

(This is running in Wine, btw.)

LibreOffice is the descendant of StarOffice and it doesn’t support anything like that anymore.

Maybe it was deemed too confusing for users? “Oh no, I mis-clicked something and now that bar is gone! How do I get it back? I don’t even know what it’s called!” 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-07-03/0/POSTING-en.html Oh yeah, the toolbar handles. You could actually move the toolbars around and sometimes even customize them. I have no evidence, but to me it feels like a lot of programs don’t allow that anymore nowadays.

Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds With Latest Incompatibility
While the Rust Coreutils offers better memory safety than GNU Coreutils due to being written in the Rust programming language, subtle incompatibilities continue to be spotted in the Rust Coreutils implementations of the different commands. The latest coming to light this week was the Rust Coreutils cp command breaking Ubuntu image builds due to differences in argument handling… ⌘ Read more

GraalVM CE 25.1.3 Gets Native Image “Hello World” Program Down To Just 6.5MB
GraalVM, the advanced JDK focused on ahead-of-time (AOT) Native Image compilation and since last year began shifting focus to more non-Java languages like Python and JavaScript, is out with its newest community feature release. GraalVM Community Edition 25.1.3 is now available with some interesting changes in tow… ⌘ Read more

Canonical First Gold Sponsor Of Trifecta Tech For Building More Infrastructure In Rust
Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical continues making more inroads in the Rust infrastructure space. Canonical announced today they have become the first gold sponsor of the Trifecta Tech Foundation that works on projects like sudo-rs for building more open infrastructure in the Rust programming language… ⌘ Read more

Intel Kills Off AMX-TF32 Support Before It Even Shipped In Diamond Rapids
Intel has dropped AMX-TF32 before its debut in Xeon Diamond Rapids. The latest Intel programming reference manual has dropped AMX-TF32 and Intel engineers are already moving ahead to strip out the AMX-TF32 support that existed in the GNU Compiler Collection… ⌘ Read more

Next Bcachefs Release Aims To Include Rust Code In The Kernel Module
The Bcachefs file-system already makes use of the Rust programming language in the user-space tools for this CoW file-system and they have been planning to make use of Rust within the kernel module too. Beginning in the next Bcachefs release, v1.38.7, they are looking at beginning to include Rust code now in their kernel driver… ⌘ Read more

California Sheriff Says Their Drone Disarmed a Suspect, Shares Video on Instagram
The Los Angeles Police Department says about 1,500 police agencies across America have drone programs, reports SFGate, and 58 of those drone-using police agencies are in California.

The Sacramento County sheriff’s office recently posted drone footage on Instagram set to theme from “Mission: Impossible,” claiming “ … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Adds Another Year To Windows 10 Extended Update Program
Microsoft has quietly extended free Windows 10 security updates for consumers by another year, pushing the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program’s end date from October 12, 2026, to October 12, 2027. “The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft’s blog post on the program has a new editor’s note confirming the change,” repor … ⌘ Read more

Intel ISPC 1.31 Brings New Targets For Nova Lake, Experimental PowerPC 64-bit
Intel engineers on Thursday released the newest version of the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, ISPC. The ISPC 1.31 supports their variant of the C programming language with extensions for Single Program, Multiple Data programming for leveraging their range of CPU and GPU hardware… ⌘ Read more

Meta Pauses Employee-Tracking Program Following Internal Data Leak
Meta has paused its Model Compatibility Initiative that tracked employee mouse movements, clicks, keystrokes, and screen content to train AI agents, after some of its collected data became accessible to more employees than intended. Meta says it has no evidence the information was improperly accessed and will not restart the program until it is … ⌘ Read more

“Disgusting” Linux sched_ext Source Code Restructured Following Complaint By Linus Torvalds
Last week the main set of sched_ext changes were merged for Linux 7.2 that included continued work on sub-scheduler support. While Linus Torvalds didn’t object to any of the features being worked on for this extensible scheduler framework that relies on user-space BPF programs, he was frustrated by the layout of the new C source files and remarked, “please don’t do this disgusting thing…proper hierarchical filesyste … ⌘ Read more

BASIC09 Programming Language Front-End Developed For LLVM
The 46-year-old BASIC09 programming language has new compiler support with a front-end having been developed for the LLVM compiler stack. BASIC09 was developed in 1980 for the Motorola 6809 CPU running with the OS-9 operating system. With this LLVM compiler front-end, you can write BASIC09 code for modern software and hardware… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 sched_ext Continues Working Toward Sub-Scheduler Support
Merged last week for the Linux 7.2 kernel were all of the sched_ext changes for this extensible scheduler support that allows loading BPF programs from user-space for handling scheduling tasks. Linux 7.2 continues building out sched_ext’s sub-scheduler support… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, that would also be fine with me. I certainly do like the “arbitrary” in your comment.

While writing the article, I also thought about something like that:

date := time.Date(2026, 6, 19,
    17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)

Or possibly:

date := time.Date(
    2026, 6, 19,
    17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC,
)

But it’s four lines for a damn timestamp. I also contemplated whether a comment acting as a separator is all that’s needed:

date := time.Date(2026, 6, 19, /**/ 17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)

I might like that the most. Not entirely sure yet. It kinda feels like a hack, but still a little elegant. Add your comment on top and we’re golden. Maybe?

I deliberately excluded them as this only distracted from the points I wanted to make. And I also realized that this example was just not ideal at all. Perhaps I should add them nevertheless?

If I ever invented a programming language, a much more human readable timestamp representation of some sort, RFC 3339 or very close to that would be part of that language. Something along the lines of /pattern/ for regexes in certain languages.

I noticed that there are quite a few UI glitches in vim-classic – and quickly found the cause: It comes with outdated Unicode tables.

I have to admit that I wasn’t aware that there’s a new Unicode release every year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Versions

Look at this huge number of changes. Every program has to keep track of that, often through libraries but sometimes not (like in Vim’s case).

I use Unicode extensively, but this shit is extremely expensive …

My TUI framework is having the same problem. At the moment, this is all offloaded to wcwidth, but if that library was to become unmaintained, I’d have to track Unicode myself.

Gah!

The DOS days were simpler. CP437, end of story. (Yes, I know that’s a lie.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s right, way harder than centrally managed. They even didn’t reach concensus over the main folder: “Alle Programme, “Alle Programme (x86)”, “All Programs”, “All Programmes”, etc. Anyway.

For class 11 (or maybe already in 10, I don’t remember exactly) we could choose either between traditional maths class with a graphical calculator or “Mathe mit CAS”. There were two teachers in my entire school who were able to teach the latter. It was also fairly new at the time I believe. Certainly unheard of for a „allgemeinbildendes Gymnasium“, maybe the technical ones were already offering it for some time, not sure. It was clear to me that I would take the maths with CAS class.

Each kid had to buy their own Cassiopeia A-Something. I don’t know how much that thing was (definitely more expensive than a graphical calculator) and whether the school subsidized that in any form. But it was slow and underpowered as hell. We rarely used it in class nor for homework (most if not all had already a desktop at home). Typically, when we worked with the CAS, we sat down on the desktop computers. Our class took place in one of the two computer rooms. The desktops were placed on the three sides (left, right, back, facing the walls or windows) and the regular school desks were in the middle. Since there were more pupils than desktops, we always shared. Nowadays, we call it pair programming. ;-)

For the exams we had the “mandatory part” (Pflichtteil) without any tools. Once we finished that and handed the papers to our teacher, we were then allowed to boot up our Cassiopeias and work with them for the second part. Before the exam started, everyone had to show the teacher that they reset their small computer to factory settings. This second part was called „Wahlteil“. But you had to do it in order to pass. So, I never understood the choice of this term. Maybe it’s because the first part is the exact same for everyone (graphical calculator and CAS class), but the second part was definitely different for the two classes. Each suited to their tools.

After one or two exams, it became clear that the Cassiopeia was far from ideal. So, we took the second part at the desktop computers from then on. Our teacher unplugged the network cables himself to avoid cheating. Each computer had an “HDD Sheriff” running that reset the disk at startup. There was also an issue that the personal user accounts were affected by that. Sometimes all your data were lost. If you were lucky, they were still there. So, we saved our Maple project to local disk (if the computer didn’t crash in between, that was no problem) and at least eventually before leaving the classroom, we then also saved it on the server. For that, the teacher quickly plugged in the cable, we saved, and then the cable was unplugged again immediately. Oh, and everybody used their USB sticks, too.

All in all, this Cassiopeia A-* was quite a useless purchase. :-D I’m not sure if I still have it. At least I thought several times about giving it to the flea market. Don’t know if I did or not.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, you mean the categorization. Yeah, that would never work in Windows, at least not without having a centralized package manager (so there’s one authoritative source of which program belongs into which category).

Oh wow, those Cassiopeias look pretty cool. Did you have one of those or one for each kid?

Qt Creator 20 IDE Released With AI Agent Support
The Qt Creator integrated development environment focused on Qt/C++ programming is out today with Qt Creator 20 and this new version is headlined by adding AI agent support… ⌘ Read more

Speaking of UIs, this is how Thunderbird looks now:

https://movq.de/v/a41105eebb/

So we continue to let every program make up its own UI style (and then we complain that “the Linux desktop” looks “messy” and “inconsistent”). I guess this uses GTK, but it doesn’t look like any other GTK program. Buttons, tabs, drop-downs, whatever, it’s all different. It even has its own subwindow system (i.e., popups that you can’t move).

I didn’t say this in the blog post, but I’m convinced that programmers these days absolutely positively hate everything that looks even remotely like Windows 95 or Motif – with a passion. I see that in my coworkers as well, they really can’t stand it. It’s an emotional thing.

Linux 7.2 Adds Ability To Limit Programs To Only Open Regular Files, Avoid Being Tricked Or Doing Silly Things
Merged as part of the many VFS changes for Linux 7.2 is the new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag for the openat2 system call. This can be used to limit programs to only open regular file-systems and avoid accidentally or intentionally opening up device files or other non-conventional data files on the file-system… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Interesting approach. 🤔

The master branch should never be in a broken state (apart from bugs I don’t know about). Any intermediate state during the development of a larger feature will happen in a different branch.

I mean, yeah, but … I don’t know, I like having “traditional releases” as a second safety net when I write programs. I like to let things mature for a while and then I cut a new release. So it’s, like, “we have a bunch of new features and fixes here, and to the best of my knowledge this works fine now”. But maybe I’m just paranoid. 🤔

‘Difficult questions’ need answering: Adoptees hope for closure with probe into South Korean program
A former magistrate will the lead the country’s first-ever probe into alleged failures in the Australian-South Korean adoption program. ⌘ Read more

Manhattan rolls out Canadian gold strategy under new leadership
Following a board overhaul, Manhattan Gold Corp has unveiled a new exploration strategy, launching a 4000m RC drill program at its Hook Lake gold project in Nunavut, Canada. ⌘ Read more

Regulator tipped to take reins of open banking amid industry frustration
A Government regulator is expected to take control of a key part of the open banking system, rather than leave it to industry, but existing players say the lack of confirmation has left them in limbo.

The uncertainty centres on which of two entities will be the “appointed person” under the Customer and Data Product Act (CDP), to drive vital open-banking application programming int … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Foundation Announces First Participants Of Fellowship Program
Back in March the GNOME Foundation announced a fellowship program. The GNOME fellowship program will help with the long-term sustainability of the GNOME desktop and looked to fund independent/community contributors over a twelve month period. Today the first recipients of the fellowship program have been announced… ⌘ Read more

Augustus wraps up drilling at emerging WA gold discovery
Augustus Minerals has wrapped up a 1650m RC drill program at its Music Well gold project in WA. Assays are pending, with near-term sample re-split results also due from its maiden campaign. ⌘ Read more

ReactOS “Open-Source Windows” Reaches The Milestone Of Being Able To Run Half-Life
ReactOS, the open-source operating system working for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows computer programs and drivers, has reached the milestone of being able to enjoy the classic game Half-Life running on this open-source platform… ⌘ Read more