In-reply-to » hey! i asked this a while ago but i have to ask again -- is anyone willing to offer space on their yarn pod to my friend? i would love to invite her to my own but she's unable to access my site for personal reasons. she's really interested in seeing what yarn is about so if anyone is willing and able, let me know!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ok 👌

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i made a new tumblr account to interact with fandom last week. while using the site today i got logged out and when i logged back in i was told my account was terminated. mullenweg will pay for this

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In-reply-to » hey! i asked this a while ago but i have to ask again -- is anyone willing to offer space on their yarn pod to my friend? i would love to invite her to my own but she's unable to access my site for personal reasons. she's really interested in seeing what yarn is about so if anyone is willing and able, let me know!

@prologic@twtxt.net i’ll email you!

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In-reply-to » This aggressive auto-logout on my bank’s website …

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’d love to have a Python script pushing my local CSV, too. But that’s never gonna fly, not in a thousand years. I can’t imagine that ever becoming reasonably stable without having to fix everything after the reverse-engineered API changes again.

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In-reply-to » QEMU on Wayland unusable, because it can’t grab the mouse … I’ll add it to my TODO list and investigate/report it eventually.

… but you can’t set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland globally, because that breaks Wine again …

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In-reply-to » QEMU on Wayland unusable, because it can’t grab the mouse … I’ll add it to my TODO list and investigate/report it eventually.

… okay, the SDL backend works if you also set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland.

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In-reply-to » @movq Yeah, luckily, there is the suckless project. I couldn't live without dmenu!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org dmenu is a great example.

There have been several attempts at porting dmenu from X11 to Wayland. Well, not exactly “porting” it, more like rewriting it from scratch. Turns out: It’s not that easy.

dmenu is super fast and reliable. None of the Wayland rewrites are (at least none of the popular ones that I know of). They are either bloated and/or slow.

It takes a lot of discipline and restraint to write simple software and not blow up the codebase. This is much harder than people think. It’s a form of art, really.

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In-reply-to » This aggressive auto-logout on my bank’s website …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I do my timetracking in a little Python script, locally. Every now and then, I push the data to our actual service. Problem solved – but it’s a completely unpopular approach, they all want to use the web site. I don’t get it. Then, of course, when it’s down, shit hits the fan. (Luckily, our timetracking software is neither developed nor run by us anymore. It’s a silly cloud service, but the upside is that I’m not responsible anymore. 🤷)

Some of our oldschool devs tried to roll out local timetracking once, about 15 years ago. I don’t remember anymore why they failed …

This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

Oh to be anonymous on the internet. That must be nice. 😅

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In-reply-to » QEMU on Wayland unusable, because it can’t grab the mouse … I’ll add it to my TODO list and investigate/report it eventually.

… but the SDL backend is broken as well, albeit differently …

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In-reply-to » This aggressive auto-logout on my bank’s website …

@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.

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In-reply-to » The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de This is a really good example of “simplicity” but achieves the intent and goals 👌

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I don’t use a screen reader fortunately (actually they’re pretty garbage). So all good 👍 (I juse use full-screen zoom).

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In-reply-to » The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.

@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.

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In-reply-to » The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.

For example, I reckon software should treat stdout and stderr with care and never output logs or other such garbage to stdout that cannot possibly be useful in a UNIX pipeline 😅

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In-reply-to » The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah that’s why I’m striking this conversation with you 😅 Not only do I respect your opinion quite highly 🤣 But like you say (and I’ve read their philipshpy) it can be a bit “elitism” for sure. I’m genuinely interested in what we think of as software that “doesn’t suck”. Tb be honest I haven’t really put thought to paper myself, but I reckon if I did, I’d have some opinions/ideas…

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In-reply-to » The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, I wouldn’t say that. Go code could fall into that category as well.

Maybe this topic could use a blog post / article, that explains what it’s about. I’m finding it hard to really define what “suckless-like software” is. 🤔 (Their own philosophy focuses too much on elitism, if you ask me.)

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In-reply-to » The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I’m referring to software that’s similar to that of suckless.org: Small, minimal codebases, small tools, but still useful. dmenu is probably the best example and also farbfeld.

Here’s the author of Anubis talking about some of their experiences:

https://xeiaso.net/blog/why-i-use-suckless-tools-2020-06-05/

(You can skip the long config and keybinds part.)

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In-reply-to » A good blog post that makes some good points: Can I ethically use LLMs?

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Yeah for sure! The thing that annoys me about a lot of this, is the sheer fact you can’t really self-host let alone self-train these things I’ve been playing around with AI at home over the past few months and building my own neural networks from scratch (in Go) with genetic algorithms on a few tasks and training sets, but man it’s hard™ 🤣 I feel like we’re doing something wrong here…

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In-reply-to » A good blog post that makes some good points: Can I ethically use LLMs?

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This was an interesting read for sure! 👍 I don’t think it had anything I hadn’t already considered in terms of the ethical/moral points of view. I’m not sure where I stand myself either to be honest. I’ve forced myself to get familiar with the ecosystem and tooling, because in my line of work as a tech lead (staff engineer in sre) you don’t want to be that one guy that ya know 😉 Ethically/Morally though, I’m definitely with the sentiment of this post 😅 Much like the whole Crypto hype yaers back (if y’all remember?!) this is also one of the most energy hungry pieces of “tech” (if you can call it that?) in a while. Then there’s these other issues “stealing people’s work”, “reliance is causing humans to become cognitively weak and neural connections to shrink”, to name a few…

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In-reply-to » hey! i asked this a while ago but i have to ask again -- is anyone willing to offer space on their yarn pod to my friend? i would love to invite her to my own but she's unable to access my site for personal reasons. she's really interested in seeing what yarn is about so if anyone is willing and able, let me know!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Yea I can! I

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hey! i asked this a while ago but i have to ask again – is anyone willing to offer space on their yarn pod to my friend? i would love to invite her to my own but she’s unable to access my site for personal reasons. she’s really interested in seeing what yarn is about so if anyone is willing and able, let me know!

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In-reply-to » What kind of half-assed nonsense is this? They only broadcast half of the current european soccer cup … (Let me guess, I’m supposed to subscribe to some streaming service if I want to watch every game, right?)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (It’s either that, or the fact that it’s women’s football and “nobody wants to see that anyway”.)

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In-reply-to » I bought the “remastered” versions of Grim Fandango and Forsaken on GOG, because they’re super cheap at the moment. Both have native Linux versions.

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.

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I bought the “remastered” versions of Grim Fandango and Forsaken on GOG, because they’re super cheap at the moment. Both have native Linux versions.

And both these Linux version crap their pants. 🫤 The bundled SDL2 of Forsaken says it “can’t find a matching GLX visual” and I couldn’t figure out how to fix that. I didn’t spend a lot of time on Grim Fandango.

Both work great in Wine. 🤦

(I do have the original version of Grim Fandango from the 1990ies, but that one does not work so well in Wine. I figured, if it’s so cheap, why not. And I now get to play the english version. 😃 The german dub is pretty damn good, actually, but I always prefer the original these days.)

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