(Of course, if we’re talking about a project you’re doing for a customer and the customer keeps asking for new stuff, then you’re never done, and you have to think ahead and expect changes. Is that what they mean? 🤔)

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.

Okay, here’s a thing I like about Rust: Returning things as Option and error handling. (Or the more complex Result, but it’s easier to explain with Option.)

fn mydiv(num: f64, denom: f64) -> Option<f64> {
    // (Let’s ignore precision issues for a second.)
    if denom == 0.0 {
        return None;
    } else {
        return Some(num / denom);
    }
}

fn main() {
    // Explicit, verbose version:
    let num: f64 = 123.0;
    let denom: f64 = 456.0;
    let wrapped_res = mydiv(num, denom);
    if wrapped_res.is_some() {
        println!("Unwrapped result: {}", wrapped_res.unwrap());
    }

    // Shorter version using "if let":
    if let Some(res) = mydiv(123.0, 456.0) {
        println!("Here’s a result: {}", res);
    }

    if let Some(res) = mydiv(123.0, 0.0) {
        println!("Huh, we divided by zero? This never happens. {}", res);
    }
}

You can’t divide by zero, so the function returns an “error” in that case. (Option isn’t really used for errors, IIUC, but the basic idea is the same for Result.)

Option is an enum. It can have the value Some or None. In the case of Some, you can attach additional data to the enum. In this case, we are attaching a floating point value.

The caller then has to decide: Is the value None or Some? Did the function succeed or not? If it is Some, the caller can do .unwrap() on this enum to get the inner value (the floating point value). If you do .unwrap() on a None value, the program will panic and die.

The if let version using destructuring is much shorter and, once you got used to it, actually quite nice.

Now the trick is that you must somehow handle these two cases. You must either call something like .unwrap() or do destructuring or something, otherwise you can’t access the attached value at all. As I understand it, it is impossible to just completely ignore error cases. And the compiler enforces it.

(In case of Result, the compiler would warn you if you ignore the return value entirely. So something like doing write() and then ignoring the return value would be caught as well.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ewww 😈

We really are bouncing back and forth between flat UIs and beveled UIs. I mean, this is what old X11 programs looked like:

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2025%2D06%2D21%2D%2Dkatriawm%2Dold%2Dxorg%2Dapps.png

Good luck figuring out which of these UI elements are click-able – unless you examine every pixel on the screen.

@prologic@twtxt.net have fun!

@prologic@twtxt.net Enjoy your road trip! Have fun!! 🤘

Gone on a road trip. Be back in a week 👋

Now I could. A few minutes ago I posted one, and it went to the void. I can’t delete, though. I get a lovely 403.

Can I create a post?

@bender@twtxt.net Ahh I see hmmm I don’t know this either 🤣

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I might give it a shot. 😃

Skimming through the manual: I had no idea that keeping the “up” cursor pressed actually slows you down at some point. 🤦

@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

@thecanine@twtxt.net With the teeth this looks like a vampire dog. :-D And I don’t get the reference either.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Oh, that’s great! I haven’t heard about any of them before either. There’s also a caveat though, that I ran right into the very first time I tried this in zsh:

$ ls > /dev/null
$ echo $_
--color=tty

Yeah, exactly what you think:

$ which ls
ls: aliased to ls --color=tty

Alt+. is going to be my favorite one! In the above, it would also give me /dev/null, which might be probably more what I would expect.

@prologic@twtxt.net no, good man. Follow the link, follow eet! :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de omg yeah! this one looks cute too (i’m weak to anything tux related!) but the commercial release has so much unpolished charm i love it! btw it’s on [internet archive(https://archive.org/details/TuxRacerCD) if you wanna download & play it :]

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I like the animations in your version much better than the ones from ExtremeTuxRacer. 😊 And there’s no little dance at the end of a race!

https://movq.de/v/7531158962/etr.mp4

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com You mean Control R?

katseye does telenovela: the MV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjnB56tSCQI

@bender@twtxt.net I SANG ALONG IN MY HEAD LMAOOO

I also just noticed that the performance issue doesn’t affect all games. 🤔 Sigh, I’ll just downgrade for the time being. Not in the mood to fiddle with this.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I guess that qualifies as an “Arch moment”, albeit the first one I encountered. I’m running this since 2008 and it’s usually very smooth sailing. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, YMMV. Some games work(ed) great in Wine, others not at all. I just use it because it’s easier than firing up my WinXP box. (I don’t use Wine for regular applications, just games.)

@bender@twtxt.net Now I AM curious! What rabbit-hole? what am I missing here? 😆

Just discovered how easy it is to recall my last arg in shell and my brain went 🤯 How come I’ve never learned about this before!? I wonder how many other QOL shortcuts I’m missing on 🥲

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz 🎵 Grafana ana bo bana fifo bo bana gra fana!🎶 Don’t mind me, I am nuts.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I recommend you to remain curious without crossing the threshold. Unless, of course, you truly want to follow a never-ending rabbit hole. 😂

GRAFANA IS DRIVING ME NUTSSSSSSS

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com i’ve been curious about searxng!!!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org as long as i get to see silly little tux sliding around in a silly game older than me it’s ok even if i committed windows/wine crimes to see it <33

I probably should implement some editing feature in tt. Sure, I can easily edit my feed in vim to fix typos. But then I still have to manually remove the old message from the cache so that the new message is inserted on next reload and I don’t end up with “duplicates” in the message tree.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Must be a decode ago that I last used Wine. I wanted to play GTA2, but that didn’t go as planned.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de And there the air raid siren goes off.

is my desktop cute yes or yes

Image

Image

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh no, how unpenguinly! But at least it runs, even races. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That sounds great! (Well, they actually must have recorded the audio with a potato or so.) You talked about pledge(…) and unveil(…) before, right? I somewhere ran across them once before. Never tried them out, but these syscalls seem to be really useful. They also have the potential to make one really rethink about software architecture. I should probably give this a try and see how I can improve my own programs.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de arch moment

Wet t-shirt contest time! After our forest stroll I just wrung out the damn thing. Fuck me!

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

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

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

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

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

@movq@www.uninformativ.de i’m grateful that this works at least!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz lol, oof, well, better than nothing. 🥴 It appears to run quite well. 🤔

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz UPDATE: getting it to run natively through a VM and other means all failed! so i did the cursed thing and tried the windows installer in wine…..

GUESS WHAT WORKED

@thecanine@twtxt.net i do not get the reference but this is very cute!

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com fuck yeah!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de missing libraries :( i expected it though

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yup 👍 Super interesting sruff 👌

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahhh, right, my bad, I could have easily found that. 🤦

There’s also a project page which lists some limitations of this study: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/overview/

It certainly sounds plausible. “Use it or lose it.”

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think it’s here on MIT’s website: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task 🤔

Felt the need to make this stupid reference - nobody will get, most likely. Feel free to guess (the file name and todays date, are both a hint), any other notes and opinions appreciated too, idk if I ever drew a standing one, from the front, before.

Image

Achievement Unlocked: I have finally gotten to sit my ass down and watch Back to the future from start to the end.

@prologic@twtxt.net But is there a source for it? Am I too stupid to use that site? 🤪

i.e: the “~30-40% drop in cognitive capabilities” for chronic users of Chatp GPT 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I was more interested in the MIT research tbh 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net … or just bullshit.

I’m Alex, COO at ColdIQ. Built a $4.5M ARR business in under 2 years.

Some “C-level” guy telling people what to do, yeah, I have my doubts.

@prologic@twtxt.net This doesn’t cite any sources, might as well be satire. 🤔

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Awww. :( Can you tell why? Missing libraries or does it just segfault?

update on tux racer: ofc it doesn’t run on modern linux LMFAOOOOOOO i’m installing red hat in a VM right now

@doesnm.p.psf.lt@doesnm.p.psf.lt so sorry for your suffering, and loss. :-P

To really annoy my neighbors and everyone in a 5 mile radius, I might take my Model M and type a blogpost on the balcony. 😈

Ingredientes nas receitas americanas be like

3tbsp kosher salt
1oz unsalted butter

Quando alguém lhes explicar vai-se sentir as ondas de choque no planeta durante meses

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Cool, that’s a nice summary!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz uh, i use yandex mail which uses HTML by default

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1935344122103308748.html Interesting article on how ChatGPT is rotting your brain 🤣

This is so good…

https://innig.net/teaching/liberal-arts-manifesto

by Paul Cantrell (@inthehands@inthehands)

#Education #Curiosity #Liberation

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz join the SearxNG cult! the grass is way greener over here 😁

@movq@www.uninformativ.de neither do I 😆 and I’m going full Albert Camus mode. Embracing the Absurdism of life just to cope, it’s the only choice I have left.

i ordered some fun colorful new minidiscs so i can finally get back to recording my mixes :D looking forward to it

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com i’m so sick of AI summaries they piss me tf off

“The only way to learn is to try. The best way to learn is to have fun.” —@ucodery@fosstodon.org

Unless your Terms of use update email looks and reads the same as the one I got yesterday from mastodon.social, I don’t wanna know about it, nor do I agree to it.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I’d love to have a positive, optimistic reply to that, but … uhm … I don’t. 🤣

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ooh, I’ve got to bookmark that page. 😃

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I wish I had the luxury of not reading that junk. 😅 But instead, I have a Mutt hotkey that pipes an HTML mail through elinks … Bah.

FFS! Can’t I just get results, accurate no BS results? No erroneous/misleading AI-Slop of a summary I’ve never asked for ? I get it, there is plenty of people who LOooove (if not worship) that shit, Good for them! But at least make it opt-in or add in some kind of “Do Not Slop” browser option (as if the “Do Not Track” one made a difference, but I digress). Shit’s only going down-hill from here, I might as well as just spin up my own Searx instance and call it a day.

@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 … 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de > That guy over there in the corner…

I’m literally sitting in a corner chuckles. I rarely get any emails nowadays. But if I do and it is not plain-text, then my Mutt gets to bark at it and I, just… won’t read it. 🤷🏽‍♂️

🥁 Brrrrrrrrr… Bud’em… Tsssss…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de make that 4 people! i use plain text when i can because this page convinced me lmfao

Aha, afinal aquele episódio do ananás no carrinho do supermercado tem background histórico

https://wholesalenutsanddriedfruit.com/upside-down-pineapple-was-a-symbol-for-swingers-in-the-colonies/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha 😂 This is gold! I’ve been following along with our ramblings on Rust. What’s it gone and done to you now? 🤔 I don’t think I can ever be friends personally, I feel “too stupid” to learn Rust 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org :‘-(

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Na, I’m too old for this shit.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de No.

#python Alguém tem o contato do Juan Lopes? @gwidion@gwidion ?

Acho que ele ia gostar de ver isso aqui:

https://mastodon.social/@carapace/114699111024833608

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah. :-( But hey, there are at least six of us using mail as it should be™. :-)

I sent the dealer an e-mail about that with all sorts of other issues as well. Let’s see if they fix anything of that some day. Or yet just even read it.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … because you, me, and that guy over there in the corner are the only three people left using plain-text email. 🫤 (And probably Stallman.)

Fuck me sideways, Rust is so hard. Will we ever be friends?

It all started in New York in the early 1980s. Click, now 85, and his friends were sitting at the long bar of the New York Athletic club reading magazine articles about boxing, fencing, judo and wrestling. “One of my mates said, ‘Dude, we don’t do any of those things.’” They had to face it. They were dull. They decided to embrace their dullness.

As a joke, they started The Dull Men’s Club, which involved some very silly, dull activities. They chartered a tour bus but didn’t go anywhere. “We toured the bus. We walked around the outside of the bus a few times. And the driver explained the tyre pressures and turned on the windscreen wipers.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/09/meet-the-members-of-the-dull-mens-club-some-of-them-would-bore-the-ears-off-you

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I like this idea 👌 Very neat!

@bmallred@staystrong.run Oh sorry I should have explained those terms 🤦‍♂️

Come on, why is the bloody IBAN only in the damn HTML part of your e-mail but not in the plain text!? Grrr! Don’t you wanna get paid, dealer!? Your new web shop system sucks so bad, I want the old version back.

Me: I had a 7-day working sprint I should relax today before I teach a class in the evening…

My brain: Good, as you don’t feel any obligation to work on your PhD today, you should just open the PhD working file and start working on it, no pressure. it will feel nice, I promise!

OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

Vocês traduzem “New York” para “Nova Iorque” nas citações bibliográficas (local de publicação)?

“Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XV: KEYB Is Half of Keyboard BIOS”

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/learn-something-old-every-day-part-xv-keyb-is-half-of-keyboard-bios/

I wish I had the time and energy to play with #pyodide more, I could try adding #shapely to #pyp5js …

https://pyodide.org/en/stable/usage/packages-in-pyodide.html

#Python #CreativeCoding

@bmallred@staystrong.run Ahhh this is an agent I’m tryining to play the game of Connect3. It uses a library written in Go I’ve been working on that supports Neuroevolution using Genetic Algorithms. Some features include: Mutation, Speciation, Lamarckian Evolution/Inheritence.

A day when you tell someone about Ezequiel Soto’s “Periodic #Tilings with #RegularPolygons” is never wasted!

https://chequesoto.info/tilings.html

new icon! the girl is manon from KATSEYE because i’m mega obsessed with them

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i linked the normal length edit instead of the full 15 minute music video because i’m not gonna subject you all to that amount of my bullshit

(…15 minute version is a great watch though)

REBORN LIKE A PHOENIX WING ❤️‍🔥 👼 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-w2HwG18vg