@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 … 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org :‘-(

@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?

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/

“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/

fn sub(foo: &String) {
    println!("We got this string: [{}]", foo);
}

fn main() {
    // "Hello", 0x00, 0x00, "!"
    let buf: [u8; 8] = [0x48, 0x65, 0x6C, 0x6C, 0x6F, 0x00, 0x00, 0x21];

    // Create a string from the byte array above, interpret as UTF-8, ignore decoding errors.
    let lossy_unicode = String::from_utf8_lossy(&buf).to_string();

    sub(&lossy_unicode);
}

Create a string from a byte array, but the result isn’t a string, it’s a cow 🐮, so you need another to_string() to convert your “string” into a string.

• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html#method.from_utf8_lossy
  
• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/borrow/enum.Cow.html
  

I still have a lot to learn.

(into_owned() instead of to_string() also works and makes more sense to me, it’s just that the compiler suggested to_string() first, which led to this funny example.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Rust is so different and, at the same time, so complex – it’s not far fetched to assume that I simply don’t understand what’s going on here. The docs appear to be clear, but alas … is it a bugs in the docs? Is it a lack of experience on my part? Who knows.

By the way, looks like there was a bit of a discussion regarding that name:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/120048

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? 🤨🫩

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, well, it’s a bit like twtxt. There is a Gopher community, but it’s small. I actually don’t like that HTTP is so easily accessible. I don’t like it that much when people post links to my site on HackerNews or something like that. Too much exposure.

Gopher is a small world. It’s slow and cozy.

And much like twtxt, the protocol is simple®, so it’s easier to tinker with it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I’m very glad twtxt/Yarn doesn’t have this. ✌️

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh, ah, I didn’t even know they sold boxes. 🤯 I hope it still works!

@quark@ferengi.one It’s as close as coffee as you can get. 😅 They take the beans, apply magic, and then most of the caffeine is gone. You can also buy whole decaf’d beans and then grind them yourself. It does kill some of the flavor – but it’s not like you’re drinking black water.

@prologic@twtxt.net That isn’t really my strong suit. 😅

@thecanine@twtxt.net … all these stupid, pointless “apps” are stuff that I eventually have to remove from family devices … Sigh.

@bender@twtxt.net Both Gopher and Mastodon are a way for me to “babble”. 😅 I basically shut down Gopher in favor of Mastodon/Fedi last year. But the Fediverse doesn’t really work for me. It’s too focused on people (I prefer topics) and I dislike the addictive nature of likes and boosts (I’m not disciplined enough to ignore them). Self-hosting some Fedi thing is also out of the question (the minimalistic daemons don’t really support following hashtags, which is a must-have for me).

I’ll probably keep reading Fedi stuff, I just won’t post that much, I think.

Gopher server is back online and I’ll be phasing out Mastodon.

gopher://uninformativ.de

(No, I won’t do multi-protocol twtxt again. 😅)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s difficult, you often don’t get what you’d expect. They also make heavy use of 3rd party libraries. IIUC, for random numbers, they refer to this library. I’ve read many times that the Rust stdlib is intentionally minimalistic (to make it easier to maintain and port and all that).

I’m struggling with this, using 3rd party libs for so many things isn’t really my cup of tea. I’ll probably make my own tiny little “standard library”. It’s silly, but I don’t see any other options. 🤷

@bender@twtxt.net “Mhhhhhhh, hehehe, gonna poop on that car. 😏”

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That’s interesting, I see them (Teichrallen) everywhere I look. 🤯 It feels like they’re about as common as mallards (Stockenten) over here. 🤔

@quark@ferengi.one Plot twist: I only drink decaf. 🤯🤯🤯

Sitting on the balcony with a fucking cup of coffee. https://movq.de/v/463f1f9d03/s.png

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I’m sure he’s doing a good job! 😊

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Looks pretty nice! Enjoy the mild temperatures while you can. 😅

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Thanks mate. 👌 (In the grand scheme of things I’m still doing great. World news are a horrible shit show nowadays, ffs. 😭)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Welcome back. 👋 (It’s a bit quiet here in general. 🤔)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks. 😅 Quite a few of them waddle around at the pond in our village. But those two individuals were seen in a nearby zoo. They’re not zoo animals, they just live there. 😅

Bird photos of the day:

• Egyptian Goose
  
• Common Moorhen (half asleep)
  
• Rock Dove
  

https://movq.de/v/4fe0207d31/

I wanted to port this to Rust as an excercise, but they still have no random number generator in the core library: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/130703

That’s the code, it’s surprisingly simple: https://movq.de/v/81dd5649be/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Only 10% of the German population had Internet access in 1998: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Deutschland#/media/Datei:Diagramm_Internetnutzer_in_Deutschland.svg I guess I was lucky in that regard.

(If today’s tech wasn’t constantly trying to track and scam you, I might still be an early adopter.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nice! The final desk looks like it’s right out of Skyrim. 😃

Having some fun with SIRDS this morning.

Image

What you should see: https://movq.de/v/dae785e733/disp.png

And the tutorial I used for my C program: https://www.ime.usp.br/~otuyama/stereogram/basic/index.html

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oooooh, never seen that before. 😲 Either white-balance doing funny stuff or unusual “filtering” through those clouds. 🤔

@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. 😡😂

A bill from our ISP in 1998.

We’re talking about a month here, 1998-07-27 to 1998-08-26.

Basic fee: 7.50 DM (about 6€ today).

Online time: 516 minutes, 23.53 DM (about 20€ today).

That’s just the ISP costs, if I’m not mistaken. The underlying phone calls were pretty pricey as well.

Image

Just as a little courtesy call (is that the right term?): 2025 continues to be annoying and exhausting, and I won’t really have the energy to work on twtxt/Yarn or texudus. Other than the occasional retrocomputing thingy (which gives a nice boost of nostalgia), I’m not doing much of anything lately.

cc @prologic@twtxt.net @andros@twtxt.andros.dev

SuSE Linux 6.4 and Arachne on DOS also work (with Windows 2000 as a call target):

• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#suse-linux-64
  
• https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html#arachne-on-dos

@bender@twtxt.net Hm, I was just surprised to see so many non-english feeds in there. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Like this? 😅

Image

Source: https://mastodon.social/@islieb/114635884398567253

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Where do they come from, anyway? Are they somehow auto-discovered or is this a curated list?

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I don’t do a lot of CSS and tried to use flexboxes recently, couldn’t find a great explanation. I somehow managed to get the desired effect, but am I using them correctly? Who knows.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I cannot / could not imagine that, either – but if it’s publicly available on the internet and something links to it, they’ll eventually find, scrape it, use it. ☹️

@arne@uplegger.eu … Petrasilie? :-D

When I chose the MIT license for all of my software, I thought:

“Should I use GPL, which I don’t really understand? Is that worth it? Yeah, there is a theoretical possibility that some company might use my code in their proprietary product … and then what? Should I sue them to enforce the GPL? I’m not going to do that anyway, so I’ll just use the MIT license.”

And now we have those LLM scrapers and now it’s suddenly a reality that these companies (ab)use my code. I can see it in my logs. I didn’t expect that back then.

GPL wouldn’t help, either, of course. (Regardless, I now think that GPL would have been the better choice anyway.)

I’m honestly considering taking my code and website offline. Maybe make it accessible through some obscure protocol like Gopher or Gemini, but no more HTTP.

(Yes, Anubis might help. Temporarily.)

I’m just tired.

Getting a bit quiet in the Yarniverse.

@arne@uplegger.eu Was sind denn Petras? :-)

🌈 Hooray! 🌈

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz A blast from the past! 😅 And all of it still works, that’s quite the surprise. I mean, I’m making real phone calls here and let the modems talk over that connection … Almost like in the 90ies. 😅

@nghialele@nghia.im Man, I wish I could watch Formula 1 on a regular basis again, but it has become expensive as fuck here. 🫤

This is my highlight, really, haven’t seen this in action in a loooooooong time:

Image

Image

Image

I had a lot of fun with my modems these past few days:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-05-31/0/POSTING-en.html

@bender@twtxt.net Not sure if you’re serious or joking, but: IE3 introduced support for CSS, Mosaic completely ignores it. 😅 Besides, it looks fine in IE3 now as well, after I fixed my CSS bug. 🤪

@prologic@twtxt.net Mosaic (2.7) works fine, I maintain that package in the AUR and test my website regularly. 😅

https://movq.de/v/d7787d6fb1/s.png

@quark@ferengi.one Ah, I see. Hm, only problem is, IE 3 doesn’t seem to support this yet. 😅 Nah, I don’t think I’ll go down that road – seems like a slippery slope. 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net Probably, yes. 🤔 There’s no standard way to do that, though, is there? 🤔

… but as it turned out, this was a bug in my CSS. It works now. 🥳

https://movq.de/v/0b35c66e11/s.png

My website is compatible with many old browsers, but Internet Explorer 3, uhm, not so much.

https://movq.de/v/d038528c00/s.png

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Yep, can’t wait to hear that dial-up sound again. 😃

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Awww, welcome to the family, little guy. 😅

Maybe you’ll enjoy this as well:

I still have one of my first modems, a Creatix LC 144 VF:

Image

I think this was the modem that I used when I first connected to the internet, but I’m not sure.

I plugged it in again and it still works:

Image

Image

The firmware appears to be from 1994, which sounds about right. I don’t think we had internet access before that. We certainly did use local mailboxes, though. (Or BBS’s, as you might call them.)

I now want to actually use that modem again. For the moment, I can only use a phone to dial into it, I lack a second modem to actually establish a connection. Here’s a video:

Image

Not spectacular, but the modem does answer after me entering ATA.

I bought another cheap old modem on eBay and am now waiting for it to arrive. Once it’s here, I want to simulate an actual dial-up session, hopefully from OS/2 or Windows 3.x.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ah, I see. I would assume that you’ll get used to it at some point. 🤔 But yeah, a lot of meaning is packed into these symbols. (It’s much, much worse with languages like Rust. 😅)

That was so great to watch, I was smiling from ear to ear the whole time. 😃

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7LYCERDnX4

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz In what way should it be more verbose? Can you give an example? 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, yeah, nothing beats modern DVCSs. I just hope that having CVS is better than nothing. We’ll see. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Okay, jetzt hör’ ich’s. :DD

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Kenne ich gar nicht und noch sehe ich die Ähnlichkeit nicht, aber kann ja noch kommen. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net With these paper thin walls, it might just work. 🤣

Happy to report that the neighbor has started playing Tschaikowski on their piano. And they’re getting really good at it! This is awesome. 😍

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s an interesting premise in that article:

The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will.

This is like saying it’s pointless to make music yourself because some professional player/audio engineer does a better job. Really, there’s always someone or something that’s better than you at a particular job.

If we focus too much on “competition”, then yes, you can just stop doing anything. I don’t know how common this mindset is, especially among artists or creative people. 🤔 I would have assumed that many writers, for example, simply enjoy the process of writing. Am I being too naive once more? 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net I hadn’t considered this particular scenario, no.

Wanna read something very scary?

Your future doctor is using ChatGPT to pass medical school, so you better start riding a bike and eating healthy now.

😨😨😨

https://infosec.exchange/@duanegran/114531604486731084

Zum Entsetzen aller Beteiligten, wie auch umstehender Personen und einiger schamfreier Gaffer, welche sich an jenem tosenden Unheil zu ergötzen vermochten, folgte nun des Wochensortiments schrecklichste Geißel: 𝕯𝖊𝖗 𝕸𝖔𝖓𝖙𝖆𝖌.

Und es sollten sich die Wolken teilen, um über ihnen nimmer endende Irrungen und Wirrungen an bovinem Fäkal und fremdgetriebener Lethargie zu erbrechen, auf dass sie zu erkennen gezwungen wären, welche Urkraft der irrealen Zusammenkunft letztlich Herrschaft über sie darstellen sollte: 𝕯𝖆𝖘 𝕭𝖎𝖑𝖉𝖙𝖊𝖑𝖊𝖋𝖔𝖓.

So zogen sie alsbald hin, zu tun wie ihnen geheißen, wohlgleich sie – diesem Schauerspiel trotzend – Trost suchten im einzigen ihnen sicher geglaubten Elixir, das dem Abgrund unter ihnen gleichend tiefschwarz glitzernd Erlösung oder mithin als Mindestmaß Linderung versprach, lag jenes doch in unmittelbarer Nähe befindlich hoffnungsschürend bereit:

K̸͓͙͖̥͗͛ä̷̯̼̤͔̈́f̵̧̿̋͒̈f̷̫̝̖̾̓c̸̛͔̀ḣ̶̳͋̓͊ë̷̫̟́͜͝͝n̵̨̳̬̒?̴̩̈́̄ ☕

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz This is way too long for me to watch in its entirety, but: “Ugh, talking is weird” – I feel that, very much. 😅

(Where is there no bass emoji in Unicode? Pah.)

And to finish the day: Om Live at Pioneer Works 🤘 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwnDKcoVHmY

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That bird pic goes right in the wallpaper collection. 😍

Now playing: Funky bass and people moving in a funny way, doing funny faces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVyEPAMpwDc (Vulfpeck & Chris Thile – Dean Town)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org He was a gift. 💚 Hatched in 2007. 🐣 Will be allowed to drive this year.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Actual family photo:

https://movq.de/v/bfd455ecfe/tux1.jpg

I have another one on my keychain and a small one in the car. And this little guy is probably hard to spot in the photo, because he’s just 1cm tall:

https://movq.de/v/bfd455ecfe/tux2.jpg

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … I didn’t say there aren’t lots of Tux plushies around here. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nope, this is some random photo. 😅

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz inb4 https://movq.de/v/c8b084d52d/s.png

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org How did I miss this one? Nice birb! 🐦

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can’t read. 🤦 Yeah, that’s gonna be a problem. I was not yet able to trigger it, though. Maybe they are (like Google) rolling out these changes gradually …

I want smell-cancelling nose… phones… thingies.

@bender@twtxt.net I might be a bit too negative today. 😅 I just wonder how long it’ll take until they also restrict Git operations. 🤷

RIP GitHub https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-08-updated-rate-limits-for-unauthenticated-requests/

Good thing I left long ago.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s funny/interesting what people see in these. 😃 @aelaraji@aelaraji.com said that some of them look like a brain on a reflective surface, and now I can’t unsee it. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz There are two more shops that sell the “classic” Tuxes: https://ixsoft.de and https://www.steiner-plueschshop.de – both German shops, though. 🥴 Anyway, if you can make one yourself, that’d be extra cool. 😃

@bender@twtxt.net They usually roll out this stuff slowly, yeah. 🫤

Forgot to post these here: A bunch of Mandelbrot images using the trans, ace, and aro color palettes.

Image

Image

Image

More and full res PNGs:

https://movq.de/v/c732f4178a/

https://movq.de/v/fa024865a8/

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I was about to say that you can always just buy one, but apparently that’s not so easy anymore?! What the heck happened? 🤨 There used to be several shops here in Germany that sold a variety of Tux plushies, but none of that exists anymore … 😳

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Thanks, I hope so too. 😅

I have zero mental energy for programming at the moment. 🫤

I’ll try to implement the new hashing stuff in jenny before the “deadline”. But I don’t think you’ll see any texudus development from me in the near future. ☹️

YouTube just went from this:

Image

To this:

Image

Why.

Red for “activated” and dark gray for “deactivated” was easy to recognize.

Now we have light gray for “activated” and dark gray for “deactivated”. It’s clearly worse.

Why, why, why.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Tux plushie is life, Tux plushie is best friend 🤘

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @prologic@twtxt.net Given that all these programs are super old (tar is from the late 1970ies), while trying to retain backwards-compatibilty, I’m not surprised that the UI isn’t too great. 🤔

find has quite a few pitfalls, that is very true. At work, we don’t even use it anymore in more complex scenarios but write Python scripts instead. find can be fast and efficient, but fewer and fewer people lack the knowledge to use it … The same goes for Shell scripting in general, actually.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz What’s wrong with them? I’ve been doing this for so long now, I don’t see the issues anymore. 🤣 (Doesn’t mean they don’t exist.)

The album I got by accident is starting to grow on me. Not that bad. 🤔 It’s Dredg – El Cielo, btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4JB8rmXaO8&list=PLRASiMqDV8psZSFQi7nUX4p0R8oRHbUy_&index=1