movq

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In the age of AI, PR reviews at work only serve these purposes:

  • A PR makes me vaguely aware that something exists. Like, I now know that there’s a component over here that probably does something with this other component over there. Maybe.
  • I can ā€œgauge the riskā€: Is this something that I can simply throw away once it breaks? If not, I’ll have to bite the bullet and start a more detailed discussion about what the flying fuck your 8000 new lines of code actually do. And then you’ll pull the ā€œbut I don’t have time for this discussionā€-card and we merge anyway.
  • Shift the blame from author to reviewer: ā€œIt passed review! The builds were green!ā€
  • I don’t need pills anymore to raise my low blood pressure.

It’s so disheartening to see everyone vomit out bullshit. ā€œYou can use AI responsibly and actually make the code betterā€, my ass. Nobody does that. Not a single soul. No human. Ever. None. Nobody.

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There appears to be a rush a disgruntled Linux users switching to NetBSD:

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/117451701775023949

They even got a ton of new donations (which, funnily, broke their little progress bar):

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https://cannot.understand.computer/kunev/p/1791449917.947134

So… donations for @netbsd@netbsd over the last few years look like this:

2020 - $46k
2021 - $52k
2022 - $44k
2023 - $60k
2024 - $40k
2025 - $79k

And in 2026 $120k so far!

And why is all that? Because of this:

Do not commit tainted code to the repository.

If you commit code that was not written by yourself, double check that the license on that code permits import into the NetBSD source repository, and permits free distribution. Check with the author(s) of the code, make sure that they were the sole author of the code and verify with them that they did not copy any other code.

Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft’s Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta’s Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

This official guideline is much more ā€œtameā€ and ā€œdiplomaticā€ than the overall ā€œvibeā€ (sic) on the Fediverse: NetBSD basically says no to AI as much as possible.

And, apparently, this attracts lots of users and donors. Maybe there’s still some hope after all?

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↳ In-reply-to » @movq People have not been fired over here. But I fully expect this to happen, too. Non-techies soldering together their own production shit is only consequent. I was actually wondering when this will happen. Product owners don't need anyone else anymore, they can just be one-man shows. That's what the AI bros jerk off to.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m way too clumsy to do actual craftsmanship. šŸ˜– I had this janitor / delivery driver job once, that was great, and I’d love to do that again. Doesn’t exist anymore, though, and paid like shit.

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↳ In-reply-to » My mate and I were fortunate enough to witness one of the very best, top-quality sunsets of the year on our evening hike. Very hard to get any better than this. The really good stuff easily lasted for 20 minutes, even one hour after the sun disappeared behind the horizon, there were red clouds slightly glowing in the dark. Absolutely insane. Enjoy!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh wow, molten sky. 😃

Ballonfahrt in den Sonnenuntergang muss auch hübsch sein!

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↳ In-reply-to » Made some ā€œbracketsā€ that I can use to mount some small speakers on the top of my monitor. That way, they don’t take up any space on the desk.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Had a 3D printer for a couple of years now. šŸ˜… I got a used one in 2019. I don’t print that much, mostly just little stuff like this.

The vibration from the desk is so intense because it simply abruptly halts. It doesn’t slow down first – it just stops, NOW. šŸ¤¦ā€ā™€ļø It’s pretty stupid, but there’s nothing I can do, other than buy a new desk. 🫤

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Made some ā€œbracketsā€ that I can use to mount some small speakers on the top of my monitor. That way, they don’t take up any space on the desk.

It’s not perfect and the curvature at the back of the monitor is annoying. But it works.

There’s a fair bit of vibration when I lower/raise the desk (hard to capture on video), and it survives that. 🄳

The speakers are trash, of course. Doesn’t matter. They’re good enough for some light background music. Like an old FM radio. šŸ˜…

Let’s see how long it takes until they fall down and break. šŸæ

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https://movq.de/v/fa5dd44cab/mount%2Dnosound.mkv.mp4

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↳ In-reply-to » I was Today years old when I learned about the Compose Key 🫠 So, no more Ctrl+Shift+U's for or having to remember Unicode like a chimp

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I love the Compose Key. 😃 Want that ā€œoā€ with the slash in it? Type Compose + o + / and there you go: Ćø. I use it all the time. Also for stuff like → arrows or ā„¢.

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↳ In-reply-to » I follow @aelaraji’s feed, but it never updates. šŸ¤” Manually fetching individual twts works, though. Do you do any aggressive filtering or something like that? šŸ¤”

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Ahhhh, some twt from the future must have snuck in? In my database, ā€œlatest twt in feedā€ had a timestamp of 1814983537 (that’s in July 2027), which made my client ignore any twts older than that. I deleted that from my DB and now it’s working again. 🄳

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@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com

and/or the people in charge realize that ā€œenterprise-classā€ and ā€œvibe-codedā€ are mutually exclusive software concepts

I’m really uncertain about this, to be honest. Short-term, you can vibe-code a ton of stuff and get away with it. I think that quality/correctness only matters for a small fraction of software out there. But long-term? I guess that then depends on whether you’re able to still pay the AI bills. Maintenance/refactoring is going to be veeeeeeeeeeery expensive, and virtually no human will be able to do those tasks. Or, you know, just rip off your customers and don’t sell any long-lasting support contracts in the first place.

I dunno. šŸ¤·ā€ā™€ļø

I hope things get better for you, @movq@www.uninformativ.de (and for anyone else dealing with the same issues).

Thanks! šŸ™

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↳ In-reply-to » I saw this circulating right afte the latest Microsoft event and it illustrates the current state of things perfectly Media Even they bet everything on AI they are renting, not even developing and happily let everything else turn to mush, as evident by the current state of Windows 11, GitHub,... Microsoft Azure AD, I mean "Entra ID", still the same account management thing, rewritten three separate times, that since the year 2000, couldn't manage to implement transparent PNG support.

@thecanine@twtxt.net I’m so glad that the Microsoft world is the one thing that I’m able to avoid. I didn’t have to touch a Windows server in over a decade.

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↳ In-reply-to » @movq People have not been fired over here. But I fully expect this to happen, too. Non-techies soldering together their own production shit is only consequent. I was actually wondering when this will happen. Product owners don't need anyone else anymore, they can just be one-man shows. That's what the AI bros jerk off to.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @david@daiwei.me I suppose the only sane thing you can do is what Lyse said:

I will have been gone in five years. At most. I should start looking for complete alternatives.

I’m looking for alternatives as well, but … what would that be? Not a clue. Actually, no, I have a lot of ideas – there are so many useful things that I would be able and willing to do. Only problem is, those jobs don’t pay the bills. Haha.

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↳ In-reply-to » @movq People have not been fired over here. But I fully expect this to happen, too. Non-techies soldering together their own production shit is only consequent. I was actually wondering when this will happen. Product owners don't need anyone else anymore, they can just be one-man shows. That's what the AI bros jerk off to.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

The IT industry is absolutely poisoned and destroyed.

Yes, and here’s an example:

I’m seeing exactly this effect in our stuff at work.

And human PR reviewers (in our company) are already completely burned out, because the AI dudes just dump all their shit on us. AI is an amplifier: If you already didn’t care about good code before AI, then you most certainly won’t start caring with AI, so the result is just a massive dumpster fire.

I suppose you can use AI to produce good code, but this takes so much time, effort, and money, you might as well code it yourself.

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AI usage at work has risen to absurd and moronic levels.

Entire dev teams getting dismantled and fired.

The people that work in accounting are expected to write their own accounting software (or rather, let AI do it). Same for marketing. And everybody else.

Former ā€œtech nerdsā€, whom I used to respect, tell me that they haven’t read any code in months. Let alone written some. They tell me that ā€œAI is really good nowā€, it’s the future, yadda yadda. At the same time, when I read their code, I want to scream and cry (and most days I do).

Virtually everything is vibe-coded now. Everywhere you look you get to see code that no human will ever be able to maintain. Huge system ā€œdesignsā€, expensive, slow.

At this point, I’m almost hoping for the bubble NOT to burst, because that might very well mean the end of this company (and, thus, my job).

There is no ā€œexit strategyā€. We completely depend on AI services now.

At the same time, I’m expected to implement ISO27001.

Everything is vague, chaotic, wonky, shitty, buggy.

People are actively working on making themselves obsolete, and they don’t seem to notice that they’re doing that, because they’re so engulfed with playing with their new AI toy.

I checked job offers, but it looks like every company is like this now. Maybe some are still a bit behind, but sooner or later, they’ll all be like that.

And the worst part is: None of this matters in the slightest, as long as there’s some idiot out there who buys our stuff. Welcome to capitalism.

People keep telling me that you can ā€œuse AI responsiblyā€ and ā€œjust to some degree, just as a toolā€, but they don’t seem to realize that this does not matter in capitalism. Companies don’t need ā€œgood productsā€. They just need to sell something. If you still believe that ā€œdoing a good jobā€ matters and that ā€œthey still need competent peopleā€, haha, my sweet summer child, nothing you do matters. You just happened to be needed in the past, but those days are gone.

The future is absolutely bleak – assuming there is a future.

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↳ In-reply-to » Chilly 15°C in the shade with a slight breeze, but it was very nice in direct sun. I jumped outside after calling it quits. There were five herons on that meadow, super sweet. One even caught something fairly large when I returned, but it was already too dark, so my camera just cooked up a blurry pixel soup.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org What is that ā€œtowerā€ in the top left of 05? šŸ¤” And wow, 20 and 21 are great!

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@david@daiwei.me I use OpenBSD’s smtpd, which was super easy to set up. It gets a little bit more complicated these days because you also need a DKIM setup, so every outgoing mail goes from smtpd to dkimproxy and back to smtpd. And then dovecot for POP3/IMAP (has basically nothing to do with the other two).

I’m cheating a bit, though: I use config management on top, which means that all the UNIX users and mailboxes and directories are created by that. If you were to do that manually, it would be a huge pain.

Maybe I’ll write a blog post about this some day, just for fun. šŸ¤”

JMAP? Never heard of it.

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#FrakturFreitag: Jemand hat Geburtstag und hier ist der Draft für die Karte. (Oder – wie beim letzten Mal – die tatsƤchliche Karte, wenn ich zu faul bin, das nochmal ā€žsauberā€œ zu machen. šŸ˜)

Das Geschenk ist ein Zeitungsabo, daher dieses Ƥußerst kreative ā€žGedichtā€œ.

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Diesmal auf die Uhr geschaut: Gedauert hat das ~30 Minuten. Und weil ich es wagte, so lange dasselbe Bild auf meinem Monitor anzuzeigen – meine Buchstabenreferenz –, hab’ ich jetzt erstmal für werweißwielange ’ne tolle Image Retention.

Ich brauche einen neuen Monitor.

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↳ In-reply-to » @lyse

Haha, indeed:

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  1. Initial uptime: A bit over 1 minute.
  2. Changing to serial console, running uptime again: It’s down to 7 seconds.
  3. Changing back to the VGA console: It’s again down to 1 second.

This really doesn’t track the actual uptime, it just happens to ā€œmostly workā€. (Like a lot of things in DOS.)

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↳ In-reply-to » Made a little program to print the system’s uptime on DOS, OS/2, and Windows NT:

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Crazy, who comes up with things like that?

I didn’t come up with it, but I was close, I guess. DOS is so small, you don’t have much of a choice but to search for ā€œanything related to timeā€. There aren’t that many syscalls/functions. You’ll quickly notice that there’s no global tick counter. So what else is there? Hmm, ā€œget the mtime of a fileā€ is pretty much the only other time-related thing. And which file is ā€œstableā€, probably allocated just once at boot? Mark Aitchison tried to use NUL, which is a pretty good idea. Thinking about it in retrospect, stdin does indeed make more sense, though, because that object really does get allocated just once at ā€œbootā€ and then it stays the same. That’s not guaranteed for NUL (although just as likely).

But, it is possible in DOS to move ā€œthe consoleā€ to a serial port:

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I wonder what that does to my little uptime program. :-)

Today, I also learned that -R is an alias for -r in rm.

Ah, I remember that. Dug it up and saved it in the blog: -R is more portable/consistent: http://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-30/0/POSTING-en.html

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Made a little program to print the system’s uptime on DOS, OS/2, and Windows NT:

https://movq.de/git/retrouptime/

(Release pending.)

This was pretty easy to do on Windows, a bit harder on OS/2 (because documentation is scarce), and quite the mess on DOS. DOS doesn’t explicitly keep track of the system’s uptime, so you have to resort to tricks like ā€œgive me the mtime of stdinā€, which probably works … Yeah.

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↳ In-reply-to » Did I post this here already?

@prologic@twtxt.net Right, sorry!

It’s a video filmed by a person standing on a beach. The hero of this little movie is a guy on a stand-up paddle board: He’s out on the ocean and tries to reach his air mattress, which is floating on the ocean next to him. But it’s a cloudy and windy day, and he can’t quite reach it. So he keeps paddling and paddling, until he almost got it. Then, another gust of wind – the mattress is gone again. But he doesn’t give up! He keeps paddling, almost reaches it – and another gust of wind. This keeps going for quite a while. Eventually, he is so close to his air mattress that he jumps off his board and tries to truly grab the mattress. And he aaaaaaalllllmooooooooost got it! But then, of course, another big gust of wind and the mattress gets pushed far, far away. Probably gone for good. 🄲

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↳ In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks. šŸ˜… I didn’t check the time, but I guess something between 15 and 30 minutes? šŸ¤”

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Might be because the typical ā€œGerman Frakturā€ (this isn’t a thing) uses very unusual uppercase letters. And ā€œkā€ is just weird. And ā€œfā€ and ā€œÅæā€ (long ā€œsā€) are very close together.

This is ā€œLuther’sche Frakturā€ from around 1708 (a photo from the book ā€œFrakturā€ by Albert Kapr), the book says this was one of the most popular ones:

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I have lots of trouble deciphering those uppercase letters.

By the way, this is worth mentioning: Fraktur fonts are often associated with Nazi Germany, but did you know that the Nazis eventually banned these fonts in 1941?

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Yeah. Typical Nazi stuff.

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↳ In-reply-to » I’d estimate that ~90% of the traffic I get is some kind of non-human / non-browser thing.

Oh, and only 29 clients have requested the actual image:

29 movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-25/0/bine-initial.png

Assuming that that’s an actual human being who’s interested in the content, then it’d be less than 1% of the hits that I get.

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I’d estimate that ~90% of the traffic I get is some kind of non-human / non-browser thing.

Here are some numbers on the recent blog post:

3804 movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-25/0/POSTING-en.html
 404 movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-25/0/t/bine-initial.png.jpg

The HTML page is obviously the blog post itself. The image is the thumbnail of the ā€œopenerā€ image: That’s the thing that you’re pretty much guaranteed to see when you open the post in a browser.

But out of the 3800 hits on the HTML page, only 400 (~10%) are also requesting that image.

So … it’s ~90% noise, right?

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You know that I’m ā€œPrinzessin Müllabfuhrā€, but the English translation isn’t that great.

So, I’m going by ā€œPrincess Dumpsterfireā€ now.

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(I’m forced to use this shit at work.)

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↳ In-reply-to » @arne Da war in Venedig die Bedienung, die am guten "britischen Englisch" erkannt hat, dass ich aus Deutschland komme - und weil ich auf einen Rechtschreibfehler im Rabatt-Programm der Speisekarte hinwies.

@arne@uplegger.eu Entschuldige, aber auf Rechtschreibfehler hinzuweisen, ist vermutlich das deutscheste, was ein Mensch tun kann. šŸ˜‚

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↳ In-reply-to » Just some light Sunday afternoon entertainment: Printing from NetBSD on the dotmatrix printer by dumping data to /dev/ulpt0. The netbook doesn’t have a parallel port, so this must be done over USB. NetBSD.escp was created by a little custom ESC/P converter written in C. 🄳

@shinyoukai@twtxt.net Sounds promising. šŸ¤” I’ll check it out!

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↳ In-reply-to » Just some light Sunday afternoon entertainment: Printing from NetBSD on the dotmatrix printer by dumping data to /dev/ulpt0. The netbook doesn’t have a parallel port, so this must be done over USB. NetBSD.escp was created by a little custom ESC/P converter written in C. 🄳

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, the partition stuff with disklabels is what I’m absolutely not used to. I need to invest more time learning this. Not just using it, but how and where is it represented on disk and all that.

I carry my notebook/netbook around a lot. šŸ˜… Watching movies in bed, for example.

I think I’ll stick with NetBSD for a while. It works surprisingly well, it’s new stuff to explore, it’s fast, and then there’s this:

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/112446618914747900

Gentoo (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy) might be another idea, but I’m afraid that the little netbook might be too slow for that? Or are there binary packages? No idea, it’s been ages since I touched this distro.

(Regarding Linux in general … we all know what Linus said. I’m not sure where this project is heading.)

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Just some light Sunday afternoon entertainment: Printing from NetBSD on the dotmatrix printer by dumping data to /dev/ulpt0. The netbook doesn’t have a parallel port, so this must be done over USB. NetBSD.escp was created by a little custom ESC/P converter written in C. 🄳

https://movq.de/v/14b09c47a5/print-small.mp4

Video description:

Video begins with a view of the netbook’s screen: 3 windows are open, one of them showing the typical NetBSD logo to print, the other one shows the commands I ran in preparation:

magick /usr/X11R7/include/X11/pixmaps/NetBSD.xpm -depth 8 -alpha set /tmp/NetBSD.pam
./pam2escp /tmp/NetBSD.pam /tmp/NetBSD.escp

The other terminal shows a root shell with this command:

cat /tmp/NetBSD.escp >/dev/ulpt0

I hit Enter, the printer starts printing.

Camera pans to show the printer, an Oki ML 3390. Continuous paper. Once finished, I manually feed the paper a little bit to better show the result.

(If you turn up the volume enough, you can hear ā€œLeavingā€ by ā€œChill Carrierā€ from 2008.)

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↳ In-reply-to » @lyse What is that crazy large Dino Chicken in 23.jpg? :D

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ahh, ohh! Thanks! :D

Both of these scenarios is mindboggling – imagine such a world:

Gastornis species were very large birds that were traditionally thought to have been predators of various smaller mammals, such as ancient, diminutive equids. However, several lines of evidence, including the lack of hooked claws (in known Gastornis footprints), studies of their beak structure and isotopic signatures of their bones, have caused scientists to now consider that these birds were probably herbivorous, feeding on tough plant material and seeds.

If they ever invent a time machine, I wanna go back to the Dinos. šŸ¦•

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↳ In-reply-to » We visited the Jurassic Museum at the Willibalds Castle in EichstƤtt. As always, taking photos indoors is almost impossible with the low lighting and reflexions everywhere. We had a great and entertaining tour guide walk us through for an hour. Afterwards, we explored two, three hours on our own.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org What is that crazy large Dino Chicken in 23.jpg? :D

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