What to Do in LA if You’re Here for Business (2025)
A tech industry guide to where to stay, eat, work, and play while visiting LA. ⌘ Read more

‘Creepy’ Listening Tool for Targeted Ads Didn’t Actually Work, FTC Says
Three firms will pay nearly $1 million for selling “Active Listening” technology that they claimed tapped people’s phones for advertising. The FTC alleges the “tech” was just pricey email lists. ⌘ Read more

Madison Square Garden Bans Lawyer Representing New York Cop Injured at a Boxing Match
Attorney John Scola is representing a police officer who is suing over injuries allegedly sustained while working security at an MSG property in 2025. ⌘ Read more

When I finish my dev work and testing flags 10 bugs within the hour ⌘ Read more

‘Perfect Storm’: How Trump’s Aid Cuts Are Fueling the Ebola Outbreak
One health provider who works on the ground says that basic medical equipment like masks and hand sanitizers are in short supply due to funding cuts. ⌘ Read more

A Danish Couple’s Maverick African Research Finds Its Moment in RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Policy
The work of Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn has long been controversial. Until Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became US health policy chief, most vaccine scientists tended to ignore it. Now they can’t. ⌘ Read more

If You’re a Serious Bowler, You Need to Know About Bowling Lane Oil
Bowling centers apply oil to their lanes using a machine that works like a giant inkjet printer. The pattern in which it’s applied can change everything about how the ball travels. ⌘ Read more

I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI
For screenwriters like me—and job seekers all over—AI gig work is the new waiting tables. In eight months, I’ve done 20 of these soul-crushing contracts for five different platforms. It’s bad. ⌘ Read more

How Handheld Translators Work and Why They’re Handy for Travel
Your cell phone can handle basic language translation, but bespoke tools can offer a much more immersive experience. ⌘ Read more

The Best Mobile Gaming Controllers for iPhone and Android (2026)
Your iPhone or Android phone can work overtime as a full-on gaming console with the help of these mobile controllers. Backbone makes my favorite. ⌘ Read more

Exclusive: Metalenz Has Figured Out a Way to Make Face ID Invisible
Metalenz’s Polar ID face-scanning technology works even when the camera is hidden under the display. ⌘ Read more

Best Travel Tote Bags for Every Kind of Excursion (2026): Away, Le Pliage, Topo Designs
These hardworking travel totes handle everything from a work trip to a weekend getaway. ⌘ Read more

Best Walking Pads for Working From Home (2026)
Our remote team clocked serious hours walking, working, and sometimes jogging to find the best under-desk treadmills for home offices and small spaces. ⌘ Read more

When my code isn’t great but it works ⌘ Read more

‘It’s Undignified’: Hundreds of Workers Training Meta’s AI Could Be Laid Off
More than 700 people working for a Meta contractor in Ireland are at risk of losing their jobs, documents show. ⌘ Read more

When I show the sales rep how to work around a display bug for their demo ⌘ Read more

Dream Chaser: could the reusable space plane’s dream be over?
A space plane once hoped to be a successor to NASA’s space shuttles may ultimately never make it to orbit. Work on Dream Chaser began back in 2004 and… ⌘ Read more

Neanderthals and modern humans worked together, new study finds
Excavations at Israel’s Tinshemet Cave have revealed a level of inter-species co-operation never seen before. Discoveries made at the site suggest tha… ⌘ Read more

‘Titanic II’ is still a thing… but we won’t be seeing it for quite a while
A modern (and much safer) recreation of the iconic, ill-fated ship has been in the works for more than a decade. Back in 2012, Australian billionaire … ⌘ Read more

When I go back to a project I worked on last month ⌘ Read more

Golden Dome: is Trump’s missile defense system even plausible?
The Pentagon has reportedly selected two contractors to begin working on the seemingly impossible defense project. Back in January of last year, newly… ⌘ Read more

Nationals deputy leader says supermarkets should pay farmers more for produce
Farmers have urged Australia’s major supermarket chains to pay more for fresh produce, in response to increased fuel and freight costs.
GUEST: Darren Chester, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
PRODUCER: Isadora Bogle ⌘ Read more

When someone comes to talk to me about work during my lunch break ⌘ Read more

When I realize no one knows how the app’s permission system works ⌘ Read more

When my pip install works on the first try ⌘ Read more

When the user table I have to work with has more than a hundred fields ⌘ Read more

When I find out the cache system never actually worked ⌘ Read more

When I’m working on two production environments at the same time ⌘ Read more

Consciousness is the fundamental basis of reality, physicist claims
What if consciousness didn’t simply arise from the physical brain, but was instead the basis of reality itself ? Exactly how consciousness works has l… ⌘ Read more

When a script saves me 2 hours of work per week and I never told anyone ⌘ Read more

It’s bad news yet again for the launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission
Just when it looked like the launch would go ahead, another spanner in the works manifested itself. It seems that NASA can’t catch a break - at least … ⌘ Read more

NASA veteran maintains that extraterrestrial life really is out there
Dr Gentry Lee, who worked on the Mars Viking mission, has spent decades designing probes that land on other worlds. Speaking recently at the American … ⌘ Read more

‘X-Files’ reboot is still in the works, new female lead is cast
The return of the iconic 90s TV series will feature two new leads and looks set to carry on where the old show left off. When The X-Files debuted back… ⌘ Read more

When I’m working remotely and get back to my computer after a short nap ⌘ Read more

Declassified files detail CIA’s little known behavioral control program
During the 1950s, the CIA had been working on a program designed to find ways to manipulate people’s behavior. Known as Project Artichoke, the endeavo… ⌘ Read more

When the small script I started working on 2 weeks ago becomes a full-blown project ⌘ Read more

When I run docker-compose up and everything works on the first try ⌘ Read more

Moon Davé doesn’t mention #py5 directly but very briefly shows something done with #Processing + #py5 cc @py5coding@py5coding

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** Snakes snakes snakes, a week note **
I’ve been working on an ill advised project. This project will have to be done in many parts. Part one of many is done, and I’m debating if I should share it, or if I should wait to get the whole thing done. But now, a smash cut…I started this post off as a normal post, but now that it is an RSS sickos only post…

Check this shit out! I recently read about the $1 unistroke recognizer, and predictably, had to try to [implement my … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Sorry if I raised the wrong hope. Only the German talk is about the “why good people don’t want to work at your company” subject. Among the key points are the absolutely terrible job adverts, team leads not themselves looking for people to hire but letting other dudes do that, company cultures and communication.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I just watched this. And whilst it’s very good and insightful, good history of MySQL and how Martin helped built a good solid Open Source + Commercial model, I’m not seeing the “why people don’t wanna work at your company” bit? What am I missing? 🤔 In any case, he does talk to great length on the importance of Culture and the insane notion of “centrlaised office working”, which I 100% agree with.

A mate just recommended this German talk why people don’t wanna work at your company: https://media.ccc.de/v/froscon2025-3321-es_es_ka_em_warum_gute_leute_nicht_bei_euch_arbeiten_wollen It’s really good. I fully agree with most parts.

The speaker referenced https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xmEgtRhw7o (Mårten Mickos: Believe in Something Bigger Than Yourself) which is also very interesting, if you make it through the first bit. He talks about his CEO role at MySQL AB.

When I have no choice but to work with an old poorly formatted JSON file ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I also had to laugh. :-D And that’s what crossed my mind for a splitsecond, too. Two decades ago or so, that would have worked. But these days are long over. Wasn’t it even an INI file or something like that?

Okay, so the funniest thing that has happened at work in the realm of AI so far is this:

So this guy (that holds a certain position of power) wants people to use more AI, meaning people are expected to install a set of AI tools on their laptops. But, of course, he doesn’t want to write proper documentation for this, because that would be silly monkey work, right? So he conjures up some AI prompts that are intended to make the AI agent install all this stuff by itself.

Do you see where this is going? Can you see the punchline?

That’s right! Since none of this AI stuff is deterministic, every setup is different. 🤦‍♀️ Like, 10, 20 systems, all set up a little different and people wonder why this or that doesn’t work as expected.

Okay, it’s not funny.

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Fuck me dead! I accidentally confused an HTML file for a YAML file and manually opened it in my browser. Unfortunately, I clicked on the OK button of the popped up dialog a bit too fast, it just caught me off guard. It asked which program to open the YAML file in. Of course Firefox thought that it could handle that and suggested itself by default. Conveniently, the “don’t prompt me again and always use this selection from now on” checkbox was enabled.

And then the endless loop of death started. Turns out, this fucking browser can’t do shit with YAML files and delegated to what had been just configured. Oh, would you look at that!? Firefox! Empty tabs after empty tabs appeared. Killing and restarting Firefox just loaded the last session with all the tabs and the loop continued.

Some bloody snakeoil on my work machine slows down link openening requests by two, three seconds. It’s always absolutely anoying, but luckily, it actually limited the rate of new tabs popping up. I still could not close the many tabs fast enough that had accumulated before I noticed what was going on in the background.

Going to the settings to change them was always interrupted with a new tab opening in the foreground.

Finally, killing Firefox and renaming the file on disk before restarting Firefox did the trick and broke the loop. I was still holding down Ctrl+W for a minute or so to get rid of the useless tabs. I didn’t want to loose the important tabs, so just ditching the session wasn’t an option.

When the server responds 200 OK but absolutely nothing works ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I will give it a try when it works flawlessly. ☺️ Then I will need people to interact with, otherwise it’s a “mute” case. 🤭

I spent the day today integrating @xuu@txt.sour.is’s double ratcheting work and ratchet library back into the reference client/broker implementation saltyim as a v2 branch. I completely redesigned and rewrite the salty-chat TUI client as well, which now includes proper notifications and a background agent that keeps running so you never miss any messages. It all “just works”™ and I’m quite happy with the outcome! 🤩 #saltyim #revamp

#py5 #Processing #Python #CreativeCoding

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When the code review takes longer than the actual dev work ⌘ Read more

NT avocado farm getting closer to reality
A Top End horticulturalist is working on tropical variates of avocado and has agreed to supply a grower with hundreds of trees. ⌘ Read more

When my regex finally works perfectly ⌘ Read more

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net Nope, not IONOS, but we use them a lot at work. To be honest, I consider them one of the better providers (at least regarding the IaaS stuff that we do). 😅

UFO whistleblower: ‘angels in the Bible may have been alien visitors’
Speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast recently, David Grusch opened up on his thoughts about aliens and angels. Grusch, who previously worked with the Nat… ⌘ Read more

When I realize I was working on the wrong branch ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks for letting me know it was Mobile Safari! I just did some testing real quick and things are not working very well 🤔 I think I’ve introduced some regressions last night as I was putting this into prod 😅 services me right for late-night deployment 🤣 I’ve taken it down for now, will spend a bit more time on testing making sure things all work properly!

When my demo only works when no one is watching ⌘ Read more

Just showelled 20cm of snow for half an hour, fuck me! I’m totally shattered. But it’s worth it. Looks so beautiful. And all the disbelief and terror in the eyes of the people. Well, that’s what our winters were like three decades ago. I’m just glad that I can work from home.

Has a bit of a long history story behind this, where last year at work we were reading this book called Engineering a Safer World and initially came across a service called Speech Reply that allowed me to upload a PDF copy of the book and start to read it, but unfortunately, the free trial right now before I can finish reading it turns out that Speech Reply service cost a whopping US$30 a month and expected me to pay a full year upfront, which was well over US$300 just for one fucking book! So I sent their sales and support staff a message kindly asking if it were possible to just pay for the audio transcription of just a single book or to change to a monthly subscription fee, to which they refused, so basically in the end I got very angry and told them to go fuck themselves and built my own service. A year later here we are :-)

Another project where I’m going to use my terminal widget toolkit is a hex editor. This is still very young, obviously, and there’s a lot of work to do (both in the toolkit and this particular application), but I’m making some progress:

https://movq.de/v/2bae14ed16/vid-1769283187.mp4

Since this program is UTF-8 clean (I hope), you can do things like enter multi-byte UTF-8 sequences or paste them from the system clipboard (another hex editor I just tried failed to do this correctly):

https://movq.de/v/e9241034c1/vid-1769283755.mp4

Under the hood, I’m using mmap() with MAP_PRIVATE, which is really cool: I get the entire file as a byte array, no matter how large it is, no need to actually read it upfront; and MAP_PRIVATE means that I can write to this area however I like without changing the underlying file. The kernel does copy-on-write for me. Only when you hit Save, it will write to the filesystem. And it’s just a couple lines of code. The kernel does all the magic. 🥳

@kiwu@twtxt.net No embedding works! I’ll have a look at what you did here 👌

@bender@twtxt.net Only missing roots would trigger that kind of sync IIRC. And that only works if another peering pod has the root twt. What you’re remembering, possibly, is an attempt to do what you were thinking of… But I tried it, turned out to be too expensive of an operation to do auotmatically.

Spent basically the entire day (except for the mandatory walk) fighting with Python’s type hints. But, the result is that my widget toolkit now passes mypy --strict.

I really, really don’t want to write larger pieces of software without static typing anymore. With dynamic typing, you must test every code path in your program to catch even the most basic errors. pylint helps a bit (doesn’t need type hints), but that’s really not enough.

Also, somewhere along the way, I picked up a very bad (Python) programming style. (Actually, I know exactly where I picked that up, but I don’t want to point the finger now.) This style makes heavy use of dicts and tuples instead of proper classes. That works for small scripts, but it very quickly turns into an absolute mess once the program grows. Prime example: jenny. 😩

I have a love-hate relationship with Python’s type hints, because they are meaningless at runtime, so they can be utterly misleading. I’m beginning to like them as an additional safety-net, though.

(But really, if correctness is the goal, you either need to invest a ton of time to get 100% test coverage – or don’t use Python.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de What worked? 😆

Another new UFO movie is coming - this time about the Roswell incident
It seems we can’t move for UFO movies these days and now yet another one is reportedly in the works. Late last year we learned details about Steven Sp… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I still think that your original domain is cool as fuck! :-)

I didn’t change any subscriptions, and I still see your messages, so whatever you did worked fine. :-)

Did it work? Am I still here? 🤣

I love using #ThonnyIDE, and, on Linux, I can use !pip install, !jupyter lab, and !py5-live-coding mysketch.py on the interactive shell console, I wish this would work on Windows too :(

https://github.com/thonny/thonny/discussions/3736

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d love to take a look at the code. 😅

I’m kind of curious to know how much Assembly I need vs. How much of a microkernel can I build purely in Mu (µ)? 🤔

Can’t really answer that, because I only made a working kernel for 16-bit real mode yet. That is 99% C, though, only syscall entry points are Assembly. (The OpenWatcom compiler provides C wrappers for triggering software interrupts, which makes things easier.)

But in long mode? No idea yet. 😅 At least changing the page tables will require a tiny little bit of Assembly.

I’ve only got a handful of syscalls working right now. Taking inspiration from the calling convention of the Linux kernel and even made the service/interrupt handler int 0x80h 🤣 I’ve only got read, write, alloc and exit working righ tnow 🥲

Whohoo! 🥳 You have no idea how great a feeling this is! This includes the Mu stdlib and runtime as well, not just some simple stupid program, this means a significant portion of the runtime and stdlib “just works”™ 🤣

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club haha! I read as Golang the first time too. It is just the way our minds work. :-P

When my script isn’t optimized but still works anyway ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, I know that terminals are super weird and messy. In both the KDE Konsole (identifying itself as TERM=xterm-256color) and xterm (TERM=xterm) it just works flawlessly. My urxvt (TERM=rxvt-unicode-256color) just doesn’t. I also tried messing with TERM in urxvt, but no luck so far.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Unix terminals are quite limited in that regard. 🫤 You know how Ctrl works? The XOR 0x40 thing? And Alt doesn’t exist at all, it’s just a prefixed ESC byte.

I was surprised to see curses knowing about “Shift+Tab”, wondering how that is supposed to work. Well, it’s an escape sequence, of course (depending on the terminal, of course).

Well, in Xterm, I actually do get key combinations with the Shift modifier. Also, combinations of several modifiers just work exactly as I expect. But not in URXvt. Hmm.

Some work on the menu system to brighten my mood a little bit. No mouse support yet.

https://movq.de/v/932773e8c7/vid-1768500519.mp4

@prologic@twtxt.net Work and the general state of (gestures broadly) everything.

@bender@twtxt.net it works fine under jenny. Maybe it is a bug on Yarn?

Yes, if a twtxt contains something like “(This is a test. Will this work as it should?)”, it will show empty on Yarn.

Okay, I had heard of “River” before but I was not aware of this:

https://codeberg.org/river/river

River defers all window management policy to a separate window manager implementing the river-window-management-v1 protocol. This includes window position/size, pointer/keyboard bindings, focus management, window decorations, desktop shell graphics, and more.

This sounds promising and it follows the old X11 model. River does all the nasty Wayland work and I can make just the WM? 🤔🤯

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s not super comfortable, that’s right.

But these mouse events come with a caveat anyway:

ncurses uses the XM terminfo entry to enable mouse events, but it looks like this entry does not enable motion events for most terminal emulators. Reporting motion events is supported by, say, XTerm, xiate, st, or urxvt, it just isn’t activated by XM. This makes all this dragging stuff useless.

For the moment, I edited the terminfo entry for my terminal to include motion events. That can’t be a proper solution. I’m not sure yet if I’m supposed to send the appropriate sequence manually …

And the terminfo entries for tmux or screen don’t include XM at all. tmux itself supports the mouse, but I’m not sure yet how to make it pass on the events to the programs running inside of it (maybe that’s just not supported).

To make things worse, on the Linux VT (outside of X11 or Wayland), the whole thing works differently: You have to use good old gpm to get mouse events (gpm has been around forever, I already used this on SuSE Linux). ncurses does support this, but this is a build flag and Arch Linux doesn’t set this flag. So, at the moment, I’m running a custom build of ncurses as a quick hack. 😅 And this doesn’t report motion events either! Just clicks. (I don’t know if gpm itself can report motion events, I never used the library directly.)

tl;dr: The whole thing will probably be “keyboard first” and then the mouse stuff is a gimmick on top. As much as I’d like to, this isn’t going to be like TUI applications on DOS. I’ll use “Windows” for popups or a multi-window view (with the “WindowManager” being a tiny little tiling WM).

Most of it should work on other platforms, the bytecode VM that is. You may run into some platform quirks though that rely on syscall() – Let me know what you run into and I’ll try to fix them nw. The problem right now is I haven’t even begun to start work on another platform/architecture yet.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe the whole bridge idea is a mistake done twice (I encouraged the first time, it was a mistake to do so). In this case, the “Babel Tower” works; there is no need to interact with “others”, let it be just twtxt.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe

Work kills the soul

Since most of the jobs that we do nowadays are simply meaningless: Yes. Work kills the soul.

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe

Work kills the soul

it sure can! 🤣

Vacation: Doing crazy things like C on DOS, lots of Rust, bare-metal assembly code, everything is fine.

Back at work: How the fuck do I move an email in this web mail program? Am I stupid? 😮‍💨

@prologic@twtxt.net Yep! I like that this distillation metaphor makes it explicit: You have to go ahead and actually distill something. It doesn’t happen automatically. The metaphor acknowledges that this is work that needs to be done by someone.

I think this is finally a good metaphor to talk about “simple” software:

https://oldbytes.space/@psf/115846939202097661

Distilled software.

I quote in full:

principles of software distillation:

Old software is usually small and new software is usually large. A distilled program can be old or new, but is always small, and is powerful by its choice of ideas, not its implementation size.

A distilled program has the conciseness of an initial version and the refinement of a final version.

A distilled program is a finished work, but remains hackable due to its small size, allowing it to serve as the starting point for new works.

Many people write programs, but few stick with a program long enough to distill it.

I often tried to tell people about “simple” or “minimalistic” software, “KISS”, stuff like that, but they never understand – because everybody has a different idea of “simple”. The term “simple” is too abstract.

This is worth thinking about some more. 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yiha! Even autoscroll, very nice! The naming certainly drew inspiration from Urwid. I like it. Looking forward to eventually checking out its inner workings. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net No, I had my break/holiday earlier. I chose to work through, except the public holidays of course.

@prologic@twtxt.net so, you were not giving time off during the end of year? The company you work for didn’t give a break?

I basically worked through the Christmas break last year. I already had my holidays in Vietnam a few weeks earlier. 😆

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Not using OpenBSD or httpd? Yeah. It’s been working quite well since ~2017, so, meh, too lazy to switch now. But nothing is set in stone, of course.

And now the event loop is not a simple loop around curses’ getch() anymore but it can wait for events on any file descriptor. Here’s a simple test program that waits for connections on a TCP socket, accepts it, reads a line, sends back a line:

https://movq.de/v/93fa46a030/vid-1767547942.mp4

And the scrollbar indicators are working now.

I’ll probably implement timer callbacks using timerfd (even though that’s Linux-only). 🤔

Ending three luxurious do-what-I-please weeks; tomorrow is back to work. What do you all do during your break (and this assumes you had one, even if short)? I mostly did nothing, which in itself was truly something! So much, I long to do it all over again. A man can dream, right? Haha!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I noticed that your feed’s last modification timestamp was missing in my database. I cannot tell for certain, but I think it did work before. Turns out, your httpd now sends the Last-Modified with UTC instead of GMT. Current example:

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 06:50:20 UTC

I’m not a fan of this timestamp format at all, but according to the HTTP specification, HTTP-date must always use GMT for a timezone, nothing else: https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc9110.html#http.date

** 2026.01 week notes **
Will I succeed in making week notes a weekly activity this year?

Only time will tell!

…also, I mean…I feel like the answer is already“no” and that is fine, but anyways.

• I don’t usually take the holidays off from work, it is a nice time to catch up on stuff while still being able to hang out with my family who are all off from school and work.
  
• I’ve moved where I work in the house so that it is easier for me to hang out with the dog who’s struggling to go up and down stairs, which is kinda problematic since … ⌘ Read more