@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh that’s fine, Mu can compile to native code and so far binaries. at least on macOS are in the order of Kb in size 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net That might be a challenge, at least in 16-bit Real Mode: The OS follows the model of COM files on DOS, i.e. the size of the binary cannot exceed 64 KiB and heap+stack of the running program will have to fit into that same 64 KiB. 😅 (The memory layout is very rigid, each process gets such a 64 KiB slice.)

And in 64-bit Long Mode, there is no “kernel” yet. The thing in the video is literally just a small bare-metal program.

But some day, maybe. 😃

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’d be cool if you could get µ (Mu) running in your little toyOS 🤣 You’d technically only have to swap out the syscall() builtin for whatever your toy OS supports 🤔

Almost all photos turned out to be blurred today. That made sorting a very quick process. Delete, delete, delete, … https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-12-26/

My little toy operating system from last year runs in 16-bit Real Mode (like DOS). Since I’ve recently figured out how to switch to 64-bit Long Mode right after BIOS boot, I now have a little program that performs this switch on my toy OS. It will load and run any x86-64 program, assuming it’s freestanding, a flat binary, and small enough (< 128 KiB code, only uses the first 2 MiB of memory).

Here I’m running a little C program (compiled using normal GCC, no Watcom trickery):

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/los86%2D64.mp4

Image

Next steps could include:

• Use Rust instead of C for that 64-bit program?
  
• Provide interrupt service routines. (At the moment, it just keeps interrupts disabled.)

When I return to a project after several weeks ⌘ Read more

I’m still deciding if I want to watch #Pluribus. When people told me Carol only wanted to meet the English speaking “imune” people it was such a turn off… like, it sounds rather offensive…

@prologic@twtxt.net Not even entirely sure how I did it myself, but likely a lucky combination of the new tail swirl, the legs closer to the screen being bigger and the head looking slightly to the side (eye & ear position), with bottom part of the hair, going behind the snout. The white is just an outline, around most of my works, so I don’t think that plays a part.

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I take my 0°C over the 36°C anytime! Even with yesterday’s gray and windy sleet in my face. However, there are definitely more pleasant times to walk in town, I’ll give you that. For example on 0°C sunny today: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-12-25/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I watched a few of these thanks to you! Very cool shit™ 😎

Exactly what type of creature is infamous Christmas villain The Grinch?
He’s green, he dresses up as Santa and he has a bad attitude - but what species is he actually supposed to be ? Lucy E. Hyde: The Grinch is one of the… ⌘ Read more

@dce@hashnix.club merry Christmas to you too!

@thecanine@twtxt.net Is it because you’ve used white pixels around it to sort of give it aht 3D look? 👀 Hmm? 🤔

Santa pulled over by cops for speeding in Fulton County, Ohio
It looks as though Santa may be a little delayed in setting out to deliver everyone’s presents this evening. Every child has wondered, at some point o… ⌘ Read more

When I have to explain our technical choice to someone who’s not technical at all ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net I might misunderstand what you wrote, but only hashing the message once and storing the hash together with the message in the database seems a way better approch to me. It’s fixed and doesn’t change, so there’s no need to recompute it during runtime over and over and over again. You just have it. And can easily look up other messages by hash.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Maybe there’s another meaning I’m not aware of, but this doesn’t look like a shitpost to me. Congrats, I guess. ;-)

Swearing can actually make us physically stronger, study finds
Reeling off verbal expletives seems to have a measurable empowering effect on human strength. A few years back, we reported on the discovery that swea… ⌘ Read more

Christmas lychees best quality in decades despite tough season
After season constraints and rain-delayed harvests, this summer is producing exceptional Queensland lychees, according to the wholesalers. ⌘ Read more

I just had a closer look at https://git.mills.io/prologic/mu and it motivated me to do some compiler building myself again. Hopefully, I find some time in the next free days. I’m bad at it, but it’s always great fun.

2025 end the year rewind:

Compared to only 3 new artworks in 2024 and next to no work, on other projects, this year I not only met the self-imposed goal of monthly pixelart, but exceeded it by 50%, with 18 additions in total.

Relicensed the majority of canine faction owned art and projects, under two less restrictive Creative Commons licensees*. This also applies retroactively, to everyone who used/archived our art and projects, back when the old license didn’t allow it.

Disappointed by the current state of the Internet and continued lack of competition among browsers, completely reworked the main website* and made Smol Drive** (a new image gallery project), both made to be compatible with as many web and Gemini browsers, as possible.

*see https://thecanine.smol.pub
**see https://thecanine.smol.pub/smolbox

Home Alone: the Wet Bandits would not have survived in real life
The classic Christmas movie sees the hapless thieves subjected to all manner of traumatic injuries. Adam Taylor: The festive movie season is upon us, … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de A crocodile had bitten the big submarine internet cable that connects Australia to Europe. The investigations revealed that some construction work last week accidentally tore up the protective layer around it. That went unnoticed, unfortunately, so marine life had an easy job today. For just 40 minutes, they were quite fast in repairing the damage if you ask me! These communication cables are fricking large.

Just kidding, I completely made that up. :-D I didn’t notice any outage either. But I didn’t try to connect to Down Under at the time span in question.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de From 2:50 PM to 3:23 PM AEST (+10 UTC) there was an outage. Everything went “up” on Down Detector, my EU region went offline, numerous sites were unavailable, and so on. Basically everything to/from the EU appeared to basically go kaput.

Hey EU friends 👋 wtf happened to the EU Internet today for about 40 minutes or so?

Pickers ‘living in squalor’ claim their end-of-season bonus was unfairly withheld
Ten pickers who worked at Hallmark Cherries’ orchard in NSW complain about poorly maintained accommodation and failure to pay an end-of-season bonus. ⌘ Read more

Trump lays out ambitious timetable for America’s return to the Moon
The first human to set foot on the lunar surface in more than five decades could do so sooner than you think. Last week, US President Donald Trump sig… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org These tables get shuffled around every time your OS switches to another process. It’s crazy that so much is going on behind the scenes.

Pentagon officials reopen ‘Yankee Blue’ memo search after FOIA appeal
The documents concern an alleged directive to halt a notorious hazing ritual involving claims of alien technology. Back in September, we reported on t… ⌘ Read more

Wow, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, so many tables. No idea what I expected (I’m totally clueless on this low-level stuff), but that was quite an interesting surprise to me. https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-21/0/POSTING-en.html

@kiwu@twtxt.net Ta, same to you!

Reports of UFOs over Wyoming power plant continue to endure
Something has been harassing the Red Desert and Jim Bridger Power Plant in Rock Springs for over 13 months. Unidentified drone-like objects shining be… ⌘ Read more

The end of an era: 3I/ATLAS completes its closest approach to the Earth
The enigmatic interstellar interloper has passed the closest point to us it will ever reach and is now heading back out into space. It is perhaps the … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kiwu@twtxt.net it just so happens to be a happy coincidence that I’m extending mu’s capabilities to now include a native toolchain-free compiler (doesn’t rely on any external gcc/clang or linkers, etc) that lowers the mu source code into an intermediate representation / IR (what @movq@www.uninformativ.de refers to as “thick layers of abstractions”…) and finally to SSA + ARM64 + Mach-O encoder to produce native binary executables (at least for me on my Mac, Linux may some later?) 🤣

@kiwu@twtxt.net Assembly is usually the most low-level programming language that you can get. Typical programming languages like Python or Go are a thick layer of abstraction over what the CPU actually does, but with Assembler you get to see it all and you get full control. (With lots of caveats and footnotes. 😅)

I’m interested in the boot process, i.e. what exactly happens when you turn on your computer. In that area, using Assembler is a must, because you really need that fine-grained control here.

Note to self: check if pygments can generate SVG, test and/or find another way to incorporate nicely formatted code into a py5 sketch… #python

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, well, given that I didn’t need this for such a long time, it’s probably not an essential tool. 😅

I’ve often wanted to have an outline of text documents, though, and tagbar/ctags can do that as well:

Image

Image

This isn’t as powerful as the “Navigator” tool in StarOffice/LibreOffice (which can be used to rearrange the document), but still pretty useful:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/so31.mp4

@kiwu@twtxt.net I’m doing great, how’re ya going? Just two more days and then I never have to work anymore. In this year.

I just baked two trays of gingerbread. One definitely good one and another experiment.

This morning was also super pretty: https://lyse.isobeef.org/morgensonne-2025-12-19/

No ocean, say scientists, but Titan’s ‘slushy tunnels’ could still harbor life
Saturn’s moon Titan may be home to habitable subterranean pockets of liquid water. The largest of the ringed gas giant’s army of 274 moons, Titan piqu… ⌘ Read more

When we hand the app over to users without giving them any documentation ⌘ Read more

When I have to jump into an emergency on a project I know absolutely nothing about ⌘ Read more

Ooooooooooh! If your .vimrc is as messy as mine, you’ll be pleased to learn that Tagbar can show a sorted list of all key mappings:

Image

🤯

Astronomers have discovered a planet that is the shape of a lemon
The mysterious extrasolar world was spotted with the help of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Contrary to what some flat Earthers still claim, plane… ⌘ Read more

When I go to a client meeting while there are still several open bugs on their side ⌘ Read more

PEP 819: JSON Package Metadata
This PEP proposes introducing JSON encoded core metadata and wheel file format metadata files in Python packages. Python package metadata (“core metadata”) was first defined in PEP 241 to use RFC 822 email headers to encode information about packages. This was reasonable in 2001; email messages were the only widely used, standardized text format that had a parser in the standard library. However, issues with handling different encodings, differing handling of line breaks, and other differences between i … ⌘ Read more

@zotero@zotero I noticed that some combinations of XFCE appearance (light) themes and Zotero made the menu “disappear” (black on black) as the window title was dark. Changing the Zotero to a dark theme or changing the XFCE theme worked (but then, I liked the dark window title on a light theme best…). Should I try to open an issue about this, or is it a XFCE issue? I don’t want to burden the maintainers but it was a bit disturbing not to find the menus…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Pretty sure all my mu solutions are very slow, but not so slow as I optimized most of the implementations to avoid as much brute forcing as I could.

Interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS is about to make its closest approach
After months of speculation, we will soon get our best views yet of the mysterious interstellar interloper. By now, just about everyone will have hear… ⌘ Read more

When I try to help a teammate and end up creating even more bugs in their code ⌘ Read more

‘Disclosure Day’: Spielberg’s new UFO movie trailer has dropped
We finally know the name of Steve Spielberg’s new UFO-themed movie - and the official trailer is here as well. Last year, rumors began to circulate su… ⌘ Read more

https://li-ma.nl/

«Our online catalogue comprises the largest media art collection in the Netherlands. Search through more than 3,500 works of art, from video-art pioneers from the 1960s to up-and-coming talents and well-known contemporary artists working with the latest technologies. New works are continuously added. The works are available for screenings, exhibitions and research.»

Via @ranoya@ranoya

#NewMediaArt #CreativeCoding #DigitalPreservation

When I try to make a small change to the CSS ⌘ Read more

When I’ve already been struggling for hours to fix a bug ⌘ Read more

#Processing & #py5 tip:
Remember the shapes you put on draw() will be redrawn over and over, and if they don’t move (leaving a trail) you might want to either clean each frame with background(...), or stop the draw loop (noLoop() in Processing or no_loop() in py5), otherwise you kill the anti-aliasing of the lines :D

”`python
import py5

def setup():

py5.size(200, 200)
py5.stroke_weight(2)
# a line that will drawn once only
py5.line(10, 10, 190, 90)  

def draw():

# you could clean the frame here with background(200)
# this other line will be redrawn many times
py5.line(10, 110, 190, 190) 

def key_pressed():

py5.save('out.png')

py5.run_sketch()

”`

Image

#Processing & #py5 tip:
Remember the shapes you put on draw() will be redrawn over and over, and if they don’t move (leaving a trail) you might want to either clean each frame with background(...), or stop the draw loop (noLoop() in Processing or no_loop() in py5), otherwise you kill the anti-aliasing of the lines/strokes/edges!

I’m posting this tip because even using these tools for years and knowing this, today I briefly thought something was odd/broken because my lines were ugly with no “smoothing” :D

”`python
import py5

def setup():

py5.size(200, 200)
py5.stroke_weight(2)
# a line that will drawn once only
py5.line(10, 10, 190, 90)  

def draw():

# you could clean the frame here with background(200)
# this other line will be redrawn many times
py5.line(10, 110, 190, 190) 

def key_pressed():

py5.save('out.png')

py5.run_sketch()

”`

Image

When I inspect the legacy code I’ll have to maintain and improve ⌘ Read more

US Space Force reveals new naming scheme for its weapon systems
The youngest branch of the US military has revealed its new naming scheme at a conference in Florida. Established in 2019, the US Space Force aims to … ⌘ Read more

I cleaned up all my of AoC (Advent of Code) 2025 solutions, refactored many of the utilities I had to write as reusable libraries, re-tested Day 1 (but nothing else). here it is if you’re curious! This is written in mu, my own language I built as a self-hosted minimal compiler/vm with very few types and builtins.

https://git.mills.io/prologic/aoc2025

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I shrank Day 9 Part 2 from “cover the whole map” to “only track the interesting lines.” By compressing coordinates to just the unique x/y breakpoints, the grid got tiny. I still flood-fill and do the corner-pair checks, but now on that compact grid with weighted prefix sums for instant rectangle checks. Result: far less RAM, way less CPU, same correct answer.

I just completed “Printing Department” - Day 4 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/4 – Again, I’m doing this in mu, a Go(ish) / Python(ish) dynamic langugage that I had to design and build first which has very few builtins and only a handful of types (ints, no flots). 🤣

I just completed “Lobby” - Day 3 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/3 – Again, I’m doing this in mu, a Go(ish) / Python(ish) dynamic langugage that I had to design and build first which has very few builtins and only a handful of types (ints, no flots). 🤣

‘Little Foot’ fossil may belong to totally new species of human ancestor
The remains of a prehistoric skeleton found in a cave in South Africa may be something completely new to science. First discovered in 1994 in the Ster… ⌘ Read more

I’m having to write my own functions like this in mu just to solve AoC puzzles :D

fn pow10(k) {
    p := 1
    i := 0
    while i < k {
        p = p * 10
        i = i + 1
    }
    return p
}

I just completed “Gift Shop” - Day 2 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/2 – But again, I’m solving this in my own language mu that I had to build first 🤣

I’m seeing crashes in the 3D subsystem. (Gallium? Glamor? Whatever other Mesa thing they have? No idea.) In the logs I find this:

malloc(): unaligned tcache chunk detected

And that’s why I still care about Rust and want to learn more about it, even though it’s giving me so much headache and I’ve given up so many times. Because Rust currently seems to be the only popular systems programming language that tries to eliminate these error classes.

And of course “the Rust experiment” in the Linux kernel has recently been concluded as “successful”, so that alone is reason enough for me:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/

I just completed “Secret Entrance” - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode https://adventofcode.com/2025/day/1 — However I did it in my own toy programming language called mu, which I had to build first 🤣

That’s the right answer! You are one gold star closer to decorating the North Pole. [Continue to Part Two]

Whoo! Making progress! With AoC 2025 solutions implemented in my own toy language 🤣

Ahh that’s because I forgot to call main() at the end of the source file. mu is a bit of a dynamic programming language, mix of Go(ish) and Python(ish).

$ ./bin/mu examples/aoc2025/day1.mu 
Execution failed: undefined variable readline

And I’m back from my holidays! 🥳 Back to work boo 😒

Using #Python’s #pathlib to compare two repos and get back some missing files from a “recovered” version of a repo (mostly stuff in .gitignore that is handy not to discard right now).

from pathlib import Path

a = Path('sketch-a-day')
b = Path('sketch-a-day_broken')

files_a =  {p.relative_to(a) for p in a.rglob('*')
    if '.git' not in str(p)
    if 'cache' not in str(p)
    if 'checkpoint' not in str(p)
}
files_b =  {p.relative_to(b) for p in b.rglob('*')
    if '.git' not in str(p)
    if 'cache' not in str(p)
    if 'checkpoint' not in str(p)
}
missing = files_b - files_a

for p in missing:
    (b / p).rename((a / p))

Flower growers see red over glyphosate import rule change
The Australian government says it plans to stop treating imported flowers with glyphosate, but local growers are not happy and are raising biosecurity concerns. ⌘ Read more

The battle to trademark matcha as counterfeits from outside Japan rise
As Japanese matcha producers struggle with the surge in demand, the industry is facing another problem — counterfeit matcha. ⌘ Read more

How experiences can shape a belief in flat Earth and other conspiracies
Researchers have long explored what might lead people to believe in things that can be easily disproven. Eli Elster: On Feb. 22, 2020, “Mad” Mike Hugh… ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe Time to become a trixie or forky!

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Yes, exactly. It also blows my mind that with sooo much less budget and equipment, her videos are way superior to productions of big TV stations.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I swear, Her vlog is all I needed to cleanse my soul! Full of pure human interactions (whenever there is any), No BS No pretending and No Nonsense. Again, Thank you!

When the lead dev asks me to explain in detail the code I let the AI write for me ⌘ Read more

When I remember I was supposed to deploy something to production today ⌘ Read more

When I haven’t had my first coffee yet and the architect starts talking technical to me ⌘ Read more

Water thieves forced to pay $558,000
Jindalee Road Wines and its former manager have been penalised $558,000 for illegally tapping into an irrigation pipeline and stealing water. ⌘ Read more

Supersized strawberries fill supermarket shelves
Seasonal conditions are leading to big berries this summer, with the fruit on the larger side in some regions because of a wetter spring. ⌘ Read more

What the fresh hell! “Glance” wants to take over my Android lock screen and won’t take NO for an answer, just “Not now — so I’ll ask again later!”

https://9to5google.com/2024/04/26/glance-android-lockscreen-motorola-turn-off/

What the fresh hell! “Glance” wants to take over my Android lock screen and won’t take NO for an answer, just “Not now — so I’ll ask again later!”

Updade: found the app and disabled it, I hope it won’t be able ta ask again anything.

Tycoon offers entire $3B company as reward for proof that the Earth is flat
76-year-old billionaire Tim Boyle has challenged flat Earthers to take a photo of the void at the edge of the world. Those who believe that the Earth … ⌘ Read more

Waiting for @prologic@twtxt.net to make it back from his luxurious vacation, to engage on Australia’s teen-under-16 social media banning technical, parental, and philosophical discourse.

Humans can detect buried objects without directly touching them
A new study has highlighted a surprising innate ability common to shorebirds that humans also possess. Most people will have tried digging through the… ⌘ Read more

Webp, though it has been around for a long while, wasn’t fully supported on all browsers until recently. The other formats has been in use for such a long time, proving to work just fine, that the advantages Webp provides haven’t been seemingly enough to merit a switch.

Google is also the one behind Webp, and, well, people don’t trust, nor like, them much.

Webp, though it has been around for a long while, wasn’t fully supported on all browsers until recently. The other formats have been in use for such a long time, proving to work just fine, that the advantages Webp provides haven’t been seemingly enough to merit a switch.

Google is also the one behind Webp, and, well, people don’t trust, nor like, them much.

May I turn your attention to this timeless masterpiece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkyFHx4ncR0 (Terra Ferma - Floating)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @zvava@twtxt.net I think people get sick of everything changing all the time and so don’t bother adopting things to change when things are already good enough 🤷

i’m always open to suggestions: PRs also welxome 🤣

Searching the web a bit brings up lots of threads where people hate WebP. The problem being that browsers support WebP but other programs tend to be problematic … ? 🤔

Further evidence points to giant columns beneath Pyramids of Giza
New satellite data reportedly backs up claims of huge structures situated deep beneath Egypt’s Giza Plateau. Back in March, an international team of s… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I like this one. Haven’t been to the Golden Bridge yet? Make sure you do!

Researchers want UFOs to be a topic of serious academic study
A growing movement aims to turn the phenomenon from a fringe topic into a subject of genuine academic pursuit. While many still dismiss UFOs as pseudo… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Here you go:

(LTT = “Linus Tech Tips”, that’s the host.)

LTT: There was a recent thing from a major tech company, where developers were asked to say how many lines of code they wrote – and if it wasn’t enough, they were terminated. And there was someone here that was extremely upset about that approach to measuring productivity, because–

Torvalds: Oh yeah, no, you shouldn’t even be upset. At that point, that’s just incompetence. Anybody who thinks that’s a valid metric is too stupid to work at a tech company.

LTT: You do know who you just said that about, right?

Torvalds: No.

LTT: Oh. Uh, he was a prominent figure in the, uh, improved efficiency of the US government recently.

Torvalds: Oh. Apparently I was spot on.

Went to Ba Na Hills today, but honestly it was so cold and misery i couldn’t take very good photos 🤣 Here’s a few shots i managed!

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net do you know what I also find equally just as stupid and dumb is having to upgrade the software license on something just to be able to get OIDC or OAuth support ffs 🤦‍♂️

can somebody please transcribe what he said and post it here? 🙏 I think it’s too good just to waste in a video it needs to be preserved. 🤣

Fuck me, soooooooo beautiful! Awwww! :‘-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYfKgi133qo

This focuses more on the landscape part, other episodes also have amazing interactions with the locals. I cannot recommend the Itchy Boots channel enough. It’s in my top three channels of all time I believe. I hardly get the travel bug, but this has now changed. Watching Noraly’s videos brings me great joy. It also shows humanity is not lost, contrary to what one might think in this crazy world. :-)

Caution, this channel gets very addictive!