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The #py5 #LiveCoding feature can be briefly described as a tool that runs your module mode sketch and keeps an eye on changes at the source file, updating the running sketch with changes you save from your editor/IDE.

You can use with any coding editor from the command line, or, if you use #Thonny IDE you could help me test this experimental version of the thonny-py5mode plug-in!

https://discourse.processing.org/t/using-py5s-live-coding-feature-on-thonny-ide/48967

#CreativeCoding #Processing #Python #ComputingEducation

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The #py5 #LiveCoding feature can be briefly described as a tool that runs your module mode sketch and keeps an eye on changes at the source file, updating the running sketch with changes you save from your editor/IDE.

You can use it with any coding editor, invoking it from the command line, or, if you use #Thonny IDE you could help me test this experimental version of the thonny-py5mode plug-in that adds a Live Coding mode!

https://discourse.processing.org/t/using-py5s-live-coding-feature-on-thonny-ide/48967

#CreativeCoding #Processing #Python #ComputingEducation

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In-reply-to » @movq https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-08-05/0/POSTING-en.html Very interesting! I basically never analyze binary files, but this were some great thoughts on that subject. I hope to remember them when I find myself in the situation to look at binaries more closely.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I don’t do it that often, either. But when I do, I always wanted to have such a tool. :-) And since it turned out super easy to “implement” 
 Why not.

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In-reply-to » The author of the Xfce Wayland compositor on LLMs:

Most of this insane power consumption happens during the models training, so the additional cost of prompting, is minimal. Facebook invented cool ways to exted the environmental damage far beyond the training stage, by dumping the dirty data center water into nearby water sources, but that’s more so a Facebook problem, than a fault of AI.

I would still never waste my own money, paying for any AI subscriptions that my employer doesn’t already pay for, no matter if we use them, or not.

I am also against aggressive scraping and taking everything as training data, disregarding the authors wishes and license. I allow it on my website, mostly as proof that no matter how much they scrape my stuff, the real me remains both a superior webdev and artist.

I am well aware this makes me come across really egotistical, especially after developers far better than me, embraced vibe coding, arguably way too much. To give an example, all attempts to get Microsoft Copilot, that’s embedded into SharePoint, to generate an extension/uBlock filter to make SharePoint revert to the old superior UI failed, but I was able to do that in three lines of code ( https://thecanine.smol.pub/ublock-filters ), in half an hour, despite me never seeing the code of that page before. After a few of these comparisons, it is increasingly hard to see most of these tools, as my replacement.

I am not even going to talk about the people trying to imitate my art style with AI, until they can show me a result where all the squares are the same size, in a grid and actually square.

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The author of the Xfce Wayland compositor on LLMs:

https://www.spurint.org/journal/2026/07/llms-and-xfwl4

He openly admits that he’s totally aware of the issues. But he simply doesn’t give a fuck.

This is (part of) why this whole AI/LLM topic makes me so sad and angry: Many people in tech are such a disappointment. You’re smart and intelligent, but you don’t give a fuck about anything. “It’s just a tool.”

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@david@daiwei.me Absolutely insane! For almost all the tools I always need two hands for sure. I can’t imagine using just a single one. And then his stuff turns out 100 times better than I could ever do.

There are advantages with just a single hand, though. I cut myself in the finger with scissors earlier. How stupid is that! :-D

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In-reply-to » Dunno if anyone will find this interesting... But some ~6 months or so ago I experimented briefly with creating a whole bootloader + kernel + userland -- Basically an entire OS in the Mu programming language (which as you know I also designed and created) -- 6 months later I've worked on it some more after spending the last week working on improvements to Mu itself, which is now able to compile itself with its own Mu implemented compiler and now have an os/arch backend called muos/amd64 that boots into a running shell, with a tiny little vfs, UNIX-like semantics, syscalls, read/write, etc. It works pretty nicely, and aside from a small Assembly "nucleus", most of the Kernel and Userspace is written in Mu.

I just taught the scc SLOC tool I use how to detect and recognize the Mu programming language. So it’s actually a bit worse than your estimate. It’s more like ~60/30 at the moment:

>>> mu = 1445
>>> asm = 2365
>>> T = mu + asm
>>> mu / T * 100
37.9265091863517
>>> asm / T * 100
62.07349081364829

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In-reply-to » Advertise in ChatGPT | Hacker News Seriously?! 😳 wut da actual fuq?! đŸ˜±

@prologic@twtxt.net Our company is paying a shitload of money for all these (different) AI tools 
 I’m probably not allowed to tell you the exact number, but it is a lot. The only other way would be to lay off employees, so we can pay even more for AI. (Needless to say, that would be the worst possible move.)

For a private person, $20 a month is also pretty expensive, isn’t it? And then assume that you maybe need more than one AI tool. You’re quickly up to $50 a month or much more. This isn’t something that I, as a private person, will ever be willing to spend for this kind of stuff.

“AI” is just expensive as fuck. On every level. They will have to (ab)use every possible way to squeeze more money out of it, and that includes ads and what not.

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I finally built a prototype of a marking gauge with a cutter wheel out of some scraps.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/streichmassprototyp-mit-messerrad/

It had been a long time in coming, I bought some replacement cutting wheels three years ago for exactly that purpose. I also found out that I need more M3 countersink bolts for future marking gauges that I want to make (maybe two or three more). Luckily, I had exactly one. I thought I got way more than that, but M3 is very, very scarce in my collection. My M3 bolt was barely long enough to attach the cutting wheel to the bar. But it’s okay for the prototype.

I was pleasantly surprised that I managed to drill the 2.5mm diameter hole almost perfectly in center in the 8mm diameter aluminium round bar. Center finder, drill press and vise with a vertical prism for the win!

I knew upfront that the M5 steel bolt to lock the bar in place definitely needs to be replaced with a brass or aluminium one (maybe with a knurled head). Otherwise, it cuts into the aluminium bar and leaves ugly marks. These burrs might even scratch the workpiece. But, of course, I don’t have any brass on hand either. Alternatively, I swap out the aluminium bar for a steel or even stainless steel one. Stainless might be tricky to precisely drill and tap, though.

I already learned a few things by making this prototype. The final wooden fence can be even a bit bigger. This round thing behind is also too short, I’d like it to be a tad longer and thicker. The final one will be made from hardwood, not spruce. Other than that, it’s great and already more practical than my store-bought marking gauge with its round fence. This only causes the tool to roll around on the workbench. Or even roll off. Stupid design.

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In-reply-to » @prologic Hmmm, I have no idea how to solve that problem. 😅 Some jenny stuff aside, I received zero bug reports or code contributions since leaving GitHub in 2018.

@prologic@twtxt.net Oh, yes, just for clarity: This wasn’t a “pro GitHub” argument. 😅 I won’t go back there (or to another “forge”).

I think we’re totally on the same page: Decentralized Git hosting is good, but we haven’t solved the “collaboration” part yet. Or rather: We have to modernize it. The tools are already there, but (many) people don’t want to use them and think they’re clunky.

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I really think I should go back to Java.

Writing programs in Python is so exhausting. I want a compiler and I want static typing. No, linters and type checkers and IDEs are not good enough. Compilers catch way more errors in advance.

Rust is also exhausting. They’re constantly adding language features and, at the same time, the runtime library remains tiny and you need 3rd party libraries for everything. Many of those are still at version 0.x (SemVer!) and you can’t rely on anything. Often times, you need the latest Rust nightly compiler.

Go is 
 I don’t like it. And huge binaries.

I like C as a language, but it’s too fragile. I want to have a proper HashMap every now and then.

None of the above have good GUI libraries, at least not on Linux.

And then there’s Java. This is my fractal renderer that I wrote over 17 years ago:

https://movq.de/v/fcd3c4e557/vid-1784121825.mp4

It’s fast. It has a GUI with custom widgets and those weren’t even hard to make. It still works without changing a single line of code. The source code files have timestamps from 2009 and I just noticed that the JAR file I’m using in the video was compiled in 2010.

Java as a language is relatively easy to learn and to master. There are few surprises. The source code organization with packages is good. Java API docs are clear and well written.

The JVM ramp-up times have improved considerably:

https://movq.de/v/e7314e521e/vid-1784121998.mp4

This isn’t like the Dark Ages anymore. Might even be usable for some CLI tools.

The only thing where Java really sucks is anything close-ish to the kernel. Try issuing an ioctl() 
 I couldn’t have made my TUI framework in Java, but then again, I wouldn’t have needed to because Swing already exists and it just works.

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Windows NT 4 didn’t have a Device Manager. You know, this thing right here that got introduced with Windows 95:

Image

And that’s super awkward in NT4.

You know what doesn’t have a Device Manager, either? Linux. Why? đŸ€” Isn’t this one of the most useful system tools? It gives you an overview of the devices in your system and tells you which driver is used for them. Linux could really use such a tool, I think? đŸ€”

(There are programs like “hardinfo” and I remember ancient KDE providing such a tool, but they’re all an afterthought. Hardly integrated into the overall system.)

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So I’ve been working on GoNIX the last few days
 Which is derived from ”Linux – At least it’s entire build process. GoNIX however has a 100% Go userland, including the init process, package and service management.

Now
 As an experiment, because I was able to make much process on enhancing the build tools and package management, I decided to see if I could build a “Desktop” Gui of sorts


I still wanted it to be fairly minimal and lightweight. So I went with wayland (of course) and labwc and yambar. So far I’m liking the result 👌 42 packages in the wayland-desktop meta port. Not too bad. Not sure if I can slim that down anymore
 But trying to avoid Mesa/GL as that drags in far too much “cruft”.

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In-reply-to » @lyse Ah, you mean the categorization. Yeah, that would never work in Windows, at least not without having a centralized package manager (so there’s one authoritative source of which program belongs into which category).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s right, way harder than centrally managed. They even didn’t reach concensus over the main folder: “Alle Programme, “Alle Programme (x86)”, “All Programs”, “All Programmes”, etc. Anyway.

For class 11 (or maybe already in 10, I don’t remember exactly) we could choose either between traditional maths class with a graphical calculator or “Mathe mit CAS”. There were two teachers in my entire school who were able to teach the latter. It was also fairly new at the time I believe. Certainly unheard of for a „allgemeinbildendes Gymnasium“, maybe the technical ones were already offering it for some time, not sure. It was clear to me that I would take the maths with CAS class.

Each kid had to buy their own Cassiopeia A-Something. I don’t know how much that thing was (definitely more expensive than a graphical calculator) and whether the school subsidized that in any form. But it was slow and underpowered as hell. We rarely used it in class nor for homework (most if not all had already a desktop at home). Typically, when we worked with the CAS, we sat down on the desktop computers. Our class took place in one of the two computer rooms. The desktops were placed on the three sides (left, right, back, facing the walls or windows) and the regular school desks were in the middle. Since there were more pupils than desktops, we always shared. Nowadays, we call it pair programming. ;-)

For the exams we had the “mandatory part” (Pflichtteil) without any tools. Once we finished that and handed the papers to our teacher, we were then allowed to boot up our Cassiopeias and work with them for the second part. Before the exam started, everyone had to show the teacher that they reset their small computer to factory settings. This second part was called „Wahlteil“. But you had to do it in order to pass. So, I never understood the choice of this term. Maybe it’s because the first part is the exact same for everyone (graphical calculator and CAS class), but the second part was definitely different for the two classes. Each suited to their tools.

After one or two exams, it became clear that the Cassiopeia was far from ideal. So, we took the second part at the desktop computers from then on. Our teacher unplugged the network cables himself to avoid cheating. Each computer had an “HDD Sheriff” running that reset the disk at startup. There was also an issue that the personal user accounts were affected by that. Sometimes all your data were lost. If you were lucky, they were still there. So, we saved our Maple project to local disk (if the computer didn’t crash in between, that was no problem) and at least eventually before leaving the classroom, we then also saved it on the server. For that, the teacher quickly plugged in the cable, we saved, and then the cable was unplugged again immediately. Oh, and everybody used their USB sticks, too.

All in all, this Cassiopeia A-* was quite a useless purchase. :-D I’m not sure if I still have it. At least I thought several times about giving it to the flea market. Don’t know if I did or not.

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How do you pick the best subjects for year 12? This tool will help
The body that crunches the numbers for every Queensland student releases a tool for “probably the most accurate ATAR prediction that you’ll get”. ⌘ Read more

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Every now and then, I think that I have carefully proof-read my message enough times and hit the “Add message” button in tt. But then, in the message tree, I spot another missed typo. My process is then to go to my twtxt.txt and fix it by hand. However, I still have to clean up tt’s cache. This is rather tidious:

  1. Recall the sqlitebrowser ~/.local/share/twtxt/tt2.sqlite from my shell history.
  2. Switch to the “Browse data” tab.
  3. Go to the messages table and wait a second or two until it’s loaded.
  4. Sort by the created_at column twice, so that I get descending order.
  5. Select the first message, which is typically the one in question.
  6. Find the “Remove currently selected row” button in the tool bar.
  7. Commit the changes.
  8. Close sqlitebrowser.

So, I finally implemented the removal of messages from the cache in tt. I can now hit d and confirm the removal. Bam! Should have done that ages ago!

Image

Next up is the search, I think.

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Trump Risks Key Surveillance Authority Over ‘Unqualified’ Spy-Chief Pick
US lawmakers are alarmed that Bill Pulte, a housing official with no intelligence experience, is poised to take charge of one of the government’s most powerful surveillance tools. ⌘ Read more

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Wrongful Arrest Exposes Failures in One of the Oldest Police Face-Recognition Tools in the US
The ACLU is suing two Florida police departments over the arrest of a Fort Myers man in a child-abduction case, saying officers treated a flawed face recognition match as a near-certain ID. ⌘ Read more

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Show HN: We post-trained a model that pen tests instead of refusing your code
I’m Dimitrios at Cosine. Quick orientation first: the read-only scan is free and you can run it right now: that’s the part to try. The pen-test mode is gated behind written authorisation, because it’s live offensive testing against real systems; I’ll explain that below, it’s not a paywall thing.

The reason `cos` exists: most “AI security” tools wrap a general model, so they inherit its refusals — point one at a real offensive task and it hedges or declines, b 
 ⌘ Read more

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@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com That DORA quote is đŸ€Ż — and it perfectly explains why AI coding tools terrify me in certain contexts. Dropping Copilot into a codebase full of technical debt isn’t gonna fix the debt, it’s just gonna write more of it faster đŸ€Ł Fred Brooks would be nodding his head right now 🙏

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In-reply-to » @movq I'm very curious...

It’s one of the reasons in fact I’ve been working on bob so I have a very concrete and strong foundation for how these things work, how they behave and how bad or good they can be. I am on-purpose building bob to be not only a decent coding tool and general task completion tool, but with serious security boundaries, sanitation, auditing and compliance. If I’m going to succeed at building autoonmous agents that can cope with a wider array of varying inputs (mostly natural language, some structural language) then it needs to be both a) Safe and b) Robust

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In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

@bender@twtxt.net Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the “AI” we seemingly have available to us today is actually telligent, understands and has cognitive reasoning. It does not. All of these LLM models from big-tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba are all just very powerful, very large multidimensional neural networks with attention that are very good at statistical probabilities of ‘what comes next”. I think we get really upset over the wrong things sometimes. We need to continue to be upset that these đŸ€Ź companies have basically destroyed any meaningful value of the concept of Copyright and Intellectual Property and Works of art. The so-called “AI” we have today is just a tool. Can you say for certain that the typewriter and the computer ruined our ability to write? Perhaps yes, but we still learn how to do so, likewise, I still think that learning to write code, research, read and write are all valuable skills to learn. Later on once you have the basics, you can defer some of the “tedious” work to these models, because frankly, they’re far better at inferencing and pattern matching than you or i will ever be, not because they’re better at pattern-matching per se, but because they have been trained on a very large corpus and they are much much faster at doing the same basic things we are far superior at.

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Show HN: AISlop, a CLI for catching AI generated code smells
Hi, I’m Kenny, I’ve been building aislop. I starting working on this after using Claude Code, codex and opencode several times and noticing some slops. They aren’t syntax and passes most tests, they are patterns like empty catch blocks, useless comments, duplicated helpers, dead code and many more. So I built a tool to scan and check for these patterns and wired it into hooks so after each tool call, the agent checks for the slops.

You can try it out with npx aislop sca 
 ⌘ Read more

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‘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

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Palantir Held a Hack Week to Add New Controls to Software Used by ICE
The hackathon, held to build user-auditing tools for Palantir customers, comes as the company struggles to address employee concerns over its relationship with ICE. ⌘ Read more

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I Cloned Myself With Gemini’s AI Avatar Tool. The Result Was Unnervingly Me
I used the Gemini app to generate lifelike videos featuring a digital clone of myself. Google sees this as the future of creation. I’m still creeped out. ⌘ Read more

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Google I/O 2026 Live Blog: All the Gemini and Smart Glasses Updates as They Happen
Follow our live coverage of Google’s annual developer keynote, where the company will announce updates to its Gemini suite of AI tools and more details about Android XR smart glasses. ⌘ Read more

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A Kid With a Fake Mustache Tricked an Online Age-Verification Tool
To stop children from bypassing its age checks, Meta is revamping its age-verification tools with an AI system that analyzes images and videos for “visual cues,” such as height and bone structure. ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » @lyse These days (and it’s been like that for a while), almost everything is loaded on-demand depending on which hardware the OS finds, so you can simply copy all your files with cp -a, install a bootloader, adjust some minor things /etc/fstab, done. Well, maybe not “done”, but it’s easy to sort out the remaining stuff afterwards.

@bender@twtxt.net It’s been a while (6.5 years) since I’ve done this. I’d do it like this:

  • Boot some Linux from a USB stick on the new machine. Preferably Arch Linux, since that is what I’m running and that’ll make the upcoming chroot easier.
  • Partition the new disk, create LUKS devices, filesystems, 

  • Mount the new filesystems and copy all data (user data and the system itself – everything). Do this either over the network or by hooking up the old disk directly.
  • chroot into the new system (Arch has an arch-chroot tool for that which is used during normal installation, if I’m not mistaken). Inside the chroot, install the bootloader.
  • Do some fixups, like adjusting /etc/fstab or /etc/crypttab.

And I think that should be it. đŸ€”

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Light Phone Is Making Its Dumb Phone More Useful With Third-Party ‘Tools’
A new developer program for LightOS allows anyone to create tools for the Light Phone, whether that’s a local public transit app for your city or a way to read ebooks. ⌘ Read more

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Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me 
 and 
 am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

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In-reply-to » (#kwq4eea) @lyse Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the “old” knowledge to fall back on.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

even our hippest AI enthusiasts found it absolutely terrible

Does this refer to the training course or to the tools themselves? đŸ€”

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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the “old” knowledge to fall back on.

It’s concerning, I’ve warned about it many times, nobody listens.

I think the best thing one can do is explicitly not use any AI tools but keep your actual skills intact. Might be out of a (good) job for a while, but once this bubble bursts, this is who is going to get hired again. (I think.)

And considering how insanely expensive all this is, I’m still (mostly) convinced that the bubble will actually burst. This stuff just isn’t sustainable.


 or I might be wrong. And if so, I see an even darker future that I don’t want to put into words right now.

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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org AI result ahead, feel free to ignore.

I “asked” the AI at work the same question out of morbid curiousity. It “said” that SQLite converts that integer to floating point internally on overflows and then, when converting back, the x86 instruction cvttsd2si will turn it into 0x8000000000000000, even if the actual floating point value is outside of that range. So, yes, it allegedly actually saturates, as a side effect of the type conversion.

I couldn’t find anything about that automatic conversion in SQLite’s manual, yet, but an experiment looks like it might be true:

sqlite> select typeof(1 << 63);
╭─────────────────╼
│ typeof(1 << 63) │
╞═════════════════╡
│ integer         │
╰─────────────────╯

sqlite> select typeof((1 << 63) - 1);
╭──────────────────────╼
│ typeof((1 << 63) ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ real                 │
╰──────────────────────╯

As for cvttsd2si, this source confirms the handling of 0x8000000000000000 on range errors: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/cvttsd2si

The following C program also confirms it (run through gdb to see cvttsd2si in action):

<a href="https://txt.sour.is/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdint.h>
<a href="https://txt.sour.is/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdio.h>

int
main()
{
    int64_t i;
    double d;

    /* -3000 instead of -1, because `double` can’t represent a
     * difference of -1 at this scale. */
    d = -9223372036854775808.0 - 3000;

    i = d;
    printf("%lf, 0x%lx, %ld\n", d, i, i);

    return 0;
}

(Remark about AI usage: Fine, I got an answer and maybe it’s even correct. But doing this completely ruined it for me. It would have been much more satisfying to figure this out myself. I actually suspected some floating point stuff going on here, but instead of verifying this myself I reached for the unethical tool and denied myself a little bit of fun at the weekend. Won’t do that again.)

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In-reply-to » (#vzivuda) @kiwu Sorry, I have two functional brain cells left in my brain, and I'm not sure if you're asking What am I putting in it, as in a) when making some? Or as in b) when consuming/serving it?

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me it is called, in Spanish, “the mother”. It is created through a bit (not by much) effort, and kept as a starting point. Just like Asian cuisine has dishes that never cool, always cooking leaving always a base on it.

How do you think a lathe (and just about any tool, etc.) is done? Yup, in part by using a lathe. 😅

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@movq@www.uninformativ.de I know it’s crazy right đŸ€Ż these things are just tools. They’re not even remotely intelligent at all. In fact they are actually quite stupid. If you feed it garbage you get garbage out! The only interesting thing is that you get somewhat intelligible garbage out 😂

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@abucci@anthony.buc.ci coined the term “failscene”:

https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1771250567.039684

I wonder about using “failscene” to describe the current slate of AI tools and demos. In contrast with the demoscene, which is about getting very low powered computers to do cool things you wouldn’t expect them to be able to do, the failscene is about getting very high powered computers to fail at doing boring things we already know how to do without them. Plus you can stylize it fAIlscene if you’re inclined to.

I love it.

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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. đŸ€Šâ€â™€ïž 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.

Image

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In-reply-to » Yikes. https://adamj.eu/tech/2021/05/13/python-type-hints-how-to-fix-circular-imports/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The thing is that’s hard to avoid if TYPE_CHECKING, but documentation tools such as pdoc don’t support that 
 so it’s either type hints or API docs. đŸ€·

I hope I can eventually find a way out of this mess 


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In-reply-to » @lyse

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Sorry, I meant the builtin module:

$ python3 -m pep8 file.py
/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pep8.py:2123: UserWarning: 

pep8 has been renamed to pycodestyle (GitHub issue #466)
Use of the pep8 tool will be removed in a future release.
Please install and use `pycodestyle` instead.

  $ pip install pycodestyle
  $ pycodestyle ...

I can’t seem to remember the name pycodestyle for the life of me. Maybe that’s why I almost never use it.

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Since I used so much Rust during the holidays, I got totally used to rustfmt. I now use similar tools for Python (black and isort).

What have I been doing all these years?! I never want to format code manually again. đŸ€ŁđŸ˜…

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mu (”) now has builtin code formatting and linting tools, making ” far more useful and useable as a general purpose programming language. Mu now includes:

  • An interpreter for quick “scriptinog”
  • A native code compiler for building native executables (Darwin / macOS only for now)
  • A builtin set of developer tools, currently: fmt (-fmt), check (-check) and test (-test).

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In-reply-to » @lyse Yeah I remember you said some days back that your interest in compilers was rekindled by my work on mu (”) 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can tell you this right now, writing assembly / machine code is fucking hard workℱ 😓 I’m sure @movq@www.uninformativ.de can affirm đŸ€Ł And when it all goes to shitℱ (which it does often), man is debugging fucking hard as hell! Without debug symbols I can’t use the regular tools like lldb or gdb 😂

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

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ve been awake at that time, didn’t notice anything. đŸ€” Where was that BGP analyzer again 
 😅 There’s a tool that keeps track of these things, right? I forgot what it was.

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In-reply-to » H
 Ho
 How have I not heard about vim-tagbar before? 😳

@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

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#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

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PEP 815: Deprecate RECORD.jws and RECORD.p7s
This PEP deprecates the RECORD.jws and RECORD.p7s wheel signature files. Lack of support in tooling means that these virtually unused files do not provide the security they purport. Users looking for wheel signing should instead refer to index hosted attestations. ⌘ Read more

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Android shopping list apps disappointed me too many times, so I went back to writing these lists by hand a while ago.

Here’s what’s more fun: Write them in Vim and then print them on the dotmatrix printer. đŸ„ł

And, because I can, I use my own font for that, i.e. ImageMagick renders an image file and then a little tool converts that to ESC/P so I can dump it to /dev/usb/lp0.

(I have so much scrap paper from mail spam lying around that I don’t feel too bad about this. All these sheets would go straight to the bin otherwise.)

Image

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In-reply-to » @bender Thanks for this illustration, it completely “misunderstood” everything I wrote and confidently spat out garbage. 👌

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

Skill Erosion vs. Skill Evolution

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

tl;dr

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

Never again

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

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In-reply-to » For the innocent bystanders (because I know that I won’t change @bender’s opinion):

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

1. The User Perspective (Untrustworthiness)

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

  • AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  • The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
2. The Moral/Political Perspective (Skill Erosion)

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

  • Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  • Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

  • Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

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In-reply-to » It happened.

@prologic@twtxt.net Nothing, yet. It was sent in written form. There’s probably little point in fighting this, they have made up their minds already (and AI is being rolled up en masse in other departments), but on the other hand, there are – truthfully – very few areas where AI could actually be useful to me.

There are going to be many discussions about this 


This is completely against the “spirit” of this company, btw. We used to say: “It’s the goal that matters. Use whatever tools you think are appropriate.” That’s why I’m allowed to use Linux on my laptop. Maybe they will back down eventually when they realize that trying to push this on people is pointless. Maybe not.

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Erlang Solutions: ​​Expert Insights from Our Latest Webinars
The Erlang Solutions team has been creating webinars that share knowledge, spark ideas, and celebrate the BEAM community. Each one offers a chance to explore new tools, hear fresh perspectives, and learn from the people building scalable and reliable systems every day.

If you haven’t tuned in yet, here’s a look at some of our recent sessions, full of practical insights and new thinking shaping the future of the BEAM.

**SAF 
 ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » And maybe I should go back to using GUI designers. Haven’t used those since the Visual Basic days. đŸ€” It wasn’t pretty, but you got results very quickly and efficiently.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

The one for Delphi was quite good.

It was! I didn’t use Delphi for long, though. Dunno why, I always gravitated towards Visual Basic back then. 😅

These days I don’t deal with GUI programming anymore.

I also avoid it when possible, because 
 it’s exhausting, because 
 the tools that I have/know are “subpar”. Doing anything regarding GUIs always feels like a chore. That wasn’t the case in the VB days.

Well, I made this in ~2009 with Java/Swing and it was pretty nice to work with, custom widgets and all:

Image

I wouldn’t dare doing this with GTK.

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In-reply-to » Hmmm 🧐 I'm annectodaly not convinced so-called "AI"(s) really save timeℱ. -- I have no proof though, I would need to do some concrete studies / numbers... -- But, there is one benefit... It can save you from typing and from worsening RSI / Carpal Tunnel.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I guess I wasn’t talking about the speed of interesting text/context, but more the “slowness” of these tools. I think I can build/ solutions and fix bugs faster most of the time? Hmmm đŸ€” I think the only thing it’s able to do better than me is grasp large codebases and do pattern machines a bit better, mostly because we’re limited by the interfaces we have to use and in my ase being vision impaired doesn’t help :/

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How to Add MCP Servers to Claude Code with Docker MCP Toolkit
AI coding assistants have evolved from simple autocomplete tools into full development partners. Yet even the best of them, like Claude Code, can’t act directly on your environment. Claude Code can suggest a database query, but can’t run it. It can draft a GitHub issue, but can’t create it. It can write a Slack message,
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[$] Gccrs after libcore
Despite its increasing popularity, the Rust programming language is still
supported by a single compiler, the LLVM-based rustc. At the 2025 GNU Tools\‹Cauldron, Pierre-Emmanuel Patry said that a lot of people are waiting
for a GCC-based Rust compiler before jumping into the language. Patry, who
is working on just that compiler (known as “gccrs”), provided an update on
the status of that project and what is coming next. ⌘ Read more

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Ubuntu 25.10 released
Ubuntu\‹25.10, “Questing Quokka”, has been released. This release includes
Linux 6.17, GNOME 49, GCC 15, Python 3.13.7,
Rust 1.85, and more. This release also features Rust-based
implementations of sudo and coreutils; LWN covered the switch to the
Rust-based tools in March. The 25.10 version of Ubuntu flavors
Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu
Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubun 
 ⌘ Read more

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