It’s the little things that make me happy these days. Like adding a function to search for text with various encodings to my hex editor. All neatly organized in the menu and with accelerators.
Just saw it happen on Mastodon, so I think that scrolling is simply broken in Firefox. ☠️
FTR, also happens with Openbox on X11 and with labwc on Wayland, so this isn’t related to my custom X11 window manager.
Oh god … this appears to be related to the input device? Using the scrollbar is fine but using the mouse wheel is not? https://movq.de/v/66db24e1ee/vid-1787378419.mp4
Emptied the CSS, removed the <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">, now it’s just plain HTML and it still happens.
There is this extremely annoying issue with my website:
https://movq.de/v/4acced3c8e/scroll.mp4
Notice how I’m scrolling, then switching to another tab, switching back, and then the scrolling position is different?
What the hell could cause this? It’s not always like this and I have only seen it in Firefox so far (but I very rarely use Chromium anyway), and this really happens a lot on my site but not on others.
Any ideas? Did I screw up the CSS somehow? 🤔
@arne They’re everywhere, send help
@arne Einfach so als Wahlergebnis verkünden. Dann denken die alle: „Ach, Mist, wie blöd, schon zu spät, na dann muss ich ja nicht mehr hin.“ Fertig. ✅
@lyse Oh yeah, going full Prinzessin Müllabfuhr! 🥳 👸
@lyse 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.
@lyse These look extra great with redshift enabled. 😅
@lyse Not that often – except for the last few months. 😅 I was reorganizing lots of repos, merging them, splitting them, changing author names, whatever. Having an empty root commit was super handy (if there was one).
Website might come back soon, although probably mostly unchanged. I have no idea how to stop the bots. 🤷♀️ So I’ll just gonna live with it? Is that the key to happiness™? 🤷♀️
@david Next year, apparently, but less spectacular. 🤔
@lyse Nice! Oh yes, observing the sun is exhausting, it’s always so hot. And for not using a tripod, these shots are pretty good!
During sunset: https://movq.de/v/6432f3fe0c/g.webp
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.”
@itsericwoodward It only did that after I asked it what’s going on. Before that, it treated all my attempts as regular trustworthy (but silently “corrected”) sources. Only a completely garbled up page (all words put into random order) was recognized as garbage. Everything else was: “Hey, that’s a good source! Here’s a summary: $correct_summary_with_original_meaning_even_though_the_actual_page_said_otherwise”
I hate having my website offline, so I tried to bring it back in a honey-potted version: “AI” agents get served article versions with inverted meaning, like “do” replaced with “don’t” and so on.
It didn’t work. Claude noticed it and “fixed” it back to the original version. When I asked it, “wait, nowhere on the page does it say $string, check again”, it said:
https://movq.de/v/c784eed33e/s.png
This is the creepiest shit ever. Silently “fixing” stuff behind my back is the epitome of untrustworthiness.
Open the bay doors, HAL.
@david Sorry, I can’t do this anymore. A large part of my work (text, code, thoughts, …) of the last 20-25 years has been stolen and is now being sold at rampant prices to idiots who then complain about me being a backwards bitch (I get to hear this every single day). Everything I say and do in public is being abused.
Fuck that, I’m out.
@lyse That sounds pretty elaborate. We did something similar last year (when this stuff still mattered, lol), but it was super easy to spot.
And then there was this, of course: https://movq.de/v/4d3971566e/pentest.webp 🤣
@thecanine This is brilliant, I love it. 😃
@lyse Hmm! I expected worse. 😅 (Never heard Czech in person.)
@prologic I only have one potential machine for this: My old netbook. I don’t want to accidentally brick it, though … 😅 It was scary enough to run my own OS on this.
Aber Auslöffeln werden es trotzdem wieder ganze andere Leute müssen. Wie immer. Das ist das bittere an der Sache. Trifft immer die Falschen.
Prinzessin Müllabfuhr. Den Namen mache ich mir jetzt zueigen. Mich dagegen wehren kann ich eh nicht. 😐
Kollege meinte mal halb sarkastisch, irgendwann werden Firmen dann wieder Menschen einstellen, weil die billiger sind.
Wir gehen teilweise von Cloud-IaaS-Hostern wieder zurück zu Hardware, weil das billiger, flexibler, schneller ist … Derzeit zumindest. Die Cloud-Hostern kommen mit dem Nachkaufen von RAM nicht hinterher, sodass ständig „die Cloud voll“ ist. (Und, ja, natürlich wird sich darüber heftigst aufgeregt, aber dass das genau am eigenen Verhalten, nämlich der religiösen Liebe zur AI, liegt, merken sie nicht.)
Es ist auch jedes Augenmaß weg. Die „fette“ Kiste mit 64 CPUs, 256 GB RAM und 2 TB Platte wird nach allen Regeln der Kunst vollgekleistert. Irgendein Furz-Workload braucht 24 GB RAM, aber das ist jetzt normal und wird akzeptiert. So ist das jetzt halt.
@prologic Just out of curiosity, have you ever ran this on real hardware? 😃
Hm, interesting: https://git.mills.io/prologic/muos/src/branch/main/nucleus/nucleus.asm You’re clearing the VGA buffer in each mode (real mode, protected mode, long mode). Why’s that? Wouldn’t it be good enough to only do that after you’ve reached long mode? 🤔
Germans love consonants – and it’s the opposite with Scandinavian languages, isn’t it? 😅 This is so crazy for me to listen to:
Love me some Finnish:
@lyse Ja und auch so: „Raus mit den Entwickler:innen! Das Marketing macht seine Software jetzt mit KI selber!!1!“ Kannste dir alles nich ausdenken. (Jaja, ist natürlich im Moment billiger. Aber diese Kurzsichtigkeit …)
Ich könnt’ so platzen ob des ganzen Vibecoding-Schrotts, der dann jetzt doch wieder vor meinen Füßen landet …
Alles so vorhersehbar. Mann, ey.
@itsericwoodward lol! “Yeah, it was me. What you gonna do about it? Hm? Hm?” Cats. Typical arrogant cats. 😂
@lyse Pretty good! Had an apple, too. 🤣
@lyse I also got up at 5 (I always do 😅) and went on a quick stroll around 6:30, but boy, that was chilly. So I said to myself: Screw that, I’ll try again later.
And now we’re at 32 °C. 🤣
@prologic Yeah, sound impressive, I gotta try this. 👌
Next heat wave coming up?
https://movq.de/v/86e3dfe123/s.png
Still a few days to go, luckily, and these models aren’t super accurate … we’ll see …
@lyse Ruff, the formatter/linter, yeah.
Lol, never heard of that banana moment before, but it sounds very fitting. :-D
No wonder. I just made that up. 🤣
Why.
Python’s numeric types complex, float and int are not subtypes of each other, but to support common use cases, the type system contains a straightforward shortcut: when an argument is annotated as having type float, an argument of type int is acceptable; similar, for an argument annotated as having type complex, arguments of type float or int are acceptable.
https://typing.python.org/en/latest/spec/special-types.html#special-cases-for-float-and-complex
(Wieder so ’n „soll ich’s einfach lassen und lieber ’ne Banane essen“-Moment.)
Bonus points for this:
Timeline Sandbox $ man ruff
No manual entry for ruffI am sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooo tired of “fast-moving” software. ruff changed a ton of stuff and now all my code bases “need fixing”. Blah.
And SemVer is worth nothing if your 4 year old program with over 16'000 commits is still at “version 0.x”. Blah!
Everything is horrible.
For the tags feed it would be cool to include the actual changelog entries
Did that now:
https://movq.de/v/669ba8eb8d/s.png
🥳
@lyse Bingo!
Oh, yeah, newsboat is good. For this particular use case, I explicitly needed a graphical feed reader, though. 😅 I ended up using Thunderbird, which has its own interesting way of configuring/adding feeds:
https://movq.de/v/a3557e3dc9/vid-1784952576.mp4
Why are feeds categorized as “Mail”? What’s going on with that “Add” button on the left of the dialog? Why does the dialog indicate that there’s a folder called “list-files Recent Commits” which doesn’t really exist in the end? (Why does it take about 1-2 seconds to load 25 feed items?) And so on.
Tell me which one of those “plus” icons on this screenshot you can click and which one is just decoration.
https://movq.de/v/bdded8f996/s.png
FFS.
@lyse Hats are back, aren’t they? Lots of people wearing hats these days, like, the big ones. 🤔
06.jpg looks like it’s from another planet. 😅
@klaxzy Hey, sounds exactly like the company I work(ed) for.
@prologic 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.
@prologic This was to be expected and I’m glad that it’s finally happening. I seriously hope that AI/LLM output gets swamped with advertisements or unwanted code, so people see what they have gotten themselves into, especially the “vibe coders”.
@david You might have ended up loading the page in an unfortunate moment while I was reworking it. 😅 The CHANGES file is there, in the browser:
@lyse Yeah, the feed names are legacy and I didn’t want to set up redirect rules. (I can’t really tell if anybody actually uses them …)
Extracting the info from the CHANGES file would be nice. Maybe I’ll add that. :-)
I’ve stopped providing tarballs for branches now. This was pretty pointless, I think.
@david Is this better? 🤔 Pretty hard to keep this concise but also not miss anything. 🤔 https://movq.de/git/jenny/
@david Oh, that is a good idea. This could be included here, yeah. 🤔
Hmm …
My project pages have this “Downloads” section and I offer tarballs for each release:
https://movq.de/git/jenny/#downloads
I added this many years ago because an OpenBSD dev asked for it (but the project in question didn’t end up in their ports after all).
What are your thoughts on this? Is it necessary to offer tarballs?
I noticed that some distributions have already moved away from using tarballs and instead always clone from Git. 🤔
@prologic 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.
@dce Yeah, but I haven’t looked into this specific issue. I am very much anti-AI, but this particular thing might be human error. I don’t know.
@lyse Oh, I’m sure they’ll keep hammering dead URLs for many years to come. These crawlers are 100% brain dead. And they don’t even need to be smarter, because they still grab valuable stuff left and right.
How many tickets and merge requests did you get before moving to your own server?
Hm, these were probably some of the more active projects:
So it’s not a ton of stuff and there are many “issues” I opened myself, but it’s certainly more than these days.
Haven't used
git send-emaileven once. I definitely have to look into that soon. Wanted to do that for several years. I typically upload the patch to my server and send a link via IRC.
git send-email is good for sending patches to a mailing list (because then the individual patches can be discussed easily), but since those are dying out as well, it loses its appeal. If you want to send patches to a single person, just sending the link to your repo is far easier. 🤔
I’m seeing some slowdowns in Vim lately. Must have something to do with syntax highlighting or indentation rules or something: When I hit Enter to go to the next line, it sometimes freezes for like 100 ms. It’s pretty annoying.
Doesn’t happen in Vim Classic, so I switched all my machines to that now.
@lyse Thanks. 😅 Yeah, I already found it slightly annoying myself. Let’s see how the bots respond to the new situation. 🤔
@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.
I thought I had made that super easy, because you can just send me an email – no sign-up process, nothing. But that’s way too old-school, people don’t know how to use git format-patch (let alone git send-email) and they also don’t understand that they can just send me a link to their forked Git repo (which can be hosted anywhere). Git is super flexible and powerful, but those features are hardly ever used.
Maybe people even need some kind “reward”, or “fame”. Like those “achievements” that you can unlock on GitHub. (Something to put in their CV … ?)
Are you aware of the Residential Proxy pest?
https://spur.us/blog/smart-tv-apps-residential-proxy-sdks
This explains the access patterns that I see in my logs.
It’s funny, because I used to warn years ago that this might happen, and then I lost track of this topic. Now here we are and it’s a real issue. 🤦♀️
Okay, so this is live now under https://movq.de/git/. („Kurzen Prozess gemacht.“)
@lyse A small portion of people might do the headphone thing because of autism or sensory issues, to isolate them from annoying noises. I used to do that myself. 🤔
Okay, so, my website also includes my code / git repos, and those are made browsable by stagit. What I don’t like about this (these days) is that this includes all the diffs of my commits. In other words: All my code.
This makes it super easy for malicious crawlers to slurp up valuable data. I don’t like that.
I’m thinking about switching to this instead:
It still shows project infos and there are Atom feeds, but to get the code, you have to actually clone the repos.
🤔
(If you spot any bugs, let me know.)
@lyse I was wondering for an embarrassingly long time why my NAS wouldn’t boot. (The main power supply switch was turn off.) 🤪
Falls sich hier noch jemand fragte, was genau mein Humor ist:
https://sueden.social/@DerSash/112366647794794897
Das Gegenteil von Erbse ist Verdiense.
@lyse Das ertrag’ ich wahrscheinlich nur auf Mute. Scheiß Lärm. 🤣
Note to self: If you turn something off, this means it is not on.
@lyse Stimmt, das hatte ich völlig vergessen. Gab da mal diese Zeit, in der „Forenbeiträge“ die Pest waren. 🤔 Da ist sie also wieder, die rosarote Nostalgiebrille. 😅
@prologic @itsericwoodward “Enterprise” Java ruins everything, eh? 😅 I only did that very briefly, luckily.
Das jüngste Posting im Shell und Programmieren-Forum bei ubuntuusers.de ist jetzt 1.5 Monate alt. 😢
Was hab’ ich dieses Forum früher geliebt. Aber das Medium ist einfach tot, niemand ist mehr an so einem Austausch interessiert …
@lyse It reads a lot nicer, yeah. And you can do oink.my_property += 1 as well, for example.
@lyse Good question, I don’t know yet if the standard library has been extended a lot. 🤔
@prologic No. After the cutoff-date, hashes are expected to be v2. End of story.
(In jenny, a twt can only ever have one thing that can be used for threading.)
I trip over this in our code at work all the time.
Python has this concept of “properties”:
class Oink:
def __init__(self):
self._foo = 3
@property
def my_property(self):
return self._foo
a = Oink()
print(a.my_property)my_property() is a method but it can be used as if it were a field.
This can also be used to define a setter:
class Oink:
def __init__(self):
self._foo = 3
@property
def my_property(self):
return self._foo
@my_property.setter
def my_property(self, value):
self._foo = 123 * valueBecause, for some reason, Python people don’t like getters and setters. Instead, they hide it behind a property.
The result is, when you read this:
a.my_property = 5
print(a.my_property)You have no idea that this actually calls a method.
@david The stuff in parens is lost on yarnd:
@david Yeah, Oracle is a Dumpster Fire, that’s true. 🫤
(Just a brain dump, nobody needs to read this.)
Does yarnd still support the old “threading”? Let’s see.
(Just a brain dump, nobody needs to read this.)
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.
@prologic See, that’s what edit/delete is good for. 😅🤪
@lyse Yeah, okay, the default being local means it only stores this stuff offline. So they claim. I don’t trust this and I don’t want to go anywhere near it.
@prologic It’s from Gabe’s feed: https://gabesarcade.com/twtxt.txt
Yeah, lol, fuck off. Tried to reproduce that hashing issue, thus playing around with Go a little bit. And what did I find?
$ tree ~/.config/go
/home/user/.config/go
└── telemetry
├── local
│ ├── asm@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
│ ├── compile@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
│ ├── go@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
│ ├── link@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
│ ├── upload.token
│ └── weekends
└── upload
4 directories, 6 filesIt collects and uploads “telemetry” now.
No.
(Don’t tell me how I can turn that off. Not interested. This is a compiler and it wants to track me, without asking for consent. That’s a no-go.)
@david It really is almost impossible to debug these hash issues. Only thing I can do is some trial-and-error, to see if I somehow end up at pmrf6ftxsdhr instead of ksou5aqw7w5a. So far, no luck. 😅
@david This is another dangling thread:
Trying to fetch "<a href="?search=kyjhiwcxeknm" class="tag">#kyjhiwcxeknm</a>" from Yarn pod https://txt.sour.is ...
Trying to fetch "<a href="?search=kyjhiwcxeknm" class="tag">#kyjhiwcxeknm</a>" from Yarn pod https://twtxt.net ...
Twt could not be found@david The one with www is correct: https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt is the canonical URL used in the url = metadata field. (For historical reasons, it also works without www and even with http.)
@david Ah, edits. Okay. Let’s hope that it’s all fixed then. 🤞
… this came off more snippy than I wanted it to. Sorry. 😅
Good morning. I’m seeing so many broken threads. You’re still investigating this, right?
@bender All the other ones worked but this broke? What’s different here? To which twt hash should this be a reply? 🤔
@david Well, I don’t see any broken threads here. 🤔
@bender No idea. I can only tell you that the correct hash would have been rwzz277nkyju for this line:
[2026-07-11 14:47:17+00:00] [(<a href="?search=5bpwpdcjnhcz" class="tag">#5bpwpdcjnhcz</a>) <a href="/timeline/profile?url=https://daiwei.me/twtxt.txt">@david</a><a href="https://daiwei.me/twtxt.txt" class="webmention"></a> (This thread is broken again on my end. Another bug or fix not released yet? 😅)](Guess I should have used my “find context” function. 🤪)
@bender Ah, the first twts were from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Fastidious/fastidious.github.com/master/twtxt.txt, not https://daiwei.me/twtxt.txt. Fetching the GitHub feed completes the thread. 👍
@david (This thread is broken again on my end. Another bug or fix not released yet? 😅)
@lyse But but but but but … is that legal?! 😂
Well, this looks good, I guess: https://movq.de/v/c324c094f9/s.png 🥳
@prologic Let’s give it a shot! Test!
@bender Speaking of drawers at the office … this is mine:
https://movq.de/v/46951f9e65/drawer.webp
Looks a bit sad, eh? 🤣 (Or you could say: Minimalism!)
Oh, crap! It’s only Thursday! I thought we had Friday already … nnnnooooooo, not another day. 😭
@bender Ha, I remember these from our trip to Florida ~30 years ago:
https://movq.de/v/481950c023/pool.webp
(Yep, it was a rainy day. 😂)
@itsericwoodward And sometimes …
https://movq.de/v/e25c13546d/i-ate-the-bear.jpg
(It’s an older meme but it checks out.)
@bender Oh my god! 😅 That’s worth a small fortune on eBay. 🤣
I’m in the process of making a big page with photos and screenshots, and this is more stuff than I expected.
@arne You have Matrix at work? No Teams, Google Chat, Slack, Discord, whatever, but Matrix? Really? Where do you work, is this Socialist Russia?!
@lyse How many people are still using XMPP? 🤔 I’d expect the number to just as low as IRC users? 🤔
However, I haven’t touched my favicon longer than that, lol:
$ l movq.de/favicon.ico
─rw─r──r── void users 2011-01-08 198 │ movq.de/favicon.ico@GabesArcade That’s Halo? I don’t think I ever saw that in person … 🤔
Sie schreien wie die Paviane und Gegenstände fliegen.
Es muss ein Fußballspiel sein.
Windows NT 4 didn’t have a Device Manager. You know, this thing right here that got introduced with Windows 95:
https://movq.de/v/1b8e044aaa/s.png
And that’s super awkward in NT4.
You know what doesn’t have a Device Manager, either? Linux. Why? 🤔 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? 🤔
(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.)
15 years without reinstalling on this particular box.
$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)Two more years and I’ll be celebrating the “20 years of Arch” anniversary.
@prologic That looks nice! What’s the temperature?
@GabesArcade The no-JS part is one thing, but you also have to disable the (nowadays common) forced-HTTP-to-HTTPS-redirect, because those old browsers can’t do modern crypto. And make sure that your webserver serves the correct page even if no Host header is sent by the client. And don’t even think about serving UTF-8 or even just putting utf-8 in the content type. 😅 And for the JPEG thumbnails I pass a special flag to ImageMagick so that IBM Web Explorer from OS/2 won’t trip. 🤣 And always use link rel="stylesheet" for CSS, because some browsers render inlined CSS as literal text. And … probably more that I forgot by now. 😂
@david Not sure, actually. Let’s see. Those are the ones where I still have the original disks (or have bought them on eBay again):
$reasons)(Plus a few “classic” office products as can be seen here: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/POSTING-en.html )
Okay, wow. Windows NT 4 wasn’t part of my timeline back then, so this is the first time I’m seeing it in action. And this thing came with IE 2, which I’ve also never seen before. (That’s interesting, because I remember using IE even on Win 3.x, but apparently that was already IE 3?)
It also makes me really happy to see my website work in these old browsers. Fullscreen images are “broken” because those are PNG or WebP, but the rest works just fine. 🥳
@lyse Oh yeah, few people are as persistent as her. That said, it’s really easy to give up. This shit is overwhelming.
@lyse Oh, yes. The brackets help a great deal.
@GabesArcade Baseball, root beer, darts, atom bombs.
( https://mastodon.social/@nocontexttrek/116862294937117528 )
Java 1.3 on Windows 95 with Proton as the editor could be another option for next Advent of Code.
Win95 runs pretty smoothly on my old box (no surprise, that box came with Win95) and I like Java, so … why not …
Not sure about the speed, though. 🥴
I just read @kat’s blog post over here:
https://bubblegum.girlonthemoon.xyz/articles/learning-to-code-like-it-s-the-90s
Jesus, it must be so overwhelming for young people to get started with programming.
When I started programming, there was the built-in ROM BASIC of that PC and probably a bit of BASIC on a floppy, and that was it. Nowadays? Millions of libraries and frameworks and languages and what not – and, much worse, there’s the expectation that you need to make something fancy. When I started, printing something and understanding IF was good enough.
Installing software was (is?) such an incomprehensible mess on Windows … Why did you allow any program to install files anywhere in the system? Why was this considered normal and okay? With no chance of ever cleanly removing that stuff again?
And now we’re back to the trend of curl | bash these days … same thing.
@lyse This apparently depends on the program now … Some Qt6 programs still allow that, others don’t. I can’t remember if GTK ever had that feature. 🤔 But yeah, this whole “move stuff around as you please”-mentality is mostly gone.
I know I keep referring to StarOffice 3.1 a lot, but it’s just such a good example for all these things. All the toolbars and panels could be rearranged:
https://movq.de/v/2fb714931d/s.png
(This is running in Wine, btw.)
LibreOffice is the descendant of StarOffice and it doesn’t support anything like that anymore.
Maybe it was deemed too confusing for users? “Oh no, I mis-clicked something and now that bar is gone! How do I get it back? I don’t even know what it’s called!” 🤔
@arne Wie sah’s denn drinnen aus? 😅
@bender twtxthashgeddon, word of the year! 😂
@arne Yay! So I’m the only one who fucked it up. 🤪🙈
@arne Foo, bar, and baz! Does it work? Is the houseplant happy?
@lyse Oh wow, those are some amazing photos! 🤯
🚨 jenny was broken due to the switch to v2 hash tags.
I pushed a hotfix to main, but this needs a few more test cases. I’ll do that tomorrow.
If you like Wordle, you’re gonna love Poople: https://poople.io/
Other than the few Unicode issues I mentioned recently, vim-classic works just fine. I completely forgot that I switched to it.
Starting the day with 32 °C inside and absolutely no cooling from the outside.
We’re at 39.5 °C now. Are we going to hit 40? https://movq.de/v/43544d5385/2026-06-27--14-12.webp
Interesting, HTTPS is almost twice as slow as plain HTTP on my server (~72 ms vs. ~135 ms):
$ hyperfine -r 50 "curl -so /dev/null 'http://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'"
Benchmark 1: curl -so /dev/null 'http://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'
Time (mean ± σ): 72.7 ms ± 17.2 ms [User: 6.2 ms, System: 4.8 ms]
Range (min … max): 49.5 ms … 99.7 ms 50 runs
$ hyperfine -r 50 "curl -so /dev/null 'https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'"
Benchmark 1: curl -so /dev/null 'https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'
Time (mean ± σ): 135.5 ms ± 28.9 ms [User: 17.8 ms, System: 5.6 ms]
Range (min … max): 93.2 ms … 198.5 ms 50 runsDamn, I broke my Atom feed (and a reader let me know, that’s cool!).
I run vnu on all HTML and CSS files after each build of the website, but I don’t run a feed validator. 😬 Time to change that.
I complain about this a lot:
https://movq.de/v/e7cb49eefb/hiccupfx
But to be honest, my blog did the same thing – to some degree.
This is fixed now. The trick is to add width and height to all <img> tags. That way, modern browsers know how much space to reserve for the image. Without this, they just reserve zero space, so when the image finally loads, you get jumpy layout.
This effect is even worse when you use <img loading="lazy"> – which I can finally use, now that the jumpy layout has been fixed. 🥳
Numbered headings in blog posts, yay or nay?
Biggest problem of having them: Links to section anchors (like bla.html#my-first-section) will break if I add a section later on. 🤔
Using gzip compression for the twtxt files now. I don’t expect any issues but let me know if something breaks. 🥁
(This feature is implemented in a pretty minimalistic way in OpenBSD’s httpd …)
Easy way to do digital detox: Use a Mastodon instance that someone else maintains. And when it’s down, there’s nothing you can do but wait. 😅
It’s ten thousand million degree celsius outside and I have to go to a birthday party today because wElL iTs My BiRtHdAy ToDaY, I think I’m going to die, send help.
I noticed that there are quite a few UI glitches in vim-classic – and quickly found the cause: It comes with outdated Unicode tables.
I have to admit that I wasn’t aware that there’s a new Unicode release every year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Versions
Look at this huge number of changes. Every program has to keep track of that, often through libraries but sometimes not (like in Vim’s case).
I use Unicode extensively, but this shit is extremely expensive …
My TUI framework is having the same problem. At the moment, this is all offloaded to wcwidth, but if that library was to become unmaintained, I’d have to track Unicode myself.
Gah!
The DOS days were simpler. CP437, end of story. (Yes, I know that’s a lie.)
Speaking of UIs, this is how Thunderbird looks now:
So we continue to let every program make up its own UI style (and then we complain that “the Linux desktop” looks “messy” and “inconsistent”). I guess this uses GTK, but it doesn’t look like any other GTK program. Buttons, tabs, drop-downs, whatever, it’s all different. It even has its own subwindow system (i.e., popups that you can’t move).
I didn’t say this in the blog post, but I’m convinced that programmers these days absolutely positively hate everything that looks even remotely like Windows 95 or Motif – with a passion. I see that in my coworkers as well, they really can’t stand it. It’s an emotional thing.
Oh god, finally: The thumbnail generator for my blog now renders a typical “play” icon for videos.
https://movq.de/v/017c2070f4/s.png
Saves me the need to write “this is a video” every time. 😬
Haha, GitHub. I “unlocked” the “achievement” called “Quickdraw”:
https://movq.de/v/efc96874f0/s.png
It’s for closing an issue very soon after it was opened.
Only problem: I was the one who opened it and it was a mistake, so I quickly closed it again. 🤦♀️ https://github.com/bundlewrap/bundlewrap/issues/892
People think that “more words means more effort” – that used to be true, and it’s the opposite now.
Anyone can make 200 words. The real flex is turning those 200 words into 6.
Regarding software, I wonder when/if programmers will get this memo.
Heads up (literally): There’s going to be a solar eclipse in August: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_12,_2026 Mostly partial, unless you happen to live in Greenland/Iceland/Spain.
As I said, I’m on vacation, and for about a week now, I did basically nothing but sleep. Day or night.
I can’t tell if this actually is a vacation or just therapy for burnout. 🤔
First draft of a file selection popup / widget:
https://movq.de/v/0955149868/vid-1781094010.mp4
Also makes use of the new Table widget.
It was an easy patch, so menus have drop shadows now:
https://movq.de/v/73af48a2d2/s.png
Not that big a difference in the dark theme, though.
Now that is an interesting move:
https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/
Maybe this is how all Free Software will look like in the future. It might not be the worst idea … ? 🤔
You know what this is?
https://movq.de/v/ef1674f6c5/bird-bird.webp
A BIRD bird! 😅
I got it as a gift from a very friendly coworker and she, in turn, got it from [Maria Matějka](https://bird.nic.cz/#about-us). 😃
Okay. I have lost the “battle” against “AI” at work and I will no longer try to “fight” any of it.
It is simply what people want. They want to use it. And that’s the end of it.
And why do they want it? Because it makes their job easier. And why is that? In very large parts, it’s because we have accumulated a metric fuckton of technical debt due to decades long mismanagement. We were (and are) operating in “emergency mode” all the time. There simply was no time to clean things up or to rethink designs. We always have to go with the cheapest and quickest solution. We are never ahead of things: Earlier this year, I started an initiative and wanted to tackle some issue that I could see coming. I was shut down because this wasn’t “urgent”. Very soon after, this exact thing became that exact problem – but now, there was no time anymore to do it properly because NOW it’s urgent, so, once again, we had to go with a quick and dirty solution.
It’s always like that and I had brought it up again and again. And now we have a huge spaghetti mess that hardly anyone understands anymore.
Nobody – except AI. It can still make some sense of this and, obviously, this is useful to people.
So, any argument I make against AI is completely pointless to begin with. I’m such a fool for not having seen this earlier.
The last argument I made today was: “Look, we already have so much technical debt and spaghetti systems, we really, really must clean this up. If we throw AI on top of this now, it’ll only get so much worse.” And once more, I was shut down. My intentions were “admirable”, but “there’s no time for that”.
Okay. Good luck with that. They’ll keep doing it this way. At some point, it’ll either explode entirely and some poor soul has to clean it up, or it’ll explode and they’ll have no other choice but to throw everything away and start from scratch – assuming they can still afford that.
In other words, none of this about AI, really, nor caused by it. Our department’s massive spike in AI usage is just a symptom of the underlying management issues. And since those aren’t being addressed, nothing will change and this whole mess will only get worse.
(I blame all this on management, because, well, that’s who’s to blame. I do not have a solution for it, though – and assigning blame without constructive criticism always sucks big time. I don’t like doing this. If you had put me into that particular management position, I wouldn’t have been able to solve any of this. The thing is, though, I’m not an expert on management and it isn’t my job – I’m just the “princess” who solves your technical issues.)
Aha, my nickname at work now appears to be “Princess Garbage Disposal” (“Prinzessin Müllabfuhr”). 🤦♀️ 🥴
Ambient noise. Crows, (wild) parrots, pigeons, the occasional blackbird, some traffic, individual raindrops, thunder, heavy rain on lots of trees.
A welcome change from the daily noise of the construction site nearby.
(I wish I had better equipment. As usual.)
Haha, someone had a similar idea … https://lpcvoid.com/blog/0018_why_i_am_against_genai/index.html
We’re currently at about 28-30°C, but the relative humidity is at a crazy low level of 20%. 😳 This actually feels pretty nice. If it only were always like that …
I’ve started collecting reasons against AI usage here, so I don’t have to repeat myself all the time:
It’s official now: People are vomiting AI code into a repo that I’m supposed to maintain. At the same time, I don’t have the authority to decline those PRs.
RIP.
Happy 5.25 day to anyone who celebrates.
(“Colour diskettes”. Ha.)
And we have a search function now. This should cover most of the basic features, I think.
I just missed the 20 year anniversary of my blog. 😬 What a stupid long time to do this.
This started out as a PHP page with user comments, MySQL as a database, a PHP webadmin … can you believe that? Totally unnecessary. But everything was “LAMP” back then, so that’s what I was using as well. I kicked out MySQL in 2011 (it just stored files since then) and eventually switched to static HTML pages in 2015.
RSS feeds have only been there since 2009, because I was late to the party. For a long time, I didn’t understand what they were good for. 🤦
Ah, there’s even a term for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_effect
The generation effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby information is better remembered if it is generated from one's own mind rather than simply read.
hfgl with your coding agents
It’s time soon to buy a new PC. Why? Because browsers are getting slow.
I just realized that this book, which I’m still using as a reference every now and then, is from 2005.
In other words, it’s over 20 years old now. 😬
Progress: My hex editor how has undo and redo. https://movq.de/v/3af465b29a/vid-1778918267.mp4
I’m not always on the same page as Rob Pike, but this hit close to home:
Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I'm being charitable).
Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.
I spent my time trying to make it better. Not just write code, but find better or at least different ways to do so. Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible.
What's happening today is a complete repudiation of everything I was trying to achieve.
“Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible”, that’s what I’ve been trying to establish in our teams as well. Obviously not to the same degree, but you get the idea.
And it all goes out the window now. We’re doing the complete opposite – and with full force.
In today’s episode of “everything goes to shit because we want it to”: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/
The supply of deep technical problems is multiplying, and the engineers who can solve them will be among the scarcest and most valuable talent in the market.
And yet:
We're reevaluating our operational footprint, and are planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams.
I’m still having some fundamental design issues with my TUI widget system, so I’m still not comfortable making this code public.
But after a day of work (and discussing AI ad nauseam at work), I just don’t have any energy left. 😑
So apparently this is the default when making a new Matrix account, which makes me wonder why we’re even doing this whole crypto dance in the first place … ?
Ganz schön viele Arschgesichter hier: https://uebermedien.de/116944/
Just missed the 15th anniversary of the Linux installation on my laptop:
$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-04-27 11:38] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)Germans don’t have humour? Oh, yes we do! Get this:
I was pushing my bike slowly up a hill, coming across an elderly lady.
She goes: “Go slowly!!! 😡”
“???”
“Haha! Just kidding! 😊“
The mindset of nerds (or people in general, but nerds especially) appears to be: “There’s a problem – I know how to build a solution around that! (Because I’m good at building things!)”
Rarely does anyone ask: “Why does this problem exist? Can we find a way so that this doesn’t happen in the first place?”
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.)
Christina Koch looking at Earth is my new wallpaper:
https://movq.de/desktop/2026%2D04%2D09%2D%2Dkatriawm%2Dartemis2.jpg
https://movq.de/v/0ebc43df8c/artemis2-2026-christina-koch-looking-at-earth.webp (Sorry, forgot where I originally found the image. Some NASA photo collection.)
In case you’re wondering where they are: https://artemistracker.com/
