Here's a strange situation:

thousands of #Rust developers use #bacon, #broot, #dysk, or #lazy-regex every single day — tools I wrote, maintain, and improve for free.

Their companies, though? None of them want to hire their author.

If you use my tools at work and your company does #Rust, I'd really appreciate a hand landing a job or freelance mission. A boost goes a long way. 🙏🦀

https://dystroy.org

Living on the East Coast means my radio-controlled atomic wall clock is completely deaf to the atomic (WWVB) signal from Colorado. In the attached video, I am using my smartphone to force the clock to sync to exact Internet time via a clever hardware hack. 1/4

New York to Sacramento compressed from six months to seven days.

The integration of national markets that followed turned Sears, Roebuck and Standard Oil into empires.

But the railways themselves went bankrupt…

https://www.selfonomics.com/p/nvidia-goes-to-zero

If you cannot, without doing any additional research, write a 3,000-word essay about why a particular technology is garbage and no one should ever use it, then you don’t understand it well enough to recommend it.

The downside of full-on self-hosting is, of course, that your server will inevitably choose to have weird hardware issues while you're in another country

In another sickening twist to Google's grasp on Android, Google can now require you to have an Android device with Google Mobile Services, or an iOS device with the reCAPTCHA mobile app installed, in order to solve CAPTCHAs.

https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/16609652

and archive: https://archive.is/Fq196

#Google #reCAPTCHA #CAPTCHA #privacy #GMS #Android

With Amazon killing off all the old kindles, they’re super-cheap right now. And it turns out that jailbreaking is a minor faff, but not too difficult, really. This one was £10 and is going to somebody who was pondering getting an expensive eink ebook reader just a couple of weeks ago. :D
#permacomputing

This week:
Two donated Linux laptops have found new homes with people who would not otherwise had laptops.

In the queue:

I've got three thinkpads awaiting new power adaptors, one of which needs a new battery, and another of which _NEEDS_ a new battery.

And two macbooks, one of which is having (broadcom) WiFi problems. And the other is waiting.

You:
Are you a carer, a migrant, unemployed or otherwise could use an Ubuntu laptop? (Or do you know someone who would benefit?)

Do you have old laptops* cluttering your space that you want to pass on? I will collect from anywhere in London.

* If your laptop turns on, I'm interested. If its already ewaste, sorry.

Reminder: de-skilling as a trend in software engineering was already in progress well before LLMs.

Toxic productivity culture, people meeting badly-designed internal reward metrics, hopping jobs and never seeing the consequences of bad choices, plummeting quality, short-termism.

Sure LLMs add fuel to this fire, but I’m not at all convinced they’re causal.

If anything, their popularity seems more a consequence of the culture than cause.

Why does our industry keep looking at things, claiming it's doing them, and doing the exact opposite of what the original idea was? A few examples:

Alan Kay (who coined the term) defined the key idea of object orientation as late bounding, so we ended up with a load of things that use rigid nominal type systems to tightly couple components, marketed as 'object oriented'.

The Agile Manifesto's core idea was 'people over process'. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen places claim they're using 'the agile methodology' because they have sprints, standups, and other processes taken from Agile.

The Zero Trust paper said, at its core, 'assume endpoints are compromised, design your systems so that an endpoint compromise doesn't automatically give control over everything', yet almost everything I've seen branding itself as Zero Trust has been of the form 'run some over-privileged thing on the endpoints to increase their attack surface, then if that thing reports that the endpoint isn't compromised allow it to do a load of things it shouldn't be allowed to do'.

I am writing this on Tusky, which is free software that someone had to write. It is running on an older Android phone, which someone had to assemble from components that other people had to make from raw materials that still other people had to produce.

You are reading this because it was transmitted via a sophisticated international communications system which someone had to design and someone else had to make from raw materials that someone else had to produce.

The electricity also had to be produced by someone, using machinery made by someone else.

Happy May Day, y'all. The world is nothing without our labour. Our masters know this; we should too.

One of the things I’ve noticed moving from C (and Objective-C) to languages like C++ and Rust, with richer static type systems is that it changes what most of the code is for.

When I write C code, almost all of my code is to do the thing. When I write the same in C++, I can usually do the thing in about half as much code. But I don’t write half as much code. The other half of the code is making sure that’s if the code doesn’t do the thing, it probably won’t compile. If I have a field that needs accessing with a lock held, I’ll write an accessor that takes a lock guard to prove lock ownership, and a wrapper that acquires the lock and returns the lock guard and a reference to the field. This compiles down to the same code as the C version (except maybe in debug builds, where I’d assert that the lock guard is really for the right lock), but now it’s harder to get wrong. Especially when I come back to the code in two years and don’t remember to read the comment telling me the locks I need to hold to access the code.

This is why I’m excited by Verus for Rust: it gives me a very rich set of tools for ensuring that my code is going to do the right thing. But it’s a big mindset shift from ‘code exists to do the thing’ to ‘doing the thing is the easy part, most of the code exists to make sure you’re not doing the wrong thing’. And I suspect that’s both why it’s hard for people to switch from C and why few people who do ever want to go back.

I know I've said it before but as a 30+ year Linux user it *still blows my mind* that Linux is now so much the superior OS for *gaming* that Microsoft is using it as an aspirational benchmark. like holy shit, this is real?

🚨 #TechWeenieAlert

“BERLIN (AP) — Robot dogs with hyper-realistic silicone heads modeled after world-renowned figures — including #ElonMusk, #MarkZuckerberg, #JeffBezos, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso — can be seen roaming around a #Berlin museum, occasionally “pooing” printed images of their surroundings which they’ve previously captured with integrated #cameras.”

#Art 🎨 / #MechaTronics / #electronics / #RoboDogs / #Robots 🤖 / #cameras 📸 / #ApNews <https://apnews.com/article/germany-berlin-robot-dogs-beeple-bezos-digital-art-4a2be2a4a4490553ad68c27beedfe83a>

🤣🤪☺️

Sometimes, people make fun of guys for doing stuff like this, but I think it's way more cool to do something you are passionate about, that is actually constructive, than buying guns for a self-created Apocalypse and harassing women online, because they won't have sex with them.

Nerds rule!

I wonder how much productivity is being lost by people using LLMs to write long things where the meaningful content remains very small in comparison.

I've noticed that looking up how to do $THING with a command-line $TOOL now almost always gives me an LLM-generated page with pages of boilerplate nonsense (what is $TOOL? How to install $TOOL on Ubuntu, how to install $TOOL on macOS, and so on), with the actual two sentences of content right at the end. These are obviously generated to provide more space for ads, but there's a lot of this cropping up in other contexts.

Saving a few seconds of writing time in exchange for wasting a few minutes of reading time for each of your readers is a staggering drop in overall efficiency.

Just my layman’s take here: if you go to work for a company named after an object of dark magic that was used by the Dark Lord to spy on people and communicate with his lieutenants, and then months or years later you suddenly realize that you *might* be working for an organization that is doing bad and wrong things, you are a fucking moron and you have been for a while. Sure, you can get out, but you will always have the stain of evil on you.

We now require proof of work before you can submit a #curl security report.

Like mowing @bagder 's lawn or washing his car.😌

BREAKING! Meshcore team splits over dispute over AI-generated code disclosure, and hostile trademark takeover.

Meshcore is an off-grid, decentralised mesh radio platform powered by low-cost and public access LoRa radio technology for reliable, long-range emergency text and embedded sensors communication. It can communicate across kilometres — no towers, no subscriptions, no single point of failure.

https://blog.meshcore.io/2026/04/23/the-split

#meshcore #meshtastic #lora #radio #opensource #foss #drama #privacy #security #selfsovereignty #ai #copyright #takeover

With Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux you can run all your favourite Windows and Linux apps side-by-side with a modern Linux kernel running cooperatively with the Windows kernel in ring 0. And unlike modern WSL, no hardware virtualisation is used so even your 486 can run it!

Please enjoy, I think this might be one of my greatest hacks of all time

https://codeberg.org/hails/wsl9x