Ted Unangst’s snarky (and entertaining) remarks this month:

• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/modern-software-2025-edition
  
• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/killing-X11
  
• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/forbidden-secrets-of-ancient-X11-scaling-technology-revealed

(#5u7y23a) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

These are lists in your Inkscape example, right?

The font stuff? Yeah, that’s a scrollable list where you can select the current font.

Someone did a thing:

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/114763322251054485

I’ve been silently wondering all the time if this was possible, but never investigated: Keep doing X11 but use Wayland as a backend.

This uses XWayland’s “rootful” mode, which basically just gives you a normal Wayland window with all the X11 stuff happening inside of it:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootful-Useful

In other words, put such a window in fullscreen and you (more or less) have good old X11 running in a Wayland window.

(For me, personally, this won’t be the way forward. But it’s a very interesting project.)

(#rdrpxzq) @prologic@twtxt.net Heyho, welcome back. 👋 Did you guys have a nice trip? 😊

(#s5gi4wa) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Probably. :-) I just saw that the account on Yarn is also gone. Maybe it didn’t survive the crash earlier this year.

Just realized: One of the reasons why I don’t like “flat UIs” is that they look broken to me. Like the program has a bug, missing pixmaps or whatever.

Take this for example:

https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/a.png

I’m talking about this area specifically:

https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/a%2Dhigh.png

One UI element ends and the other one begins – no “transition” between them.

The style of old UIs like these two is deeply ingrained into my brain:

https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/b.png
https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/c.png

When all these little elements (borders, handles, even just simple lines, …) are no longer present, then the program looks buggy and broken to me. And I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to un-learn that.

Alright, now for something fun! Taxes! Yay!

(#xhtmyhq) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Wow. Just like Skyrim! 😃

@mckinley@mckinley.cc’s blog appears to have gone stale, hm.

(#5qxemxa) @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh dear. 😩

(#x6kfgia) @arne@uplegger.eu Stattdessen rutscht er seitlich vom Tisch? 🤪

(#vjop7ga) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can confidently say that I don’t remember ever having seen fireflys. (Nor Firefly.) 😳 I’m most surprised that you could count them. Naively, I would assume that these guys move around a lot and you’d lose track of them?

We’re entering the “too hot to think”-season in 3, 2, 1 … and we’re live!

Welcome to the family, Puffy. 🥳🐡

(#xabos5a) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

They’re all talks, not real hands-on trainings like you did.

I love listening to good, well-structured talks. Problem is, not everybody is a good speaker and many screw it up. 🥴 I’m certainly not a great speaker, which is why I gravitate more towards “workshops”, in the hopes that people ask questions and discussions arise. Doesn’t always work out. 🤣 At the very least, I almost always have some other person connect to the projector/beamer/screenshare and then they do the stuff – this avoids me being wwwwaaaaaaaaayyyy too fast.

We are usually drowned in stress and tight deadlines, hence events like today are super rare … We used to do it more often until ~10 years ago.

Once a year the security guys organize a really great hacking event, though.

Oh dear, I’d love to participate in that. 🤯 That sounds like a lot of fun. (Why don’t we do this?!)

(#esedu3a) @prologic@twtxt.net This person isn’t particularly happy with this study:

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/114717549619229029

I don’t know enough about these things to form an opinion. 🫤 I sure wish it was true, though. 😅

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

(#v7d7d4a) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Multi-Threading. Is. Hard. 🤯 And yes, that blog is great. 👌

(#a4qstxa) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org lol – I explicitly kept them in there so that the code is easier to understand for non-Rust people 🤪😂

(#a4qstxa) @prologic@twtxt.net I’d say: Yes, because in Go it’s easier to ignore errors.

We’re talking about this pattern, right?

f, err := os.Open("filename.ext")
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

Nothing stops you from leaving out the if, right? 🤔

(#gg4pbpa) (Of course, if we’re talking about a project you’re doing for a customer and the customer keeps asking for new stuff, then you’re never done, and you have to think ahead and expect changes. Is that what they mean? 🤔)

Saw this on Mastodon:

https://racingbunny.com/@mookie/114718466149264471

18 rules of Software Engineering

1. You will regret complexity when on-call
   
2. Stop falling in love with your own code
   
3. Everything is a trade-off. There’s no “best” 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs
   
4. Everyone hates code they didn’t write
   
5. Don’t use unnecessary dependencies
   
6. Coding standards prevent arguments
   
7. Write meaningful commit messages
   
8. Don’t ever stop learning new things
   
9. Code reviews spread knowledge
   
10. Always build for maintainability
    
11. Ask for help when you’re stuck
    
12. Fix root causes, not symptoms
    
13. Software is never completed
    
14. Estimates are not promises
    
15. Ship early, iterate often
    
16. Keep. It. Simple.
    

Solid list, even though 14 is up for debate in my opinion: Software can be completed. You have a use case / problem, you solve that problem, done. Your software is completed now. There might still be bugs and they should be fixed – but this doesn’t “add” to the program. Don’t use “software is never done” as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.

Okay, here’s a thing I like about Rust: Returning things as Option and error handling. (Or the more complex Result, but it’s easier to explain with Option.)

fn mydiv(num: f64, denom: f64) -> Option<f64> {
    // (Let’s ignore precision issues for a second.)
    if denom == 0.0 {
        return None;
    } else {
        return Some(num / denom);
    }
}

fn main() {
    // Explicit, verbose version:
    let num: f64 = 123.0;
    let denom: f64 = 456.0;
    let wrapped_res = mydiv(num, denom);
    if wrapped_res.is_some() {
        println!("Unwrapped result: {}", wrapped_res.unwrap());
    }

    // Shorter version using "if let":
    if let Some(res) = mydiv(123.0, 456.0) {
        println!("Here’s a result: {}", res);
    }

    if let Some(res) = mydiv(123.0, 0.0) {
        println!("Huh, we divided by zero? This never happens. {}", res);
    }
}

You can’t divide by zero, so the function returns an “error” in that case. (Option isn’t really used for errors, IIUC, but the basic idea is the same for Result.)

Option is an enum. It can have the value Some or None. In the case of Some, you can attach additional data to the enum. In this case, we are attaching a floating point value.

The caller then has to decide: Is the value None or Some? Did the function succeed or not? If it is Some, the caller can do .unwrap() on this enum to get the inner value (the floating point value). If you do .unwrap() on a None value, the program will panic and die.

The if let version using destructuring is much shorter and, once you got used to it, actually quite nice.

Now the trick is that you must somehow handle these two cases. You must either call something like .unwrap() or do destructuring or something, otherwise you can’t access the attached value at all. As I understand it, it is impossible to just completely ignore error cases. And the compiler enforces it.

(In case of Result, the compiler would warn you if you ignore the return value entirely. So something like doing write() and then ignoring the return value would be caught as well.)

We really are bouncing back and forth between flat UIs and beveled UIs. I mean, this is what old X11 programs looked like:

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2025%2D06%2D21%2D%2Dkatriawm%2Dold%2Dxorg%2Dapps.png

Good luck figuring out which of these UI elements are click-able – unless you examine every pixel on the screen.

(#rx7b6fa) @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I might give it a shot. 😃

Skimming through the manual: I had no idea that keeping the “up” cursor pressed actually slows you down at some point. 🤦

(#xfrwj3q) @aelaraji@aelaraji.com I use Alt+. all the time, it’s great. 👌

FWIW, another thing I often use is !! to recall the entire previous command line:

$ find -iname '*foo*'
./This is a foo file.txt

$ cat "$(!!)"
cat "$(find -iname '*foo*')"
This is just a test.

Yep!

Or:

$ ls -al subdir
ls: cannot open directory 'subdir': Permission denied

$ sudo !!
sudo ls -al subdir
total 0
drwx------ 2 root root  60 Jun 20 19:39 .
drwx------ 7 jess jess 360 Jun 20 19:39 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   0 Jun 20 19:39 nothing-to-see

(#rx7b6fa) @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I like the animations in your version much better than the ones from ExtremeTuxRacer. 😊 And there’s no little dance at the end of a race!

https://movq.de/v/7531158962/etr.mp4

(#y36ebpa) I also just noticed that the performance issue doesn’t affect all games. 🤔 Sigh, I’ll just downgrade for the time being. Not in the mood to fiddle with this.

(#y36ebpa) @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I guess that qualifies as an “Arch moment”, albeit the first one I encountered. I’m running this since 2008 and it’s usually very smooth sailing. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, YMMV. Some games work(ed) great in Wine, others not at all. I just use it because it’s easier than firing up my WinXP box. (I don’t use Wine for regular applications, just games.)