Nostr notes by Mx. Chara Aznable of Pnictogen

this is ridiculous. the sample code which implements this is even ...

2026-10-22T17:50:03Z

this is ridiculous. the sample code which implements this is even worse. why is this all necessary?? #Wayland you fuckin' stink. I can't believe that you managed to make something that makes vanilla #X11 programming seem sensible.

(passage from wayland-book dot com)

In summary, the following steps will take you from zero to a window on-screen:

Bind to wl_compositor and use it to create a wl_surface.
Bind to xdg_wm_base and use it to create an xdg_surface with your wl_surface.
Create an xdg_toplevel from the xdg_surface with xdg_surface.get_toplevel.
Configure a listener for the xdg_surface and await the configure event.
Bind to the buffer allocation mechanism of your choosing (such as wl_shm) and allocate a shared buffer, then render your content to it.
Use wl_surface.attach to attach the wl_buffer to the wl_surface.
Use xdg_surface.ack_configure, passing it the serial from configure, acknowledging that you have prepared a suitable frame.
Send a wl_surface.commit request.

We have nothing riding on #PHP really but we had been considering ...

2026-10-21T19:35:27Z

We have nothing riding on #PHP really but we had been considering using PHP personal-wiki software on our tiny corner of web-hosting space so, uh, guess that's out?

As a second-generation Chilean, I will be quite honest: when I ...

2026-10-18T23:16:46Z

As a second-generation Chilean, I will be quite honest: when I see libre used as a #software buzzword my hackles start to rise. I know that there's probably some legitimate use of "libre" in this context especially because the #Linux and #foss communities (in concert with corporate programmers who merge seamlessly into the purportedly "open" and "free" spheres) have made "free" and "open" into practically meaningless shibboleths. Perhaps that's why "libre" has come into use.

But you know the biggest "libre software" is XLibre, the fashy X11 fork? It's not a great sign. On the other hand I have heard nothing particularly bad about LibreOffice.

We stumbled into a strange rabbit hole because we thoughtlessly ...

2026-10-17T07:25:20Z

We stumbled into a strange rabbit hole because we thoughtlessly added sunflower seeds to a quickbread with a little too much baking soda in it perhaps because the sunflower seeds stained the batter blue-green in a narrow zone around the seeds.

Apparently this reaction is well-known and has been employed to make greenish and bluish breads and cookies and results from the base-catalyzed autoxidation of chlorogenic acid, literally "green-making acid", an ester of quinic acid and caffeic acid. Caffeic acid has two adjacent phenolic groups and is thus susceptible in basic solutions to mild oxidation (air is sufficient) to an unstable ortho-quinone which reacts further with various amino acids to yield colorful byproducts. #baking #chemistry

I'm dropping this article, which is not of any particular ...

2026-10-15T01:44:05Z

I'm dropping this article, which is not of any particular importance, simply because it demonstrates that the #NFT racket has not actually died. It's too sweet a grift to pass up, too simple: sell people worthless blocks of digital garbage and convince them that the blocks of useless bits, which have no substantial physical existence that can't be wiped away in a moment, are someday gonna be worth GAZILLIONS.

https://archive.is/JwAzz

So here’s the twist. StonkBrokers aren’t just pictures of cartoon brokers. While each character is represented by a different NFT (refresher: a digital ownership certificate recorded on a blockchain), every StonkBroker also has its own crypto wallet. These hold tokenized assets, such as crypto versions of shares in companies like Apple Inc. and Nvidia Corp.
StonkBroker holders can“activate” their NFT by paying fees in the project’s $StonkBroker token.

Activated StonkBrokers – which come in various levels ranging from measly floor trader to managing director or partner – receive rewards in the form of tokenized shares or other assets. To collect the incentives, StonkBrokers must “Clock In” to work for the day.

Oh yeah. Pure #innovation babee!!

(cont'd)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53143/53143-h/53143-h.htm This ...

2026-10-14T23:23:38Z

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53143/53143-h/53143-h.htm

This from Project Gutenberg is one of our favorite old-timey reference texts, a massive compendium of practical recipes and formula for just about every conceivable household or shop use. I made my own stamp-pad ink from a Henley's recipe. But right now what I'm curious about is glues and cements, because apparently there's no two-part epoxy in the house (not anywhhere obvious) and there's none in the local shops.

The Pnictogen Wing and family live in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Seattle and one of the consequences is that shops tend to be poorly stocked, if they don't go completely out of business. There's no more drugstore nearby; I'd have to take a bus to Renton to find the nearest one, and if I did that I might as well go to McLendon Hardware where they'll have a good selection. Lack of money makes this a less than attractive option.

So I was wondering what Henley's might recommend. I know of one cement recipe that used to be commonly deployed for cementing pieces of glass together for making tanks &c. It's a real beauty: mix litharge, lead(II) oxide, with glycerol in a certain proportion and the paste slowly hardens rock-solid and insoluble. (Pretty sure it still leaches lead of course.) If I had any Bi2O3 on hand (Alyx is sadly out of commission atm, however) I'd see if that reacted with glycerol in a similar way. I have some Sb2O3 on hand (Alyx made tartar emetic from that a couple times) but, eh, maybe we can do better? Anyway I've searched the literature and found no indication that metal oxides other than PbO give this useful reaction with glycerol.

Oh here's a lovely one that I've heard about before: gelatin "tanned" with potassium dichromate, preferably with the help of sunlight, sets to an insoluble cement. And yes we do have K2Cr2O7 on hand but no I don't intend to put hexavalent chromium into a household cement. But Henley's says that chrome alum, which contains the far less toxic Cr(III), also reacts with gelatin.

And would you believe it? It's a commercial product, sold for the special purpose of cementing microscope slides! e.g. https://www.newcomersupply.com/product/chrome-alum-gelatin-adhesive/

So, definite possibility. I hope I haven't run out of chrome alum, but that at least is reasonably easy to get. We got our small amount at Glazer's camera shop, up in the Mercer Mess region of Seattle. #chemistry

(cont'd)

I'd like to point out that this is exactly the attitude one ...

2026-10-14T20:11:04Z

I'd like to point out that this is exactly the attitude one encounters in MLM scams like Amway, and in so many other corporate grifts: they function largely by shaming the people who aren't earning enough. Again and again it's droned into the marks: "you'll get rich and famous but only if you're SERIOUS about it, if you're not pulling in such and so many dollars or new customers then you're not SERIOUS and you're not gonna make it."

#Linux really is cooked if it remains in the grasp of Linus Torvalds. Obviously Linux is more than just the Linux Foundation or the personal empire of Torvalds (although Torvalds himself might feel differently about that); there's a Linux laity, you could say, at the mercy of a Linux priesthood. There is, perhaps, a limit to how much damage Torvalds can actually do if he's determined on it. But I suspect at least that there might be a schism which makes the "GNU/Linux" slapfight look silly in comparison.

Why? Well...you know who owns the Linux trademark? Torvalds seems to have total ownership here, with the Linux Foundation merely serving as his legal instrument (q.v. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark) so if there's a powerful enough rebellion against Torvalds's corruption, can anyone doubt that Torvalds will react by snatching up his toys, lawyering up, and suing the shit out of anyone daring to maintain an unapproved Linux fork? And because Torvalds has the backing of malicious #tech execs he'll have all the money in the world to protect his trademark.

~Chara

quoting
nevent1q…mr6n
I’m pushing this reply to top level because it’s extremely important: https://is.badat.dev/objects/a142a17d-9320-4007-bef4-99762f9fa854

> I asked whether that risked cutting off bright new developers that we would rather hang onto; Torvalds answered that the kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world.
> [...]
> Torvalds added that he does not want to scare off people who want to write code; his message is that you have to either put in the effort to learn, or put a lot of money into an LLM to participate.

Linus Torvalds prefers if you can’t contribute to the kernel without pouring money into tokens for Claude Code

if you don’t pay a shit ton of money for tokens, you aren’t a serious developer according to him

the “learn” thing here is a distraction: in this context, you’ll be learning to clean up slop until you either burn out (very quickly at that) or pay for tokens and cognitively surrender to the bot

that’s the learning path now

Hm is there any value in trying to work up a scheme for ...

2026-09-25T01:51:38Z

Hm is there any value in trying to work up a scheme for representing 3D space as filled with rhombic dodecahedra instead of cubes? I was thinking of how one might try to implement a 3D grid that has some advantage in analogy to the hexagonal grid in representing 2D space. A plain square grid has a subtle problem in defining the "neighborhood" of a cell, for there are four face-to-face members and four corner-to-corner members whereas the hexagonal cell has six identical neighbors.

I trawled through MathWorld looking up polyhedra that tessellate 3D space. There's a lot of weird choices but only the rhombic dodecahedron, so far as I can tell, is both convex and has all its faces congruent, all the same shape.

I'm sort of curious generally about the subtle issues that crop up in simulations because of the limitations on how a continuous field of some sort, in 2D or 3D space, can be divided up into discrete units. #Programming culture being what it is, it's tended to overuse rectilinear models because they're so easy to implement and there must be a lot of software out there where square or cubical grids are deemed good enough even if really they aren't.

(cont'd)

There's a famous #MST3K bit that a great many people have ...

2026-09-24T22:31:31Z

There's a famous #MST3K bit that a great many people have identified as an uncanny prediction of #Internet commerce and its intricate obsession with micropayments. As the MST3K "Johnny Long-Torso" sketch demonstrates however the method does not require the Internet or indeed ANY technology really. It's very simple: divide a thing which MUST function as a unit into little pieces and then you can extort people on the basis that they need all the parts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3h8S6GA-bo

"The doll who is himself sold separately!" As a unit he's valued at eight bucks, but in pieces he can be sold for over $300! #Profit!! The American Way!!!

(etc.)

Indeed debt has a special meaning in #capitalism. If you're a ...

2026-09-21T19:30:44Z

Indeed debt has a special meaning in #capitalism. If you're a capitalist, you have a great deal of latitude not merely in running up huge debts but in moving them around and pushing the debt onto others, as happens with many "vulture capitalist" schemes by which hedge funds &c. acquire troubled businesses, load them up with debts acquired elsewhere, then torpedo the businesses in order to take advantage of the fact that in the United States and "the West" it's considered practically a free action to destroy a corporation no matter who's hurt in the process. Corporations are paradoxically both considered to be immortal and expected to rise and fall at a moment's notice, sometimes for the purpose of exploiting a single legal loophole.

(more)

I screwed around with evdev settings a little but everything I ...

2026-08-21T21:20:44Z

I screwed around with evdev settings a little but everything I tried either stopped the mouse from working in X11 completely (didn't check it in Wayland) or it didn't change the weird window title bar single-click-to-maximize behavior in Wayland / labwc / LXQt on my FreeBSD desktop. I'm not sure how much I care but as with all little glitches, it's a bit of a mystery

YEAH! Windows 3.1 'chitz' background in ctwm! This is the ...

2026-08-18T22:31:59Z

YEAH! Windows 3.1 'chitz' background in ctwm! This is the shiznit!! #X11

I am semi-convinced that one of the biggest reasons why #tech ...

2026-08-18T20:38:38Z

I am semi-convinced that one of the biggest reasons why #tech folks addicted to #GenAI, people who refuse to listen to anyone trying to make the case that "generative AI" is fraudulent and destructive and not "Ph.D. intelligence in a box" (which, btw, is rented out by the token and kept on a remote server farm, hence "in a box" is false) is the simple fact that Internet hecklers exist.

That may seem silly, but I will defend my wild assertion: Internet hecklers are helping to keep alive the hope that "generative AI" is a real thing and about to become superintelligent in an "intelligence singularity" (a actual phrase I saw on Twitter last night.)

(cont'd)

I'm abruptly reminded of how 1990s computer geeks loved the ...

2026-08-17T16:44:42Z

I'm abruptly reminded of how 1990s computer geeks loved the expression "dead tree" in reference to books made from paper. The snide quality of the expression belies the long-maintained premise that the high-tech corporations are #green (i.e. environmentally conscious) in some way when, in fact, they're run by people who don't give a single solitary shit for the environment.

quoting
nevent1q…8jdj
We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/

also, @nprofile…0adl, it's fallacious to pretend that ...

2026-08-17T01:34:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…eeqg
_________________________

also, nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpqzhtmd6jdvgxumpjwwva4v4utnsw7pt0t0wysry9k8pv67h98yerqwj0adl (nprofile…0adl), it's fallacious to pretend that merely because you dislike criticism of fake AI (the "generative" stuff is not really AI, but "AI" is better for marketing than "sludge machine" even if "sludge machine" is more accurate) when you see it here, that means the people complaining about AI fraud are doing nothing else to fight the fraud. You are, it seems to me, merely trying to complain that anyone detests the technofascist AI craze at all.

"Web 2.0", the curse of the modern age, or whatever age ...

2026-08-13T02:40:12Z

"Web 2.0", the curse of the modern age, or whatever age this is, can be largely credited to #Netscape and Marc Andreessen and his co-conspirators, who figured that the easy way to make yourself popular in the high-pressure and very new #Internet market of the early 1990s was to put out a web browser full of weird new gadgets and gizmos and little programmatic tricks for doing things chiefly of use to criminals. Yeah it's another #crypto sort of thing: all tech scams boil down to the same few patterns.

You know how much those geeklords love patterns. They write gaseous books about them, heaps of books.

(cont'd)

@nprofile…st9f exactly. strip away all the fluff and nonsense ...

2026-08-10T17:54:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…cxl3
_________________________

nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyd968gmewwp6kyqpq35y2y0paj77cjsupfcxfh4flpc6fxqx86nk64m2wu6gk45w64s3swpst9f (nprofile…st9f) exactly. strip away all the fluff and nonsense from the GenAI sales talk, and their pitch boils down to mere obsession with "productivity" in that special tech-sector way in which nothing is actually produced.

it's taken us too long to get back to this point: poking away ...

2026-08-09T07:25:20Z

it's taken us too long to get back to this point: poking away at #X11 programming from Common #Lisp (cmucl in this case) using the CLX library. This image captured from our CachyOS Linux system running LXQt + labwc Wayland desktop environment.

But that brings up the question: we spent a couple years in college plugging away at learning X11 programming with the help of those massive O'Reilly books back in the 1990s. 1990s computer #programming books tended to be written to a far more literate standard than is usual in the tech sector of today (generative #AI fanboys probably hope to get away without even knowing how to read) so it was relatively painless despite the somewhat tedious nature of the X11 APIs.

So...does anything like this exist for #Wayland? Are there books that are any good? I'd like to know in particular whether it's at all possible to create non-rectangular windows.