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Publishing to

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Last Notes

2026-07-29 00:29:03 GMT

lazyweb, is anyone aware of an airtable-like frontend for postgres? ideally it would just lean on postgres for auth, access controls, etc

2026-07-20 20:49:43 GMT

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even people within the field of software bullshit talk like this which is a very silly reflection on the field imo

2026-07-20 20:47:59 GMT

the way people talk about computer science is like if they thought you get a physics degree to become an electrician

2026-05-17 11:20:33 GMT

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this whole "broken promise" thing is such a beat up too!!! There never was such a promise, only "no plans" and "not considering taking it to the election" after days of media pressure trying to force them into a position in 2024. Receipts: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/anthony-albanese-says-hes-not-considering-taking-negative-gearing-changes-to-voters/higxqtdre

2025-12-18 04:39:49 GMT

we could solve the ram crisis by bringing back 32 bit pointers and bringing back segmented addressing for those few apps that use more than 4GB of RAM

2025-12-14 02:32:43 GMT

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I'm still a little bit unclear on what exactly happens when you run a 32 bit Windows program from a DOS prompt. The Windows program runs in the System VM and the DOS prompt waits for it to exit, but any console output written by the Windows program doesn't show up? (if the command redirects output to a file though it does get written to that file)

2025-12-14 02:27:41 GMT

question for folks more familiar with DOS and Win9x than I am: is it possible to run 32 bit code in a DOS VM? I know 32 bit DOS extenders were a thing and I see DPMI lets you request 32 bit protected mode but this doesn't seem to work under Windows and I wonder if I'm missing something or whether you just couldn't do this

2025-12-11 07:21:28 GMT

the g in gobject stands for glib, and the g in glib stands for gtk, and the g in gtk stands for gimp, however the g in gimp stands for gnu, so really the g in glib stands for gnu, but you shouldn't confuse it with gnulib, which is developed by the gnu project, who shouldn't be confused as the developers of glib, which is the gnome project, in which the g also stands for gnu

2025-12-10 06:02:36 GMT

hmmmm idk about this verification method Discord is offering
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/693/746/597/209/222/original/8636cdcb14a547d9.png

2025-12-07 04:44:39 GMT

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enjoyed reading this piece on perl and its decline https://www.beatworm.co.uk/blog/computers/perls-decline-was-cultural-not-technical

2025-12-07 04:24:05 GMT

hypothesizing that having exposure to Perl or not is a kind of programmer generational cleavage

2025-12-04 05:17:46 GMT

does anyone know where it might be possible to acquire 90s PC firmware ROMs for emulation purposes?

2025-11-23 06:39:25 GMT

the other thing about all these dogshit AI features getting crammed into everything is they always do the most dogshit job of the cram in. see: firefox, the other day
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/597/634/173/865/752/original/27501b4ec99e5a13.mp4

2025-10-21 11:05:53 GMT

Do you use git gui or other Tcl/Tk apps and find yourself annoyed that your staid old unix program does not look very nice on your beautiful new hidpi monitor?
Simply LD_PRELOAD=tk-hidpi.so and enjoy Tcl/Tk in gorgeous high definition! https://codeberg.org/hails/tk-hidpi
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/411/813/736/144/558/original/548be2d9218ba35d.png

2025-10-17 00:26:57 GMT

FYI web developers: you don’t have to set up an IntersectionObserver or onscroll handler to hide images when they’re scrolled outside the viewport. Browsers actually do this for you! Hope this helps

2025-09-28 02:07:34 GMT

Was checking some stuff in the local laws and discovered it's not just allowed to create a nuisance with a bike, it's mandatory
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/279/473/237/730/923/original/0ded4e095cabc775.png

2025-09-26 05:29:26 GMT

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new way to attach a dom remove event that isn't MutationObserver just dropped

2025-09-17 00:08:11 GMT

Why is it that windows laptops don’t sleep? Why do they sit there punching the fans the whole time the lid is closed??? Come on guys, even Linux has got sleep sorted out

2025-08-17 22:53:06 GMT

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the cloud is just Worse than well-run normal linux servers. but running your business on well-run normal linux servers yields over too much power to labour, so the cloud wins

2025-08-17 22:45:07 GMT

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the problem with elastic cloud services is that they will scale as far as your wallet does. But usage running away outside of predicted growth is always something I want to know about. normal servers hit a wall sooner (out of disk, out of memory, etc) and raise your attention so you can go and fix them. cloud shit just runs up your bill and you find out well after the fact

2025-08-17 22:41:23 GMT

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every time I've deployed something """properly""" with cloud shit it has ended up costing a bomb while having mediocre performance and reliability. conversely every time I've deployed something to just a normal debian server it has been rock solid with no issues and no ops effort required for years

2025-08-17 22:39:07 GMT

Had a support ticket open with Vultr requesting a refund for a couple month's worth of charges for a cloud storage bucket I couldn't delete due to errors on their end. I said I'd begin the chargeback process with my bank if they couldn't refund me and they nuked my account on the spot! Glad there wasn't anything important left in there

2025-08-17 04:05:33 GMT

i ran fastfetch on my cat's feeder
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/042/120/516/212/457/original/3333a162d2869e01.png

2025-08-07 22:23:26 GMT

scientists: climate change will cause massive upheaval to the global economy and poses an existential threat to humanity
everyone: eh, i don’t subscribe to doomerism. we’ll figure it out. life finds a way
tech guys: my slop generator will cause massive upheaval to the global economy and poses an existential threat to humanity
everyone: holy SHIT

2025-07-10 23:55:04 GMT

“When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.” https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/

2025-07-08 11:54:04 GMT

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please do write it, even if it might be hard to see anyone’s mind being changed in the short term. there’s value in having it on the record that we knew

2025-07-02 11:56:06 GMT

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in recent years the cops here seem to have decided to fly their helicopters heaps more all the time, and the thundering sound travels for miles in the cold still air at night and it drives me fucking crazy

2025-06-26 23:09:05 GMT

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I spent a couple of hours yesterday getting Audacity building, reproducing and diagnosing the bug, and wrapping my head around the complex logic in this part of the code so that I could implement a correct fix. To have copilot review my work, which I contributed back for free, is just so incredibly disrespectful to my time and effort.

2025-06-26 23:01:13 GMT

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You know back in my day, we had static analysis tooling that would give you exactly this kind of feedback, except it was correct. Now we have shit which only looks at the vibes of the source text and does no semantic analysis whatsoever, so of course it's just fucking wrong

2025-06-26 22:59:21 GMT

Sent a pull request to Audacity fixing a crash bug I'd been running into frequently. The cause was an out-of-bounds memmove. Classic C++ areas.
Anyway I got a fucking copilot review on my PR which left two comments, both completely wrong, one of which suggesting I reintroduce the out of bounds memory access. I'm furious!
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/752/131/328/495/177/original/fb81f01d09e9d532.png
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/752/134/514/863/761/original/f66e28f5aba93a52.png

2025-06-16 06:47:35 GMT

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This result should raise serious questions about the consequences of this effect in software development where the work is a continuous process of building upon and refining a body of knowledge

2025-06-16 06:35:17 GMT

Remarkable chart in a new paper out of MIT looking at cognitive performance of LLM users in an essay writing task - https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/691/639/874/965/449/original/000bf6d521d93c19.jpeg

2025-06-03 09:02:54 GMT

shot, chaser
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/618/614/757/156/252/original/437e45cc8550e38b.png
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/618/619/199/367/215/original/02fa2fb7baf4bcdf.png

2025-05-09 05:40:02 GMT

AI guys, everyone
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/476/261/844/351/206/original/f506604930ce76d2.jpeg
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/476/261/869/567/836/original/7656fa1599df3e3a.jpeg

2025-03-01 00:02:59 GMT

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we don't sell your data! but, look, we actually kinda dooooo,
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/084/237/945/321/576/original/0506c82d8e998ab9.png

2025-02-28 23:16:13 GMT

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Mozilla have been up to a lot of clown shit lately, but slapping SaaS terms on a piece of software which is distributed to end users, with these kinds of overbearing and categorically inapproriate terms, has to be the clowniest. Fire these lawyers

2025-02-28 23:12:09 GMT

not allowed to watch porn on Firefox anymore
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/084/035/975/894/217/original/e50684233e1e83d6.png

2025-02-25 00:32:02 GMT

firefox has put a "sponsored" weather widget in my new tab page which doesn't even dignify with the temperature unit basically the entire world uses
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/061/701/365/016/833/original/155f94186ddf308b.png

2025-01-15 04:32:33 GMT

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you are going to have to pay me even more if i have to do a bad job

2025-01-08 21:50:24 GMT

I'm open for Ruby on Rails contract work in 2025!
I'm an experienced systems and performance engineer with deep knowledge of Rails and the Ruby VM, and I have code committed and CVEs credited in both projects. I am also highly proficient with web tech, databases, and Linux systems.
I've worked at every layer of the stack from kernel to browser frontend, and I'm comfortable with cracking open the code to answer questions the documentation doesn't.
From 2013 to 2018 I worked on systems and performance at GitHub, where I led efforts to upgrade the main Rails app from Rails 2.3 to 3.2 (old heads know) and from Ruby 1.9 to the 2.x series.
I'm based in Melbourne, Australia and am experienced and comfortable working remotely, however I am also open to hybrid arrangements if you're local.
Available for immediate start on short-to-mid-term contracts. DM here, or reach out via email at [email protected].
boosts appreciated :) #ruby #rails #fedihired

2024-12-27 04:36:13 GMT

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this industry is lucky there hasn’t been a bigger backlash, given that one of the dominant business models is Ransom

2024-12-27 04:29:53 GMT

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How do normal people deal with this shit? Do they just put up with their life’s memories being locked away in their device and sometimes just lost entirely?

2024-12-27 04:28:08 GMT

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this is the thing with Apple, their stuff is pretty sure, but damn if you aren’t on their blessed path (in this case paying them to store my photos on iCloud) the most basic tasks are *such* a chore. And I have no idea how I’d even pull these photos off my phone for archival if I didn’t have this old macbook hanging around

2024-12-27 04:24:37 GMT

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I’m pulling off a year’s worth of old photos to free up space on my phone, and having imported and archived to my NAS all of 2020 I am currently watching Image Capture delete them one by one at the blistering rate of <2 per second

2024-12-27 03:56:20 GMT

every time I pull out my 2018 macbook pro (the one with the shit keyboard) for some occasional task I ask myself how I ever put up with this thing
this is the computer that drove me to linux for good

2024-11-24 13:16:01 GMT

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the plot thickens! it appears that qemu patch from 2021 never actually landed. it was only fixed with this commit in september 2024 https://github.com/qemu/qemu/commit/5504a812611

2024-11-24 13:08:58 GMT

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and its this kernel change from 2021, released in 5.12, which changed the number of memslots on x86 from 512 to SHRT_MAX. that'd do it https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/4fc096a99e01d

2024-11-24 13:03:09 GMT

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figured out the real reason why this is so slow poking around in gdb some more. kvm_log_clear iterates kvm_state->nr_slots times clearing out dirty bitmaps on each memory slot. the code seems to assume nr_slots is relatively small - 32 is the default value for it if KVM_CAP_NR_MEMSLOTS is unspecified.
on my machine, KVM_CAP_NR_MEMSLOTS is 32764 :)
tracking down this mismatch between assumption and reality has led me to find it's been fixed already upstream. neat! https://patchew.org/QEMU/[email protected]/

2024-11-24 08:54:26 GMT

noticed my home assistant VM always idled at around 10% CPU on the host, even though the guest didn't report that much CPU activity (in fact, it was mostly idle)
so I busted out the old profiler
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/537/082/167/390/017/original/85ef71db81f25a8b.png

2024-11-11 01:13:36 GMT

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I tend to err on the side of being less fancy with JS. if scrolling is janky, so be it - that's kind of how the web is already. Using canvg adds to bundle size, is slower by wall time (even if smoother feeling), and adds to complexity that might come back to bite in an unpredictable way (there's a large space for potential problems here: canvg API changes, rendering differences between canvg and native that make it difficult to move back to native in the future, opportunity cost of future browser optimisations that can't be replicated in canvg, etc)

2024-11-11 00:47:32 GMT

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more info needed: what’s the issue with dropping frames? Is there an animation that’s being interrupted? How does it compare to a native img tag with no canvas involvement?

2024-11-06 22:44:36 GMT

we are about to find out which tech companies become IBM and which of our colleagues are happy going along with it

2024-10-30 23:29:49 GMT

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nothing really important happened before 1 jan 1970 anyway

2024-10-30 23:28:10 GMT

hackernews mindset
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/398/963/912/147/762/original/2a34b8feb922cb74.png

2024-10-21 06:57:37 GMT

omg bluesky’s default moderation settings are liberal civility politics in a nutshell. Hilarious
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/344/104/685/968/129/original/e114f2e9ab801e0e.jpeg

2024-10-16 00:23:08 GMT

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is this a good idea? maybe, maybe not.
but it is cool

2024-10-16 00:22:50 GMT

imagining a scifi future where all syscalls run over io_uring, then you replace the submission and completion ring buffers with a network pipe, then you could run programs on disparate physical hosts all under a single-homed kernel

2024-09-28 11:18:29 GMT

FM radio is so cool. I am sitting at home listening to some quite modern dance music through a 40 year old device faithfully reproducing sounds that weren’t even invented when it was built. I love that you can still listen to music this way and I hope FM broadcasting never turns off.

2024-09-26 11:17:38 GMT

every internet company rebrand is like "we're so excited to launch our new brand identity designed in collaboration with [prestigious sounding design firm] which aims to capture the playfulness at the heart of what we do" and then you look at it and its just their name but they picked a different font

2024-09-07 08:21:23 GMT

I have seen the infamous Metro Trains JSON PID
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/095/291/068/838/427/original/a0a45fbf46ba2517.jpg

2024-09-04 22:58:48 GMT

The Internet Archive losing its appeal means one thing: pirate stuff. Pirate brazenly. There’s no point trying to do it the nice way - you’ll get shut down anyway. Copy, share, and archive to your heart’s content. It’s the only way we’re keeping digital media and our cultural memory intact.

2024-09-02 08:42:43 GMT

did you know bash supports generics
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/067/067/038/694/770/original/d5c9625589e58bd3.png

2024-08-31 15:08:54 GMT

I am a big fan of rust and think it's a natural fit for linux into the future. What isn't a natural fit is the npm tier dependency sprawl situation.
I really do think we need to listen to what distro maintainers are telling us, because they are the ones who understand how the rubber hits the road when it comes to maintaining and supporting software long term.

2024-08-31 02:51:38 GMT

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musl-cross-make is really good in my experience, if glibc isn’t a hard requirement. agree building a glibc cross compiler is a complete pain in the ass though

2024-08-31 01:38:55 GMT

idle thought but it would be cool if linux had an arch-independent universal executable format. Maybe wasm, maybe not, but something fully portable which can access the entire syscall interface, with raw performance being less of a priority

2024-08-26 03:31:40 GMT

debian people, am I missing some nifty little flag or package here, or is this just the normal thing to do when creating a new debian container?
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/113/026/206/831/354/333/original/553fccbf377553a6.png

2024-08-18 10:54:16 GMT

Absolutely beggars belief how many queers are still happily posting away on X
Like, how are we supposed to liberate ourselves if y’all won’t liberate yourselves

2024-08-17 10:12:06 GMT

it really is some sweet cosmic justice that the 4chan window manager guy, having alienated the entire mainstream linux desktop community on account of being a highly unpleasant character, is now unable to fix bugs all on his own

2024-08-14 03:53:02 GMT

Thanks Google 👍
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/112/958/341/445/688/633/original/5fc8978361ffbc20.jpeg

2024-08-14 02:22:09 GMT

looking for recommendations: I want a dirt simple CI runner, something that works with Forgejo/Codeberg, no containers, something that just runs on a machine and invokes a shell script in a repo checkout. What options are there?

2024-08-11 01:29:55 GMT

i sooooo struggle to deal with this kind of writing style
you can just write "we're not doing masks btw". like just own it. it's fine. it is, for better or worse, the norm.
this kind of writing just reads like you know it's not great, you know it's incompatible with the rest of the accessibility stuff you're talking about, you know to expect some blowback for it, and you're trying to preempt that blowback with therapy speak. it's the appearance of accountability while dodging accountability that gets me
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/112/940/770/414/781/950/original/830ca8cd70aaa417.png

2024-08-03 03:23:30 GMT

just one more lane bro
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/112/895/939/321/626/154/original/8a7d220172b8a3fa.png

2024-07-31 08:34:04 GMT

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reading about how things are done over in golang
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/112/880/177/697/953/305/original/613c3066ad29c8b6.png

2024-07-31 08:33:26 GMT

reading about how things are done over in node.js
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/112/880/174/031/079/276/original/1c6e1beff2d13085.png

2024-07-10 23:15:37 GMT

every time I see someone else's shell script I check that it sets (at least) -eu. if it does, it's probably a fine script, if not, suspicion builds, and usually turns out to be warranted

2024-06-16 03:12:51 GMT

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the msgpack serde implementation gets pretty close to what I'm after. only downside is that the keys have to be encoded as strings (see highlighted)
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/112/624/104/706/101/513/original/c509b8b81fb61e90.png

2024-06-16 02:58:28 GMT

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ideally I would like to write something like this with serde:
#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize)]
struct Person {
#[key(1)]
name: String,
#[key(2)]
age: usize,
}

2024-06-16 02:52:25 GMT

is there a binary serialisation format with json like data types where keys are explicitly a number for the wire?
don't say protobufs, i explicitly do not want protobufs

2024-06-10 22:51:30 GMT

fedi meta
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/112/594/767/316/327/653/original/429385a9698e49d9.png

2024-06-04 08:50:32 GMT

everybody wants to be the guy to write the filesystem that solves data loss once and for all because it would look good as hell on a resume

2024-03-24 00:16:46 GMT

what on earth is going on over at C++
are they ok
https://social.hails.org/system/media_attachments/files/112/147/778/634/127/097/original/15ca4b19581a4d30.png