My least favourite part of today's giant ass-fuck PHP RCE vulnerability, aside from the obvious stuff, is the incredible amount of LLM powered disinformation around it, including mitigations that may or may not actually help, and are all kind of accepted to not be exhaustive at all.
Well, hot damn. It's the world's shittiest REPL but the entire pipeline from event to objects through a text renderer for the view data works. We're getting closer to something that works like a MUD/MUCK would, and I'm pretty pleased with it.
I'm picking up this Rust shit at alarming speeds, fun times.
This sound has popped in my head at random times since the mid 90s, and it should be in yours too
Urethral Engine 5 with SpeedPee technology
Woke up in the middle of the night after a really weird dream that I just have to write down while I remember it.
The first thing is that it was revealed Hatsune Miku's hair, when cooked, could double as pasta. On her head? Teal hair. On the plate? Pasta. SOMEHOW a large crowd was fed, but there was too much, and she ate the leftovers. So my last memory of this segment is a short haired Miku happily eating a heaping plate of carbonara, saying "hmmMM SAUce gOOd." 1/x
I'm genuinely impressed by Haiku. I used to love BeOS, back in the day, which I got to experience around R5. They upped their compat game a lot since I last looked.
Aside from how ludicrously tight, fast, responsive and minimally efficient it still is, what kind of shocks me is how the icons, window decorations, buttons, dialogs and UX in general still looks really slick by today's standards. It does not really feel any sort of retro, in the slightest, which is an odd feeling.
Exosphere now has a mini website, because I felt like it should.
It took a few weeks and I still strongly dislike frontend work, but I am pleased with the results.
I've been doing this shit for over 30 years at this point, and watching the last refuges away from corporate nightmares run full speed towards the same, on purpose, has been disheartening in a fundamental way.
Without a place to remember "oh yeah right, I actually love everything about this" periodically, I genuinely find myself not knowing how to deal. Maybe I'm blowing it out of proportion for myself. Maybe poking at my lab and my own projects is enough. But I worry.
I've always compartmentalized work. I like the work, I don't always love the _job_, which is the context in which I do the work, and those are two separate things.
There always were communities where you could find people like me who just, you know, really really like what they do and it's their whole thing, trying to make things they find beautiful.
Lately I don't feel like like that's true anymore, and I sit there uncomfortably, with a sense of "well, where do I go then?"
I'm tired, boss. Can we go back to when computers were cool and the overwhelming majority of good things were born out of someone's irrational amount of care about a problem?
Everything lately has been trying to minmax some weird "productivity" metric that is ill defined, the same way people praise "growth" as a metric for something's value. Nonsense.
Seeing this bullshit ethos hit FOSS and generally hacker communities as a whole has been painful, in a way I didn't expect.
I really want to like HomeAssistant but their security approach is baffling. They insist haos doesn't need console security because it's inherently local, and then don't provide any support for tls on their web app at all, with a healthy vibe of "you only need TLS for the internet" alongside it. And then their only option is essentially "pay a sub to support the project and get a cloud proxy with SSL so you can access it remotely!"
I have a lot of opinions about this, turns out.
I mean, you use what you want, and I will never judge you for it -- everyone has different requirements.
But when you insist people should drop the least terrible option, when every other option is clearly worse, strikes me as somewhat performative. We're all doing the best we can within the choices we have. At this point you might as well recommend people turn off their computers and cast them into the sea.
Like, have we learned nothing of internet history?
A thing that bothers me in the "mozilla are doing things they (rightfully) should be criticized about" discourse is that it always comes with a huge serving of "This is why you shouldn't use Firefox".
And like, realistically, use what? One of the proprietary closed source browsers? One of the arguably more evil webkit/spark/chromium re-skins? That one fork of firefox that depends on upstream? That one browser made by the worst person you know?
I was thinking of Earthworm Jim on Genesis today. The cartoon art style was so uniquely endearing that it's one of the rare things where my Dad, who had zero interest in video games, sat down and watched me play as a kid, laughing uproariously at the sounds Jim made, and the way he moved. The way he used his own head as a whip, and just in general, his idle animation really got to him.
I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back, it really highlighted how unique the animations were.
Also, because I felt this was understated in the other docs, I added this helpful "how does it work" section to the documentation in the getting started arc.
I kind of hope it helps, maybe. I've been writing so much text that I've lost track of what is too much and what is not enough at this point.
Major 3.0.0 release of Exosphere, my simple, agentless CLI and TUI driven patch reporting application for remote UNIX systems.
Major highlights are: inventory sorting, reboot status, operations from the TUI command palette, CLI docs and help polish pass, and much more.
It's been cooking for a while, and I'm glad to have it out. If you're using my silly little tool, thank you, and I hope you find this update useful.
The old man has finally discovered his new bed and decided that it's not a scary new thing after all.
Update: I've started migrating to Cyclopts based on the solid foundation of "fuck it, we ball", and lemme tell you:
The API is so incredibly nice that my custom tab completion parser in the Exosphere REPL shrank in size by like 75%, and does all the same stuff. A bunch of workarounds and annotations are now gone, and it's all just... taking iterables and going through them.
That alone is kind of sick, and further cements my desire to switch.
I've become deeply annoyed with Typer, because while I love what it does and how it works in general, the second there's a gap in their (poorly documented) API, you end up reaching for Click underneath -- which was one of the selling points. But now that they've vendored it, they basically made all of it private and actively plan to mess with it -- so you essentially have no stable way of covering these gaps anymore, short of nicely asking if they might consider exposing X or Y for your use case.
I've been mulling it over and toying with Cyclopts, and the vibe I get is that it was actually designed by someone who wanted a nice API, and knew exactly what they wanted out of it. For the most part it seems to work how you _expect_ Typer to work, except it has all the things I want right there, and clearly documented. I'm considering switching to it, even if that involves sprawling refactors. The result would really be nicer, I think.