I just read a sentence where someone was discussing the foolishness of 'letting agents yolo infra in prod'.

I understood it. But it did occur to me how many native English spears would think that that is just a gibberish sequence of (sometimes not even) words, or at best think that 'prod' was a prod.

This is the jargon of the same community that has been telling people since the days of COBOL that it has been democratizing computer programming by letting people tell computers what to do in English. (-:

#EnglishLanguage #jargon #AI #LLMs

The #MirBSD WWW site http://www.mirbsd.org is coming up, when it comes up at all, with a notice that it is unavailable for legal reasons.

I am hoping that this is just more fallout from the problem with LLM scrapers. I *very* much doubt that @mirabilos is publishing anything illegal. (-:

A bit of a shame, because I wanted to check that I was hyperlinking correctly to the paxmirabilis WWW page.

Interestingly, CloudFlare public DNS on 1.1.1.1 refuses to answer queries about mirbsd.org or any subdomains, including toot.mirbsd.org. My own resolving proxy DNS server looks up the domains just fine, as do Quad9 and Google PDNS.

Damn!

It looks like the phones(5) manual page is out of date everywhere.

http://jdebp.info/FGA/BSDs-for-Linux-users/use-the-man-man.html

#FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD #DragonFlyBSD #MidnightBSD #GhostBSD #LinuxMigration

I actually read the #FreeBSD Handbook's chapter on how FreeBSD bootstraps.

It's stuck in 2010. I'm not kidding. There's stuff in there that changed in the FreeBSD 7.3 release notes.

FreeBSD can boot on UEFI firmware nowadays, and directly from ZFS datasets. There's a gpart bootstrap command, and syscons does not use bright white for kernel messages any more.

In the meantime, the Handbook is telling people how to accidentally destroy their MBR or GUID partition tables with bsdlabel.

Do you think that we can get the Handbook people to catch up with the actual operating system, that is 16 years ahead? (-:

https://github.com/jdebp/freebsd-doc/blob/main/documentation/content/en/books/handbook/boot/_index.adoc

#UEFI #ZFS

@Toasterson @SolarisDiaspora

The #OpenIndiana WWW site lists you two, so I hope that you know whom to tell about this:

There are two OpenIndiana codes of conduct. They are different in fairly significant ways, and since people are looking around at alternative operating systems more than usual at the moment, they are noticing this.

My educated guess is that the one with more sources is the more recent one.

https://docs.openindiana.org/misc/conduct/

https://www.openindiana.org/community/#code-of-conduct

First BSD thing of any kind that I've heard of actually in the U.K. for a long time. (#EuroBSDCon has not been in the U.K. since half a decade *before* Brexit.)

Bit of a commute to inside the London ULEZ at 3 hours's notice, though. (-:

The 2nd of September is today. That might have been a typo.

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@abs0/117201860802391427

#NetBSD

Today's top tip is twofold:

1. In the Z shell, you can get help about the thing under the cursor as you are typing a command-line with ESC followed by 'h'. In several terminal emulators this is the sequence generated when you press [⎇ Alt]+[H]. It's not [F1] for help, as we could do with 4DOS and 4OS2 and Take Command, but it's not bad.

2. Of course, this is just running the man command, which is less than helpful with builtins. But it does not have to. In your .zshrc, unalias the run-help alias and then autoload run-help as a function. There's such a function supplied out of the box, and it knows about Z shell builtins.

https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/User-Contributions.html#Accessing-On_002dLine-Help

#ZShell #UnixShells

@mirabilos

Apparently, lack of WWW site activity indicates nonexistence. (-:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49143658

#MirBSD

Yes. Really. Joy+Horton #vi had — well, has, since it's still there in #Illumos — three forms of open mode, in addition to visual mode, as explained in a long-forgotten comment in the source code.

https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/116789549545886384

I challenge the #retrocomputing world to find an ADM-3 (not an ADM-3A, which had cursor addressing) or another video terminal without cursor addressing, in the 21st century.

All of the retrocomputerists on YouTube appear to have 3As.

There's apparently an as yet unfilled niche for an aspiring YouTube retrocomputerista to show Joy+Horton vi in its 'one line' open mode on a video terminal that lacks cursor addressing.

#Unix #Tribblix

Following on from a recent conversation with @rl_dane about running Joy+Horton #vi in one of its three (sic!) 'open' modes on a paper terminal:

I decided to see whether any modern #termcap or #terminfo database actually had any settings anywhere for switching dot matrix printers between near-letter, draft, and letter quality modes.

#Illumos, #OpenBSD, #Debian, and #NetBSD all use the Dickey terminfo.src. #FreeBSD is the only one maintaining a different database. It is still maintaining the old BSD termcap file, in 2026.

Neither of the databases have sdrfq/snlq/snrmq or ZG/ZL/ZK capabilities in any record.

This stuff exists solely as words on a manual page (and reprints of the same in various books) and a single Usenet post by Oliver Okrongli in 1994. It's not even in the O'Reilly termcap+terminfo book.

We should prune such stuff that apparently has never really existed.

#retrocomputing #Unix

#BeckySmethurst 4 hours ago put out a video that contained a lengthy sales pitch for #Anthropic and #Claude in the middle.

People are Not Happy, and there is a lot of talk about unsubscribing in the comments section already.

Will there be a significant blip in the subscriber figures? Will people actually follow through? The tools aren't showing any subscriber figures for today, yet. But yesterday the total was around 855k.

#LLMs #AI

1991: With the release of Net/2, #BSD changes the old /usr/dict to /usr/share/dict .

1997: FHS 2.0 is released, changing the /usr/dict from FSSTND 1.x to /usr/share/dict .

1998: #Debian changes /usr/dict to /usr/share/dict in its spelling packages, the change taking about a year to propagate to all packages.

2001: #Wikipedia is invented.

2009: A 2-edit account puts the old /usr/dict name into Wikipedia. where it has stood ever since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Diff/325776830

Remember: Sometimes Wikipedia is so out of date that what it says stopped being true before Wikipedia even existed.

#Unix #FilesystemHierarchyStandard

A random stranger rudely shouting at me across a shop, again. Someone thinks that I work there, again.

I don't know how people are drawing these conclusions again and again. I don't wear anything like the shop uniforms. And it's not happening in only one shop.

It's a bit of a shame that this fella went to all of that trouble digging through Illumos.

https://youtube.com/v/tUqHsv6JarY?lc=UgwAiVOVkz-sP_j-H7J4AaABAg

#Illumos is one of the few platforms that does not have the <sys/ttydefaults.h> header from 4BSD. It was ironically quite the wrong place to look. The GNU and musl C libraries have the header, as do all of #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, and #NetBSD.

The problem is that although <sys/ttydefaults.h> has been around since 1983 (1993 in its current form), almost no-one, apart from people like me who write terminal emulators and whatnot and cannot just use cfmakesane(), knows that it is there. It isn't in any manual.

Which leads to things like stty in GNU coreutils going all around the houses to do something simple, too.

#ttydefaults #termios #stty

I found a disintegrating plastic container of a mystery crystalline chemical in amongst the re-used plastic food containers of electronics spares in a cardboard box in the relative's shed. I only realized after reaching in to the container.

I believe that it was #thymol.

There was what was left of a non-specific hazard warning on the container, but the labelling was woefully inadequate to indicate the contents or the hazard and the lid had gone. Sold by a specialist supplier as an insecticide decades ago and them dumped part-used in a box by the relative. Alongside re-used plastic ice cream tubs still labelled for the ice cream.

Fortunately, I was wearing gloves. But now I've had to put those and all of my clothing into the wash, after rinsing myself down on site.

Leaving chemical boobytraps in what seems like a box of electronics odds and ends is not on.

#ShedClearance

Warning: there's a lot of U.S.A. politics in the rest of the thread, so have a care about clicking through.

But this part was interesting. Someone wanted to prove that generative AI was alright by showing how it allowed xem to do something that xe could not do unaided.

But it did not do the task specified.

It changed the whole image in ways that weren't prompted at all. The basketball hoop gets blended into the gazebo, which alongside the side of the building becomes an Escherist nightmare. The garden furniture, foundations, and canoes are all changed significantly, and the footpath becomes blended in with the rocks and grass. Even the trees appear to change species.

Also, the windows and doors change shapes.

To the writer of the alt text, however, this is 'the same cottage' with just a siding change.

Yet more evidence that the major thing that the 2020s have proven is that we humans are generally not capable of applying the #TuringTest.

https://mstdn.ca/@Hardhead13/116388219342242077

#AI

The new way of selling 'AI' seems to be to push it as a bugfinder. The latest example being waved around as of yesterday includes, as one of its non-embargoed examples, what is patched by this #OpenBSD patch.

https://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/patches/7.8/common/025_sack.patch.sig

The problematic thing is that this sort of bugfixing hasn't changed the commentary in the code, which stated that p points to the last linked list entry at the point of the added null check and can never be null. But it actually can be, if there was a sole linked list entry that ended up being fully encompassed and thus deleted.

So this kind of 'AI' use is going to give us a lot more comments-do-not-match-code maintenance headaches down the road.

(Both #NetBSD and #FreeBSD factor this out into a separate tcp_sack.c and do the linked list handling slightly differently without a 'previous' pointer.)

#AI

The cable box, that the relative's cable company never wanted back well over a decade ago, has come out of hiding down the back of a workbench in a shed and yielded a 500GiB Seagate hard disc. Not to be sniffed at.

If I can figure out how to get the heat sink off, I shall satisfy my curiosity about what CPU it used.

It's one of those affairs that uses the 'H' type of torx-head screws — purportedly a 'security' measure, but I was able to buy a set of L keys for £15 from Machine Mart.

Thanks should go to whoever it was on the FediVerse who put me on to #MachineMart a couple of years ago.

https://machinemart.co.uk/p/laser-miniature-star-bit-set-tamperproof/

Yes, I know. £15 for something that I could have got for a tenner off e-Bay is not the best trade. But I'm having fun channelling #BigClive, opening the thing up with pry bars and sticking the hard disc into another machine to see how it is partitioned and formatted.

#torx #ShedClearance

Inspired by a #TomScott aside in an episode of Lateral:

What tune did you sing (if you did) the English alphabet to when you were a child?

#AlphabetSong #ABCSong #SesameStreet

The 1750 #UKLaw rule for calculating the date of #Easter breaks down quite simply.

The New Testament account is that Jesus rose from the dead on the day after the Sabbath, i.e. the Sunday (the Sabbath being Saturday), that followed Passover.

So what's the date of #Passover? It's the fourteenth day of Nisan, which is the first (ecclesiastical) month of the Hebrew luni-solar calendar.

Hebrew calendar months (nominally) begin at the new moon, so the 14th day is (approximately) the time of the full moon.

So when does #Nisan start? It has all been done with tables for about 16 centuries, but the underlying aim was to tie it to the vernal equinox.

Hence expressing all of this with the religions taken out: Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

And because the Gregorian Calendar aimed to stabilize the dates of the equinoxes, taking even some of the #astronomy out of the rule gets this last part turned into "after the 21st of March".

#Pascha