sigh

Earlier this week, we had to pay a large sum of money, because there's leakage in the apartment complex we live in, and it needs to be fixed ASAP. Initially, we wanted to pay it in monthly installments, but none of the banks were willing to allow that, so full price up front it had to be.

That puts is in a pretty bad financial position, because this was our entire savings, the savings that were meant to last until early December1, and now our account is almost empty, and we have bills to pay.

I have some income, but not nearly enough to sustain us. While I'm trying to find a way to bridge the gap, I don't think I'll be able to do so on my own, so here I am, asking for #MutualAid (links in footnotes2 below). I'm also open for short-term contract work (contact me3 for resume & more information).

Any and all help is most appreciated to get us through the next few months, every little bit helps, as does boosting this plea.

Thank you!

1. We'll be fine from December onwards. ↩︎

2. Liberapay, Paypal, GitHub Sponsors, Revolut ↩︎

3. DM, Email, or Signal (algernon.42). ↩︎

So, the first few steps will be: reading Linux From Scratch, peeking under NetBSD's hood, and reading up on the theory behind Nix & Guix.

I will not be using neither Nix, nor Guix (the package manager), but I do plan to use a Lisp for the configuration language. Which Lisp? I don't know yet. Probably not Common Lisp (slop), not Clojure (Java is heavy).I'm considering Guile and Fennel at the moment, or - if I'm writing the package manager anyway - then one of the Schemes I can embed in Rust.

I have my reservations about Fennel... I love it, but... I do not love Lua and the Lua ecosystem all that much.

Guile is okay, I guess. I haven't worked with it much, I will have to tinker a little, and see if I like it, and if I can bend it to my will1.

1. It's a Lisp. Of course I can bend it to my will. ↩︎

I realized something today: I have been using Linux for 30 years this December, but I have never assembled a distribution from scratch. I have built tiny images for tiny embedded devices, using binaries from other distributions.

But I never built one from scratch. Maybe I should.

Except it will not be a Linux distribution.

Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2

Not a shade on the author of this article, more on reMarkable: if a four year old device obsoletes into this kind of sorry state, I'm not buying anything from you, ever.

#algernonReviewsHackerNews

ROFL. I just ran a "detect AI generated code" tool on iocaine, and it's hilarious.

Scores:
  Claude     ████████████████████ 67.5%
  Gemini     ███████ 25.4%
  GPT        ██ 7.0%
  Copilot     0.0%
  Human       0.0%

The signals it uses for scoring is hilarious. Follow along in the next few toots for some mind bogglingly bad takes!

Big Plan for 2027: explore the viability of migrating my infra from #NixOS to #Guix.

Previously, I had three major concerns: GNU, my reliance and investment in systemd, and package availability.

The latter isn't terribly hard to address. The second is no longer a concern. That leaves GNU, but even there, nixos has worse entities near it than GNU.

I will have to figure out how to replace impermanence and home manager, but the former is also a concern with nixos, because upstream recently dropped a feature I use, and do not wish to stop using.

A hard ban on LLM/"AI" use in a FLOSS project is the moderate stance. I am not a moderate person.

Giving space to these machines is throwing the millions of people whose work they stole, the millions of people who suffer under their crawlers' assault under the bus.

We do not throw each other under the bus in a civil society. I hope you understand this to be the bare minimum.

@mullvadnet Hi! I'm using your nftnl-rs crate in a Rust app of mine, and I'd like to look up a set within a table (both by name). As far as I can tell, that's not something I can do with nftnl-rs's safe wrappers, and would need to drop down to nftnl-sys.

I was wondering if it would make more sense for me to add the lookup bits I need, and send you a patch. Would you be interested in it? And if so, is there a way to send a patch without using GitHub1?

1. For all intents and purposes, I do not have a GitHub account, and do not wish to have one either. ↩︎

I am glad to read there are sane voices in Debian. I can only hope that the majority share this sentiment.

Spinning this out from a longer thread, because it is Important™, and I wish to pin it. There's something I learned from Jurassic Park, something that has proved to be a great guiding principle in these interesting times we live in.

"Life... uhh... finds a way."

So does hope, and so shall we all.

It's been a while I refreshed my pinned #introduction toot, and I figured today will be a fitting day to write a new one.

Hi! Despite the avatar, I'm not a furry1, I'm a boring cishet white dude. Despite my privileged status, I might be considered a "terrorist"2 in some weird jurisdictions, and some companies3 will consider me a "malicious actor", because I built myself a crawler defense system that serves them an infinite maze of garbage. To them, I say: fuck you. I'm a Vengeful Mouse.

I also have the privilege of being able to admire the human body in all shapes and forms, even such "grotesque" things as a female presenting nipple (like this one: :female_presenting_nipple:, not to be confused with the :manboob:, an entirely different and totally not grotesque thing). I wish this was the norm, rather than a privilege.

I'm a serial drive-by contributor, I have my fingerprints all over the internet. I have code in #QMK, #Kaleidoscope, and #Chrysalis, but I contributed to #Forgejo, #niri, and a whole lot of other things too. I find great joy in playing with new things, and submitting patches or other contributions. I used to be a #Debian developer, I've put #Hy in production, and lately I've been building #NixOS configurations not only as a literate #OrgMode document, with with #OrgRoam. I am extremely normal and neurotypical.

Apart from these very normal things, I use #NixOS to boot into #Emacs, which is the real operating system I use, like a very sane, completely neurotypical person would. I also tend to live-toot (very verbosely) all kinds of shenanigans I'm up to, because I always forget I have a blog.

While I do wrangle code for a living in a variety of languages (in whatever language necessary, I'm a generalist! But if I can choose, I turn to #Rust, although #Lisp languages are also very dear to me), if it were up to me, I'd much prefer wrangling other kinds of words4 than programming language symbols. Sadly, we're not living in a world that makes possible, so I had no choice but become a #luddite and so can you.

But I'm not all about tech5! I'm also Dad to wonderful Twins, and Husband to my Wife, who not only puts up with my crazy, but gently6 fans the flames too. I may occassionally toot about #parenting, too.

I may or may not have an unhealthy addiction to footnotes7.

1. Nope, I'm not in denial stage, I do not work in infosec. ↩︎

2. I'm anti-fascist. ↩︎

3. Like Anthropic. ↩︎

4. Short stories like this toot, or The Tragedy of Byr (which might need an explanation to really understand what's going on). ↩︎

5. I wish I could leave tech, really. ↩︎

6. Where "gently" is either an eyeroll and more wood thrown onto the campfire, or straight up lighting up the neighbourhood, figuratively speaking. ↩︎

7. ...if you haven't noticed yet... ↩︎

But first: lets get rid of some bots.

Woke up to see iocaine refusing connections again. Turns out there was a big wave a few hours ago.

However... iocaine does continue to work, and there were requests that managed to go through. It's just refusing a lot of them.

To me, this suggests a problem around accept(), so I'll have a look at the listener parts.

The documentation says I should add an SSH server. The linked page there doesn't tell me much about how, though.

I figured I'll copy /run/current-system/configuration.scm somewhere, edit it, and guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm.

But alas, that ends with:

Git error: unsupported URL protocol

In the traceback above, I see references to /home/ludo/<something>. I suppose it is trying to fetch channels from there or something?

Lets start a (hopefully not too painful!) #Guix adventure thread!

I downloaded the latest VM image (1.4.0), started up QEMU like this:

qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -nic user,model=virtio-net-pci,hostfwd=tcp::10022-:22 \
  --enable-kvm \
  -m 2048 \
  -device virtio-blk,drive=guix -drive if=none,file=guix-system-vm-image-1.4.0.x86_64-linux.qcow2,id=guix

Boots up fine, gets an IP, nice. But there's no SSH running, so I can't log in. Lets try adding one!

Today was a good day. To crown it, before I go to sleep, lets paint a happy picture! :bob_ross: :easel:

Let there be green trees, blue sky, happy little clouds and a big, bright, bright sun! In the corner, an evil billionaire - OH NO! But remember! This is a happy picture, for there's a :trebuchet:, and we can launch him into that big, bright, bright sun, while gentle music plays. :synth_sun:

I love happy pictures. Good night, Fedi.