(can anyone confirm my suspicion that this plan is doomed anyway because no support for MediaTek MT792[12] wifi cards?)

#netbsd

attempted to install netbsd on a convenient laptop: thwarted at screen one of the installer because the *keyboard* is unresponsive :(

When a nobleman came in to the tavern and put a note on the board, the monster hunters went to check it out. Laughter erupted.

"A gazebo? Quick, someone get Eric!"

Then the bounty caught their attention.

"That's a lot of gold. Why?"

"This gazebo," the nobleman said, "was made by Baba Yaga."

#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

i was reminded of this blog post on “the myth of RAM” from 2014 which argues that the asymptotic complexity of random access addressing is sqrt(n), both empirically on actual hardware, and theoretically from simple physics

https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html

it took me AGES to remember the magic keywords to dredge up the dratted url, tho!

in the course of which i found this rather more academic article on modelling asymptotic complexity of virtual address translation https://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0703

So, likely confirming many sceptics' view of the Online Safety Act, Ofcom has concluded that in its first nine months it has had no discernible positive impact on the flow of inappropriate & dangerous material reaching children via social media.

As many argued at the time (and as I became convinced of after discussions in my timeline) this was the wrong way to address what remains a serious social problem.

We need a much bigger stick to deal with BigTech!

#politics
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/oct/23/uk-children-just-as-likely-to-have-suffered-harm-on-social-media-despite-crackdown-ofcom-online-safety-act

Hello Mastodon. I made a thing https://edjefferson.com/localwiki/

more or less confirms that the PHP exploit on Wednesday was overblown, and contrary to claims it would be exploited in 15 mins, we haven’t even seen one confirmed exploit yet. even proof of concept exploits are incredibly hard to write and deploy.

AI companies were lying. again

https://blog.luitjes.it/posts/i-want-my-wednesday-back/

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@djlink/117485618079098034

More laptops and consumer electronics that take cordless drill batteries, please.

your feedback is important to us, please place your microphone as close to your speaker as possible

Anyone got a recommendation for an html/js/css searchable select-one drop down menu widget that is all four of

- self-contained, doesn't drag an entire library of other unrelated components with it
- written directly to native browser APIs, not react or any other overlay component model (native web components are fine but not required)
- fully keyboard accessible
- not slop

this is for work and there's a client requirement for permissive licensing for the final product

too many people think code is a binary (mind the pun) in that it either works or it doesn't, when really it's a spectrum from "does it blow up (almost) every time" to "this will never have an issue"

code that looks like it works can only *mostly* work, and that's often the worst code of all

this is a post about AI

an interesting read: https://eliastaylor.com/noexploit/ ("There isn't an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability")

"If you take a look at github right now, there are thousands, literally thousands, of "PoC" exploits for this vulnerability. One thing you'll notice about all of them though, is that they do not work against a vanilla PHP instance."

more programming languages should have official plushies

I propose that awk's stuffed animal should be a sock stuffed with cotton batting and adorned with a single enormous googly eye

help i am a man what can i do proactively to keep sexism from making it harder for us to make software aside from purging the sin from my heart??

a few things
- make u workplace ADA and OSHA complient
- do not use "culture fit" (aka "do they have my same hobbies") as hiring criteria
- have an office administrator on payroll whose job it is to do stuff like make sure there is enough coffee n pens n shit; if u cant afford one dont make this a female senior engineer's job for some unholy reason

So, much like I rail about decisions to copy the designs of the social media platforms we’re trying to avoid here in our voidspace, why are we continuing to copy the software development platforms of the corporations we loathe the output from? Why build our communal efforts around their craptastic profit maximalist worldview?

Slow the fuck down. Make small useful things in small groups. Things that build on other small useful things built by small groups. Release it and then start thinking about what’s going to go into the next version, if there needs to be a next version. Keep an eye on what folks are saying in case you need to issue a hotfix. Stop dribbling out every little tweak and idea you have and look to having a shared, cohesive, comprehensible vision for what correct looks like for your software instead. Then take the time to make it correct. You’ll be happier, your users will be happier, I’d be willing to bet on it.

Qucik poll for those of you who have deployed #iocaine, or are considering doing so. Currently, I provide pre-compiled binaries of it, a single binary wrapped in various packaging boilerplate. That single binary includes a default script, a default word list, and some text to use for markov chain training embedded in it (and a default configuration too).

This makes deployment reasonably simple: it's a single binary. Drop it, run it, pretty much done. I don't think anyone runs it like that, however.

I'm considering dropping the embedding, and shipping not a single binary, but a tarball instead. A script, some configuration, training data and everything else that was embedded was still in the tarball, and it would be set up so that iocaine can easily find them - they wouldn't be embedded into the binary itself, is all.

Not embedding allows me to drop multiple dependencies, and allows me to remove a whole lot of code that made embedding work.

My question is: how would this affect you? Also feel free to reply with details, if you have some to share.

@zwol Where's that news story about someone who was like "UGH, why is my local government taking so long and talking about so much money, for putting five steps to make a path down a small hill?? I'm just gonna get some two-by-fours and bang together some steps myself! There! I did it for you!"
and then the follow-up reporting about the quality, safety, accessibility, usability, and longevity, issues that this made clear.

EDIT: one piece of the reporting, enough to give search terms for more in-depth from different angles (this story is a relatively soft touch, trying to vaguely express multiple people's perspective)
https://globalnews.ca/news/3614167/tom-riley-park-stairs-removed-toronto/

Fiddly tedious detail work is no fun, and it's hard to persuade management it's worth doing, particularly if it means there's fewer developer hours available for shiny new features.

And this is one of the most important practical reasons why all software is bad.

For the most part, programming isn't all that difficult. There are things that require heavy mathematical analysis to get right, but nowadays you can usually rely on someone having done that for you and wrapped it up in a library.

The catch, though: Writing a program that works for sure, always, for everyone, requires enormous amounts of fiddly, tedious detail work, and you need a lot of experience to be able to look at code, or program behavior, and see where that detail work hasn't been done.

RE: https://scoat.es/@sean/117480478803436020

I wanna say something a little more nuanced here:

It is easy and cheap to produce software that *mostly* works. It is also easy and cheap to learn enough programming to produce programs that are good enough for your own personal use.

The extra 90+% of costs that Mr. Coates is talking about here are *all* in the gap between "mostly works, most of the time, for me and people like me" and "works for sure, always, for everyone."