does anyone remember when people would talk about code smells. or design patterns. or application architecture principles.

I just discovered a web framework in Gforth: 1991.

"But Fredric Jameson establishes that in postmodernism we have experienced a weakening sense of historisity such that what is, what was, and what will be all exist as presents in time. 1970, 1991, 1992, and 2017 all happen simultaneously. Hence developers working on new projects while still coding in decades-old text editors. They write the future in the past and are made present in so doing."
https://www.1-9-9-1.com/

Code:
https://github.com/urlysses/1991

The Ultrawealthy Produce More Carbon Pollution Than Nearly Half of Humanity
https://time.com/article/2026/10/27/carbon-emissions-ultra-rich-oxfam-report/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Top Stories @top-stories-time

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today.

Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man. Just last month, on Sept. 14, he turned 90, on the same day Brad and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary. I will always treasure that he and I shared that date.

Walter was more than Chekov. He was a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend. To the fans who loved him for so many years, thank you. He loved you too.

Rest well, my dear friend. Keep navigating a steady course.

– George

A brief aside to discuss the concept of race.

Race is a social construct. It may overlap with some linguistic or biological markers, but ultimately it's something imposed by power. Race is like money: it exists because the people with the guns made it up.

In South Africa, "Black" and "Coloured" are considered to be different races. This loosely corresponds to the traditional divide between Nguni and Khoi people, but "Coloured" also includes a lot of people with mixed heritage (which often goes centuries back - humans don't fit neatly into categories.) If a Black and a Coloured person were to travel to Europe, they would both be considered Black by European standards, but in South Africa there would be a divide, which just shows us how arbitrary race is.

There are, roughly, ten Black people for every Coloured person in South Africa; during the late Apartheid person, which is when the rest of this thread is set, White people narrowly outnumbered Coloured people.

Did you know all of our live streaming is available through peer tube?

Check it out if you haven't https://gnulinux.tube/c/seagl2026/videos

#seagl2026 #peertube

Indian Supreme Court rules that cancer drug markups are extortionate, orders them to drop

Prices are expected to drop about 70%

Sadly the woman who sued to bring the case to court did not live to see it. RIP Sarojam Radhakrishnan

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/oct/23/india-cuts-cost-cancer-drugs

#India

Me: it's still hard for me to accept that big tech did "embrace, extend, extinguish" of Linux 🙄
Bae: it's worse, they did "embrace, extend, extinguish" of Linus 🫩

Since #PHP is at the top of peoples minds, a short diversion.

In the Before Times of 20+ years ago, I worked for a smallish tech company that did some of everything. One of the #consulting jobs we took on was to #audit a #codebase for a company that was buying another company - the application was the acquiree's crown jewels, and the purchaser wanted a good solid analysis of it.

It was in PHP. I was not looking forward to it. As a betting person you are unlikely to go wrong with "very #niche market-specific software application developed in-house by small company working in that space is likely to be pretty terribly #designed and #implemented", and most of the PHP I had looked at by that point was, well, bad.

And it absolutely was not. It was in the then-new PHP v.5. And it was cleanly designed, nicely modular, very #readable #code and well documented, good #development practices. Sure, there were some things in it that could be improved, mostly more efficient algorithms / data structures IIRC, but all software can be improved *somewhere*. The final report was fairly glowing about it.

Anyone who tells you all code written in $LANGUAGE is awful, or all #programmers who use it are idiots, is showing you their whole ass. Languages are #tools. Some are easier to use for certain purposes than others, but they're all useful for something. Don't be closed-minded.

#engineering #software #SoftwareEngineering #RightToolForTheRightJob #homily

The greatest challenge of our time isn’t to figure out how to get to Mars or become interstellar, but to figure out how to live sustainably on Earth.

The plenary of the IPCC was suspended on Friday, with no agreement on the timeline for publication of the reports nor on the budget for 2027.
As scientists, and authors engaged in writing these reports, our message is simple: we are working and we will keep working to provide the best scientific evidence we can to inform decisions on one of the defining global challenges of our time, climate change. An open letter signed by more than IPCC authors (and more signatures coming): https://zenodo.org/records/23463829

We held the latest episode in our series with Michael Hudson and Kathleen Tyson
You can see the full video here:

https://youtu.be/SV8aN91bK5Q

Something I occasionally think about, and then proceed to be horrified to my core over, is this:

A Raspberry Pi 4 *vastly* outperforms an Amiga 4000. Or a Symbolics XL1200. Or an SGI Octane. A typical microSD card is *much* faster than a Seagate Cheetah Ultra320 SCSI HDD you might have found in a high-end Unix workstation back in the day.

But the Pi 4 is barely able to run modern-day office software or browse the mainstream web. The microSD card is mostly considered a slow piece of junk (which it very likely is, though for other reasons than its performance).

What the fuck are we even doing here?

"Trans Lives are Real. Harry Potter is Not"
Sticker spotted in NYC

@GossiTheDog From a quick read of the story (and some personal experience with this company, long before AI), this seems to be more about making sure the AI spend is billed to the client rather than absorbed as an overhead cost. The $29 is how much Accenture will absorb themselves. Everything else must be billed to a client. They've done this for years with time, as well. It's fairly standard in IT consulting. You have to make sure costs are billable.

> Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute

Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

> Programming is the art of abstraction, of understanding how to compose smaller indeas into bigger ones, of how to understand the automation of a larger system by understanding the rules that automate smaller ones and understanding how to combine them.

https://blog.glyph.im/2026/10/programming-isnt-special.html

4/9

just been reminded of the time rage against the machine were the winning protest vote for the Christmas number one. BBC had them on to play 'killing in the name' in the run up.

They asked them not to do the "fuck you, I wont do what you tell me" part, to predictable results, and the Consternation of the presenter.

It’s not our job to fix our employers: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/06-its-not-our-job-to-fix-our-employers/

Hi folks, if you are maintaining a widely used #OpenSource infrastructure project (think networking, encryption, testing/QA automation, desktop libraries, payment libraries ...) now is a good time to ask for a security audit or other support through the Sovereign Tech Resilience program.

The basic idea is: you apply (quick process), and we pair you with a partner firm from our network. We help with the scoping and pay the bill for the partner.

This is _not_ money for maintainers -- we have other programs for that -- but it does translate in free access to services for you.

Please take a look at the full services provided and consider if some of them could make sense for you. Happy to answer questions.

https://www.sovereign.tech/programs/resilience