The Malleable Systems Collective catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power in computing

There’s no size difference between a string and a struct{ string } and it’s just as easy to read as a straight string. Because of the String() method, you can pass these values to %s etc in format strings and they’ll print out the name with no extra code or work.

The fish told me of this cool new feature. In short,

func main() {
  mux := http.NewServeMux()
  mux.HandleFunc("GET /path/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    fmt.Fprint(w, "got path\n")
  })

  mux.HandleFunc("/task/{id}/", func(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    id := r.PathValue("id")
    fmt.Fprintf(w, "handling task with id=%v\n", id)
  })

  http.ListenAndServe("localhost:8090", mux)
}

Handy!

Гришаев решил корабль Тезея.

Flancia Meet is a weekly video conference where we discuss our projects and goals, and occasionally work in public. Most participants are programmers.

I am here often. I helped to write this page.

Это приватный сервис для ведения задач, как рабочих, так и домашних. Данные хранятся в локальном хранилище браузера (localStorage).

Local first!

SSG for Git is something new for me.

Turn paper documents into a searchable digital database.

The author tells a brief history of passports: they are very recent. China got them since Han dynasty, West got them since First World War. What about Russia? I think it was Peter the First who introduced them? No? It's always Peter the First...

Anyway. Passports are used for surveillance, and with the ongoing digitalization, will be used even more. Everything is tracked with no real need for the citizens. Something like NFT could be used instead. The author talks about age verification and phone contracts. I thought of NFT for medicine: the doctor doesn't really need your name.

What will the world without identification look like? Dunno. I don't really want to lose the ability to get back my money in case I get scammed; how would that work without identification?

MVC is a very popular architectural design pattern that goes absolutely against the spirit of object-oriented programming.

Teehee.

A weird problem

Comics about UNIX??

In not too distant future, in a universe not too dissimilar to ours, the world is barren. Vast sprawls of arid deserts and inhospitable jungles cover the face of the planet, while the majority of its denizens persist in gigantic walled-off Metacities, governed by the omni present gov-corporations. These cities are home to many beings living under the tyranical regimes of their watchful overlords. This is the age of technocrats, transhumanists and digisophers, all slaves to meticulously crafted closed hardware, deceptive software and cyber practices designed to enthrall all who wish to persist on this new frontier of the future.

Archive.today is a time capsule for web pages! It takes a 'snapshot' of a webpage that will always be online even if the original page disappears. It saves a text and a graphical copy of the page for better accuracyand provides a short and reliable link to an unalterable record of any web page

The biggest design mistake I made with Amfora, my first community open source project, was autogenerating config files. On startup, the application looks for a config file, and creates one if it doesn’t exist, full of all the application defaults. At the time, I thought this was great, as it documents all the existing options, and makes them very visible to the user in case they want to change them. In the end, this decision created a lot of headaches and is not something I’d ever do again.

makeworld is right! I had the same problem in Mycorrhiza but didn't suffer great consequences because the configuration design didn't change much.

A hackernews claims their internet experience is faster on FreeBSD due to a superior internet stack. Is it true!?

It's 2024 - do you know where your post-quantum cryptography is?

Q-day is in 10 years max.

Few people know how to use computers.

Alex tells us that, for him, baking and cooking are easier than programming and soldering, because the errors there average out. As for me, this is completely inverse.

In programming, an error never fixes itself. You can observe it and fix it, you can write tests. You can run the program multiple times. It's you who fixes it, and you can understand how it's done. It's measurable!

Meanwhile, cooking is a nightmare. Burning something is routine for me. Is that too much or too little oil? For how long do I fry? What do I do with these spices? Do they really affect the taste? And to observe something, I can't rely on symbolic things like text. No, I have to look (is this color good? No idea!), smell (as if I know the difference) and taste (nothing more inaccurate).

I'm happy when something can be cooked with a timer. 15 min for buckwheat? I'm in. I'm more happy when the time is short. 4 min for this thin kind of spaghetti? Already boiling water!

I mean, even boiling water is not simple. My parents told me to wait until the correct bubbles appear. I'm waiting for the scary ones. Also, salt is supposed to make it boil faster. How much salt do I add?

And I didn't even talk about plants, which Alex also considers easy. They're not 😭

Cute.

“JUST” It's one of the worst four-letter words I know.

Автора бесит слово «просто». Меня тоже! Я вот стараюсь его искоренить из себя. Непросто это всё!!

A proposal for the next generation of portable documents.

Беру любой JSON и вижу, как его можно упростить, убрав лишнюю вложенность. Вдвойне обидно, что на эту вложенность кто-то тратил время, а она не нужна!

Everyone told me there is no water on top of this Brazilian mountain, there won’t be any frogs. Now I’ve dedicated my life to preserving this incredible species

PaperWM is a Gnome Shell extension which provides scrollable tiling of windows and per monitor workspaces. It's inspired by paper notebooks and tiling window managers.

Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip going to the right.
Opening a new window never causes existing windows to resize.

Every monitor has its own separate window strip.
Windows can never "overflow" onto an adjacent monitor.

Since windows go left-to-right horizontally, workspaces are arranged vertically.
Every monitor has an independent set of workspaces, and there's always one empty workspace present all the way down.

All these scrolling WM:s sound so fun! I want to try one one day.

Where ActivityPub developers coordinate their efforts to make the Fediverse a great space for cooperation

A forum for the fedidevs. What's funny is this notice it shows on my outdated Safari:

Unfortunately, your browser is unsupported. Please switch to a supported browser to view rich content, log in and reply.

This sentence contains to a funky website that recommends some browsers. Links2 is not there for some reason.

I should join the forum though, as I'm a proud fedidev now!

Scientist labeled a colony of bees with QR codes and observed what happened. Turned out, information flow in the colony is pretty effective, it's not just random. Also I learned of trophallaxis.

Replacing all magic numbers with variables/constants is not always good. Think.

If there is one principle that should be added to the UNIX philosophy, it is:

"Finish your project."

Let me list my finished projects.

• Uh...

I can't even say Mycorrhiza is finished despite it being in maintenance mode!

P2P technology is doomed on mobile [because of small batteries]. For a democratic web, we need to work on federation.

The author thought so in 2016. 8 years later I'm developing for the federated web, cool. I like how they mention Diaspora, which is history now.

If you feel unsure about colors, then do not use colors. Black on white is enough. Syntax highlighting might be an exception, but even there black on white is ok.

Martin came up with the idea of using something like the roots from semitic languages for naming things. I thought of the same before I read this article, but it's good to have it written down by somebody.

bees

The OpenSearch description format can be used to describe the web interface of a search engine. This allows a website to describe a search engine for itself, so that a browser or other client application can use that search engine. OpenSearch is supported by (at least) Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Chrome. (See Reference Material for links to other browsers' documentation.)

Flancian recommended me this tech. I might want to implement it for Betula, maybe. Gotta investigate.

a simple, multi-tenant feed reader

While not as rigorous as systems like Darcs and Pijul (which are based on a formalized theory of patches

An ActivityPub debugging instance? Gotta take a look, probably.

A wiki on Thinkpads and Linux.

Another thinkpad post for my collection.

Archive whole YouTube channels.

RapidAPI for Mac is a full-featured HTTP client that lets you test and describe the APIs you build or consume. It has a beautiful native macOS interface to compose requests, inspect server responses, generate client code and export API definitions.

Grishka recommended me this for HTTP probing. It helped me!

Libre audio books. Recommended by Flancian.

Written before the Fedi times.

Collection of encrypted correspondence between the compiler and various correspondents, in approximately 150 alphabets, accompanied by transcriptions of the letters in Arabic. The compiler cites Shihāb al-Dīn al-Jindī al-ʻAlāʼī, Burhān al-Dīn al-Qudsī, and Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Jaʻfar al-Ḥusaynī as authorities for some of the alphabets. The manuscript is incomplete, lacking its beginning and end. Occasional marginal notes. Some worm damage in margins.

Via https://t.me/linguopunk/549

Арабская книга 14 века с собственным тайным алфавитом для тайных записей

Viktor asserts that being a night person means that you go to sleep late not because it's your organism demand, but because it's your habit, id est it's your choice. I'm writing this as I'm transitioning to being an early bird.

Then he gives some motivational talk.

Tedu. The person that developed projects I want to develop too five years ago already with the same stack for some reason. Author of Honk, Inks, Azorius and whatnot.

Orwell said:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

All about hypertext!