I have used vim since around 2000. I have written five books, a PhD thesis, a few dozen papers and over 150 articles with it. At this point, my higher brain functions are not engaged at all when I use a bunch of common vim commands, they just happen. Documents I wrote with anything else have random :w in the middle.

So I tried NeoVim when it was quite new. Vim that you are familiar with, but better? Great!

Persistent undo is one of my favourite features of vim (introduced a few years after I started using it). My .vimrc includes a couple of lines related to this. One sets the path to be under ~/.cache so the undo files do not clutter the rest of the filesystem (I do the same for the swap files). The other sets the undo limit to something large (10,000, I think) because disk space is enormous relative to pretty much anything involving human-readable quantities of plain text.

I don’t often need the persistent undo. But on the few occasions when I have needed it, it’s been invaluable: ooops, I deleted something from this file, maybe last week and one reboot ago, what was it? Undo until I find it, copy it, paste it into the current version. Or, a bit more commonly: I had this working, then I tidied it up ready to commit, now it isn’t working, what did I do?

Vim has kept this working across major version upgrades over a period of about 20 years. I don’t even think about it, it’s just part of Raskin’s First Law: A program may not harm a user’s data or, through inaction, allow a user’s data to come to harm. If vim or the computer crash, or if I close a file and come back to it six months later, my undo history is still there.

The first thing I noticed in NeoVim was that undo didn’t work. I tried opening the file in vim and undo didn’t work there either.

Neovim had changed the format of the undo files. It hadn’t upgraded the old one. It hadn’t used a different name for its undo files. It had just noticed the existence of a vim undo file, deleted it (losing all of the data in it) and replaced it with one that vim couldn’t read.

I raised an issue about this and was told that the persistent undo format was unstable and users should not rely on data being preserved in a feature explicitly called persistent undo. It had changed once and would probably change again.

And that ended my experience with NeoVim. The authors showed immediately that they absolutely could not be trusted with any of my data. Breaking persistent undo is something I could forgive as a bug, but the attitude that just because something is a persistent file on your filesystem that contains data that you might want is no reason for their program not to delete it meant they had no concept of a duty of care to their users.

Apparently now they’re platforming white supremacists. I am completely unsurprised. Different facets of the same underlying attitude.

Samsung Printer is the Next Frontier Of Minecraft Servers

hackaday.com/2026/08/20/samsun…

Réception du jour : Catzilla

#kaiju #godzilla

Yeah, yeah, Facebook, but this is brilliant: facebook.com/share/p/1MCCancxK…

"My favorite thing about The Odyssey is that when you notice how the poem is structured, the whole thing starts looking like Odysseus is just making up an alibi after coming home from a 10-year Fuckboy Tour of the Mediterranean.

See, the parts of The Odyssey that Homer narrates directly are surprisingly grounded. At the beginning we see Ithaca, Telemachus travels around looking for news of his father, and so on. At the end Odysseus returns, kills the suitors, and everyone is happy (except for the suitors). The gods interfere constantly because this is ancient Greece, but mostly it's a story about people doing people shit just like The Iliad.

But in the middle section, the narration very conspicuously shifts from Homer to Odysseus himself. He's explaining to the Phaeacians why it took him ten years to sail home from Troy, and suddenly we're dealing with one-eyed giants, cannibal armies, a witch who turns men into pigs, magic bags full of wind, six-headed sea monsters, and a trip to the Underworld.

Odysseus tells his story to the Phaeacians while he is stranded, broke, and in desperate need of a ship home. And remember that Odysseus is not merely capable of lying – lying is basically his superpower. He routinely invents elaborate fake biographies for himself at the drop of a hat, to the point that even Athena is impressed with his capacity for deception. He is canonically the original male manipulator.

And it makes sense why Homer depicts Odysseus telling all of this to the Phaeacians instead of the much-less-gullible Penelope, since you can imagine how his story would have gone over with her:

"Odysseus, the Trojan War ended 10 years ago. Where have you been all this time?"

"See what had happened was, we were gonna come straight home – but then when we were in sight of Ithaca, my men opened this magic bag of wind while I was asleep and it blew us to the other side of the ocean."

"Why did they open the bag after you told them not to?"

"Ah, well, see, I sort of forgot."

"Your men all died because you had a magic bag of wind that you forgot to tell them not to open and then took a nap?"

"No, they were all fine! But see, then a cyclops and some giant cannibals killed most of the men, and a witch turned the rest into pigs. But don't worry, they got better."

"They got better?"

"Well sure, the witch changed them back after I slept with her."

"...I see. Well, I suppose you had to save your men."

"Exactly! And so after a year with her-"

"You slept with her for A YEAR?"

"Hermes told me to, baby!"

"The god Hermes told you to fuck another woman. For a year."

"Penelope, who am I to question the will of the gods? So then we went to the Underworld, and after a quick detour back to see Circe again-"

"YOU WENT BACK?"

"It was important, babe! She had to tell us how to avoid all the sea monsters!"

"The sea monsters."

"Oh, sure – loads of sea monsters out there. The sea is lousy with monsters these days."

"Uh huh. And did you sleep with her again?"

"I mean, it would have been rude not to..."

"ODYSSEUS."

"Will of the gods, baby, will of the gods! So anyway we're headed home for real this time, but the men ignored my extremely excellent advice and ate one of Helios' sacred cattle while I was asleep, and Zeus killed them all. Damndest thing. So I wash up naked on this beach with a beautiful nymph, and well, one thing kinda led to another..."

"Did you sleep with her for a year too?"

"Of course not!"

"Well, that's a relief."

"It was seven."

"SEVEN?"

"She bewitched me! I was bewitched! Can't fault a guy for what he does when he's bewitched, can you?"

"And did you meet any other women on this epic journey of yours?"

"Well, there was this teenage princess..."

"ODYSSEUS!"

"Nothing happened, babe, I swear! I just washed up naked on the beach right in front of her. Nice girl, you'd like her."

"Odysseus, this is the second time you've just happened to wash up naked on a beach right in front of a beautiful woman."

"I know! Crazy, right? Anyway, when I told her parents everything that had happened, they were so amazed that they gave me all this gold and a ride straight home so I could be with my beloved."

"After 10 years."

"Well yeah, straight home after 10 years. Don't forget the sea monsters, babe!"

"The sea monsters that you are conveniently the only person left alive to have witnessed."

"I don't love where you're going with that..."

"Odysseus, do you know what I did while you were gone?"

"...Waited faithfully for me?"

"I raised your son, ran your kingdom, kept a hundred men from taking your throne, and spent three years weaving and unweaving the same fucking burial shroud every night to keep them off my back."

"That's... actually very clever."

"Thank you."

"You know, between the two of us, that's really more my–"

"Finish that sentence and I'm sending you back to the Cyclops."

“After just “10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it”.

An MIT study showed that test groups who used ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels”. We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.”

theguardian.com/books/ng-inter…

#ai #cognitivedebt

How to Build Your Offline Knowledge Library with #Kiwix on #Linux

ostechnix.com/kiwix-build-offl…

You heard it here first:

grumpygamer.com/twp2_announce/

Ron Gilbert announced the development of Thimbleweed Park 2!

Linux to be supported. As a side note - Mr. Gilbert himself switched to using Linux few years back 🐧

👉 grumpygamer.com/twp2_announce/
👉 mastodon.gamedev.place/@grumpy…

#gaming #news #ThimbleweedPark2 #Linux #pointandclick #adventure #games @grumpygamer

Ron Gilbert (GrumpyGamer)

2026-07-29 23:27:06

@holarse Yes, we haven't set up the builds yet, so it defaults to Win, but we will have Mac and Linux.

Secondo le misurazioni di @ooni almeno sei grandi provider italiani censurano, prevalentemente tramite DNS tampering, i siti di informazione sull'interruzione volontaria di gravidanza Women on Web (WoW) e Women Help Women (WHW)

ooni.org/post/2026-italy-block…

AI tech companies have ‘hidden debt’ worth around $1.65 trillion, report claims — amount is 122% of debt reflected on the balance sheets of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/ai-tech-companies-have-hidden-debt-worth-around-usd1-65-trillion-report-claims-amount-is-122-percent-of-debt-reflected-on-the-balance-sheets-of-alphabet-amazon-meta-microsoft-and-oracle?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Tom's Hardware @tom-s-hardware-TomsHardware

Coyote V. Acme

In The United States District Court, Southwestern District, Tempe, Arizona Case No. B19294, Judge Joan Kujava, Presiding

newyorker.com/magazine/1990/02…

(The New Yorker, Shouts & Murmurs, By Ian Frazier; February 19, 1990

I don't know why this post hasn't surfaced in my fedi feed so here I am, reposting it from Lobsters.

It is a post about making animations by abusing progressive JPEGs (and, I guess, web servers that send the image frame by frame with the right delays)

Regressive JPEGs: maurycyz.com/projects/bad_jpeg…

Boulet on sharing on the modern Web

bouletcorp.com/rogatons/2026/0…

"To be an artist on the internet is to plant flowers in a garden where someone is playing with a flamethrower." (Awful translation by me.)

Holy shit! The literal video version of Total Eclipse of the Heart is on YouTube again. I remember looking for a few times, but I guess it kept falling foul of copyright strikes.

Anyway, in honour of the memory of the great Bonnie Tyler, enjoy one of the finest things YouTube has ever hosted.

youtu.be/fsgWUq0fdKk