I consider writing software a kind of craftsmanship. It's important to me to think through what I build, to consciously make design decisions based on knowledge and the existing problem space. To understand why things work (or not!) and be able to solve problems as they come up. To keep things readable, understandable, maintainable.
In the end, I want to be proud of what *I* build.
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I was thinking about this kind of stuff today when I saw there was an "intel-microcode" update for my computer. My computer is pretty old now, and it seems to work fine. So I wonder what the update is about. And it crosses my mind that the political situation in the USA might mean companies are pressured into doing things they wouldn't have done in the past...
That said, I'll probably install the update. I think it unlikely to be malicious. But this forced-trust really isn't a great way for things to work.
Che ne dite del CW quando si parla di guerra?
Non perché non me ne frega ma perché attualmente non ce la faccio.
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per favore segnala i post senza CW sulla guerra così li sistemiamo lato mod ❤
Confermo che - come dice @Donutsaurus - ci vuole il CW su LS per quegli argomenti.
The internet tells me that there is a book called “Natural dyes for education and colour experimentation”, targeting educational and artistic users, that can be downloaded (licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and looks quite interesting:
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So my display, which is accurately showing the data, is like:
We're going slower than a Toronto pub crawl. No, wait! We're going faster than the speed of light!
We're somewhere in Mexico. No, wait! We are probably in Kansas.
The client ship is going the exact same speed at the exact same location as us! No wait. It *is* us. No wait, it's *ramming* us at full speed!!
Man, I had some fails in my time, but this one wasn't just a fail, it was fucking *embarrassing*.
"Build a special custom icebreaking display using the hardware on the ship, it'll be brilliant!"
The hardware doesn't work in the ice. Any actual icebreaker captain could have told me -- us -- that, had we -- they -- ever actually consulted one.
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Fedi, a good friend needs to find a place to live in Padua (Padova), Italy. He has citizenship, but doesn't speak the language well. He's not wealthy but he's able to afford a small place. He's currently in the UK.
Can anyone help me find him a letting agent or any other source where he can view and apply to rent an apartment? He's tried calling a couple of places to no avail.
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Fedi update: He's willing to look anywhere in Italy now -- suggestions welcome. (He was interested in that area because his family is from there, but no one is left there now.)
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Ehi Fediverso italiano!
Aiutiamo l'amico di @wohali a trovare un appartamento a Padova!
🇮🇹 Going to Italy in the near future. Exciting!
Does anyone have recommendations for learning to read/ speak Italian? Hopefully not AI-cooked like Duolingo
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While I don't like to travel, and I dislike planning travel, Wikivoyage is a really helpful site when I have to.
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Thanks for the reminder!
Have a (short) trip I have been nervous about planning as I had not been there before and it is a bit of a smaller town... but it at least spells out a bit about the public transit options, limited though they may be.
It also includes a link to a bike route map, which is a really compelling option for me!
grep.be/blog//en/computer/clue…
thanks to Wouter for writing what I think on the subject
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I don't care what tools you use. Whether your use is ethical or not is not my business, it's yours, and it is your conscience you'll have to clear. I used to be a gatekeeping elitist prick who judged people who used software I disliked. I try not to be one anymore.
But - and this is a very, very big but - if the tools you use only exist because they're scraping and DDoSing the entire internet, and the cost of their existence is externalized to me, and everyone else running a website?
Then I will care, and I will call you out on your bullshit if you try to present yourself as an ally, while making excuses for the damage these things cause.
This is not about ethics. This is not about copyright, or rights in general. This is about externalizing costs to people who do not deserve this level of abuse, and then denying their complaints.
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ilpost.it/2026/02/22/oura-ring…
ma questi sono gli smart ring con la batteria al litio nel lato interno dell'anello con cui si rischia seriamente di perdere il dito?
(no, il caso che era finito sui giornali era della samsung)
Gli “smart ring” dell'azienda finlandese Oura piacciono tanto a Robert Kennedy Jr. e al suo movimento Make America Healthy AgainIl Post
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It’s a thousand years of the English language, compressed into a single blog post. Read it and notice where you start to struggle. Notice where you give up entirely.
deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-…
An experiment in language changeColin Gorrie (Dead Language Society)
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@David de Groot @Yogthos yeah, beyond that I recognized a few words, but some of those I recognized from the time when I played a medieval nun on the internet :D
(I hand copied a text in Old English of which I had read a translation, so I had a vague idea of what was happening, but I couldn't exactly understand what I was copying in each individual sentence)
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Dear people who use #warpWeightedLoom : how noisy are they?
I've seen videos of human-powered mechanical looms and there is quite a bit of *clack* noise when it's used, and I have some experience with backstrap looms where the moving parts are mostly soft and there isn't a significant noise.
Are the warp weighted ones somewhere in between? do the weights hit each other? Anything else that isn't soft hitting some other hard part?
Would it be possible to have somebody read a book in a room with a few looms in use, for the weavers to listen to, or would it be hard to hear them?
maybe @Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber knows?
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As for the *why* I need¹ to know this, I'm not overthinking the worldbuilding for a piece of smut.
I've resigned myself to the idea that I will never write said smut, and this is purely an exercise in SFW worldbuilding porn :D
it helps me fall asleep. when I don't get stuck on this kind of questions I don't know the answers for :D
¹ FSVO need
Do you have 5.25" and 8" floppy disks that are spare, low-quality, degrading, or just generally in bad shape?
I'd like to take my floppy disk data recovery game to the next level. I have equipment, but there's no substitute for experience. Therefore I'm looking for loose collections of old floppy disks to practice on. I'm especially interested in working with disks where the binder affixing the media to the donut is starting to fail.
I'm in London; will pay shipping; can pick up disks around here as well. Boosts are appreciated!
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Yes, the #EU has a lot of regulations.
But remember that thanks to those regulations you can use a single USB-C cable that can charge anything, rather than 10 different connectors and adapters as it was common until 10-15 years ago.
Remember that it’s thanks to those regulations if you no longer have to pay eye watering roaming fees for calls and data when you travel to other EU countries, as it was common until 5-10 years ago.
Remember that it’s thanks to those regulations if big tech has at least some constraints onto what it can do with your data and how much choice you have as a customer.
Remember that it’s thanks to those regulations if you, as a EU citizen, can benefit from the services of any other embassy of any other EU country if stranded abroad.
Those who try to depict the EU as a bureaucratic hell worth dismantling are those who hate the impact that its laws have on their freedom of exploiting markets, exploiting customers or living out of rent money.
Or those who hate the combined economic and political power of a united Europe with a single market because it threatens their national interests, and they’d rather exert their leverage with a bunch of divided and weaker countries instead.
Europe isn’t perfect and a lot can be improved. But those who call for its demise DO NOT talk in your interests.
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Insert here meme of
> Man tries to burn EU flag. Flag doesn't burn because of EU regulations on flammable materials.
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At this point, open-source development itself is being DDoS'ed by LLMs and their human users.
At the risk of being a bit gross: this is the software development version of peeing in the pool. If *one* person does it, it's gross but will probably go unnoticed. However, at this point, it's like having 100 people all lined up on the side of the pool peeing into it in unison. I don't really want to swim in that, do you? And now they've started eyeing the punchbowl and watercoolers too. #AI #AIslop #LLMs
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Today, we’ll have a look at one of my favourite download managers. Every Linux system includes this tool, wget. It’s manpage describes it as the perfect tool...ninad.pundaliks.in
consigli su dove dormire in zona Lugano senza svenarsi?
@thunderpussycat e io saremo a Hacking New Year questo fine settimana (programma qui: hny.indyfac.ch/schedule) a presentare i nostri libri.
ogni consiglio per una trasferta non troppo costosa è benvenuto. grazie! 
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TIL that #solarPanels also have bad consequences :D
today just after lunch for the second time since they had been installed our batteries were basically full, the sun was still shining, and we still can't send energy to the grid¹, so we run a dishwasher load, a washing machine (cold water, so it didn't help a lot, but that's what I had to wash at the moment) and we still weren't using what the panels were producing, so I had to face The Pile of Stuff That Needs Ironing.
I had been successfully² postponing that for *weeks*!
¹ from installation to being enabled for that it usually takes a couple of months, between bureaucracy and waiting for a tecnicians
² not that it is in any way near the bottom
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@tk (water heating was / is integrated with heating water for the radiators, and changing *that* would have required too much work and expense. the quote for an air-water heat pump were, as I said, extortionate, so we added air-air heat pumps, but they are sized to work *together* with the radiators, not instead of them)
(one day we'll have a fully electric house, but it will need to happen through gradual changes)
(and yesterday, since the sun was shining and there was some warm wind, it was a bit too warm to turn on the heating anyway)
Elena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.
@tk here the quote was for about 25k€, plus an unknown expense to change the electrical wiring to get three-phase current, plus having to pay more for electricity (because three-phase) and not being able to afford solar panels for years
or we could start with the solar panels and start saving money on electricity and save it for more electrification later
it wasn't a hard choice :)
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Modern¹ Italy had two queens and a bit.
The third one was only queen for a few months and then we got rid of the whole thing.
The second one, Elena, whose husband was busy making sure that Italy would become a republic soon², devoted herself to charitable work. I don't think it makes her especially worth of merit, but if you are stuck as a woman born in a royal house in the 1800s and are a baseline good person, that's one of the things you do.
The first one, Margerita, was a reactionary asshole who encouraged the shooting of protestors and was an enthusiastic supporter of fascism.
Guess which one is being celebrated with a stamp this year?
¹ there was a kingdom of Italy in the middle ages, but that's a different matter
² this may have not been his aim
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How does XMPP work? I'm looking at Jabber's website and apparently some clients are both clients and servers at the same time or something? It's quite confusing...
Are spaces or multi-channel groups (like discord) a thing in xmpp? Which clients support that on iOS and Linux and etc?
Is Movim a client or a server or what?
Are groups hosted in the server of the user who created it like on Matrix or what?
Any easy tutorials I could send to my discord friends?
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Ci tengo a segnalare che oggi #trenord ha annunciato *per tempo* che un treno già presente al binario sarebbe partito prima di quello in arrivo (in ritardo) ad un altro binario, nonostante l'orario dicesse il contrario.
Credo anche con abbastanza preavviso per prendere gli ascensori per il cambio binario!
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Meanwhile, reading¹ my Plinius the Younger, describing his uncle's books, as one does
“STUDIOSI TRES, in sex volumina propter amplitudinem divisi”
(about scholars, three books, divided in six volumes because of their size)
it's a shame the author of acoup.blog is no longer on the fediverse, because for some inexplicable reason.
¹ in an Italian translation, but in Italy they usually publish Latin authors in both languages)
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Mi sono appena resa conto del fatto che, così come “Ministero del Made in Italy” usa parole inglesi, la parola “autarchia” è greca.
Così.
Sono cose che ti sconvolgono, prima della colazione alla mattina.
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Posted on February 3, 2026
Tags: madeof:atoms, madeof:bits
Today I had a day off. Some of it went great. Some less so.
I woke up, went out to pay our tribute to NotOurCat, and it was snowing! yay! And I had a day off, so if it had snowed enough that shovelling was needed, I had time to do it (it didn’t, it started to rain soon afterwards, but still, YAY snow!).
Then I had breakfast, with the fruit rye bread I had baked yesterday, and I treated myself to some of the strong Irish tea I have left, instead of the milder ones I want to finish before buying more of the Irish.
And then, I bought myself a fancy new expensive fountain pen. One that costs 16€! more than three times as much as my usual ones! I hope it will work as well, but I’m quite confident it should. I’ll find out when it arrives from Germany (together with a few ink samples that will result in a future blog post with some SCIENCE).
I decided to try and use bank transfers instead of my visa debit card when buying from online shops that give the option to do so: it’s a tiny bit more effort, but it means I’m paying 0.25€ to my bank1rather than the seller having to pay some unknown amount to an US based payment provider. Unluckily, the fountain pen website offered a huge number of payment methods, but not bank transfers. sigh.
And then, I could start working a bit on the connecting wires for the LED strips for our living room: I soldered two pieces, six wires each (it’s one RGB strip, 4 pins, and a warm white one requiring two more), then did a bit of tests, including writing some micropython code to add a test mode that lights up each colour in sequence, and the morning was almost gone. For some reason this project, as simple as it is, is taking forever. But it is showing progress.
There was a break, when the postman delivered a package of chemicals2 for a future project or two. There will be blog posts!
After lunch I spent some time finishing eyelets on the outfit I wanted to wear this evening, as I had not been able to finish it during fosdem. This one will result in two blog posts!
Meanwhile, in the morning I didn’t remember the name of the program I used to load software on micropython boards such as the one that will control the LED strips (that’s thonny), and while searching for it in the documentation, I found that there is also a command line program I can use, mpremote, and that’s a much better fit for my preferences!
I mentioned it in an xmpp room full of nerds, and one of them mentioned that he could try it on his Inkplate, when he had time, and I was nerd-sniped into trying it on mine, which had been sitting unused showing the temperatures in our old house on the last day it spent there and needs to be updated for the sensors in the new house.
And that lead to the writing of some notes on how to set it up from the command line(good), and to the opening on one upstream issue(bad), because I have an old model, and the board-specific library isn’t working. at all.
And that’s when I realized that it was 17:00, I still had to cook the bread I had been working on since yesterday evening (ciabatta, one of my favourites, but it needs almost one hour in the oven), the outfit I wanted to wear in the evening was still not wearable, the table needed cleaning and some panicking was due. Thankfully, my mother was cooking dinner, so I didn’t have to do that too.
I turned the oven on, sewed the shoulder seams of the bodice while spraying water on the bread every 5 minutes, and then while it was cooking on its own, started to attach a closure to the skirt, decided that a safety pin was a perfectly reasonable closure for the first day an outfit is worn, took care of the table, took care of the bread, used some twine to close the bodice, because I still haven’t worked out what to use for laces, realized my bodkin is still misplaced, used a longand sharp and big needle meant for sewing mattresses instead of a bodkin, managed not to stab myself, and less than half an hour late we could have dinner.
There was bread, there was Swedish crispbread, there were spreads (tuna, and beans), and vegetables, and then there was the cake that caused my mother to panic when she added her last honey to the milk and it curdled (my SO and I tried it, it had no odd taste, we decided it could be used) and it was good, although I had to get a second slice just to be 100% sure of it.
And now I’m exhausted, and I’ve only done half of the things I had planned to do, but I’d still say I’ve had quite a good day.
Happy Mail Carrier Appreciation Day! 📮
Posties make Postcrossing possible, one delivery at a time... so today’s a perfect day to leave a postcard or a quick note of thanks for yours.
Elena ``of Valhalla'' reshared this.
Fellow fedizens! As decreed by xkcd.com/843/ some fifteen years ago, it is once again time to spend the morning reading through the Wikipedia article en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_….
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Right now, on the morning after #FOSDEM, if you started watching now and wanted to see all the currently available videos of talks that were held at the @fosdem that just finished, you have nearly 4 days ahead of you.
See review.video.fosdem.org/overvi… and dashboard.fosdem.org (the 'SReview stats' dashboard) to follow along at home.
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Anyway, somebody(TM) should really write a wayland-based UI inspired by Microsoft Bob, with the whole point-and-click adventure look.
without the crashes and the backend oddities that made sense at the time, of course :D
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PhilSalkie
in reply to Gina Häußge • • •The amount I say "Just because it works doesn't mean it's right."
Functionality, maintainability, efficiency, elegance, scalability, portability, development cost, development time.
Looks like the MBA crowd has noticed they can use tools to affect one or two variables, and since they don't understand the others, those must not matter.
We'll be cleaning this mess up for decades.
Gina Häußge
in reply to PhilSalkie • • •wbftw
in reply to PhilSalkie • • •@PhilSalkie and part of maintainability is managing of complexity (the accidental type, where we as devs have control), and with gen AI this is hard (if not impossible) to control. This defers maintenance costs, which as we all know (right?) increases them, and also makes the whole system harder (sometimes impossible) to change.
This model only makes sense if the software being shipped is short-lived/throw-away, a model fit for VC-backed companies designed to be acquired.
sotolf
in reply to Gina Häußge • • •Preslav Rachev
in reply to sotolf • • •sotolf
in reply to Preslav Rachev • • •Preslav Rachev
in reply to sotolf • • •@sotolf that’s probably what they told the first person who refused to write assembly code and instead invented a higher-level language.
The resistance is futile, and the writing is on the wall. I understand very well where the limitations of the statistical machines are, and try to play with them to my advantage. Nothing more nothing less.
I’m not trying to convince anyone that that’s the right way to go - only that there other ways to fulfill your life creatively than programs.
Gina Häußge
in reply to Preslav Rachev • • •@preslavrachev @sotolf I'm not sure why you keep thinking my statement was about scratching a creative itch of all things.
And the comparison to the move from assembly to higher-level languages is one of apples and oranges. A compiler is deterministic. An LLM *by design* is not.
But as I already said elsewhere, you do you.
Bob Gould
in reply to Gina Häußge • • •Dave bauer
in reply to Gina Häußge • • •Preslav Rachev
in reply to Gina Häußge • • •I’ve been writing code for 25 years. Allow me to disagree. While I love building things, programming is just a tool for achieving a goal, not the end goal in and of itself. While I’m meticulous about what comes out as a final product, I don’t care anymore if it’s written by me, by a colleague, or by a machine, as long as it meets my strict criteria.
If you’re looking for an authentic form of expression, try creative writing. This is one area I’d be ashamed of delegating entirely to AI
Gina Häußge
in reply to Preslav Rachev • • •