Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

OK, now for the first of my "summary of tweets that are still relevant" posts... #indie #music:

First, "The Nameless Murderess" by The Once. A swing-y murder ballad with some *amazing* vocals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ijxVHxzqA (See also: https://singout.org/no-fortune-fame-nameless-murderess/)

Second, "Jabberwocky". Kate "Erutan" Covington's comeback song after struggling to recover her singing voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlyrweRsILk

Third, "Long Lost Century" by The Woodlands:

https://soundcloud.com/the-woodlands/long-lost-century

More music roundups to come.

@codesections @MrChainman The two big reasons I find Mastodon superior, which you didn't mention are:

1. I was scared off Twitter by a friend slamming into a "to be allowed to continue to log in, you must give us your SMS number" message. (I have no mobile number to give)

2. On Twitter, I was in the process of progressively un-subscribing from more and more people as Twitter kept spamming my notifications view with "In case you missed it..." entries that I couldn't opt out of.

...and I just noticed that I didn't properly collapse the descriptions of figures 171 and 172. Since it's been 40 minutes, I'm just going to leave that mistake up.

No need to annoy people deleting and re-drafting after that long.

@3rik @fsfe Probably a good idea to add WireGuard above/below OpenVPN:

https://www.wireguard.com/

On the Linux side, it's been available as an out-of-tree kernel module for years and Debian Testing is now moving to flipping it on as an in-tree module:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-Enables-WireGuard

@victorhck Given things like BashFAQ's explanation of how flaky set -e is (http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/105) and how much of a pain it is to get everything just right for portability with bash, I've taken to just rewriting shell scripts longer than "cd to the directory containing the game, then exec it" in Python.

Aside from the niceties of having sane whitespace handling and variable substitution, try/finally, and stuff like os.walk, os.path.normpath, shlex, and subprocess, its presence is basically a de facto standard for non-Windows platforms at this point, as well as being easier to write in a manner that's portable to Windows.

I wanted to start off my #dos tweets recap with the link I found for IBM's CUA keybindings reference, but, sadly, it's now dead.

If anyone wants to try to track it down, this was the URL for the relevant section in one of the versions of IBM's reference:

http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr/BOOKS/f29al000/2.2.54

Failing that, I've since picked up a used copy of http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/931408154 so maybe I'll try to find time to transcribe the reference tables listed as Figures 171 and 172 (Keyboard Functions, p. 315-322), (Keys to Functions, p. 319-322), Figures 175-185 (Mnemonic Assignments for ..., p. 345-349), and Figure 200 (Shortcut Key Assignments, p. 451-452).

(That said, if you can find a copy of the book, pick it up. While it's primarily intended for OS/2, it's got a *lot* of nifty stuff useful for DOS TUIs, including "Appendix E. Translated Terms"... charts translating various English menu/button labels like "Redo" into 16 different languages.)

@oilyfish Is there an "introduction to fosstodon culture for newcomers" document which could explain things like the mindset behind caring so much about using invidio.us?

(Personally, I care about the risk of broken links so much that I think it's bad enough to be using YouTube, even with its own frontend... let alone a frontend that considers it a point of pride to not use YouTube's official API when youtube-dl spends so much time keeping up with YouTube's changes.)

@gairsty http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ really helped me get a grasp on things back when I was a geeky teen just getting started with it.

I'd also recommend these, since talking the terminal and related stuff digs up so much about the system as a whole:

* http://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/
* https://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
* http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ
* http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/ (Stuff like why ASCII is laid out the way it is.)
* http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ (Focused on *why* UNIX programs are designed as they are.)

@mollusk @codesections Almost certainly JavaScript, given the ridiculous amount of effort poured into it and the results that show up in The Benchmarks Game.

@codesections I would own two RasPi boards.

Checkmate. :P

(Seriously, though, that's probably how I'd write it. I'm a bit of a nitpicker about my own use of language.)

@mollusk @codesections When devotees are fighting for the honour of their favourite language, they come out about equal:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/which-programs-are-fastest.html

It's all about the algorithms and features implemented and how much effort is put into optimizing.

@theodraxis Sounds like my preference to not use such stimulants for my ADHD was a good choice. 90%+ of the time, my problem isn't motivating myself to start what I *should* be doing, it's motivating myself to stop what I *am* doing... which is usually something with a similar "big work, big reward" profile to "actual work" (eg. hobby projects) and, thus, likely to have Ritalin emphasize the benefits of continuing to work on it.

Without any drugs, I already have a pretty good track record for "If I can just motivate myself to change tasks, five minutes on the new task will turn into five hours".

It reminds me of a comment on the TV Tropes secondary pages by a contributor who took some Adderall with the intent to work on a paper and wound up spending three hours improving TV Tropes instead.

@ataraxia937@fosstodon.org ...that said, I should find or write a YouTube userscript which forces 480p or 720p quality on logged-out video playback, rather than "auto". "auto" is often over-sensitive to YouTube's heavy page loads, resulting in videos starting at 144p and spending too long there.

(And, "auto" or the inconsistent play/pause performance, Google is famously impervious to receiving feedback from users in forms other than randomly-appearing "on a scale of 1 to 5, how well is YouTube working today?" popups.)

@ataraxia937@fosstodon.org Agreed. On desktop, with uBlock, I just don't see Invidious as having a worthwhile value proposition... especially with the bug where, when the Play/Pause button is focused, the arrow keys don't do anything.

(I habitually never click the video frame because if the browser is bogged down, it can take 10+ seconds for YouTube to react, while Play/Pause always reacts quickly.)

I got used to not logging into YouTube years ago when they tried to force me to make a Google+ profile.

@lupyuen Having skimmed that paper as someone who's lurked on /r/rust/ and the Rust RFCs since before version 1.0, my impression is that the paper's focus is misguided:

1. I didn't see any evidence of them addressing the question of whether Rust affects the *number* of CVEs filed per amount of code, which seems like an obvious important thing to consider in a situation like this.

2. It comes across as if they're oblivious to the fact that other safe languages, like Python, have FFI support, like the ctypes module, and are calling out Rust as uniquely flawed in how the safe and unsafe code interact.

3. When they're classifying the vulnerabilities, it feels like they're oblivious to the fact that they are re-discovering the already well-known implications of constructs necessary for C FFI. (Had they approached it from a "does the real-world of Rust match the expectations for these constructs?" angle, it wouldn't bother me, but what they wrote feels like it lacks that self-awareness.)

4. I'm not a programming language theorist but, given the level of theoretical discourse that shows up in Rust RFCs, the kinds of ideas that show up in Rust team member blog posts, and the kinds of tooling, both experimental and production-ready, which get announced in /r/rust/, their recommendations for mitigating the risk feel so simple that I'd be surprised if they weren't already on the list of things that have already occurred to the relevant people and either are "easier said than done" or have non-obvious fatal flaws.

All in all, it just has an air of "People who know far less than they think they do acting with un-earned confidence".

(In fact, it feels vaguely reminiscent of the parts of the Unix Hater's Handbook that, yes, are a problem with Unix... but nobody else has managed to put anything better into practice.)

@CaptainStack I'm also in the market for one... though, if it requires permission to post to or modify my Mastodon account, I may go without since I'd prefer not to have to audit and self-host to feel suitably comfortable with it.

@wizzwizz4 @ticoombs

If you look at the spec for ABE definitions, you'll see that it supports whole-URL regular expressions too.

@protonmail For the focus-tracking, unless it's penalizing you for allowing your mouse and keyboard to go idle, you could also just run it in something which virtualizes the concept of "active window" like Xephyr, Wine in virtual desktop mode, or a VM like VirtualBox or KVM.

@randynose @shibayashi @lain

Fundamentally, the question is whether you're old enough to have strong memories of TVs from before they had the processing power to substitute a blue fill when failing to sync with an NTSC/PAL signal's timing.

@wizzwizz4 @ticoombs

If you want to block subresource requests, I used to use NoScript's ABE module to do things like neutering Google Instant without killing off Google's search pages entirely.

https://noscript.net/abe/