TIL: Python has a flag to skip the first line of code when running a script. Allows fun nonsense like: ``` """ color = "white and gold" """; color = "black and blue" #""" print("The dress is " + color) ``` $ python3 x.py The dress is black and blue $ python3 -x x.py The dress is white and gold

Web developers who break Ctrl/Cmd+click for "open in new tab" should be forced to work with a one-button mouse until they atone for their sins

Qt's QThread insists that if you use a QThread object to start a thread, then you cannot delete the QThread object as long as that thread is still running. This is causing me quite the headache, because I'd really like to just let a thread run independently without caring about when it finishes...

python3 -m pip install --edible .

A few weeks ago, someone on here posted a link to a very long, detailed, interesting article on modern CPU design. I still haven't finished reading it, and meanwhile my reading list keeps getting longer. That is to say, I'm encountering a pipeline stall caused by modern CPU design and slow reads

Highly disappointed to find out that Oracle's Greek offices are in Athens and not in Delphi https://www.oracle.com/europe/corporate/contact/field-offices/#greece

idea: "booter service", except it's not DDoS-for-hire - it's just a guy who will make you any kind of boot media you need, and can help you flash working firmware onto bricked mobile devices

Trying to take apart an old ThinkPad DVD drive to fix a thing. For some reason, the metal shell of the drive is not just screwed together, but they also put adhesive tape on most of the edges. And some of the screws are under the tape. And some of the tape is under other screwed-on parts. Why??

Rewrote some Kotlin code into plain Java today. I guess that makes me a

Remember how in older iOS versions, the on-device update screen showed an animated settings icon with spinning gears? That animation disappeared at some point - except not really! It's just hidden by the "version number logo". If that logo fails to load, the animation is still there, even in iOS 26.

Felt a sudden need to implement a Deflate decompressor from scratch. It went roughly like this: * a week of having RFC 1951 open on my phone and thinking "none of this makes any sense, dafuq are you on about" * 2 days of "actually this sort of makes sense?" * then "no wait this makes perfect sense"

There should be a bot that monitors Git repos for changes to C++ `friend` declarations, and in response automatically posts "friendship ended with X, now Y is my best friend" memes to the project's group chat

why are modern memes so confusing? /j https://floss.social/@servo/116492583465193891

Shout-out to the loud wasp in my room that took less than two seconds to leave once I opened the window. I hope you have a nice day

The Liskov substitution principle is an important rule about inheritance in object-oriented programming. It states that if you define a subtype S of a type T, then if a property is true for all objects of type T, that property must also be true about Barbara Liskov

At some point during Windows 11, they fully removed the File Explorer menu bar. It was already mostly gone since at least Windows 8, but still existed in some places like the Control Panel, if you knew how to bring it up (either with the Alt key or the advanced setting "Always show menus").

That's one hell of a patch note > VLC 3.0.23 [...] adds a dark mode option on Windows and Linux, support for Windows ARM64 and improves support for Windows XP SP3.

"Inspired" by my recent Spotlight issues, I thought I'd give KDE's Baloo another try. For those not into KDE, Baloo is the file search indexer, so the KDE equivalent of Spotlight. Baloo has a pretty bad reputation for slowing down the system *a lot*, so most KDE users seem to turn it off.

Achievement unlocked: Electrostatic discharge through a RAM stick without damaging it (I think)

Achievement unlocked: Fixed my Debian system's file permissions and umask to be actually consistent with each other, and didn't lock myself out of the system while doing so. (Why is this even something I need to do on a *fresh* install of Debian? Please just decide if you want umask 0022 or 0002!)

welp, after years of using macOS with not much trouble, I finally got hit with one of those "Spotlight constantly rewrites its index and thus eats disk space" bugs. Rebuilding the index just made it worse, somehow. I guess that means goodbye to the only good file search for me :(

In the docs for a Win32 function that does *not* have separate A and W variants: > The strings pointed to by dwItem1 and dwItem2 can be either ANSI or Unicode. Do I even want to know how they do that?? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/shlobj_core/nf-shlobj_core-shchangenotify

me: *plugs in a spinning rust SMR hard drive* Windows: want me to try ReadyBoost on this? I bet this drive is *great* for low-latency non-sequential IO

As of recently, we're up to RFC 9953. It won't take long anymore until we hit RFC 10000. June or so perhaps? https://mastodon.social/@dgelessus/115385634145614192

Has anyone tried building a Linux distro that doesn't rely on a Unix-style shell? At least not as a core system component that's required for startup, package management and such. Call it "Shellack Linux" or something

why is it called "Power On with AC Attach" and not "systemd-boot socket activation"

was preparing to wipe a laptop last night, and it took a bit of restraint to not start the OS install right before the DST transition (it's Linux, so it would've been fine probably, but still)

oh no, somebody got some YTP on the federal standard! (... feeferal saasdard!)

"melancholy" but pronounced like "anchovy"

Did something happen to CiteSeerX? It seems that all URLs under https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ and https://csxstatic.ist.psu.edu/ currently redirect to the Wayback Machine. I can't find an official announcement about anything, or even anyone discussing it in any of the usual places...

A random fedi server's web interface just showed me an "age verification" dialog. It had just a text input and an OK button. Mildly confused, I did what came naturally and typed "ass" into the text box. It let me in. Now I'm wondering if it accepts anything or actually checks for (mild) swearing.

when you're a cryptographer at NIST and *really* don't like Microsoft: https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary?index=F

I wonder when websites hosting PDF files will stop telling people that they need to install Adobe Acrobat Reader to open this document. It's been, like, 10 years since anyone had a computer with no other PDF viewer application already installed.

DID YOU KNOW: Cloud games stopped existing on 29 April 2024. It says so on Microsoft's website, so it must be true! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/support/cloud-games

Websites: if you host large downloads and those same files are also available on GitHub, you should advertise that very prominently! I prefer freeloading off the megacorp than taking up your bandwidth or increasing your hosting costs.

Are you seeing rendering artifacts in your video games that you suspect are caused by Claude-generated code? Try turning on "Anthropic Filtering" in the graphics settings

so if I'm installing Linux next to a modern Windows and need to shrink the Windows partition to make room for Linux... what do I do with the Windows recovery partition at the end of the disk? Is it worth doing the annoying partition-moving dance so the Windows boot and recovery partitions stay […]

Downloading a Debian ISO. Figuring out how to verify the PGP signature "the proper way" took longer than the download itself (on a not-that-fast DSL connection, so it did take a few minutes).

It has been 0 days since this happened to me, though the other way around actually: I was receiving a bigint that I *thought* was fixed-size, but is actually variable-length. https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/115983054387084921

Why is it called "Quicksort" and not "Tony Hoare's Pro Sorter"

surprised that so far nobody has developed a Windows executable linker called "PE-LD" or "LDPE"

Out-GridView my beloved https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/out-gridview

>"free" software >look inside >never calls free()

Current state of translations of Microsoft products: I just saw a duration of "1 second" translated to German as "1 Zweiter". That's not the word for the unit of time ("Sekunde"), but for "the second person/thing in a sequence".

huh, I thought that more modern CPUs ran on *lower* voltages? but you do you, Intel

Do YOU want to morge continvoucly like all your coworkers, but without the risk of PR fallout due to obvious plagiarism? Try morging the oldschool way using JBIG2 - the definitely very real image compression standard that is like JPEG, but bigger. Featuring amazing grephics displey quality!

Is there a tool that can scan a C codebase and show all preprocessor switches that I might want to define with `-DENABLE_FOO=1`? Obviously there are many edge cases, but even a simple script that finds all identifiers used inside #if, #ifdef, etc. (except for include guards) would be really useful.

"Ironic. He could save others from bad OCR, but not himself."

Thank you, UK Government National Archives, that's not ominous at all

yo wat. Discord's desktop client recently added back/forward buttons - a nice addition! But somehow they aren't entirely in sync with the back/forward navigation already built into the hidden underlying browser engine, which happens to be what gets controlled by the back/forward buttons on my mouse?