Landlock is still young and a bit unpolished, but it’s slowly getting more popular. 🥳

Another example:

$ setpriv \
    --landlock-access fs \
    --landlock-rule path-beneath:execute,read-file:/bin/ls-static \
    --landlock-rule path-beneath:read-dir:/tmp \
    /bin/ls-static /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

The first argument --landlock-access fs says that nothing is allowed.

--landlock-rule path-beneath:execute,read-file:/bin/ls-static says that reading and executing that file is allowed. It’s a statically linked ls program (not GNU ls).

--landlock-rule path-beneath:read-dir:/tmp says that reading the /tmp directory and everything below it is allowed.

The output of the ls-static program is this line:

─rw─r──r────x 3000 200 07-12 09:19 22'491 │ /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

It was able to read the directory, see the file, do stat() on it and everything, the little x indicates that getting xattrs also worked.

3000 and 200 are user name and group name – they are shown as numeric, because the program does not have access to /etc/passwd and /etc/group.

Adding --landlock-rule path-beneath:read-file:/etc/passwd, for example, allows resolving users and yields this:

─rw─r──r────x cathy 200 07-12 09:19 22'491 │ /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

PSA: setpriv on Linux supports Landlock.

If this twt goes through, then restricting the filesystem so that jenny can only write to ~/Mail/twt, ~/www/twtxt.txt, ~/.jenny-cache, and /tmp works.

st tries not to redraw immediately after new data arrives:

https://git.suckless.org/st/file/x.c.html#l1984

The exact timings are configurable.

This is the PR that changed the timing in VTE recently (2023):

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/2678

There is a long discussion. It’s not a trivial problem, especially not in the context of GTK and multiple competing terminal widgets. st dodges all these issues (for various reasons).

Something happened with the frame rate of terminal emulators lately. It looks like there’s a trend to run at a high framerate now? I’m not sure exactly. This can be seen in VTE-based terminals like my xiate or XTerm on Wayland. foot and st, on the other hand, are fine.

My shell prompt and cursor look like this:

$ █

When I keep Enter pressed, I expect to see several lines like so:

$
$
$
$
$
$
$ █

With the affected terminal emulators, the lines actually show up in the following sequence. First, we have the original line:

$ █

Pressing Enter yields this as the next frame:

$
█

And then eventually this:

$
$ █

In other words, you can see the cursor jumping around very quickly, all the time.

Another example: Vim actually shows which key you just pressed in the bottom right corner. Keeping j pressed to scroll through a file means I get to see a j flashing rapidly now.

(I have no idea yet, why exactly XTerm in X11 is fine but flickering in Wayland.)

The WM_CLASS Property is used on X11 to assign rules to certain windows, e.g. “this is a GIMP window, it should appear on workspace number 16.” It consists of two fields, name and class.

Wayland (or rather, the XDG shell protocol – core Wayland knows nothing about this) only has a single field called app_id.

When you run X11 programs under Wayland, you use XWayland, which is baked into most compositors. Then you have to deal with all three fields.

Some compositors map name to app_id, others map class to app_id, and even others directly expose the original name and class.

Apparently, there is no consensus.

Yeah, little fellow. I also just want to walk away. https://movq.de/v/bef8c35f01/ach.mp4

“🫩” is my new favorite emoji.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, if there’s no stable API, then it’s not a lot of fun … Bah. :|

… but you can’t set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland globally, because that breaks Wine again …

… okay, the SDL backend works if you also set SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org dmenu is a great example.

There have been several attempts at porting dmenu from X11 to Wayland. Well, not exactly “porting” it, more like rewriting it from scratch. Turns out: It’s not that easy.

dmenu is super fast and reliable. None of the Wayland rewrites are (at least none of the popular ones that I know of). They are either bloated and/or slow.

It takes a lot of discipline and restraint to write simple software and not blow up the codebase. This is much harder than people think. It’s a form of art, really.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I do my timetracking in a little Python script, locally. Every now and then, I push the data to our actual service. Problem solved – but it’s a completely unpopular approach, they all want to use the web site. I don’t get it. Then, of course, when it’s down, shit hits the fan. (Luckily, our timetracking software is neither developed nor run by us anymore. It’s a silly cloud service, but the upside is that I’m not responsible anymore. 🤷)

Some of our oldschool devs tried to roll out local timetracking once, about 15 years ago. I don’t remember anymore why they failed …

This is developed inhouse, I’m just so glad that we’re not a software engineering company. Oh wait. How embarrassing.

Oh to be anonymous on the internet. That must be nice. 😅

… but the SDL backend is broken as well, albeit differently …

… which is probably a GTK bug.

QEMU on Wayland unusable, because it can’t grab the mouse … I’ll add it to my TODO list and investigate/report it eventually.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

@prologic@twtxt.net Hm, I wouldn’t say that. Go code could fall into that category as well.

Maybe this topic could use a blog post / article, that explains what it’s about. I’m finding it hard to really define what “suckless-like software” is. 🤔 (Their own philosophy focuses too much on elitism, if you ask me.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I’m referring to software that’s similar to that of suckless.org: Small, minimal codebases, small tools, but still useful. dmenu is probably the best example and also farbfeld.

Here’s the author of Anubis talking about some of their experiences:

https://xeiaso.net/blog/why-i-use-suckless-tools-2020-06-05/

(You can skip the long config and keybinds part.)

The lack of suckless-like simple, hackable software these days is appalling.

The Linux installation on my main PC turned 14 today:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This wasn’t always the case, though. Quake3, Quake4, Unreal Tournament 99 and 2004 are examples of games that used to run very well as native Linux games. But that was 20+ years ago …

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (It’s either that, or the fact that it’s women’s football and “nobody wants to see that anyway”.)

In all fairness, GOG says that Forsaken is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – not current Arch Linux. If you ask me, this just goes to show that Linux is not a good platform for proprietary binary software.

Is it free software, do you have the source code? Then you’re good to go, things can be patched/updated (that can still be a lot of work). But proprietary binary blobs? Very bad idea.

I bought the “remastered” versions of Grim Fandango and Forsaken on GOG, because they’re super cheap at the moment. Both have native Linux versions.

And both these Linux version crap their pants. 🫤 The bundled SDL2 of Forsaken says it “can’t find a matching GLX visual” and I couldn’t figure out how to fix that. I didn’t spend a lot of time on Grim Fandango.

Both work great in Wine. 🤦

(I do have the original version of Grim Fandango from the 1990ies, but that one does not work so well in Wine. I figured, if it’s so cheap, why not. And I now get to play the english version. 😃 The german dub is pretty damn good, actually, but I always prefer the original these days.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I have to say, this sounds much worse than our stuff at work. 🫩 (We don’t use any Microsoft services, at least not for core tools.)

Okay, now this is a very interesting Rust feature:

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/07/03/stabilizing-naked-functions/

This (and inline assembly) makes Rust really interesting for very low-level stuff. 🥳

It took about a year, I think, but I’ve now finished another run of Tomb Raider I, II, and III. And I have, for the first time, played the two bonus packs “Unfinished Business” (for TR I) and “Golden Mask” (for TR II). They’re available as a free download, if you have the original games. (The bonus pack for TR III is not free.)

I just love these games – and the game mechanics. It’s just the right balance between challenging and relaxing.

https://movq.de/v/c55a2a137d/the%2Dend.jpg

What kind of half-assed nonsense is this? They only broadcast half of the current european soccer cup … (Let me guess, I’m supposed to subscribe to some streaming service if I want to watch every game, right?)

This aggressive auto-logout on my bank’s website …

Dude, you want me to print something, sign it, and scan it back in. This takes forever and I’ll have to re-login a dozen times. Narf.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Uffpuh. Es Wetter spielt verrückt. 🫤

@prologic@twtxt.net That too, yeah. 🥴😩

@prologic@twtxt.net Bah! Why can’t we all have mild weather. 🥲

Is des äni Hitz!

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Yay, heat. 🫠

TIL: The logo of sudo is a sandwich. 🫠 https://www.sudo.ws/

Ted Unangst’s snarky (and entertaining) remarks this month:

• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/modern-software-2025-edition
  
• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/killing-X11
  
• https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/forbidden-secrets-of-ancient-X11-scaling-technology-revealed

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

These are lists in your Inkscape example, right?

The font stuff? Yeah, that’s a scrollable list where you can select the current font.

Someone did a thing:

https://social.treehouse.systems/@ariadne/114763322251054485

I’ve been silently wondering all the time if this was possible, but never investigated: Keep doing X11 but use Wayland as a backend.

This uses XWayland’s “rootful” mode, which basically just gives you a normal Wayland window with all the X11 stuff happening inside of it:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Rootful-Useful

In other words, put such a window in fullscreen and you (more or less) have good old X11 running in a Wayland window.

(For me, personally, this won’t be the way forward. But it’s a very interesting project.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Heyho, welcome back. 👋 Did you guys have a nice trip? 😊

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Probably. :-) I just saw that the account on Yarn is also gone. Maybe it didn’t survive the crash earlier this year.

Just realized: One of the reasons why I don’t like “flat UIs” is that they look broken to me. Like the program has a bug, missing pixmaps or whatever.

Take this for example:

https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/a.png

I’m talking about this area specifically:

https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/a%2Dhigh.png

One UI element ends and the other one begins – no “transition” between them.

The style of old UIs like these two is deeply ingrained into my brain:

https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/b.png
https://movq.de/v/8822afccf0/c.png

When all these little elements (borders, handles, even just simple lines, …) are no longer present, then the program looks buggy and broken to me. And I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to un-learn that.

Alright, now for something fun! Taxes! Yay!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Wow. Just like Skyrim! 😃

@mckinley@mckinley.cc’s blog appears to have gone stale, hm.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh dear. 😩

@arne@uplegger.eu Stattdessen rutscht er seitlich vom Tisch? 🤪

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I can confidently say that I don’t remember ever having seen fireflys. (Nor Firefly.) 😳 I’m most surprised that you could count them. Naively, I would assume that these guys move around a lot and you’d lose track of them?

We’re entering the “too hot to think”-season in 3, 2, 1 … and we’re live!

Welcome to the family, Puffy. 🥳🐡

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

They’re all talks, not real hands-on trainings like you did.

I love listening to good, well-structured talks. Problem is, not everybody is a good speaker and many screw it up. 🥴 I’m certainly not a great speaker, which is why I gravitate more towards “workshops”, in the hopes that people ask questions and discussions arise. Doesn’t always work out. 🤣 At the very least, I almost always have some other person connect to the projector/beamer/screenshare and then they do the stuff – this avoids me being wwwwaaaaaaaaayyyy too fast.

We are usually drowned in stress and tight deadlines, hence events like today are super rare … We used to do it more often until ~10 years ago.

Once a year the security guys organize a really great hacking event, though.

Oh dear, I’d love to participate in that. 🤯 That sounds like a lot of fun. (Why don’t we do this?!)

@prologic@twtxt.net This person isn’t particularly happy with this study:

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/114717549619229029

I don’t know enough about these things to form an opinion. 🫤 I sure wish it was true, though. 😅

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Multi-Threading. Is. Hard. 🤯 And yes, that blog is great. 👌

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org lol – I explicitly kept them in there so that the code is easier to understand for non-Rust people 🤪😂

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d say: Yes, because in Go it’s easier to ignore errors.

We’re talking about this pattern, right?

f, err := os.Open("filename.ext")
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}

Nothing stops you from leaving out the if, right? 🤔

(Of course, if we’re talking about a project you’re doing for a customer and the customer keeps asking for new stuff, then you’re never done, and you have to think ahead and expect changes. Is that what they mean? 🤔)

Saw this on Mastodon:

https://racingbunny.com/@mookie/114718466149264471

18 rules of Software Engineering

1. You will regret complexity when on-call
   
2. Stop falling in love with your own code
   
3. Everything is a trade-off. There’s no “best” 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs
   
4. Everyone hates code they didn’t write
   
5. Don’t use unnecessary dependencies
   
6. Coding standards prevent arguments
   
7. Write meaningful commit messages
   
8. Don’t ever stop learning new things
   
9. Code reviews spread knowledge
   
10. Always build for maintainability
    
11. Ask for help when you’re stuck
    
12. Fix root causes, not symptoms
    
13. Software is never completed
    
14. Estimates are not promises
    
15. Ship early, iterate often
    
16. Keep. It. Simple.
    

Solid list, even though 14 is up for debate in my opinion: Software can be completed. You have a use case / problem, you solve that problem, done. Your software is completed now. There might still be bugs and they should be fixed – but this doesn’t “add” to the program. Don’t use “software is never done” as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.

Okay, here’s a thing I like about Rust: Returning things as Option and error handling. (Or the more complex Result, but it’s easier to explain with Option.)

fn mydiv(num: f64, denom: f64) -> Option<f64> {
    // (Let’s ignore precision issues for a second.)
    if denom == 0.0 {
        return None;
    } else {
        return Some(num / denom);
    }
}

fn main() {
    // Explicit, verbose version:
    let num: f64 = 123.0;
    let denom: f64 = 456.0;
    let wrapped_res = mydiv(num, denom);
    if wrapped_res.is_some() {
        println!("Unwrapped result: {}", wrapped_res.unwrap());
    }

    // Shorter version using "if let":
    if let Some(res) = mydiv(123.0, 456.0) {
        println!("Here’s a result: {}", res);
    }

    if let Some(res) = mydiv(123.0, 0.0) {
        println!("Huh, we divided by zero? This never happens. {}", res);
    }
}

You can’t divide by zero, so the function returns an “error” in that case. (Option isn’t really used for errors, IIUC, but the basic idea is the same for Result.)

Option is an enum. It can have the value Some or None. In the case of Some, you can attach additional data to the enum. In this case, we are attaching a floating point value.

The caller then has to decide: Is the value None or Some? Did the function succeed or not? If it is Some, the caller can do .unwrap() on this enum to get the inner value (the floating point value). If you do .unwrap() on a None value, the program will panic and die.

The if let version using destructuring is much shorter and, once you got used to it, actually quite nice.

Now the trick is that you must somehow handle these two cases. You must either call something like .unwrap() or do destructuring or something, otherwise you can’t access the attached value at all. As I understand it, it is impossible to just completely ignore error cases. And the compiler enforces it.

(In case of Result, the compiler would warn you if you ignore the return value entirely. So something like doing write() and then ignoring the return value would be caught as well.)

We really are bouncing back and forth between flat UIs and beveled UIs. I mean, this is what old X11 programs looked like:

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2025%2D06%2D21%2D%2Dkatriawm%2Dold%2Dxorg%2Dapps.png

Good luck figuring out which of these UI elements are click-able – unless you examine every pixel on the screen.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I might give it a shot. 😃

Skimming through the manual: I had no idea that keeping the “up” cursor pressed actually slows you down at some point. 🤦

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I use Alt+. all the time, it’s great. 👌

FWIW, another thing I often use is !! to recall the entire previous command line:

$ find -iname '*foo*'
./This is a foo file.txt

$ cat "$(!!)"
cat "$(find -iname '*foo*')"
This is just a test.

Yep!

Or:

$ ls -al subdir
ls: cannot open directory 'subdir': Permission denied

$ sudo !!
sudo ls -al subdir
total 0
drwx------ 2 root root  60 Jun 20 19:39 .
drwx------ 7 jess jess 360 Jun 20 19:39 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   0 Jun 20 19:39 nothing-to-see

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I like the animations in your version much better than the ones from ExtremeTuxRacer. 😊 And there’s no little dance at the end of a race!

https://movq.de/v/7531158962/etr.mp4

I also just noticed that the performance issue doesn’t affect all games. 🤔 Sigh, I’ll just downgrade for the time being. Not in the mood to fiddle with this.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I guess that qualifies as an “Arch moment”, albeit the first one I encountered. I’m running this since 2008 and it’s usually very smooth sailing. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, YMMV. Some games work(ed) great in Wine, others not at all. I just use it because it’s easier than firing up my WinXP box. (I don’t use Wine for regular applications, just games.)

Speaking of Wine, Arch Linux completely fucked up Wine for me with the latest update.

• 16-bit support is gone.
  
• Performance of 3D games is horrible and unplayable.
  

Arch is shipping a WoW64 build now, which is not yet ready for prime time.

And then I realized that there’s actually only one stable Wine release per year but Arch has been shipping development releases all the time. That’s quite unusual. I’m used to Arch only shipping stable packages … huh.

Hopefully things will improve again. I’m not eager to build Wine from source. I’d rather ditch it and resort to my real Windows XP box for the little (retro)gaming that I do … 🫤

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz lol, oof, well, better than nothing. 🥴 It appears to run quite well. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahhh, right, my bad, I could have easily found that. 🤦

There’s also a project page which lists some limitations of this study: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/overview/

It certainly sounds plausible. “Use it or lose it.”

@prologic@twtxt.net But is there a source for it? Am I too stupid to use that site? 🤪

@prologic@twtxt.net … or just bullshit.

I’m Alex, COO at ColdIQ. Built a $4.5M ARR business in under 2 years.

Some “C-level” guy telling people what to do, yeah, I have my doubts.

@prologic@twtxt.net This doesn’t cite any sources, might as well be satire. 🤔

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Awww. :( Can you tell why? Missing libraries or does it just segfault?

To really annoy my neighbors and everyone in a 5 mile radius, I might take my Model M and type a blogpost on the balcony. 😈

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I’d love to have a positive, optimistic reply to that, but … uhm … I don’t. 🤣

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ooh, I’ve got to bookmark that page. 😃

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I wish I had the luxury of not reading that junk. 😅 But instead, I have a Mutt hotkey that pipes an HTML mail through elinks … Bah.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m trying to call some libc functions (because the Rust stdlib does not have an equivalent for getpeername(), for example, so I don’t have a choice), so I have to do some FFI stuff and deal with raw pointers and all that, which is very gnarly in Rust – because you’re not supposed to do this. Things like that are trivial in C or even Assembler, but I have not yet understood what Rust does under the hood. How and when does it allocate or free memory … is the pointer that I get even still valid by the time I do the libc call? Stuff like that.

I hope that I eventually learn this over time … but I get slapped in the face at every step. It’s very frustrating and I’m always this 🤏 close to giving up (only to try again a year later).

Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess I could “just” use some 3rd party library for this. socket2 gets mentioned a lot in this context. But I don’t want to. I literally need one getpeername() call during the lifetime of my program, I don’t even do the socket(), bind(), listen(), accept() dance, I already have a fully functional file descriptor. Using a library for that is total overkill and I’d rather do it myself. (And look at the version number: 0.5.10. The library is 6 years old but they’re still saying: “Nah, we’re not 1.0 yet, we reserve the right to make breaking changes with every new release.” So many Rust libs are still unstable …)

… and I could go on and on and on … 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org :‘-(

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … because you, me, and that guy over there in the corner are the only three people left using plain-text email. 🫤 (And probably Stallman.)

Fuck me sideways, Rust is so hard. Will we ever be friends?

OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

“Learn Something Old Every Day, Part XV: KEYB Is Half of Keyboard BIOS”

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/learn-something-old-every-day-part-xv-keyb-is-half-of-keyboard-bios/

fn sub(foo: &String) {
    println!("We got this string: [{}]", foo);
}

fn main() {
    // "Hello", 0x00, 0x00, "!"
    let buf: [u8; 8] = [0x48, 0x65, 0x6C, 0x6C, 0x6F, 0x00, 0x00, 0x21];

    // Create a string from the byte array above, interpret as UTF-8, ignore decoding errors.
    let lossy_unicode = String::from_utf8_lossy(&buf).to_string();

    sub(&lossy_unicode);
}

Create a string from a byte array, but the result isn’t a string, it’s a cow 🐮, so you need another to_string() to convert your “string” into a string.

• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html#method.from_utf8_lossy
  
• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/borrow/enum.Cow.html
  

I still have a lot to learn.

(into_owned() instead of to_string() also works and makes more sense to me, it’s just that the compiler suggested to_string() first, which led to this funny example.)

fn sub(foo: &String) {

    println!("We got this string: [{}]", foo);
}

fn main() {
    // "Hello", 0x00, 0x00, "!"
    let buf: [u8; 8] = [0x48, 0x65, 0x6C, 0x6C, 0x6F, 0x00, 0x00, 0x21];

    // Create a string from the byte array above, interpret as UTF-8, ignore decoding errors.
    let lossy_unicode = String::from_utf8_lossy(&buf).to_string();

    sub(&lossy_unicode);
}

Create a string from a byte array, but the result isn’t a string, it’s a cow 🐮, so you need another to_string() to convert your “string” into a string.

• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/string/struct.String.html#method.from_utf8_lossy
  
• https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/borrow/enum.Cow.html
  

I still have a lot to learn.

(into_owned() instead of to_string() also works and makes more sense to me, it’s just that the compiler suggested to_string() first, which led to this funny example.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Rust is so different and, at the same time, so complex – it’s not far fetched to assume that I simply don’t understand what’s going on here. The docs appear to be clear, but alas … is it a bugs in the docs? Is it a lack of experience on my part? Who knows.

By the way, looks like there was a bit of a discussion regarding that name:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/120048

So I was using this function in Rust:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/path/struct.Path.html#method.display

Note the little 1.0.0 in the top right corner, which means that this function has been “stable since Rust version 1.0.0”. We’re at 1.87 now, so we’re good.

Then I compiled my program on OpenBSD with Rust 1.86, i.e. just one version behind, but well ahead of 1.0.0.

The compiler said that I was using an unstable library feature.

Turns out, that function internally uses this:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ffi/struct.OsStr.html#method.display

And that is only available since Rust 1.87.

How was I supposed to know this? 🤨🫩

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, well, it’s a bit like twtxt. There is a Gopher community, but it’s small. I actually don’t like that HTTP is so easily accessible. I don’t like it that much when people post links to my site on HackerNews or something like that. Too much exposure.

Gopher is a small world. It’s slow and cozy.

And much like twtxt, the protocol is simple®, so it’s easier to tinker with it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I’m very glad twtxt/Yarn doesn’t have this. ✌️

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh, ah, I didn’t even know they sold boxes. 🤯 I hope it still works!

@quark@ferengi.one It’s as close as coffee as you can get. 😅 They take the beans, apply magic, and then most of the caffeine is gone. You can also buy whole decaf’d beans and then grind them yourself. It does kill some of the flavor – but it’s not like you’re drinking black water.

@prologic@twtxt.net That isn’t really my strong suit. 😅

@thecanine@twtxt.net … all these stupid, pointless “apps” are stuff that I eventually have to remove from family devices … Sigh.

@bender@twtxt.net Both Gopher and Mastodon are a way for me to “babble”. 😅 I basically shut down Gopher in favor of Mastodon/Fedi last year. But the Fediverse doesn’t really work for me. It’s too focused on people (I prefer topics) and I dislike the addictive nature of likes and boosts (I’m not disciplined enough to ignore them). Self-hosting some Fedi thing is also out of the question (the minimalistic daemons don’t really support following hashtags, which is a must-have for me).

I’ll probably keep reading Fedi stuff, I just won’t post that much, I think.

Gopher server is back online and I’ll be phasing out Mastodon.

gopher://uninformativ.de

(No, I won’t do multi-protocol twtxt again. 😅)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s difficult, you often don’t get what you’d expect. They also make heavy use of 3rd party libraries. IIUC, for random numbers, they refer to this library. I’ve read many times that the Rust stdlib is intentionally minimalistic (to make it easier to maintain and port and all that).

I’m struggling with this, using 3rd party libs for so many things isn’t really my cup of tea. I’ll probably make my own tiny little “standard library”. It’s silly, but I don’t see any other options. 🤷

@bender@twtxt.net “Mhhhhhhh, hehehe, gonna poop on that car. 😏”

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That’s interesting, I see them (Teichrallen) everywhere I look. 🤯 It feels like they’re about as common as mallards (Stockenten) over here. 🤔

@quark@ferengi.one Plot twist: I only drink decaf. 🤯🤯🤯

Sitting on the balcony with a fucking cup of coffee. https://movq.de/v/463f1f9d03/s.png

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I’m sure he’s doing a good job! 😊

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Looks pretty nice! Enjoy the mild temperatures while you can. 😅