NotAwfulTech

Currently in its very early stages, but it'll be a useful resource to identify slopified garbage and get it out of your life.

Credit to Kat Marchin for starting this.

Happy Holiday and merry winter solstice! I'm sharing a Nix flake that I've been slowly growing in my homelab for the past few months. It incorporates this systemd feature, switches from CppNix to Lix, and disables a handful of packages. That PR inspired me, and I'm releasing this in turn to inspire you. Paying it forward and all that.

Should you use this? As-is, probably not. It will rebuild systemd at a minimum and you probably don't have enough RAM for that; building from this flake crashed my development laptop and I had to build it on a workstation instead. Also, if you have good taste in packages then this will be a no-op aside from systemd and Lix, and you can do both of those on your own.

Isn't this merely virtue-signalling? I think that the original systemd PR was definitely signalling, since it's unlikely to ever get deployed on the systems of our friends. However, I really do sleep better at night knowing that it's unlikely that jart or suckless have any code running on my machines.

Why not make a proper repository and organization? Mostly the possibility that GitHub might actually take down a repository named nixpkgs-antifa. If there's any interest then I could set up a Codeberg repo. However, up to this point, I've only used it internally and my homelab has its own internal git service.

Mods: You've indicated that you don't like it when people write code to approach our social problems. That's fine; I'm not publishing an application or service and certainly not starting a social movement, just sharing some of my internal code.

Once I asked a friend of mine, "What was the best meal you ever had?"

He thought about it a moment and then replied, "A stick of pepperoni dipped in peanut butter... after a day hiking the AT." (He'd actually hiked the whole Appalachian Trail, as I recall.)

Years before that, a different friend asked me the same question. The one item that came to mind above all others was the dessert course at a resort my family visited when I was a child, on a snorkeling trip to the Caribbean. I don't think I've had a sopapilla that good since. And sure, childhood taste buds and all, but that's kind of the point: the best subjective impression is the best subjective impression.

One of the best things I've ever made myself was early in the first COVID season. I was throwing together a soup of whatnot, and I made a broth of soy sauce, mirin, gochujang, garlic and probably a few other things. When I had a taste, it was knee-bucklingly good. I haven't hit the proportions just right again, or something; everything I've tried in that genre has been nice, but not that nice.

Dad was the sort who'd try a new thing at a restaurant and then try and figure out how to make it at home. He was good at it, too. I picked up that habit, a bit. My white whale is the suanla chaoshou/suan la chow show/swans from Mary Chung's in Cambridge, MA. For that, I have to go by memory, since the restaurant closed years ago, and I have to adapt it to my current diet, since I went mostly-vegan vegetarian. There's a dumpling-sauce recipe from 1993 that is perfectly serviceable, but I tried it with three different chili pastes and it just wasn't the same. I think it was adapted for home cooks of the early '90s and left out doubanjiang, which a Sichuan restaurant would have had on hand. A couple heaping teaspoons of that brought the flavor a lot closer....

Anywhoo. Do you folks have food memories that stand out? Best ever pizza? Cookies that you'd like to find again?

Stumbled across this proposal whilst reading about one of the AI-free calibre forks cropping up - pretty interesting idea all around.

Cassandra Granade writes:

Things are moving really fast, so I went on and created a Codeberg organization for coordinating a post-Calibre path forward for uniting readers and writers in the goal of archiving, organizing, and reading books.

https://codeberg.org/rereading

DNS is still propagating, but https://rereading.space/ should be up soon as well.

After ten years on GitHub, general-purpose programming language/toolchain Zig has jumped ship, citing severe CI headaches caused by crumbling infrastructure as the major reason why.

The Zig Software Foundation hopes to see less violations of their strict "no slop" policy from this move as well.

tl;dr: nsf requested that python software foundation affirms that they “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws”.

the psf has withdrawn the proposal instead.

The (imo) best splinter group of the former Disco Elysium game studio ZA/UM announced their first product. Hard to imagine they will actually deliver on all the hype they are building but the vibes are so so good right now. Also the website design is quite fresh.

If you haven't seen them before maybe start with the manifesto and the blog.

A well-done mockery of the state of open-source, with a solid parody license as a bonus.

Cross-posting a good overview of how propaganda and public relations intersect with social media. Thanks @Soatok@pawb.social for writing this up!

You may remember this youtuber from such famous videos as "Harder Drive", "Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters", or "30 Weird Chess Algorithms". He tends to put out videos around once a year, often about not-awful machine learning.

This time it is a video about solving a horrible high dimensional optimization problem involving convex polyhedra. As well as 100% clearing Call of Duty Black Ops: 6.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH4MviUE0_s

Tired of going to Scott "Other" Aaronson's blog to find out what's currently known about the busy beaver game? I maintain a community website that has summaries for the known numbers in Busy Beaver research, the Busy Beaver Gauge.

I started this site last year because I was worried that Other Scott was excluding some research and not doing a great job of sharing links and history. For example, when it comes to Turing machines implementing the Goldbach conjecture, Other Scott gives O'Rear's 2016 result but not the other two confirmed improvements in the same year, nor the recent 2024 work by Leng.

Concretely, here's what I offer that Other Scott doesn't:

• A clear definition of which problems are useful to study
• Other languages besides Turing machines: binary lambda calculus and brainfuck
• A plan for how to expand the Gauge as a living book: more problems, more languages and machines
• The content itself is available on GitHub for contributions and reuse under CC-BY-NC-SA
• All tables are machine-computed when possible to reduce the risk of handwritten typos in (large) numbers
• Fearless interlinking with community wikis and exporting of knowledge rather than a complexity-zoo-style silo
• Acknowledgement that e.g. Firoozbakht is part of the mathematical community

I accept PRs, although most folks ping me on IRC (korvo on Libera Chat, try #esolangs) and I'm fairly decent at keeping up on the news once it escapes Discord. Also, you (yes, you!) can probably learn how to write programs that attempt to solve these problems, and I'll credit you if your attempt is short or novel.

Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.

stumbled over this in my feed earlier, looks interesting

A crossover between Godot and Blender was not on my bingo card for 2025, but I'm still pretty happy to see - not just because we got a cool little game out of it, but because interop between the two got a major boost.

seen via this

might be a cool thing some here may enjoy contributing to

Good news: a portable version of the LEGO Island decomp just came out, meaning ports to other OSes or devices are now possible.

Hell, there's even a browser port now, available at https://isle.pizza/. If you wanna learn more about the decomp, check out the video I linked.

Just ran across this and figured I’d link to people, looks interesting

“Not awful” is maybe a bit suspect, but at least they’re entertaining :)

I forgot to post it here earlier but it's revision weekend!

That ain't clickbait, Xe Iaso's personally-made anti-scraping measure (originally made to deal with Amazon overloading their git server) has ended up being used by the literal United Nations.

I recommend reading the full blogpost, its a wild ride.

This video was recommended to me and I found it quite sweet. Ben is a non-verbal quadriplegic who requires 24 hours care. His brother and caretaker created a custom software for him that can be controlled with two buttons. It has quite a lot of features by now, there is a keyboard with text-to-speech, movies and even some simple video games.