NotAwfulTech

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the psf has withdrawn the proposal instead.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.

in the spirit of this post, but from the other side

I have a shitdroid that I can't root because the vendor sucks, but google can go fuck themselves too. combined with that I haven't androided much for about a decade and know nothing about the current ecosystem.. I'm looking for good alternatives to a few things. free/foss preferred but I'm pragmatic over picky - if there's a good paid option I'm willing to consider it

immediate known requirements include contact sync, calendar (more business than personal but either works if it's good). maybe also other things I should know about?

judicuous preference to things that support open protocols and self-hosting (i.e. anything that has to use their service to operate - no go)

tell me about good apps! I know about syncthing and photosync

For anyone not in the know, EasyRPG is a free and open-source reimplementation of the RPG Maker 2000/2003 engine. Its a pretty cool little community project, I recommend checking it out.

Fun fact: somebody managed to pull off deferred rendering on the Nintendo 64. And its let them show off impressively high-res textures at pretty solid framerates.