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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10h

(Apologies to Claude Lecommandeur, but I had to.) (Apologies to all other people named Claude as well.)

dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

"TIL" isn't quite true - I'm sure I've seen something about "reserved blocks" before, when creating an ext4 partition, but didn't properly realize what that means until now. The usual tools for looking at disk usage don't explicitly say "50 GB reserved" or anything.

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

TIL that ext2/3/4 on Linux by default arbitrarily reserves 5 % of space for use by root. That's quite a few GBs on modern disks! I'm sure this makes sense on large shared servers with actual administrators, but on a desktop system or a pure data disk, that's just 20-200 GB wasted...

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

WHYYY do old elastic hairbands spontaneously turn into a substance with the consistency of earwax why did I put this in my hair aaaa

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

@PolyWolf oh so *that's* what Python's antigravity module is for!

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

[Was sagt der BeOS-Nachfolger zum Maskottchen von Gentoo?] Hi, Kuh!

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

When programming with POSIX threads, beware of functions whose name ends with _np, such as pthread_setname_np. This indicates that they implement a NP-hard problem (such as "naming things") and may be very inefficient! #WrongFacts

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

... the *what* global compute cluster?

Screenshot of a Hacker News submission titled "Tracing Mystery Network Traffic with eBPF Across HRT's Global Compute Cluster"

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

me: "New Terms of Service? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the European Union, localized entirely within my System Settings.app?" Apple: "Yes!" me: "May I see it?" Apple: "No."

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

@b0rk wanted to learn about just-in-time compilation, but someone misheard the acronym

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

@glyph Pythonista's update cycle is like half the reason why I refuse to take part in the Python ecosystem's scheduled old-version-dropping lol (To be clear, I have no issues with maintainers dropping old Pythons if doing so benefits them in some way! And I can understand not wanting 8 Pythons […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

See also this Stack Overflow question, via which I found the two blog posts I linked here. This is basically all you'll find about this feature (?) online. stackoverflow.com/questions/8635359…

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

Perhaps the only real use of the class field: Windows itself uses it to store some encryption keys related to local password storage. This seems like intentional obfuscation, using this field specifically because it can't be viewed easily! moyix.blogspot.com/2008/02/syskey-a…

moyix.blogspot.com

SysKey and the SAM

The Security Accounts Manager The Security Accounts Manager , or SAM, has been used by Windows since the days of NT to store information on ...

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

In practice, it's almost always left blank. When something does use it, it tends to be something pointless like the program's name or literally just "Class". AFAICT, you can also only set the class when creating a key and can't change it afterwards, making it inconvenient for many things.

Screenshot of a regedit-like tree table view. There is a key "Clients" with a few subkeys, all of which have nothing shown in the rightmost column. There is a second key "Cygwin", which shows the class "Cygwin" in the rightmost column. The "Cygwin" key has two subkeys: "Installations", which has no class, and "setup", which also has class "Cygwin".

Screenshot of a regedit-like tree table view. There is a key "Microsoft" (not expanded, but indicating many subkeys) with nothing shown in the rightmost column. There is a second key "MikeN", which shows the class "Class" in the rightmost column. Its tree of subkeys is also shown, and they all also have the class "Class".

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/10/2026

Did you know that every Windows registry key has a secret extra field that regedit won't show you? Okay it's not secret at all, it's openly documented: the "class" field. But no standard Windows tool shows it! learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/w…

learn.microsoft.com

RegQueryInfoKeyW function (winreg.h) - Win32 apps

Retrieves information about the specified registry key. (Unicode)

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

if you're curious: the link pointed to gh.io/AAzfaht, which redirects to some old announcement about how privacy is important to them github.blog/news-insights/company-n…

github.blog

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026

okay, thanks for keeping me informed!.

Screenshot of the upper left corner of the GitHub "Notifications" page, showing an info banner that reads "This is a test message for the global banner. [link] Review this update"

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

Example: >>> sorted(["4", "1", "2", "02"], key=int) ['1', '2', '02', '4'] >>> sorted(["4", "1", "2", "02"], key=int, reverse=True) ['4', '2', '02', '1'] >>> list(reversed(sorted(["4", "1", "2", "02"], key=int))) ['4', '02', '2', '1'] The last call flips the equal elements "2" and "02".

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

TIL: Python's sort/sorted with reverse=True isn't always the same as simply reversing the sorted list! If some of the elements are equal according to the sort key, then reverse=True preserves the relative order of those elements, where reversing the sorted list would reverse the equal elements too.

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

Thankfully, I was only doing this because I was about to re-image the machine, so nothing was lost. Would have been worse if I had used the live USB to try to fix the old install! (Well, most likely I would've just turned off Secure Boot temporarily until I updated the system, but whatever.)

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

A "fun" Secure Boot problem today: Had a laptop with an older Ubuntu install and booted it off a current Debian live USB. After I did that, it refused to load the installed GRUB, which worked fine before! I assume the Debian live system updated some list so the old GRUB is now considered unsafe?

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

@glyph If all you care about is *any kind* of more up-to-date Python on iOS, there's the a-Shell family of apps, which includes Python 3.13 at the moment. That has a much more bare-bones UI and no custom libraries though, so it's not really a replacement for Pythonista […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

@glyph I was going to suggest Pyto, which I've heard good things about, though I haven't tried it myself. But apparently that's also stuck on Python 3.10 🫠 pyto.app

pyto.app

Pyto IDE

Python 3.10 and C/C++ on iOS

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026

(yes, they call it "2026 Terms of Service" when the effective date is 2027-01-01, don't ask me why)

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026

Dropbox will disallow users under 18, starting in 2027. Huh. Not clear if this also applies to users without an accout who just want to download a public file, but I think it does? This seems... unusual. www.dropbox.com/en/terms2026

dropbox.com

2026 Terms of Service - Dropbox

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

If clit isn't to your liking, there aren't many alternatives unfortunately. The best I could find is "scrot". It stands for "screenshot" and absolutely nothing else. manpages.debian.org/trixie/scrot/sc…

manpages.debian.org

scrot(1) — scrot — Debian trixie — Debian Manpages

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

This went around as a joke a while ago, but apparently there's a real command called "clit" in many Linux distros. It stands for "convert .LIT" and absolutely nothing else, mhm. manpages.debian.org/trixie/convlit/…

Screenshot of a tweet by user "anna" @meowkoteeq:
"
devs naming an app:

macOS: Swoomp

Windows: Internet Manager 6 Extreme

Linux: klitoris
"
7:06 AM · Apr 21, 2026

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

thanks, random Wikipedia editor. I might have been confused about the existence of Luxembourg otherwise en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_No…

Wikipedia screenshot: "the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.". In that list, "Luxembourg" is the only country name that has a link.

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

[spoiler] The second string being printed has a carriage return character at the end. Printed with escaping, it would be ERROR: "hello" != "hello\r" Printed unescaped in a terminal, the carriage return moves the cursor to the beginning of the line, so all you see is the ] appearing in a […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

Protip: When you print a string variable for debugging, use a printing mode that escapes special characters, like Python's repr. If the language doesn't have that, at least put brackets or quotes around the string value! Saves a lot of confusion when you see something like: ]RROR: [hello] != [hello

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

Perhaps this is why mastodon.social rate-limits so often, even when logged in?

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

So apparently if you're in the Mastodon web interface and press the L key, it focuses... something at the absolute bottom of the page, making it load more and more of the infinite scrollback, *repeatedly forever*. Which can be useful! I'm just a little surprised that they have a built-in DoS key.

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

Perhaps make the code generator output folder its own separate repo and always commit there along with the main repo, somehow? (Probably not as a Git submodule, because then you'd get constant conflicts, on top of all the other headaches of Git submodules.)

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

I am almost fully serious about this. You don't want to *literally* do this of course, because at scale it bloats the repo and generates pointless conflicts. But whenever I work on a code generator whose output *is* committed into the repo, I'm quite a bit more confident about my changes!

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

Committing generated code to version control is pretty cool actually, because it makes it easy to see how your changes to the code generator are affecting the output

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/09/2026

It's so unsatisfying that even though C has conditional compilation, you basically can't do feature detection with it. You don't get reflection, because the preprocessor isn't really part of the language, and roughly none of the standards-guaranteed macros tell you the things you want to test for.

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

The French word for "peanuts" is "arachides", which means that every time I look at the list of ingredients for French chocolate I will go "hey look there's spiders in it"

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

[The Message from Deep Space, act 3] I also find the other characters' discussion about the aliens' Y/Z axes really funny. "oooh, the aliens put the depth axis before the height axis! That must mean that depth is more important to the aliens than the vertical! What does this say about their […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

[The Message from Deep Space, act 3] Couldn't the aliens be more consistent with their math syntax? They start off with postfix notation for arithmetic, but switch to infix for... everything else, including relational/logical operators! And that equality operator! Aliens, you can't just use […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/08/2026

* Applications 36 GB * Desktop 1 GB * Documents 9 GB * Downloads 860 GB * Music 23 GB * Pictures 17 GB someone please help me budget this, my home folder is dying

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2026

soooo is it safe/a good idea to monkey-patch Python standard library classes/instances? I know the more robust solution is to write a wrapper class. But it's so inconvenient to write a delegating wrapper just to override one method, when you can just monkey-patch it in a couple of lines

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

This behavior all makes more sense for the other compression algorithm modules (bz2, lzma, zstd), which are not quite as essential to the modern software world as zlib and might more realistically be missing. (Though for bz2 and lzma that still seems pretty unlikely.)

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

Even the stdlib's zipfile module works if zlib is missing - it just won't be able to read/write ZIP files with deflate compression (so practically speaking, it will only support uncompressed ZIP files).

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

TIL that the zlib module in the Python stdlib is technically still an optional module, meaning that you're allowed to build CPython without linking against zlib and it will mostly work. I would've expected zlib to be a required dependency by now!

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

References: * PRONOM User Requirements, section 2, "The PRONOM format signature model": www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/aboutap… * freedesktop.org Shared MIME-info Database spec, section 2.12, "Recommended checking order" […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

anyway, for my use case, it makes sense to trust the data signature check more, because the tool is very developer-oriented, the internal file format is what actually matters here, and it's a one-off guess that can already be easily overridden. Just thought the differences are interesting!

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

In contrast, the shared MIME-info database is used to determine file types in free software desktop systems (e. g. in the KDE file browser), where it's more important that the check is fast and makes sense to the user. Here, it's an advantage that the user can rename files to override their type!

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dgelessus @dgelessus.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

This makes perfect sense, as they're quite different applications/scenarios. PRONOM is from the National Archives of the UK and they probably want to check that files remain readable in the future, so they need to know exact file formats with more detail and reliability than the extension offers.

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