Anyone can recommend forgotten books about designing and programming text user interfaces (TUI) for consoles/terminals, also known as screen design back in the 80s?

*Not* curses or using existing libraries, but more like relying directly on ANSI/VT100 control sequences. And *no*, I'm not asking for a list of escape sequences :)

The kind of material I'm thinking of is something close to the 1989 "Programming the User Interface: Principles and Examples" by Judith R. Brown and Steve Cunningham. But focused on TUI exclusively. The more (pseudo-)code, the better.

#ansi #vt100 #terminal #tui #console

@alsutton same tonight with #Eurostar delays of 2 1/2h in #Paris & chaotic situation at Gare du Nord

Oh the joy of having to block AI bots from scraping some public repos we host from the bot with the signature

"KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.2; +https://openai.com/gptbot"

I hope they read the license for all the code before using it ;)

Today's #wtf computing moment; There seems to be no way to let a downloaded, LaunchDaemon started, app on #macos have access to my LAN unless the developer does some magic to it (e.g. an interactive mechanism to trigger a LAN access permission dialog).

This means the shared cache I have on my LAN for my act_runner instances can't be used by the runners on macos, because macos blocks access to it.

🤯

#Forgejo #Gitea

https://gitea.com/gitea/act_runner/issues/711

We've also shared a blog post about features that developers will want to know about coming in 4.4.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/07/mastodon-4-4-for-devs/

This seems, to me, to meet the definition of “creative accounting” 😂 https://nypost.com/2025/06/30/world-news/italy-finds-16-billion-loophole-to-hit-5-defense-spending-pledge-a-bridge-to-sicily/

It’s *really* difficult to recommend using the #eurostar when this is the experience you have in Gare du Nord in Paris on one of the hottest days of the year.

The staff were repeatedly asking folk to move in closer to each other, the ticket check barriers printed new tickets for some folk with different seat numbers, splitting up families, due to a “technical fault”, the announcements to ignore the gate printed tickets were so quiet most folk didn’t hear them, and the train was 40 mins late.

Just for future reference and if anyone is curious: the seventeen AI slop security reports submitted to #curl (so far):

https://gist.github.com/bagder/07f7581f6e3d78ef37dfbfc81fd1d1cd

Maybe this will come handy.

What is the root¹ issue with agentic AI? by @Mer__edith

¹ no pun intended I swear

Google is up to more shenanigans (https://www.laptopmag.com/ai/gemini-phone-access-update), time to switch to free open alternatives:

GOOGLE ANDROID ALTS
@e_mydata & @murena
@volla
@iode
@nitrokey
@openandroidinstaller
@GrapheneOS
@calyxos

GMAIL ALTS
@Tutanota
@fastmail
@hellomailo (in French)
@mailbox_org (in German)

GOOGLE DOCS / DRIVE ALTS
@nextcloud
@CryptPad
@CollaboraOffice
@ONLYOFFICE

GOOGLE PLAY ALT
@fdroidorg

GOOGLE KEEP ALT
@joplinapp

YOUTUBE ALT
@peertube

(news via https://eupolicy.social/@alderik/114765467397075662)

Google's emissions are up over 50%, Amazon builds huge data centers powered by 75% natural gas.

Remember all those posts telling us that "AIs climate impact isn't that bad" supported by some really funky math/perspective and/or numbers Sam Altman invented?

Here's the actual impact.

"AI" is a fossil fuel technology.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/technology/amazon-ai-data-centers.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SU8.2JRa.e3Ju6r_pL1Im

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/google-emissions-ai-electricity-demand-derail-efforts-green

Thinking 5 years out, we could be in a place where, for some information, the authoritative sites have gone out of business, and others have just given up trying to get views, so Google’s answers become even worse because its data sources (the sites) are not updated or don’t exist any more. There’ll also be no good site link results because there are no good sites trying to compete with AI answers.

Seems like a new form of #Internet #enshitfication could be on the way.

#Google #AI

Interesting effect of #Google’s #AI answer box; Sites used to get visitors by folk clicking on search result answers, but now the sites creating the content see nothing because their site is ingested and the content, or a derivative, is shown by Google directly to users as part of an AI response.

This massively cuts the number of visitors some sites get, and has knock-on effects for monetisation, viability, etc.

I’ll be ignoring the AI box from now on.

Source; https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/s/Kz4xCsGOkG

The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Yup, we've had those words since 1997.

Essentially, proprietary development is a cathedral model by nature. Therefore, that's what all non-FLOSS corporate development looks like, even when such development relies of Open Source code.

What we're seeing is an attempt by such corporate developers to force a cathedral model onto Open Source maintainers, when we now have long documented evidence that the bazaar model is very credible.

(4/n)

Recent discussions about libxml2, and the maintainer's decision to make all bug reports public, remind me of a situation I've been in.

For 4 years, 2009-2013, I was the Google Tech Lead for the Open Source aspects of Android.

One of the discussions that came back often was whether Android was truly Open given that its development happened primarily behind closed doors.

Back then already, we thought we didn't have good words to talk about that development model.

(1/n)

European Commission- Call for applications - Expert Group for a Technology Roadmap on Encryption (E04005) ACTIVE - deadline 1 September 2025.
#dataretention #lawfulinterception #digitalforensics #encryption

"The selection shall prioritise experts with technical profiles, coming from either public or private sector, whilst aiming to ensure proportional representation across the following fields of expertise: • Home affairs, ideally with an experience in fighting high-tech crime, and/or a background in the area of decryption and artifact extraction, computer forensics, network forensics, smartphone forensics, cloud forensics, IoT forensics, memory forensics and/or lawful interception; • Cybersecurity. with diverse backgrounds including but not limited to vulnerability management, evaluation of cybersecurity risks and certification and encryption (including quantum and post-quantum cryptography); • Telecommunication, including with experience in computer networks/Internet, 5G/6G, IoT, VoIP, Satellite, Quantum communication and/or encrypted communication applications; • Big data analysis, including with expertise in AI technologies; • Standardisation, notably in relation with cybersecurity and/or telecommunication technologies, including protocol networks, exchanges of digital data, and lawful interception; • Justice and fundamental rights, including experience in data protection and privacy, as well as experience in criminal justice, such as cyber-enabled and/or cyber-dependent crimes"

https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/expert-groups-register/screen/expert-groups/consult?lang=en&groupID=4005

If you though #Google was achieving anything in relation to reducing carbon emissions, read pages 80-82 of their environmental report.

They try hard to make it look like they’ve achieved something by calling out “avoided emissions” on a graph showing a multi-year upward trend in actual emissions.

Even when, as a planet, we’ve seen multiple years of unprecedented destructive weather anomalies the “Don’t be Evil” company is failing to tame its emissions.

We’re screwed.

https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2025-environmental-report.pdf

Sent a pull request to Audacity fixing a crash bug I'd been running into frequently. The cause was an out-of-bounds memmove. Classic C++ areas.

Anyway I got a fucking copilot review on my PR which left two comments, both completely wrong, one of which suggesting I reintroduce the out of bounds memory access. I'm furious!

It has indeed been a difficult year for GNOME, financially. If you benefit from GNOME as a user, we really need your donation:

https://donate.gnome.org/