Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
This is a modern motherfucking website.
And it’s still fucking perfect.
https://modernmotherfuckingwebsite.dreamstation.systems/
Remote
Liam Proven
@lproven@social.vivaldi.net
mastodon 4.7.3+vivaldimodTall, once dark, black-clad atheist skeptic SF fan; writes (mostly about computers) for a living. Grizzled internet veteran, online since 1985. Current primary email is from 1991.
All opinions expressed are my own & not those of any employer.
2194 Followers
531 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 28, 2022
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
RT @brianoneill.bsky.social
Honestly, if this somehow wrecks Mar-a-Lago a lot of long-held beliefs I have about the afterlife will be hastily reconsidered.
No Sloptober
https://no-sloptober.com/
« This October we challenge you to abstain from LLM based tools entirely. Think of this as a fast for your mind! This is not a judgement of others, but a personal challenge to you. »
<- I mean, why not? I do it anyway, every month…
help wanted
https://lake.computer/blog/help-wanted/
«
I am very sorry that the software that I created & put online for free, without any warranty, explicit or implied, has not met your expectations. You are entitled to a full refund. I have taken the liberty to initiate it. You should already have it.
»
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Thoughts on the Future of Web Browsers
https://sarahjamielewis.com/log/2026/future-of-web-browsers.html
<- on trying to build a clean hard-fork of Firefox ESR that removes all the AI and all the user-hostile features.
The open FOSS web really needs all the Firefox forks to get on board & help with this.
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Firefox 156 arrives with a forest of forks in its wake
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/09/19/firefox-156-arrives-with-a-forest-of-forks-in-its-wake/5297194
From Waterfox to LibreWolf and Pale Moon, there's a browser for almost every Mozilla dissenter
<- by me on #theregister -- note, this is really about the alternatives, not the Mozilla products, which get about 1 paragraph each.
Replying to
@thevhswizard@retro.pizza
"Alzo is your free home for fun on the web!"
"Alzo is now part of the Blorp network."
"Alzo is now Crung!"
"Crung! is shutting down."
Don't use AI to write
Writing requires thinking, don't let an AI do the thinking for you.
https://paulbakker.io/writing/no-ai-for-writing/
<- author uses them for coding; hasn't made cognitive next step yet…
A thought prompted by my earlier post:
Decades ago there was a brief trend for Javascript email sigs that, as a protest against people using HTML for email, automatically closed their email client.
Instead of a request not to email me slop, suggestions please for a prompt I can include that would remove my address or something like that.
https://social.vivaldi.net/@lproven/117319495193707341
Quoting
I have noticed a disturbing trend for LLM-bot-slop emails recently. They typically cite a totally irrelevant article, plug some product (natch), have no signature or company or anything. They usually come from %IndianName%@gmail (but occasionally %PolishName%).
This week, I have added a line to my email signature:
*DO NOT SEND ME AI OUTPUT. CAN'T WRITE ENGLISH? SEND THE PROMPT.*
If your pitch is slop, I am not writing about it even if it's a free weakly-godslike AGI which runs on an old phone and has produced combined cure for the common cold _and_ cancer as a proof of concept.
Open quoted postI have noticed a disturbing trend for LLM-bot-slop emails recently. They typically cite a totally irrelevant article, plug some product (natch), have no signature or company or anything. They usually come from %IndianName%@gmail (but occasionally %PolishName%).
This week, I have added a line to my email signature:
*DO NOT SEND ME AI OUTPUT. CAN'T WRITE ENGLISH? SEND THE PROMPT.*
If your pitch is slop, I am not writing about it even if it's a free weakly-godslike AGI which runs on an old phone and has produced combined cure for the common cold _and_ cancer as a proof of concept.
How to make Xfce look like almost any desktop you want
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/09/13/how-to-make-xfce-look-like-almost-any-desktop-you-want/5295775
Panel Profiles handles the heavy lifting, once you've installed the plugins it expects
<- by me on #TheRegister
RE: https://xoxo.zone/@davidcelis/117287518491382866
Nice find here. I've got the editors to update my recent article on Omarchy sponsorship. 😁
Quoting
interesting; it looks like Anthropic quietly pulled their donation of $150,000 in AI token credits to Omarchy. they no longer appear as a patron and this announcement post has scrubbed any mention of them. backlash… kind of works sometimes?
https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/omacom-foundation-secures-tokens-from-leading-labs/
Open quoted post7 vintage Linux features I want back – and why they still matter
https://www.zdnet.com/tech/linux-features-i-miss/
If you've been around Linux long enough, you probably have certain features you wish would have never gone away. These are Jack Wallen's
Thoughts return to forbidden RAM upgrades as Raspberry Pi OS gets fresh lick of paint
https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/09/23/thoughts-return-to-forbidden-ram-upgrades-as-raspberry-pi-os-gets-fresh-lick-of-paint/5298600
New dock and app launcher arrive while soaring memory prices revive scrutiny of a two-year-old firmware restriction
<- by me on #TheRegister
Replying to
Fair point.
But TBH I already have text files on my desktop for doing just this:
stock-ai-response.txt
stock-foss-angle-response.txt
stock-cloud-response.txt
stock-blockchain-response.txt
stock-ext-content-response.txt
I just copy them into the reply and hit Send.
I don't mind adding another one if it'll get me off their blasted lists.
What's in a (road) name?
https://www.capeandislands.org/in-this-place/2022-09-13/whats-in-a-road-name
« Over the years I’ve casually pursued a hobby of investigating unusual or enigmatic Cape Cod street names, especially names that turn out to signify something quite different than what they seem to suggest. »
Replying to
@davidgerard@circumstances.run @cstross@wandering.shop
FFS. Reading you 2 in the context of my tiny heart scare 18mth ago makes me even more grateful to teenaged Liam going vegetarian 45 years so. The docs described me as "very active" (!!) and told me my circulatory system was in very good health for my age and weight.
I nearly passed out just from the shock.
The Strongest El Niño Ever
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-strongest-el-nino-ever#footnote-anchor-1
With all the July runs in, dynamical models give a ~90% chance of a record-setting event
<- much bigger than 1877-1878. That killed ~50 million people.
Replying to
@bpl
I am very happy with X11 and will be happier still if I am never compelled to switch to Wayland, thanks.
I'd rather use Arcan.
Omarchy gains $18.5M in backing, fresh converts – and fierce critics
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/09/17/omarchy-gains-185m-in-backing-fresh-converts-and-fierce-critics/5296780
DHH's Arch-based desktop becomes the latest front in FOSS's culture wars
← by me on #TheRegister
Replying to
@flick@spinster.club (I've been doing this since I worked at AVG over a decade ago. I distilled a lot of my job down to half a dozen stock responses.)
Replying to
@benjamineskola@hachyderm.io @AAKL@infosec.exchange
I can't believe I find myself defending bot coding, but here we are.
- You dismissed half a day of my work, and months of these Finnish Amiga hackers, in 3 words.
And now you're all surprised and hurt that I am upset.
Remember the human.
- Amix isn't slop. Amix is hand-coded 1980s C code, optimised for low-end kit for '80s Unix. It was a remarkable product for a remarkable computer. Sure, it was a flop, but maybe the first production SVR4.1 version. Now, thanks to bot-aided reverse-engineering and some drivers and a tweaked bootloader, it runs on newer kit than its creators intended.
Part of that is a human-written bootloader from 24 years ago, which I link to and whose creator I name.
This is not some vibe-coded bucket of bot slop. This is very careful reversing, modifying, and updating of over 1/3 of a century old code that most fans of that platform have forgotten ever existed.
That's why I wrote it.
Do you really not see how dismissing all this hard work with 3 words is hurtful?
Replying to
IBM i (OS/400) The Database Operating System
https://osadmins.com/en/ibm-i-os-400-the-database-operating-system/
<- too enthusiastic, but an good deep-dive into the computing industry's single most radical shipping commercial OS
Everybody's Lost Their Minds
https://www.netmeister.org/blog/everybodys-lost-their-minds.html
«You know there are 2 ways for AI to achieve superhuman intelligence, right? … The brain worms have been spreading, & it looks increasingly like everybody's lost their goddamn minds already.»
Ctenophores Aren’t Just Beautiful. They’re Biological Wonders.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/ctenophores-arent-just-beautiful-theyre-biological-wonders-20260916/
Comb jellies are helping answer fundamental questions in biology, from how the earliest nervous systems evolved to how bioluminescence works.
<- the most fascinating animals of all
Replying to
@zzt@mas.to BTW this thread inspired an entire article. It's here:
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/25/anti-ai-open-source-has-an-enemy-in-common-but-almost-nothing-else/5278275
Replying to
@brie @techokami@woof.tech
It is arguably a bit of a shame but TBH it's not something I really want or miss.
You may enjoy the article I wrote comparing the 2 of them a few years ago.
https://www.theregister.com/software/2022/07/28/battle-of-the-retro-unix-desktops-nscde-pitted-against-cde/521134
Replying to
@retrofan64@oldbytes.space I was not aware of MonkeyBagel, but I am now.
Assuming you mean
https://monkeybagel.com/
Replying to
Thank you very much to all the people sharing this (or even liking it)... But please *SIGN IT* as well.
Replying to
@grahamperrin@mastodon.bsd.cafe @rl_dane@polymaths.social @zzt@mas.to It's about the movement of the Overton Window.
Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years (and working with a decades-old C codebase)
https://changelog.complete.org/archives/44456-celebrating-45-years-of-kermit-with-the-first-new-c-kermit-release-in-15-years-and-working-with-a-decades-old-c-codebase
Don't be a meat proxy
https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/
Replying to
@davidgerard@circumstances.run @cstross@wandering.shop
Really not. Apart from the 2nd hand Meccano skeleton, my asthma is getting much, much worse on the cold damp IoM so lungs fairly knackered...
Replying to
@rl_dane@polymaths.social @grahamperrin@mastodon.bsd.cafe @zzt@mas.to
Thanks to Win11, I suspect that perfectly capable hardware is much less than £20/$20.
So, let me try to put it in some real terms. A dead easy OS, with a desktop GUI, that can run passably on a Core 2 Duo and well on a low-end PC from a decade ago.
As a thought experiment: it has some architectural limitation that makes Chromium and Javascript impossible. Let's say it can only run Dillo, Netsurf, things like that.
We want something that can get online, let people talk (on as many chat services as possible), email, share diaries and address books, talk to XMPP and Telegram and Matrix and so on... with no Electron, no JS, nothing at all like that.
The Web may be very broken – as a thought experiment, let's accept that – but how much else can we make usable?
Gribnif: Classic Atari ST/TT/Falcon Software
https://gribnif.github.io/
«
The source code to NeoDesk, Geneva and several other titles is now available on GitHub.
»
Replying to
@benjamineskola@hachyderm.io @AAKL@infosec.exchange @theregister@geeknews.chat
Well, because I specifically addressed that point in the text.
I suppose the thing that I didn't was in contrasting it with NetBSD... Perhaps I should specifically have pointed out that NetBSD is slop free by design.
I think recoining Amix is a fascinating bit of code archaeology and it's probably only realistic with bot assistance.
Replying to
@thevhswizard@retro.pizza BTW, full disclaimer, I have seen a version of this done before, but I looked and I couldn't find it and decided that the enshittification of mid-21st century search engines meant it'd take longer to find than retype.
Replying to
@alicemcalicepants@ohai.social Oh, that is THE WINNER.
Congratulations! You win the internet for today!
Replying to
@gdinwiddie@mastodon.social Exercise for the reader -- as in this instance, the author is dead, sadly.
Replying to
@roaminchemicals@mastodon.social
Hmm. I don't see it that way.
As a comparison: I gave up eating meat and all other products of dead animals in about 1983. I still don't, nearly 45 years later.
I don't see that as in any way legitimising the meat industry. I see it as proof that you can, it's not that hard, and you will be absolutely fine and will enjoy doing it.
Replying to
@dakkar@s.thenautilus.net Vertical tabs for the win.
Don't much care what they look like, TBH.
Replying to
@kestral@masto.hackers.town @mntmn@mastodon.social
*Very* tempting, but it's just a bit too small for me, like a lot of modern kit. (GPD Pocket, ClockworkPi DevTerm, etc.)
I have big hands and like big phones which many people complain about. These things look lovely, but not for me.