NHS healthcare in the UK be like: if you are late even by 40 seconds past 0800, you're gonna get bounced by the phone system. good luck! or if you actually need healthcare, go fuck yourself i guess
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✧✦Catherine✦✧
@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
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Joined June 14, 2025
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BEHOLD: contraption
@gsuberland@chaos.social wanna test the new packages? https://glasgow-embedded.org/en/install/binary.html
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
bonus: zh-CN variant
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
to answer the most common bit of feedback: yes, i could add the vertical progress bars too, i've looked at the code. however:
the code that draws them is incredibly convolutedthe installer already has a progress bar
... so if you really want those you might as well just use old InstallShield
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
did i mention that my implementation is fully DPI-aware? :D
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
pov
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
this is actually running on Windows 10. if you reparent a toplevel window, it gains this anachronistic Aero-like chrome. for some reason
i did it. i bolted InstallShield-style background to an MSI installer. you have no idea how difficult this was
i do not think i can rightfully describe how much effort it took to get here
dealing with windows installer is a quasi-religious experience in the sense that you get to really understand what Dante was writing about
twink32.dll
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
@joe@f.duriansoftware.com lmk if you need to know how that works
it's uh, kind of involved
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@joe@f.duriansoftware.com
@joe@f.duriansoftware.com that miiiight have an EHCI debug port
did you know: autotools aren't real
after giving up on an e-bike with the awful Shimano drivetrain, i bought a scooter on a whim (i had very good experiences with them previously). Joyor S5 (600W). as it turns out:
this is definitely the right form factor for meeven though i'm not pedaling i am still getting quite a workout, close to the upper limit of exercise i can tolerate at allthe 600W motor is not enough to overcome the fucking hills nearby. i'm going to upgrade to a T10 (2x1000W). if that will not be enough torque i don't know what will bethe firmware was written by... someone who has no high regard for the safety of the driver, what with the jerky engine braking the moment you let off the gasthe manufacturer put in a "speed limit" parameter (for legal purposes, you see) and also a wire. you can open up the front left blinker and cut the wire. this removes the legal speed limitthe manufacturer (or someone who is very convincingly impersonating the manufacturer) has a detailed video on youtube explaining exactly how to hotwire their scooter "for educational purposes only"
we just spent four hours trying to figure out why wix in wine in the nix sandbox chokes on an unicode filename
wix: works with hanziwix in wine on my machine: works with hanziwix in wine (from nix store) with exact same versions as my local setup: works with hanziwix in wine inside the nixbld sandbox: claims it cannot open XXX??YY???? where each ? corresponds to one ideogram
cause: nix stdenv doesn't bother to install locales, even en_US.UTF-8, and wine, after being run without a locale, just... switches to something, i think cp1252
the most insulting bit is that i tried using 8.3 names to work around it, but the algorithm wine uses to generate 8.3 names depends on the encoding of the filename so it didn't work
existence of Wine, Nix, and Wix implies the existence of Nine in the fourth, mysterious quadrant
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@niconiconi@mk.absturztau.be
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
we just pushed zh-CN localization. the entire lifecycle should be localized now; it also does things like pick the manual language for the Start Menu shortcut according to the installer language
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
if you want to see how the sausage is made: https://codeberg.org/GlasgowEmbedded/windows-dist
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on social.treehouse.systems
i don't think i will ever trust any "AI protection" measure built with Claude. that's just participating in a protection racket
"A web font that makes written content costly to scrape for AI training."
look inside
accessibility-breaking slop
made some final adjustments to the installer
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@parzivalwolfram@infosec.exchange
@parzivalwolfram@infosec.exchange we concluded the target audience isn't interested in XP after some marketing research
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@wren6991@types.pl
@wren6991@types.pl to be fair this is using some kind of LZMA (i think, don't know exactly, it's a microsoft-specific cabinet compression algorithm) and the expanded version is closer to 400 MB
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@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
oh, have i mentioned that all of the tooling is built with Windows 7 support? and we ship Python 3.14, not some ancient EOL version
check this out: https://codeberg.org/GlasgowEmbedded/windows-dist/
in about a day's work i learned WiX and built an MSI installer for #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer! look at it, it includes everything (Python, Yosys, nextpnr-{ice40,ecp5}, Python libraries, the manual) in a package that is just under 90 MB and fully self-contained. and we cross-build everything from Nix using a combination of MinGW, Wine, and a lot of elbow grease
this isn't quite complete yet (among other things it doesn't yet automatically install the prepackaged wheels) but it's pretty close
ok so i spent like two hours tearing my hair out trying to figure out why my .msi cannot install a file in a .cab file which is most fucking definitely there
tried changing compression ratios, using external cab, giving files explicit ids, everything in the world. eventually found someone's stackoverflow post where they were similarly driven to the brink by this error
the post said "touch every file you're packaging"
reader. dear reader. the suggestion fucking worked.
not only that but for some reason, building the .msi is now about 3 times faster. which leaves some horrifying space for thought for what the cause could have been
why the fuck is this called "Word Count Summary Property" https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/word-count-summary
Replying to
@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems
one thesis i have is that people who resort to LLM use to produce tests are doing this because of very real pain points, and also that these pain points are best addressed by building test frameworks that don't inflict acute misery on those who use them
existence of youtube shorts implies the existence of youtube long longs and youtube doubles
Amaranth's simulator interface has taken a massive amount of effort to design and implement, but the payoff is that writing tests in it is actually pleasant. there's very little friction (i use a few helpers but those should be upstreamable) and the tests are compact and easy to debug
this is possibly the highest achievement of everything we've built for the language
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@iris_meredith@mastodon.social
@iris_meredith@mastodon.social hm, I don't agree that it is. there is nothing about the rejection of humanity that makes you more likely to cause an atrocity. indeed there's infinitely more ways to not be human than to be human, and most of them are benign
they even ban spell-checkers if they're based on LLMs. that's kind of impressive. unenforceable, clearly, but impressive https://not-brain.d.on-t.work/notes/aparmsocvf8wbdj6
Quoting
what do you mean openjdk forbids ai code openjdk.org/legal/ai
fucking twist of the century
Open quoted post
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@iris_meredith@mastodon.social
@iris_meredith@mastodon.social but then you run into the definition of "disfigure"
as a simplified but very real example, one might not want to "be human" after seeing the atrocities perpetuated in the name of humanity
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@jrose@social.belkadan.com
@jrose@social.belkadan.com @joe@f.duriansoftware.com I... guess that's the ABI?
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@joe@f.duriansoftware.com
@joe@f.duriansoftware.com they have some real weird patches too
really good video about how guitar and piano and violin strings vibrate https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sYdXa_yp0fc
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@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange
@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange many many years ago, i filed quite a few issues against coqchk, Rocq's proof checker. it had a lot of unsafe code. (I wanted to put theorems on the Ethereum blockchain so that they self-reward the people who find them.)
anyway, although my issues were eventually resolved and coqchk is better as a result (I filed some of the fix PRs!), i was eventually pointed to a previous experiment, which basically concluded with humans proving False quite a few times
@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange i just learned something you might get a kick out of
so you know "CJK"? apparently zh_CN speakers sometimes use "LGC" (Latin/Greek/Cyrillic)
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@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange
@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange ohhhh... if I'm reading the repro right, this is really similar in cause to a well known OCaml quirk
three or four maybe https://chaos.social/@weirdunits/117001739463210230
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@tubetime@mastodon.social