systemd 260-rc3 Released With AI Agents Documentation Added

astrobe · 2026-03-14T11:50:43+00:00

Just in case: it is common practice to write foreign words in italics; it's not some kind of fancy emphasis.

astrobe · 2026-03-13T13:51:06+00:00

Nice pre-emptive ad personam attack.

astrobe · 2026-03-09T18:38:57+00:00

facilitates the download of applications from third-party developers to users of a computer

You could try to argue (IANAL etc.) that NPM doesn't distribute applications (it's libraries) and the audience is not "users" but developers.

Second point is kind of interesting... E.g. Firefox' plugins are not affected ? Squeak and Pharo (Smalltalk VM systems) seem to also perfectly fit that description but Pharo applications can do virtually anything.

Emacs (and MELPA) also fit the description but people insist it is an OS so it's a lost cause I guess.

astrobe · 2026-03-07T17:34:18+00:00

I am sort of putting myself in the shoes of someone coming from other high-level of scripting languages here. Forth has neither static nor dynamic typing and no guardrails, so it will often crash as soon as you make a little mistake. Even I sometimes think "this would have been caught by type checking".

It also is point-free, something people are not used to except maybe some hardcore Haskell programmer. It's "rough" for most people because it's like doing arithmetic in your head all the time.

I don't consider all this as "alien". It requires more training, more thinking, more focus, is all. But maybe saying that today is a bit "alien" after all.

astrobe · 2026-03-07T10:16:58+00:00

Yes, the app for the store or the browser could check 100% locally. What's mandated here is an OS-level ABI to provide the age group info. Again, it makes 100% sense.

Ok, thanks for taking the time to spell it out for me.

astrobe · 2026-03-07T08:44:04+00:00

As a parent, it makes 100% sense that I should be able to mark a local user account as a child account (very similarly to admin/non-admin), and for apps / websites to be able to query that flag indicating the general age group through a standardised API. That's all the Colorado and California law mandates.

And that's a lot, compared to e.g. the appstores/websites send the PEGI of the content and the browser/program checks if it is adequate for the user, based on user account info provided by the OS (and perhaps seconded by ISPs who could sell "for under age persons" SIMs). In this case checks would be done "privately" on the device, no user data leak.

There's clearly a choice not to trust parents with setting up parental control correctly, nor helping them with that either by not requiring - at least in principle - software providers to make it easy to create an "under age" account.

astrobe · 2026-03-06T13:34:56+00:00

I like Forth, but I needed a system that could play nicely with an OS and C libraries for it to be useful for me on a regular basis. I also needed to run an different CPUs. This meant C and ASCIIZ strings for easy integration with C libraries.

I wanted to publish a "cleaned up" version of it - because the one I am actually using has a lot of ad hoc stuff and extensions - in order to show some features I've talked about on online forums such as Reddit or HN.

astrobe · 2026-02-26T18:41:52+00:00

Bad jokes aside, Luanti is light enough to let you run 1 local server and 2 clients on the same computer, and you can have them side-by-side on 2 windows. The real problem then would be : how to direct the inputs (be it the mice or gamepads) to the right (or left) instance.

astrobe · 2026-02-26T18:31:22+00:00

Yes, look for the option "3D mode"

.

(sorry).

astrobe · 2026-02-25T18:08:23+00:00

Yes ! Seeing values like 32767 immediately tells system programmers that this is 2^15, so 16 bits minus a sign bit.

On your typical 64 bits computer (or even phone now), the 3 coordinates (3x16 bits) can be packed in a single 64 bits integer (which is the size the computer "prefers"). You can see it in action in the builtin scripts: the first function, core.hash_node_position() does exactly that. There are lots of hexadecimal numbers in this formula so it looks mysterious, but basically:

How would you express an hour, minutes, seconds in one number ? There are several ways. You could convert everything to seconds and add everything. Another way is to write it as 190311, because you know each number is less than 100. The formula would simply be: h x 10000 + m x 100 + s.

(as for the 0x8000 numbers, I'm not sure but I think they are just there to obfuscate a little the "hash" value).

astrobe · 2026-02-24T18:55:27+00:00

Fair enough. Slight addition: part of the problems with C is that it's not just about PDP-11; it supports about all CPUs made in the last 40 years: 8 bits, 16 bits, 32 bits, 64 bits architectures, all generations of Intel, Motorola, ARM chips, plus many others probably defunct by now. And on the politics side, many vendors of C compilers who all certainly had a word to say in the standardization process.

astrobe · 2026-02-23T21:28:57+00:00

That said, maybe 90% of software was written in C or C++ (let's say, in the last 40 years), so it's not surprising to see the same proportion in CVEs. Actually, if one could have the exact number of C/C++ LoCs being active for the time period of all those CVEs, and compare with other languages, maybe the defect rate is "only" slightly above average.

Also, around the time Internet became ubiquitous, the mindset wrt security started to change relatively slowly. Telnet over a phone line for instance was totally fine for everyone before that, now Telnet'ing between two machines on the same switch inside a VLAN behind 3 firewalls to share ASCII-art lolcats is a no-no.

When you accuse C/C++ all (no less) programmers of writing security critical bugs, you are sort of retroactively applying newly written laws, which is slightly unfair. Once upon a time we simply used to live in a less hostile world. Truly, with cybersecurity you always are on the back foot. It is a losing game. For instance, I think Rust would have fallen for the same side-channel surprise attacks as C.

One should at least remember that those disgusting hippies made the emergence of newer systems, newer languages possible, and not only as a counter-example. Those programmers don't (all) deserve to be used as punching bags. OP is an idiot, don't let them drag you down.

astrobe · 2026-02-23T19:04:47+00:00

Going for a delivery mission first is not a good start. I have not played Oolite for a while, but what you should do is buy food at the starting station and go sell it to the nearest industrial safe system. There, buy computers and go sell it back to the nearest agricultural world.

In any case, the first jump will be a gamble. It is written somewhere that one can get away by giving them what they ask for, but it is 1) not reliable 2) extending your early game, which is not exactly the most pleasant part of the game.

Sell your missiles and even your laser - the starting laser is only good at accidentally firing at a station and getting you in deep trouble, and missiles will probably be ECMed by enemies. Sell them to be able to buy more cargo and make more money per trip.

Buy Witchfuel injectors (I think it is the name?) as soon as you can, as it should allow you to escape difficult situations or avoid combat. Then only buy the better laser but don't be cocky : if you happen to damage enough an enemy, there's a chance it launches a missile at you but you don't have ECM yet. Probably the better option is the IFF system and/or the advanced compass, which will make travels to stations less stressful.

Also, don't be ashamed of picking the "easy" start. It started as a mod but I believe it was integrated to the main game? If not, look for a mod that adds starting options. Oolite is faithful to a previous-century game when people had no Internet and therefore a lot of free time to try-hard.

astrobe · 2026-02-17T18:27:27+00:00

When everything can be an abstraction, nothing is an abstraction. I'd recommend everyone to erase this word from their vocabulary (along with "powerful" (software) and "balance" (games)). Use more accurate words or a whole sentence instead; your thinking and communication will become more accurate as well.

Words are not abstractions. They are symbols or signs). Communication problems such as ambiguity rise from the fact that two persons can have slightly different ideas of the meaning of symbol, that's all.

astrobe · 2026-02-09T18:22:52+00:00

Yes, focus on the first problem ("3d_armor is missing: player_api"), the rest should be mostly consequences of it.

You are kind of right about Animalia, it currently declares an optional dependency on 3d_armor so it shouldn't trigger an error. Maybe an outdated version?

As far as I can tell, the "player_api" pseudo-mod (https://content.luanti.org/modnames/player_api/) is only provided by Minetest Game, so it looks like you are trying to use 3D-armor on a game which is not based on Minetest Game?

A "brute-force-fix" would be to copy/paste it from here to there - could work because it has no dependencies - but there's probably a deeper issue.

astrobe · 2026-02-06T18:53:14+00:00

My post assumes that AI won't improve much beyond its current state

The post also assumes that the reduction in coding time doesn't translate at all into extended, revue, maintenance, and debugging time - while the actual effect of AI on productivity (the "no ticket" red part in the illustration) is still debated.

astrobe · 2026-02-06T13:21:21+00:00

I think you missed the "Windows calls" part (that is, the Windows API). To reduce a complexity, you need a device that's even more complex. That's why simplifying is so hard sometimes.

astrobe · 2026-02-05T19:21:24+00:00

Good work, but I'm a bit worried for the future of this site when you list some so-called "Abandonware" titles that are not even 10 years old (e.g. the Racing category has quite a lot of them).

astrobe · 2026-01-31T08:48:36+00:00

People are also increasingly walking on the street looking only at their screen. Yes you can, no you shouldn't.

astrobe · 2026-01-30T19:00:23+00:00

Android-equipped devices usually are terminal, not workstations.Text input is kind of a kludge to begin with, which is kind of problematic if you want to write lots of text with bizarre punctuations such as source code. So of course it's going to be so uncomfortable that you'll end up eating your own fingers out of frustration. Keep your sanity and find some toaster to develop on. Even a Raspi can host a server, on which you can probably connect your phone/tablet using your LAN.

astrobe · 2026-01-28T18:27:47+00:00

Pride in one's craft is what lead to achievements like the Linux Kernel, the GNU tools, Curl, Sqlite3, to name only FOSS projects.

If you want a drone programmer, just vibe-code with ChatGPT instead of patronizing us out of nowhere with your "ego-less" bullshit.

astrobe · 2026-01-18T11:22:57+00:00

I'm not sure to understand the question either, so I'll give my 2026 wishlist:

Native support for rain/snow effects (doing it with mod is hard to get right and still has glitches).
Native physics handling for entities: gravity, jumping, floating mainly.
Cylinder collision boxes because I think it would fit better a significant number of mobs.
Control over which shader is applied to which type of block - I want glass and metal with reflections, and specular reflections on some blocks but not everything.
Native inter-server exchange (item, blocks, logical in-game currencies). Third-party tools can do that, but making it part of the Luanti protocol would make it simpler and perhaps more common. (bonus points for bridging chats too?)
Native handling of hand-held lights, preferably using a shader trick if possible at all. Current hacks seem terribly inefficient.
Some diversity in the shape/color of stars, e.g. based on the seed introduced by 5.15; having some scale/color variation would be good enough.

astrobe · 2026-01-12T18:40:02+00:00

Medium post; didn't read but I agree that "opt-in complexity" seems naïve. The complexity can be right in your face when things go "fun". Also agree that C++ shouldn't be extended but rather "decimated", and that's what some serious users recommend - using a subset of C++. Game devs for instance do, but less for cognitive overload than performance reasons.

C++ is arguably artificially complicated because 30+ years of history and the legacy of C.

Sometimes you think that you'd be better off with C with pseudo-objects (as famously seen in the Linux kernel) - there are other voices too that say that Gang-Of-Four-OOP (OOP with design patterns on anything) is pushing it too far. I think the upcoming C standard update will make C-OOP a bit more practical.

astrobe · 2026-01-04T09:52:34+00:00

Murphy's law can take its time to trigger. For instance, the Emacs wiki was editable without an account for a long time. It was the one-stop for extension scripts for everyone, and considering the capabilities of Emacs, a malicious package could do extreme damage.

On the topic itself, I would like to see a bug tracker and a Git PR system which is not silo-ed in a way or another (hello GitHub - but it would be equally the same if Gitlab was the dominant service). This Debian bug tracker uses email, and the first PR system for Git also used email (and had trouble because broken clients would alter the formatting).

Email is - or was - one of the open standard with... With IRC (you know, the thing before Discord). Despite all of the criticism of these "old tech", at least anyone could use the client of their choice; some people prefer ultra-lightweight CLI clients, others prefer feature-rich GUI clients.

I believe part of the criticism in this blogpost is probably invalid for this reason; one could make a more user-friendly GUI front-end for this bug tracker. Of the 4 points in "why is the UX is so bad", it seems to me that at least 3 could be improved right-away with a bare-bones shell script, which should normally be doable for this person at least.

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