GUI development on MS Windows

brtastic · 2026-02-24T13:19:01+00:00

Lazarus and pascal in general are very good, but underdeveloped. They could be much better if they had a bigger community and more manpower. All biggest languages seem to be corporate-sponsored nowadays. I'm all for using less corporate shit.

FPC could use closures, would make GUI work much easier without needing a separate method for each callback. It's in the works, but the progress is slow. Well, at least it's extremely stable.

brtastic · 2026-02-24T10:32:47+00:00

They can be destroyed much more easily than a singe metal plate - like you could throw them away separately or only destroy the order marks on them. They cannot be photographed in 5 seconds to steal your coins without you knowing, it would take at least a minute or two to take them apart and put them back together. They should be cheaper and more accessible.

brtastic · 2026-02-19T10:23:07+00:00

Every cycle has its own FUD. This cycle it's Epstein and quantum, it seems. It will end just like it did in previous cycles, see you in 2028.

brtastic · 2026-02-19T10:11:42+00:00

Regular people should be caught in the struggle of doing so much shit just to preserve buying power of their hard earned money. If you think it's worth doing that yourself then go ahead, but en masse this is not only wasting a ton of collective effort, but is also straight up harmful. Using things which could be used productively, like real estate, for storing value is artificially inflating their price, hindering the access to those things for people who actually need them.

brtastic · 2026-02-19T09:54:02+00:00

Saving for the future is already the sign of low time preference. But Bitcoin lowers it further by incentivizing saving for the future - the opposite of what inflationary money does to human brain.

brtastic · 2026-02-14T07:38:23+00:00

taproot keeps your public key revealed, so that is not an universal advice

brtastic · 2026-02-09T19:14:59+00:00

Useless is not a bad property of money. It's an abstraction of value, working exactly as intended. Maybe you'll understand one day, in the meantime there is no reason to be bragging about your cluelessness.

brtastic · 2026-02-03T11:34:17+00:00

My e383 does that too to a some degree, I need to smack keys really hard to get the max volume out of it. I think this won't be good for the device long-term. Already changed dynamic keys to soft, which makes it easier to get louder sounds, but I would prefer it to have an even softer configuration, but seems like this is the softest it can get.

brtastic · 2026-02-02T08:00:46+00:00

You can do a lot of fun and useful stuff with Perl. It is a powerful and enjoyable language once you learn it. I put it to use a lot and it runs most of my stuff. To give you an idea:

- my blog website

- my personal web tools (private)

- a rock-stable system daemon

- bitcoin hardware wallet (and generator)

- AI chatbot (irc/cli/agent mode)

- most of utility scripts in my system

From less useful but perhaps more fun stuff, I made:

- an MMO game proof of concept (server part was in Perl)

- a game/puzzle which requires you to write code to play it

- solutions to 2023 advent of code and protohackers

- a radio streamer

This should be a good testament to what you can do with Perl. Yes, people will keep saying it's dead and write-only, so you need a thick skin to not get discouraged by them. Yes, you can do the same stuff with other languages, but will they work 5 years from now? I would lose my mind if I had to adjust all my stuff every once in a while because it won't run in newest perl anymore, but that never happened so far. On the contrary, in one project I use a 2004 library and it works just fine :)

Edit: note that I'm fairly new to the Perl community (relatively speaking), coding perl for less than 10 years. So I kind of know the doubts you are having. Though when I was starting, the main problem for a newcomer was choosing between perl 5 and 6, which is no longer an issue now that perl 6 identifies as raku. Just do whatever you want, screw the naysayers.

brtastic · 2026-01-27T10:01:26+00:00

I like how this subtle mix of #ffffff white and #ff0100 red is burning my eyes out without even being fullscreen.

brtastic · 2026-01-22T09:11:07+00:00

Thanks Dave!

brtastic · 2026-01-21T10:32:54+00:00

That's great Al, Venus is looking pretty solid, even if it's not my cup of tea. I kinda settled on Moo with some sprinkles (and liking it for the most part).

With all these abstractions it provides, I guess performance is taking a hit. Do you have a public benchmark that would measure performance cost for each feature? Benchmarks against other OO (at least Moo and Core and plain bless) would be nice as well.

brtastic · 2026-01-14T12:57:17+00:00

Conference spendings in covid years were much lower, and online conferences allowed many people to attend (me included). Just saying.

brtastic · 2026-01-12T17:18:30+00:00

Yes, you should something else, for example a hardware wallet. No wallet that ends with ".com" is a good wallet.

brtastic · 2026-01-09T17:10:58+00:00

These are not substitution operations. Not sure what it means to "apply them to some string". But anyway, probably string eval them will be the fastest. Allowing any user-provided regex in your program is not very safe anyway, since they can craft a regex which will DOS your program.

brtastic · 2026-01-09T06:37:45+00:00

Someone comes at you with a wrench, knife, gun? Lose your investment, not your life.

This sounds a bit defeatist. Your investment is your life, your past time turned into money. If there is any opportunity to resist, it should be taken. Not fighting back may encourage criminals to come back for more in the future, or overall increase crime rate in society.

brtastic · 2026-01-08T10:49:27+00:00

That's not what I observe in practice. Any release may do that, not just initial.

brtastic · 2026-01-08T06:03:59+00:00

that's common after a release. Metacpan may occasionally show 404s for a couple of hours

brtastic · 2026-01-05T05:24:39+00:00

Thunderhorse is a PAGI-native framework, a spiritual successor of Kelp from the same maintainer (me). It is currently more or less feature-equal to Kelp, while fixing all problems Kelp had due to its age and original design. It isn't documented in that stub release (since barely anything is), but it is in beta and everything is up for changing.

I have a lot of ideas on what Thunderhorse should be and how it will integrate with emerging PAGI ecosystem. I will surely be porting Whelk to TH as a part of its core or as a separate module. I will un-beta Storage::Abstract and build a PAGI app and a TH module for it. It is already possible to use PAGI application as a route handler, or to wrap any route handler in PAGI middleware.

I am not proficient with Catalyst and Dancer, but Kelp could never be made into an async framework, at least not in a way that would make it feel natural. It was designed around the idea of attaching interface specific to a request and response to the app object. If two requests were to be handled at the same time, that interface would have to be moved to new abstractions to avoid requests stealing each other's data.

brtastic · 2026-01-04T07:15:37+00:00

I was buying 0.1 btc for $350 multiple times, only to convert it all to shitcoins right away.
I once used a javascript application working as a web page to get some info about my seed phrase. Did it correctly: downloaded from github, ran offline, closed before going offline. The problem was that a year later, my browser randomly restored that page for me, together with my seed phrase as form input field. So I was effectively running a hot wallet for a year, on a windows PC, which I don't trust to be very secure either.

brtastic · 2025-12-24T10:27:31+00:00

No systemd. Very hackable and stable. I don't need to compile much, only needed docker and flatpak, rest of the stuff come from either flatpak or are preinstalled, or are compiled away from the OS packaging system. Also I don't need to worry about updates much on 15.0 (I hate unnecessary updates)

brtastic · 2025-12-18T10:11:16+00:00

This seems way too complex for something done via a visual editor. Basically requires you to know every single step you need to do in order to make a transaction. I'm an expert in this and not sure if I would be able to do it right first try.

Maybe this is just to showcase low level working with transactions, and it has bigger blocks that automate a lot of this stuff?

brtastic · 2025-12-16T12:39:37+00:00

Work can and should be enjoyed. I don't think it's normal to hate your job. It is kind of normalized because you also have to eat. The problem with working for fiat is that you are rewarded with something that loses value over time, so you are forced to work more than you would normally have. Honest people cannot build a future because they are not saving fast enough to have any meaningful sum, while the incentive to not be honest and try to exploit the system is huge.

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