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Dexter’s second law: The pendulum that swings twice as high lasts half as long.

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Having spent days making PkgBase easy on …

The (highly opinionated) Sum Total of computer history:

0. BSD Unix
1. Macintosh
2. Packaged Base in Red Hat 5.2
3. Squiggly underline spell check
4. FreeBSD Jail to manage the fustercluck that are RPMs on Red Hat
5. Two-finger scrolling
6. Hardware-assisted virtualization
7. ZFS v28
8. NVMe

TCP/IP is taken for granted, as it is not vendor/platform-specific.

Flat screen displays are a TV crossover technology, as are WiFi, GPS, and fancy batteries.

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If that doesn’t set people off, I don’t know what will.

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Call For Testing: Major updates

occambsd.sh - More-consistent syntax
propagate.sh - Propagate PkgBase installs
imagine.sh - Image boot images from the others and upstream
sideload.sh - Push (much of) a configuration to a new installation
rc.local.sh - Semi-idempotently configure basic aspects of a system

They’re never done, never perfect, but they do exactly what I have envisioned in various ways and given talks about for 20+ years.

github.com/michaeldexter/occam

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Emerging observations on how lockdown was great for :

Work from home was blessed as a valid thing

Sci-fi-like casual video conferencing without hesitation around the world is now the norm for some of us, only limited by time zones and languages.

Group video chat is equally familiar and commonplace, with excellent self-policing of audio quality and behavior.

Events are focusing on quality over quantity, complimenting the above.

Basically, the “open source seems to be where drunk guys pinch your butt while mansplaining you” factors were globally nipped in the bud.

Good work everyone!

These are delightful times!

❤️❤️❤️

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Repost: It took time, but development is back to a robust pace on both and with a good balance of new features and subtle refinement.

I have begun posting recordings of the weekly Jails/Zones, , and bhyve Production Users calls:

youtube.com/@callfortesting

The running minutes documents are linked from callfortesting.org

Heads-up: There are many ways to participate and lots to do!

I don't see those "other" comments below! Shame on you! A Mastodon dies every time you answer an "other" poll question without adding a comment. (Ignoring the fact that they all died out long ago...)

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How does your open source project or effort handle SWAG?

#mlmmj 2.2.0 is out!

- new control/subreleaseall: release all held mail from a sender in one go (great for patch series)
- $disarmedfrom$ is now RFC 2047 encoded, so mail clients display the disarmed address
- control/replyto and mlmmj-receive-strip are deprecated
- build fixed for GNU make and OpenBSD's make, iconv is now detected by configure
- memory fixes, French and Czech translations updated

codeberg.org/mlmmj/mlmmj/relea

@oxy @dexter @joel
getac.com/us/products/laptops/

GeTac laptops also take a beating and they run *BSDs:
dmesgd.nycbug.org/dmesgd?do=in
Completely over engineered for abuse. They are NOT light weight however.

Anybody running lots of 15.x systems who could run

netstat -nxptcp | grep -

And report back a % of machines that report any lines in addition to the header?

More details at reviews.freebsd.org/D58484 which is in STABLE but not RELEASE

Instead of:

A hill I'm willing to die on

I'm gonna start saying:

A hill I'm having a picnic on

Just... spreading out a nice blanket with a basket of food and staying on that hill for a long long time

✅ too many ppl dying already
✅ picnics are cozy n nice
✅ nobody wants to eject someone having a nice picnic on a hillside, so you will probably win

Holy moly, #GNU sed was immensely faster than #FreeBSD's #sed with the exact same command.

The BSD sed was taking minutes and not finishing at all, only writing about 64KiB of the file per second.

GNU sed finished the entire 34MiB file in a few seconds.

Weird.

rld@Intrepid:tmp$ cat access_log* |sed 's/^.*"\([^"][^"]*\)"$/\1/' >agents.txt
^C
rld@Intrepid:tmp$ cat access_log* |gsed -E 's/^.*"([^"]+)"$/\1/' >agents.txt
rld@Intrepid:tmp$ 
``

@mwl @dexter Ask me what my storage team thinks about this inability. And how many times a day I hear them express this opinion

unfug 

SCSI is short for supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

A simplified history of regular expressions:

- In 1951, Stephen Kleene invented regular expressions.

- In 1966, Ken Thompson built the first software implementation of regular expressions, in the QED text editor for CTSS. UNIX ed is a cut down version of QED, popularizing the tradition of regular expressions in editors. grep started as a standalone version of the engine from ed. em, ex, vi, and vim evolved from ed.

- In 1987, Larry Wall spread regular expressions to the next generation of programmers through Perl. Gravely, it uses backtracking, spreading terrible performance for decades. It derives its engine from the rn newsreader, which derives it from Gosling Emacs. James Gosling told me he wrote it from scratch.

- In 2010, Russ Cox, having spent time at Bell Labs, rejected backtracking and built RE2, a fast and scalable engine, generalized from work on Google Code Search. Its ideas have spread to Go regexp and Rust regex, a new generation of engines. These engines dynamically select between specialized matchers, depending on the pattern.

- Since 2025, Ian Erik Varatalu has been researching regular expressions for his PhD and has produced a fast engine using symbolic derivatives. It implements seldom-included intersection and complement and efficiently implements lookaround, which had been exclusive to backtracking engines.

#unix #computerscience

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Somehow I expected the legendary FMT1 datacenter to be a bit more Star Trek Enterprise-y.

In reality it has door seal foam that is falling to the floor leaving black tar-like goo that sticks to clothing.

For the week ending 2026-09-12

Very Low: IA, IL, MI, MN, NE, NY, OH, OK, PA, VT, WI, WV, WY

Low: CO, CT, DC, GA, IN, KS, LA, MD, ME, MO, NH, NJ, RI, SD, TN, VA

Moderate: AK, AL, AR, DE, ID, KY, MA, NM, OR, UT

High: HI, MS, NC, NV, SC

Very High: CA, FL, TX, VI, WA

🤭 My wife standing next to the president of Latvia in a group photo.

If you like #Flow movie, #3D animation or simply #Caturday, please follow @martinsh
A guy behind water and light animation of the movie.
@Blender ,
@NunavutBirder ,
@jwildeboer , @lisamelton , @_elena , I know my reach is not even comparable to yours, please boost the account to give some traction.

When passkeys first came out, I saw that they were tied to a particular device. I have many computing devices. I could use my password manager to store them but then, what advantage do they offer over my password manager? None.

Based on that, I decided against using them.

The post linked above goes into the technical details of how passkeys aren't for us.

For real world use, for someone who isn't a techie? Use a different password for each site. Either use a password manager or, if that's too complex, write it down in a book. On paper.

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A nice discussion of passkeys.

They're for the company's convenience. They don't protect the user.

hawksley.dev/blog/i-dont-like-

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