Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.
lazy afternoon
Ich habe endlich mal wieder etwas aufwendiger gekocht.
Es gab Ramen mit Konjaknudeln, Gemüse (Champignons, Broccoli, Karotten, Shimeji) aus dem Airfryer, Kimchi, Mayak Tofu und das in einer Dashi mit Milch und Erdnussmus.
Nicht hübsch, aber war schön wärmend und ich bin happy. :)
In since post-Xcode Agentic coding we’re all having the “are LLMs compilers” conversation again…
It’s really helpful to think of LLM’s as databases of _someone else’s code._ That pretty quickly establishes good bounds of what they are and what they are not. They’re a bit more than that but still fundamentally constrained by the data.
That also gives you a good sense of the ethics, and the progress curve. They can really progress only as long as they have data to gobble up.
A Failed SwitchBot Plug Mini and Cooking Electrolytics
https://hackaday.com/2026/02/07/a-failed-switchbot-plug-mini-and-cooking-electrolytics/
I'm an unpaid volunteer running 5 websites and 5 accounts helping people use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. I pay their bills every month.
If you want to help these sites & accounts keep going, you can buy me a coffee:
➡️ https://ko-fi.com/fedithing
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Alternatively become a patron:
➡️ https://liberapay.com/FediThing
All support greatly appreciated! 🙂
❤️ 
@FediTips, 
@FediFollows, 
@FediVideo, 
@FediGardenFedi.Garden 🌱 & 
@homegrownGrow Your Own Services 🌱
I'm an unpaid volunteer running 5 websites and 5 accounts helping people use Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. I pay their bills every month.
If you want to help these sites & accounts keep going, you can buy me a coffee:
➡️ https://ko-fi.com/fedithing
(No registration, choose any amount, all currencies work, one-off or monthly donations)
Alternatively become a patron:
➡️ https://liberapay.com/FediThing
All support greatly appreciated! 🙂
❤️ @FediTips, @FediFollows, @FediVideo, @FediGardenFedi.Garden 🌱 & @homegrownGrow Your Own Services 🌱
FR#152 – The DSA Needs Big Tech
Last week was the FOSDEM conference, where my time was mostly spend chatting with people so I had little time actually listen to all the talks at the event itself. I want to spend some time on one panel in particular, because while rewatching the panel I realised it surfaced some pretty deep structural issues between the fediverse and the DSA.
The panel “The Fediverse and the EU’s Digital Services Act” brought together Alexandra Geese, a Member of the European Parliament and one of the lead negotiators of the DSA; Felix Hlatky, the recently appointed Executive Director of Mastodon; and Sandra Barthel, founder of the Alliance of Open Networks. The title of the panel suggested this was about complementary approaches to the same problem of how Europe can protect democratic discourse online, but turns out there’s a bit more to it.
Geese laid out the DSA’s most powerful provision clearly. Article 34 requires Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs, defined as platforms with more than 45 million monthly active users) to assess systemic risks, and allows the Commission to mandate changes to algorithms, targeting systems, and business models. This, Geese argued, is what makes the DSA meaningful. It gives Europe the ability to intervene in how platforms shape public discourse, without having to become a “ministry of truth” that decides what content is or isn’t allowed.
Hlatky then described the fediverse as a fundamentally different kind of network. “It’s a network of a lot of small networks. In fact, in the fediverse there’s around 30,000 active small servers.” He went on: “From a regulatory point of view, it’s very attractive because they all of them default under the SME exemption, small medium enterprises, so all of these servers are very small so they fall under this exemption.” When asked what makes the fediverse a nicer place than mainstream social media, Hlatky pointed to design and culture: “Polarizing content on Mastodon and the broader fediverse, it will never be amplified in the same way as in other networks, simply because of design choice, that this content doesn’t have this strong amplification. But the second thing that is probably more important is that trust and safety is not an afterthought, something that is bolted on later because we need this for regulatory compliance, but it’s part of the initial product design process.”
These are both reasonable statements on their own, but positioned next to each other it is visible that both Geese and Hlatky describe projects that work against each other. Geese’s entire model depends on VLOPs actually existing, as without a platform that crosses the 45 million monthly active users article 34 of the DSA has nothing to act upon. The DSA’s power to force algorithmic changes, to mandate risk assessments, to reshape business models, all of it requires a centralized platform large enough to qualify. Without a VLOP, the DSA actually does very little. On the other hand, Hlatky, as the Executive Director of one of the largest software developers building the alternative, is explicitly celebrating the fact that nothing in the fediverse qualifies for the DSA, and that the structure of the network makes it likely that nothing will ever qualify. The network architecture of the fediverse creates the possibility for the large majority of participants (if not everybody) to avoid DSA regulation via the SME exemption.
During the panel, Geese was remarkably candid about the geopolitical pressure the European Commission faces when trying to enforce the DSA against US-based platforms. She described how US government threats, including tariff escalation and NATO posturing, are actively deterring the Commission from enforcement. In her framing, DSA enforcement is no longer just a regulatory question, and she sees it as one of three fundamental geopolitical conflicts facing Europe, alongside defense against Russia and economic competitiveness, and argued that enforcing the DSA requires political courage at the highest levels of European leadership.
This problem of political will only matters if VLOPs exist to enforce the DSA against. In a network of 30,000 small servers, there is no entity for the Commission to pressure, and no platform for the US government to shield through diplomatic coercion. The fediverse sidesteps the geopolitical vulnerability that Geese described, but does so by eliminating the regulatory lever entirely.
The very geopolitical pressure that makes DSA enforcement difficult is itself an argument for the fediverse. If the Commission can be coerced into not enforcing against US-based VLOPs, then a network architecture without VLOPs is more resilient, not just technically but geopolitically. But that resilience comes at a cost to both sides of the current power dynamic. For the US, a world without VLOPs removes the ability to fuse state power with platform power, the dynamic that currently allows the US government to shield companies like X and Meta from European regulation. For the EU it removes the regulatory lever that the Commission has spent years building, and with it the role the EU has carved out for itself as the global counterweight to Big Tech. The EU’s position in digital governance, as well as the way the EU understands itself, is built around being the entity that regulates platforms. Without platforms large enough to regulate, that position loses its foundation.
For Hlatky, this avoidance of the DSA is not a big problem, as he sees many positive traits for the fediverse, such as polarizing content not being amplified and trust and safety being integrated into product design. However, these traits can better be described as how Hlatky views Mastodon, as those are not characteristics that are intrinsic to an ActivityPub network, and the claim that trust and safety is integral to Mastodon’s product design is contested within the community as well. While other ActivityPub software also proclaims these traits, it might just be an emergent property that flows from the type of people and their interest who are the early adopters and new builders of of open social platforms. In a potential world where open social protocols gain mass adoption, I’m not sure these characteristics will hold up, especially if it becomes a hyped new technology that attracts a very different user base with other priorities.
This is something I have written about before: one of the reasons the European Commission actually needs platforms like X to exist is that it has built its entire regulatory infrastructure around the assumption that VLOPs exist. Open social networks don’t just offer an alternative to Big Tech, they undermine the assumptions that European digital regulation is built on. The panel at FOSDEM was collegial and constructive, and everyone agreed that the fediverse is good and the DSA is necessary. But nobody asked the harder question: if the fediverse succeeds in replacing centralized platforms, what regulatory framework takes over from the DSA?
For Protocols For Publishers I gave a presentation on the state of the open social web, explaining to publishers how both ActivityPub and atproto have different visions for how a social network can function. In my opinions these visions can be complementary to each other, with atproto well suited for the distribution of news, and ActivityPub creating new primitives for community building. The slide deck can be downloaded here.
PieFed has seen a sustained growth of new users over the last week, increasing it’s total user base by 50% in a week. The main driver of growth for PieFed, created by New Zealand based developer Rimu Atkinson, is a popular post on the BuyFromEU subreddit that describes the platform as an European Reddit Alternative. While impressive growth in relative terms, in absolute terms the entire network is still small, with some 8k monthly active users (MAU) for PieFed and 36k MAU for Lemmy.
Mastodon has announced that they are beginning work on a new onboarding experiment, where they’ll recommend “the closest server geographically that is in the correct language during the sign-up flow.” Mastodon using the mastodon.social as a default server for signup has been a point of critique for years within the community, and the organisation is now addressing this feedback.
Holos continues to be one of the most interesting projects moving ActivityPub forward. It runs an ActivityPub servers on your mobile phone, with a relay that handles your identity, as well as data forwarding for the periods when your phone is inaccessible. The latest update allows you to set your identity based on a domain name you own, fairly similar to atproto. Once the project launches as a 1.0 I’ll write a more detailed explainer about it and why I think it matters, for the protocol-minded people I already recommend taking a look.
FediMTL is a conference about digital sovereignty and the social web, that will be held on February 24, 2026 in Montreal (streaming options also available).
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr152-the-dsa-needs-big-tech/
To read a compressed file without having to first uncompress it, use
"zcat" or "zless" to view it. There is also "bzcat", "bzless", "xzcat"
and "xzless".
-- Dru <genesis@istar.ca>
Just a shout out to everyone directly or loosly involved in *BSD world here on fedi and elsewhere.
Thanks for having me here. It's been a couple of years now since I migrated from Linux and really enjoying it.
be safe and keep up the excellent work,
#appreciation #bsd #kiss #unix #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #dragonfly #runbsd #illumos
Hot take: basic vim (without plugins) is mostly what vi should have been in the first place, and much of the differences between vi and vim are improvements. Multi-level undo and redo in an obvious way? Windows for easier multi-file, cross-file operations? Yes please, sign me up.
Basic vi is a product of its time, namely the early 1980s, and the rather limited Unix machines of the time (yes a VAX 11/780 was limited).
(The touches of vim superintelligence, not so much, and I turn them off.)
To read a compressed file without having to first uncompress it, use
"zcat" or "zless" to view it. There is also "bzcat", "bzless", "xzcat"
and "xzless".
-- Dru <genesis@istar.ca>
"Poland’s favourite blogger Michał Sapka..."
-- 
@rubenerdRuben Schade 
🇦🇺🇸🇬
I've got a quote for my pleasure card now.
minor tr(1) gotcha I encountered recently: It does NOT use regex-style "[a-z]" notation for a character class. One might do something like
$ echo 'abcd123' | tr -d '[a-c]'
d123
which does what's expected. But then put a "[" or "]" in the input:
$ echo '[abcd123]' | tr -d '[a-c]'
d123
The "[" and "]" are treated as literal characters and get deleted/translated too. You can use class-names with them though:
$ echo '[abcd123]' | tr -d '[:alpha:]'
[123]
The reason that
$ … | tr "[a-z]" "[A-Z]"
works is that the left-bracket gets translated to a left-bracket and the right-bracket gets translated to a right bracket, so you don't see an issue.
It *is* documented in man pages:
>System V has historically implemented character ranges using the syntax “[c-c]” instead of the “c-c” used by historic BSD implementations and standardized by POSIX. … if the shell script is deleting or squeezing characters as in the command “tr -d [a-z]”, the characters ‘[’ and ‘]’ will be included in the deletion or compression list which would not have happened under a historic System V implementation.
But it's easy to miss.
Close up picture of a cicada (insect)
I took this picture in June 2004 with the first digital camera I owned. It was the emergence of "Brood X" which happened in central New Jersey.
These particular cicadas emerge only every 17 years. This individual, if they mated could be a grandparent but unfortunately they die soon after mating.
There must have been millions of them and for a few days the noise was deafening. It sounded like old 1950s sci fi UFOs.
I think it's so cool we share a planet with so many different creatures. We need to preserve this planet. It's the only one we have!!
Just had to rewrite a bunch of the placement logic for Octavo, my PDF imposition/printing Mac app. It was a bit of a rabbit hole, there were a bunch of bugs and bad assumptions interacting together, and as soon as I wanted to place a page slot rotated 90 degrees, they all came to the surface.
Fixed and unit tested now.
As a reminder, the TestFlight beta is open: https://octavo.pro
What is your personal "Killer App"? You can choose only one.
I think Poupou thinks the fish are her friends
Just watched the recording of 
@Toasterson 's ips talk. Cool stuff all around
Since some people have asked me if I they could collaborate on my rust IPS work, I decided to publish the Repo now on 
@Codeberg
https://codeberg.org/Toasterson/ips
Note: illumos is the main OS using this package manager but we should make this available for many operatingsystems as we can,
Happy if someone makes ipsOS based on linux aswell. (Please choose a better name though)
The Goal is to bring the IPS innovations to as many people as possible.
"The State Department is removing all posts on its public accounts on the social media platform X made before President Trump returned to office on Jan. 20, 2025."
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/07/nx-s1-5704785/state-department-trump-posts-x
ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.” What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.
I think Poupou thinks the fish are her friends
a lot of people don't realize this #plushtodon
What is your personal "Killer App"? You can choose only one.
Trois Nuits est en "coup de cœur" à la librairie Payot à Lausanne. Merci la Suisse ! 🙏🙏🙏
소망: 서두르지 마라, 머지않아 이루어진다 기다리는 사람: 장애가 있어 오지 않는다 잃어버린 물건: 찾기 어려움, 아래에 있음 여행: 여의치 않으니 보류하라 장사: 사는 것은 손해니 자제하라 학문: 안심하고 면학에 힘쓰라 시세: 팔아라, 큰 이익이 있다 다툼: 때를 기다리지 않으면 이길 수 없다 연애: 장래에 행복해진다 이사: 움직이지 않는 편이 좋다 출산: 순산이나 조심하라 질병: 생각보다 중함 혼담: 갑작스럽게 성사되기 어려움. 기다리면 좋은 인연을 만난다
(인간 OCR + Kagi 번역) 제27번 み吉野は 요시노는 山もかすみて 산도 안개 끼어 白雪の 흰 눈이 ふりにし里に 내린 마을에 春は來にけり 봄은 찾아왔구나 (후지와라노 요시쓰네) 운세 「중길」 처음에는 근심거리가 있겠으나, 놀라거나 방황할 필요는 없습니다. 나중에는 모든 것이 평화롭게 가라앉습니다. 마음을 차분하고 바르게 가지면 행복이 오래 지속될 것입니다.
Note to self: they're gonna expect me to know who won The Big Game Trademarked By A Litigious Corporation when I get into work. Especially since they know I'm from Seattle.
Must remember to check scores before Tuesday morning.
this might be the most american object ever made
.NET IDE의 핵심은 벤더 락인에 묶여 있고, GUI 프레임워크는 Windows에 치중되어 있습니다. 저는 이 문제를 AI 코딩 에이전트의 힘을 빌어 풀어보기 위해 저와 같이 닷넷데브 운영진으로 활동하시는 송영재 님께서 만든 크로스플랫폼 UI 프레임워크 MewUI로 오픈소스 .NET IDE, LibraStudio를 만들기 시작했습니다.
그러나 난관은 AI가 이 프레임워크를 전혀 모른다는 것. 제가 만든 HandMirror MCP로 어셈블리를 직접 검사해 AI에게 정확한 API 정보를 제공하여, 첫 빌드만에 오류 단 3개로 빠르게 구현을 마칠 수 있었습니다. 그 과정을 정리하여 공유합니다.
👉 https://devwrite.ai/ko/posts/why-i-use-handmirror-mcp/
#DotNet #MCP #AIAgent #NuGet #OpenSource #GitHubCopilot #HandMirror #IDE #닷넷데브 #MewUI
I’m 15 episodes in and “Ascendance of a bookworm” is by far the best isekai I’ve ever watched. Amazing show thus far.
새삼스럽게 앨빈한테 별 옷 다 입혔음을 깨달음 그리고 왜 잘 어울리는지 아직도 의문임
앨빈의 해사하게 웃는 얼굴을 좋아함 그야말로 햇살이라서
Rutris를 통해 NC퍼플을 설치까지는 했는데, 실행이 안된다. 아쉽다. 나중에 뭔가 방법을 찾을 수 있겠지.
앨빈의 해사하게 웃는 얼굴을 좋아함 그야말로 햇살이라서
I am heartbroken to see that the journal First Monday is shutting down. I'm all the more grateful I got to check one off the bucket list and publish there last year. But it will be missed.
firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...
First Monday @ 30
| Fir...
새삼스럽게 앨빈한테 별 옷 다 입혔음을 깨달음 그리고 왜 잘 어울리는지 아직도 의문임
( ˘ω˘)ｽﾔｧ
おやふみ
Today's my birthday and I just received the most wonderful gift ever. My children spent the past two weeks writing and drawing stuff, and I had no idea what they were toiling on. Turns out they wrote a D&D adventure, complete with pre-rolled characters, for me to play. They've used the Old School Essentials rule book and little else. They'll be the ones mastering, of course. I can't wait.
@dansup i'm fairly sure some of my followers are literally dead at this point.
apparently Mobilizon 5.2.0 broke JSON-LD stuff for the few AP implementations that care, without any announcement other than ‘bugfix: Replace joinmobilizon.org by mobilizon.org’
The Devil Wears Prada 2: The Legend of Nigel's Gold
@evanEvan Prodromou 2 Devil 2 Prada
Dolmengi
mcc
Inside Fediverse
Stefano Marinelli
+ 
@reiver ⊼ (Charles) 
ploum
jnkrtech
Misty
wakest ⁂