What is Hackers' Pub?

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.

Hi, yes, welcome to Mozilla Burger. It's true our burgers come with asbestos but the good news is you can pick it off yourself. Look how easy that is. No we can't make a burger without it and let you add it yourself later. Why would we do that?

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A thing that's super frustrating is how the existence of service workers means entire groups of websites (say, all Google service simultaneously) will suddenly stop working unless I go into the Firefox "Task Manager". This is a critical part of using a computer like cmd-opt-esc was in Mac OS 7 or ctrl-alt-del was in Windows 95, but it's not foregrounded as well as it was in those old OSes. The browser recreated a problem from 90s computing but didn't recreate the solutions from that era

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me in 2022: make everything a native app, preferably a CLI. no browser apps ever if possible.

me in 2026: I don’t trust anything except my browser or a full VM to open untrusted media in a decent sandbox.

hell has frozen over and I don’t hate the idea of web chat apps, provided they run in an actual browser and not an Electron app.

RE: https://pleroma.envs.net/objects/251654b9-594a-4f6f-8f06-6cf817cf6258

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If you choose not to pay your $100/yr then if you want to write code for a new apple iOS device you need to call technical support to get them to reset your list of allowed devices. It's nuts. But now my flashcard app runs on my phone again.

Anyway, this is one of my favourite flags in my flag deck. Every country (or state or overseas territory) ought to have a flag inspired by Atari Adventure.

(Can you guess whose flag it is?)

Per fess argent and gules, in chief a castle triple-towered gules masoned sable, windows and portcullis closed or; in base pendent from the portcullis by a chain or a key of the lastArgent, a castle Or composed of two embattled towers joined by a lower curtain wall unembattled, in the centre thereof a portcullis sable; to dexter a key fesswise Or
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The Fediverse has its own Twitch-style livestreaming platform called OwnCast. You can follow OwnCast accounts from Mastodon, they will post in your timeline when they go live.

Lots more info at fedi.tips/owncast-live-streami

Some nice accounts to follow:

MUSIC
@video - Eclectic DJ shows, house-adjacent, dance, hip-hop
@hamishtpb - Pop & rock music, requests, chat
@TIBtv - Music videos from the Fediverse
@SchenklTV - German-language radio shows
@strim - Experimental music collective

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I “love” these little AI slop artifacts that creep into all our codebases now… But who knows, maybe in the “We have to clean up the Asbestos mess”-future these can be helpful…

Current favourite in one of ours, deployed in production is in a blocklist:

“# Alibaba (huge bot network found in your logs)”

Screenshot of a diff where "import csv" has been replaced with "importxlswriter # use this instead of csv"
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I “love” these little AI slop artifacts that creep into all our codebases now… But who knows, maybe in the “We have to clean up the Asbestos mess”-future these can be helpful…

Current favourite in one of ours, deployed in production is in a blocklist:

“# Alibaba (huge bot network found in your logs)”

Screenshot of a diff where "import csv" has been replaced with "importxlswriter # use this instead of csv"
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The kind of immediate writing I did in that microblog -- which went to Mastodon anyway -- was easy because I used a script in the terminal is better done in a "real" microblog like snac2, but it's nice to have an archive of what I was thinking (and typing into my Ruby script).

I haven't done a programming project like it (https://github.com/passthejoe/blogPoster) ever since, and I should. I want to do something that's a desktop GUI, and programs that help me write and publish blog posts with less friction still have a lot of appeal.

The social media paradigm of "type into the box, hit send" is still pretty powerful. All the things you need to add to a post (title, tags, categories, images) just makes everything take longer, and in my case it makes me write less, or write fewer shorter posts. That's good or bad, I guess, depending on how you look at it.

I still think @bt@bsd.cafeBradley Taunt has the right idea with his simpler static site blogging systems https://btxx.org/projects/

I brought back a few more sites by re-aiming DNS for my domains at an 9 VPS that runs the web server and did some builds in and , so now I'm also running:

https://passthejoe.net
https://zola.passthejoe.net
https://stevenrosenberg.net
https://wruby.passthejoe.net

I have been maintaining this VPS in terms of doing updates, but I didn't know I still had the web server running, and at least one of these domains was already aimed at it. Now all 4 are working.

I thought I would give up the server, but I like the ease with which I can add sites in Caddy, and it's been a very reliable environment. It's a low-RAM VPS -- 512 MB -- so I had to set up a swap file just to get it to dnf upgrade. There's enough RAM to run the web server, but it's no powerhouse.
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Just back home from another very busy day at work. In fact this week has been very stressful. Anyway was checking my email and I got this amazing message. I'm not naming the sender but that has bought a huge smile to my face and I'm glad to have helped someone.

"Just wanted to say thanks so much for your clear POSIX-y oriented thinkpad boot splash change tutorial. I was a little freaked out cause of the potential to brick my machine but it's all gone great.

Really appreciate you taking the time and giving back to the world like that!"


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I wrote about AI again. On some level I don't now why I do this to myself

jenniferplusplus.com/what-is-a

Actually, I wrote most of it months ago, for work. But, it was well received, so I put it on my blog. This is the more generic version.

The short version is that AI is not magic. It's a real phenomenon with real behavior and tradeoffs. I'm deeply tired of *****ALL***** the tradeoffs being handwaved away. And so much imagination fills in for the actual behavior. So I tried to describe how it's built, because that informs how it works, which informs what it actually does. And to be clear, it does things. It's not useless. But that's not the same as being useful, or worthwhile.

Anyway, I already put ~4k words on this in the article, so I'll shut up and let it speak for itself.

@jenniferplusplus
Good article! I have a similar stance, as an academic computer scientist. I do have one minor quibble, though: transformers do not generate tokens. They generate a probability distribution of potential next tokens, and are dependent on a "second system" to collapse that distribution into a concrete token. I've demonstrated this here:

web.archive.org/web/2026011500

(Forgive the Wayback link, the blog is having technical issues.)

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🎥 New conference recording from the Unison community!

A deep dive into content-addressed code and how it changes refactoring, dependency management, and remote code execution.

🌟 Dejan's keynote is one to watch!

youtube.com/watch?v=mQHo2Csqs5

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A long interview with Jimmy Lovine (The founder of Beats and later Apple Music), about John Lennon, Steve Jobs and the state of the streaming platforms.

Instead of people like him, we got MBAs and Shareholders steering everything against the wall.

youtube.com/watch?v=niqahsc9jfo

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🕐 2026-02-26 18:00 UTC

📰 Claude Code Remote Controlが登場。ソファでも移動中でも、ローカルセッションをスマホから動かす (👍 87)

🇬🇧 Claude Code's new Remote Control feature lets you access local PC sessions from your smartphone - perfect for coding on the go from couch or train.
🇰🇷 Claude Code의 새로운 Remote Control 기능으로 스마트폰에서 로컬 PC 세션에 접근 가능 - 소파나 이동 중에도 코딩할 수 있습니다.

🔗 zenn.dev/ubie_dev/articles/cla

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I am now officially an iNaturalist ambassador 👨‍🌾🕵️‍♂️🪿🍄🐝🌻

My first project is organizing a BioBlitz (people come together at a place and identify all the living beings they can find) for the marsh near my apartment.

It's happening on April 25th to coincide with the City Nature Challenge.

It will be co-lead with Ryan Bartlett, a local native bee expert, who'll be bringing fun gear to safely catch insects and ID them.

Our findings will lay the groundwork for more intentional stewardship of that land.

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久しぶりにやわらかボタン(純正)のンミ触って楽しくなってたので風呂はいる前に家でスロ打ってたんだけど、まだ暖房無しは寒いのう 芯から冷えた

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