F-Droid blog post on the topic: https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

It was posted before Google backpedalled somewhat, if I remember correctly.

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is the active ingredient in most fabric softeners. However, PDMS is a silicone oil that destroys absorbent properties.

The oil in the fabric softener latches on to clothing and creates a coating. Towels absorb water, but oil repels it. When an oil coating attaches to a towel, it causes the fibers to become greasy and slippery, which hinders its absorbency. When the soapy residue of fabric softener builds up on the towel, it causes it to become stiff instead of soft.

Source: https://www.towelsupercenter.com/blog/should-you-wash-towels-with-fabric-softener/

Yeah, from what I understand, countries try to regulate the use of antibiotics, so that we don’t blow the most potent ones, a.k.a. new ones, right away. But on some level, we’re reliant on regularly discovering new antibiotics, which isn’t great.

and the superbugs that might breed aren’t viable in humans.

But diseases jump from non-humans to humans all the time?
At least, Wikipedia chooses to spell out the sentence “Most human diseases originated in non-humans” and lists a who’s who of pandemics as such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis

Or do you mean something different?

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!

Yeah, the latter is certainly a big part of it. The way to make it compile-safe is to use macros to generate code, so that my users can write e.g. Package::my_frontend.version and that gives them the version of their frontend package.
Writing such macros, i.e. writing code to generate code, is certainly something I haven’t done a ton of yet, because you practically cannot justify doing that in an application codebase, only in a library, so it is new stuff that I learn.

But well, you did already call it a “nice abstraction”, which is another big part where my excitement comes from and where I think, the special nerdery is necessary.
Others might build projects which are visually tangible, like a sexy GUI, or which do something tangible, for example a colleague (who I will absolutely not deny his own special nerdery) is currently building a driver for a motor. If that driver works, you can see a motor moving in the real-world. Even non-nerds can at least tell that something is happening.

But with my project, my success is that you can write Package::my_frontend instead of Package::from_str("my_frontend")?. And that if you rename the package to super_duper_frontend, that the compiler will tell you to fix the code rather than it only breaking once you actually run the build code for the frontend.
No chance of explaining to non-coders why this is exciting or even just when you’re successful.

Isn’t that still just an alias for Invoke-WebRequest though?

At least, I heard again of that being the case not too long ago. Might have also been outdated information, though…

On Monday, one of our students at $DAYJOB asked me what projects I do in my freetime. After I infodumped on her for half an hour, she asked in disbelief “And you do these in your freetime, without being paid?”.

Like, mate, did you not listen how feckin’ excited I got just then? Of course, I do these in my freetime.

To be fair, though, the last project I told her about is very dry. It’s a library to help automate CI builds. And the thing I’m thrilled to build is a compile-safe API for accessing the packages in your workspaces. Like, yeah, it does take a special kind of nerd to get excited about that…

Invoke-WebRequest has entered the chat

🫠

I mean, Rust does have a pretty inclusive community…

Yeah, you don’t need the urinal to be under the sink. You can just run a pipe to the urinal…

I’m guessing, those people are worried that it will be removed. It’s already somewhat on the line since Wayland started replacing X11, because individual desktop environments can now decide to implement it or not.

Ah, I think, I know what you mean, that the format is supposed to be written with foolish oversimplifications that are borderline incorrect, whereas “secured by TLS” just sounds like a normal statement from an expert…

I’m guessing that was supposed to be “secured by a thin layer of TLS”…

Genuinely how I feel sometimes. Like, I’ll usually just say yes, so that we can move on, but I have made the joke “How would I know?” quite a lot of times already, because it’s much closer to the truth…

Haha wow, my initial thought after reading your post was “signatures went away”, but then I figured I’m biased towards that being significant, because I recently was on an ancient forum that still had them.

So, instead I tried to formulate the more abstract development. I had read about it a long time ago, so I did not pull that whole comment out of my arse just then, thankfully.

But that it is then precisely signatures which elicit a reaction, that’s hilarious. 😅

And yeah, I do not miss signatures. Within minutes of reading on that forum, I had grown a disdain for some users, because they’d respond with half a sentence and then a distracting GIF in their signature. And of course, they would respond multiple times to a topic, so you could get 10+ instances of that same GIF on one page.

Unfortunately, this does mean I now need to demonstrate that by including a shitty signature:

I’m not a signature, I just clean here.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. ~ Sun Tzu

Not sure, I can articulate this thought well enough, but I feel like there’s been a split between “personal” and “impersonal” social media.

Early internet forums were usually about some specific topic and pseudonyms were paramount, but each person was still given room to present themselves.
So, what I mean by that, is that forum posts had signatures, big profile pictures, as well as typically some additional information about the user, like “Rank: Lord Supreme – Joined: March 2005 – Posts: 3 trillion”.
The forums generally weren’t focused on the people, but you still knew the regulars.

Then came Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon etc., which put people into the focus. You were discouraged from using pseudonyms. You were encouraged to post pictures of yourself. You were encouraged to broadcast any random thought you had.
And while you can use these networks to read or talk about certain topics, you’re really supposed to follow people and get to know them.

And then, sort of as a counter movement again, you have your “link aggregators”, i.e. Lemmy, Lobsters, Reddit etc…
Discussions only happen when there’s a topic, i.e. a post, to talk about. You can’t just broadcast thoughts without context, but rather have to sort them into specific topics/communities.
And while there’s a tiny profile picture next to posts and we do have some regulars that are more widely recognized, most users are not.

Yeah, have not heard about any of these problems before this post…

Back in 2010, the OpenOffice devs had to abandon that name for trademark reasons¹, so they renamed to LibreOffice and continued developing under that name.

OpenOffice theoretically also still exists, but it’s hardly getting updates. Unless you specifically like software from 2010 (including some security vulnerabilities, I believe), you want to use LibreOffice.

¹) The OpenOffice trademark was owned by Sun Microsystems, which got bought by Oracle. Oracle has a very bad reputation, so the devs did not care to wait around for Oracle to fuck everything up.