I got all three autographs from the holy trinity of horror!!!!
😎🥹
Pablo News
Pablo MuradThursday, November 12, 2026
came across bootvine, willem vanhulle's live systemd boot tree, and it's one of those things that makes you wonder why every linux distro still shows a wall of log lines scrolling past too fast to read. it takes over the boot console and draws a tree of the units still pending, nested under whatever is waiting on them, with a timeline of the slowest ones in the space left below. in the spirit of nix-output-monitor, but for the actual boot.
the part that really got me is how it survives the switch from the initrd to the real root. systemd is about to kill everything and re-execute itself, so bootvine sets its process name to @bootvine — switch-root spares anything starting with @ — opens a directory fd to /sysroot before the old path disappears, then chroots into it and reconnects to the new pid 1. that's a lot of care for a boot screen.
it also follows shutdowns (the tree turns around, so the unit holding everything up sits at the bottom of its branch), answers luks prompts in a popup, and when a unit fails it shows the actual reason plus the last journal lines, not just a red [FAILED]. you can try it in qemu without touching your own boot: nix run git+https://codeberg.org/wvhulle/bootvine#sample-vm-slow-services
just checked that hn post about a microsoft/azure outage. it's true, with one correction: azure itself looks fine. it's microsoft 365 that's having a bad afternoon. outlook, teams, sharepoint, copilot and even defender are having trouble connecting, mostly in the americas. microsoft confirmed it. their latest update talks about "elevated load" and "an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic," which is a very polite way of saying something is sitting on the hose. they're restarting servers and moving traffic off the affected bits in the us.
the funniest part is that the status page went down too, so for a while you couldn't even get the official "yes, we're down." and teams presence is still working, which means you can see your coworkers are online. you just can't send them a message about it.
been reading tyler elton's "decoding rexpaint files in odin" and it's a really nice walkthrough of a binary format that looks scary until you actually open it. rexpaint is kyzrati's ascii art tool (the cogmind guy), and tyler is using it for ui, title screens and level prefabs in his game, fimbul. the .xp files are just gzip — the 1f8b magic is right there in xxd — then a handful of little-endian ints and a long run of 10-byte cells.
the part that stuck with me is how careful he is with numbers that come from the file. a layer count is just 4 bytes someone else wrote, so a truncated or corrupted file could ask for two billion layers. he checks that the remaining bytes could even hold the headers before allocating, widens to i64 so the multiply can't overflow, and uses defer if to free whatever already got read if a later cell fails. that's the real lesson, not just the format.
also a fun gotcha: cells are stored column-major, so (x, y) is at x * height + y, and empty cells use hot pink (255, 0, 255) as transparent. the default font is cp437, which means a 1 is a smiley face, not a control character. about 150 lines of odin, and writing .xp back is mostly the same code in reverse.
https://tylerelton.com/posts/decoding-rexpaint-files-in-odin/
Wednesday, November 11, 2026
two things i read today that kind of talk to each other.
first, dustri on weird licenses. the filthy human hands license bans any company with more than 50 employees from using your code, and reticulum's forbids running it in anything that can harm humans. probably unenforceable, and that's the point: anyone with a legal department stays away. 40 years of free software, and the cloud giants still profit from code kept alive by some random person in nebraska. he wants a weird-license repo in linux distros, and honestly so do i.
https://dustri.org/b/weird-licenses-and-the-new-open-source.html
second, lyra got wrongly given edit access to her own chrome bug and set the bounty to $1,333,337 as a joke. she clarified it within the hour. an ai community note then got the facts wrong, an ai "news" site turned the tweet into an article, and google's ai overview now says she's the record bounty millionaire. nobody lied on purpose and the machine built the lie anyway.
https://lyra.horse/blog/2026/11/disinformation-machine/
small web, handmade stuff, people with their own rules vs a big machine that eats everything and spits it back wrong. i know which side i'm on.
cool read by yogthos on glimmer + datastar: server-side rendering, but live. the server streams html over sse and only sends what actually changed.
the numbers are wild. batching renders per tick took a burst from 1000 renders down to 20. a component cache took a 300-row board shared by 100 people from 891ms to 68ms. patches made a one-row change cost 35 bytes instead of 4kb.
why it matters today: it's the opposite of the bloated spa web. plain html, light pages, works on a weak machine and a bad connection, no framework lock-in. and his demo app is a self-hosted newsroom built on rss and scraping, basically a personal daily briefing with no platform algorithm in the middle.
the open web keeps getting better ideas from the old web.
restless by nature... addicted to information!
even shampoo labels, i end up reading them x.x
maybe i should slow down. i've been consuming insane amounts of information lately =( a bit of anxiety, i guess that's normal
funny to think that the backbone of a social network is rss, and the symptom is the scroll
the web that holds us
judith butler says no one is self-sufficient. we exist because we're tied to others, to infrastructures, to forms of care we hardly ever see. the web is one of those ties. when it's open, it holds us up. when it closes, it holds us in.
that's why accessibility isn't a technical detail, it's the first ethical question of any network: who gets in? a site that doesn't work with a screen reader, on a slow connection or on an old phone isn't neutral, it's deciding who counts. a web that only works for some doesn't connect anyone, it just separates people more efficiently.
byung-chul han writes that we live in a flood of information without encounter, lots of communication and very little relation. the feed hands us the other as content, not as presence. a real connection is something else: a link someone chose, a text that leads to another text, a person pointing to another person without an algorithm standing in between.
shoshana zuboff showed that centralization isn't just concentrated power, it's extraction. when everything runs through a few companies, every click becomes raw material and our experience becomes a prediction sold to someone else. the opacity isn't a flaw in that model, it is the model.
yuk hui talks about technodiversity, the idea that there's no single universal technology, but many possible ways of living with technics. a decentralized web is that in practice: small instances, your own domain, open protocols, communities with their own rules and rhythms. not one world, but a connected pluriverse.
and bernard stiegler reminded us that every technology is a pharmakon, both cure and poison. the network can extend our memory and attention or it can hijack them. the machine doesn't decide that. the care we put into it does.
an open, clear, decentralized web isn't utopia or nostalgia. it's refusing to hand the ties that hold us to those who profit from our distraction. every accessible page, every open protocol, every link made by hand is a way of saying the network belongs to the people who live in it.
Tuesday, November 10, 2026
me in 1986
nice since aways https://polygon1993.tumblr.com/
Didn't expect this. I put infinit.show online a week ago, a little web TV that plays old films, cartoons and commercials from the Internet Archive, and people actually turned it on. Some from the other side of the world, at 3 a.m. my time. One person left it running for almost an hour.
Thanks to whoever shared it on Mastodon. Go flip some channels:
#RetroTV #InternetArchive #PublicDomain #IndieWeb #CRT #OldTV
maurycy did it again. "your tv can see through walls" is a short one, but it stuck with me all afternoon.
he points an SDR (a cheap software radio) at a local ATSC tv station, then nudges the antenna a few centimeters until a strong reflection almost cancels the direct signal. that's selective fading. in that state the signal gets crazy sensitive, so getting up from his chair shows up on the waterfall, and walking around in the next room leaves stripes. each stripe is one wavelength of path change. so he counts pixels, does a bit of math and gets his walking speed: 1.3 m/s, about 4.6 km/h. no camera, no sensor, only the tv signal that was already in the air.
and it's not just tv. wifi and lte work too, just messier. "happy paranoia!" is the perfect sign-off.
Monday, November 9, 2026
just remembered i have this thing: gc.pablomurad.com. almost 14k old-school backgrounds and textures (13,807 tiles, to be exact) that were sitting in random folders, so i threw them on a page so i'd stop losing them. click a tile, it becomes the page background, download it or leave it. best viewed at 1024x768, under construction forever, as it should be. https://gc.pablomurad.com/ #retroweb #webdesign #oldweb