JdeBP

Closer to the source than an English newspaper:

* https://lecanardenchaine.fr/police-justice/55332-les-hackers...

A long way down the real story comes out. The filer of the report was trying to remotely patch a bunch of servers for CVEs, and a reboot after patch was part of the process.

* https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/59060#issuecomment-66...

The cost is that proper procedure now requires a full analysis of what was done to the server, instead of the desired patch and reboot.

* https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/59060#issuecomment-66...

Pretty much the only insightful comments were the one that said that non-AI tooling exists for this:

* https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/59060#issuecomment-66...

And the one pointing out the promises that 'AI' will handle mundane things that lead people to believe that they can give it rôte tasks to do:

* https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/59060#issuecomment-66...

No, it did not. As it says:

> fbcon will still be compiled in the kernel

Anyone can run a userspace virtual terminal system. I've been doing so for over a decade. It's cutting the terminal emulator out of the kernel (for which there has been a configuration option for years) that the distributors are not doing. Fedora is not doing that here the same as everyone else has not done that.

20 years and counting …

Marshall Kirk McKusick, mentioned in this comic, was still committing changes to FreeBSD as of last August:

* https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/sbin/restore?id=2cefae4c...

> Linux distributions are currently moving away from the in-kernel virtual terminal to better userspace solutions, generally Kmscon.

As I noted 9 years ago, Kmscon got pulled into systemd with much fanfare, and then was quietly dropped with a lot less fanfare.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16014573

9 years down the line, people are still believing the blurbs on the WWW that in fact pre-date systemd-consoled. Whilst Kmscon itself still exists, having spent the time from roughly when David Hermann (now Rheinsberg) pulled it from systemd until 2025 under the stewardship of Peifeng Yu, there's no sign yet that people who make distributions are building Linux as a general rule with the in-kernel terminal emulator cut out.

Would that they were! I, for one, first proposed this in 2006.

I'm not sure that societal trends can be extrapolated from YouTube videos, certainly not from one YouTube video, or channel. There's a lot of oddball stuff on YouTube that, if taken to be definitive would have you, for example, believing that the human race is becoming MMORPG players from New Zealand.

What it might illustrate is that "No AI" and long-format are currently seen as ways of attracting attention.

I think that you need to re-read "escape sequences" and "American National Standards Institute" a few more times until it clicks that these are two entirely different noun phrases.

Then you need to learn a lot more about control sequences.

You can start with CSI, value 0x009B, not being an ASCII character. Then proceed to ITU T.416 (ISO 8613-6) where the SGR control sequences for indexed and direct RGB colours are standardized. Then you can learn that the "E" in ECMA-48 does not stand for "ANSI", but for "European". And finally you can discover that ECMA-48 standardizes exactly 8 colours. 16 colour SGR sequences beloved of CGA-like and VGA-like art are not in the standards and are in fact the product of IBM's AIXterm.

… and multi-byte character set support was added for nvi2 about a decade and a half ago.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/vi-family.html

You are looking at the wrong one. Look at /rescue/vi .

"ANSI Art" has been the true problem name all along. "ASCII Art" used the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. "ANSI Art" did not use the American National Standards Institute.

Even if one took it to mean using ECMA 35 and ECMA 48 escape and control sequences, which wholly forgets the likes of Avatar and PCBoard, "ANSI Art" usually did not actually use any ECMA 35 character set switching, instead relying upon SAUCE data and suchlike and using IBM's (not ANSI's nor ECMA's) rather different code page system and 8-bit character sets, and usually furthermore misinterpreted ECMA 48 SGR sequences when it came to blinking, bright, faint, and bold.

If people are preferring "XTerm Art" or "Terminal Art" for what is made nowadays, that seems to be a nomenclature change for the better.

Oh, it really wasn't. If you want the terrible reality, start with how FidoNet CHARSET and CHRS 'kludge lines' tried to make this work.

I enjoyed the default timezone and the timezone set by init, even though that latter is not following the IANA conventions. Turnabout is fair play for the decades that some of us had PST8PDT hardwired as the default timezone by some operating system makers. (-:

That said: please do not become yet another abuser of the 'xterm' terminal type ('xterm-16color' in this case). Thomas Dickey has a lot to say on the subject of things that pretend to be XTerm and are not. Windows NT has first-class terminal types of its own, and has had for about 30 years at this point. Pick whether you're going to be cloning the old CSRSS or the new Microsoft Terminal, or even something else like the old POSIX subsystem or MS/PC/DR-DOS.

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#tic-i...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#tic-m...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#tic-w...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#toc-_...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#toc-_...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#toc-_...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#toc-_...

I was wondering whether the Guide pointed to the actual doco. The Guide is not perfect. I had not yet checked. (NetBSD has a Guide; FreeBSD has a Handbook; OpenBSD has a FAQ. One of the reasons for keeping the names straight is that there is something else called by its authors the OpenBSD Handbook, which is not produced by the OpenBSD people, and is a perennial thorn in their sides when people come to them with "I read in your Handbook that …" problems.)

Reading that chapter, it turns out that it does. Maybe it should stress the point more, but the actual doco is the likes of these:

* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/evbarm-aarch64...

* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/i386/INSTALL.h...

* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/amd64/INSTALL....

* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/amiga/INSTALL....

* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/sparc64/INSTAL...

… and so forth. Plus the manual pages for postinstall(8) and the like.

If those are Elantech or Synaptics touchpads, then this is the bug report to get behind:

* https://gnats.netbsd.org/60897

I think that it is specifically the interaction between ihidev and ACPI. The hardware devices themselves are PS/2, with a vendor-specific extension to PS/2 activated by a special handshake, plus I2C. (On machines from 2024 that come with 9 USB root hubs; such is the inertia of laptop design.)

There definitely was, and still is. Copyright is not defined by the presence of a "(C)", a "(c)", or even a "©" in some text. What the ASCII/ANSI Art world did not have was a culture of litigiousness. People rarely even made a fuss over copying. In part this was because the whole mechanism that got the art distributed to its viewership involved huge amounts of breaches of then copyright law.

(The legal frameworks that allowed computer systems to be exempt from copyright restrictions, if they were just making copies in the ordinary course of transmitting things around computer networks, did not exist until the turn of the 21st century. Under U.K. law, for example, the way that the WWW worked was technically a massive violation of copyright until The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 came along.)

The law was not different. People's attitudes were.

We tried that in the 1980s with MS/PC/DR-DOS and code pages. We also had BBS networks where people shared such files around the world. One language per file turned out to be a bad idea.

We're going to have the it-conflicts-with-GNU-parallel discussion again. It has happened almost every time that this has come up on Hacker News since 2015.

This is entirely a packaging choice. There is no reason that parallel cannot be in its own package, or renamed. In fact, do not believe the old Hacker News discussions where people point to a bug filed in 2010 being closed as 'WONTFIX' by Joey Hess. In the intervening years, Debian has instituted a wild system where it does rename the moreutils parallel, but only if GNU Parallel is also installed. Because Debian made its GNU Parallel package fix the name clash.

* https://sources.debian.org/src/parallel/20240222%2Bds-2/debi...

There is nowadays an open bug report (against moreutils rather than parallel) on this from a user's perspective:

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1107381

In contrast, Arch Linux simply changed its packaging to eliminate the name clash back in 2012, by fixing moreutils and not parallel, making it always the parallel-moreutils command.

* https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/mo...

I don't need it.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44916853

The real challenge is not finding another channel for transmitting personal information. It is finding something else for the FINGER protocol to do. (-:

I made two additional wrong guesses, the Advanced RISC Computer class of machine firmware and the file archiving utility from System Enhancement Associates. (-:

(Back when the headline was "Arc is Sunsetting". I am so 2 minutes ago.)

How far Apple has come from the OpenSTEP days, when it would have been called /Package (if the guesses at are correct). (-:

Nobody is interested in bitmap fonts?

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/terminal-resources.htm...

I don't know about that. In some places ('m', '0') it is closer to Ubuntu Mono.

It has a slashed zero:

https://github.com/tywr/Nordwand-Mono/blob/main/src/glyphs/n...

Xe misconstrues how the standards process works, a bit. Standards don't develop out of thin air. Usually they standardize some sort of existing practice, and in this case that existing practice was DEC VTs.

In addition, there was ECMA-35 as well as ECMA-48. ECMA-35 provides some important context to ECMA-48, and the reason that ECMA-48 appears to not concretely define some stuff is that actually that stuff is in ECMA-35.

vttest post-dated these standards by three quarters of a decade for the latter and by a dozen years for the former, and wasn't really a comprehensive test suite until the 1990s.

It is amusing to see this point made in a discussion that is notionally about one of the BSDs.

"Those that do not learn history" and so forth.

It has needed some fixing over the years. errno was one thing. There have been a number of things in that vein, where Bernstein relied upon 1989 C or even K&R semantics and suchlike.

But compared to some other code from the 1990s, it has lasted the test of time quite well.

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/djbwares/

Your toaster does not run NetBSD? (-:

Thank you, but no. I'll stick with /dev/tty0 . It's federated.

That would be the self-consistent choice. But it is debatable that it is the right choice when things like the <ctype.h> functions sometimes fall over, either accidentally or deliberately, if erroneously given a signed char, and sign extension can sometimes accidentally yield an EOF value.

That explains all of the .ptl source files, which I didn't recognize straightaway.