Just speak the truth

Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community.

It is a technical decision.

The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle maintenance for multiple X server implementations. Part of the reason for moving X from main to community was to reduce the burden on the security team for long-term maintenance of X. Additionally, nobody so far on the security team has expressed any interest in collaborating with xxxxxx on security concerns.

We have a working relationship with Freedesktop already, while we would have to start from the beginning with xxxxxx.

Why...

Some fun engineering advice blog

Found a link toward this fun, but very wise, huh... blog, I guess? I don't know.
Maybe there is a better forum category for this, if so, please move the thread accordingly.
Anyway, here's the link: https://grugbrain.dev
Enjoy!

Do old‑style version numbers still make sense?

Long before the endless scroll of release notes and automatic updates, software came packaged in physical media: floppies, CDs, DVDs. Version numbers were lovingly crafted—Version 3.5.2 meant something. It signaled a meaningful hierarchy: major features, minor improvements, bug fixes. You’d carefully note it in a spreadsheet, or stamp it on the media sleeve, and you knew exactly what you had. Back then, if you were shipping a desktop app on CD, you couldn’t just push a micro‑patch. You needed a build, a test cycle, a labeled release. A three‑part version number made sense: major.minor.patch told a coherent story. Then came...

Build a HTML5 “Helix Jump” prototype with Three.js and TypeScript – Step 4: scoring, animated CSS background and platforms fading away

In the fourth step of the Helix Jump HTML5 prototype with Three.js and TypeScript, I added a clean CSS-based score display, a subtle animated background using only CSS, and made destroyed platforms fade out and fly away with GSAP. These visual touches make the game feel more alive, and as always, you get the full line-by-line commented source code for free.

Unionize or die

Tech workers have long resisted the suggestion that we should be organized into unions. The topic is consistently met with a cold reception by tech workers when it is raised, and no big tech workforce is meaningfully organized. This is a fatal mistake – and I don’t mean “fatal” in the figurative sense. Tech workers, it’s time for you to unionize, and strike, or you and your loved ones are literally going to die.

In this article I will justify this statement and show that it is clearly not hyperbolic. I will explain exactly what you need to do, and how organized labor can and will save your...

Click when Red – learn JavaScript and CSS by building a reflex game in a single HTML page

Learn how to build a complete reflex game using only HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript — all in a single file. No frameworks, no dependencies, just pure code to teach you the real fundamentals of web development. Perfect for beginners who want to understand how a web page works, how to react to user input, and how to write game logic from scratch.

Building my childhood dream PC

Build a HTML5 “Helix Jump” prototype with Three.js and TypeScript – Step 3: adding spikes and using GSAP for camera tweening

In this third step of my Helix Jump prototype with Three.js and TypeScript, I’m adding deadly spikes and animating the camera using GSAP for smoother transitions. As always, I’m sharing the full source code, commented line by line, completely free.

The British Airways position on various border disputes

My spouse and I are on vacation in Japan, spending half our time seeing the sights and the other half working remotely and enjoying the experience of living in a different place for a while. To get here, we flew on British Airways from London to Tokyo, and I entertained myself on the long flight by browsing the interactive flight map on the back of my neighbor’s seat and trying to figure out how the poor developer who implemented this map solved the thorny problems that displaying a world map implies.

I began my survey by poking through the whole interface of this little in-seat entertainment system1 to...

2025-05-05

On Sunday, 2025-05-11 there will be scheduled maintenance of the suckless servers. It's estimated this will take about 2 hours from about 10:00 to 12:00 UTC.

The mailinglist, website and source-code repositories will have some downtime.

Update: the maintenance was finished at 2025-05-11 13:00 UTC. There was a small issue with storage space, hence the 1h delay for fixing it.