cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/33171587

A barn owl mum discovered at a Lincolnshire farm has been described as rare and incredible. Not only is the creature the oldest barn owl ever to have been recorded, the female was found successfully breeding a six-week-old chick.

The bird of prey has left experts amazed after she was discovered at Eastfield Farm in Hough. The incredible creature is 18-years-old - and experts are sure she’s the oldest barn owl ever recorded in Britain or Ireland.

The owl was ringed as a chick, the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) have confirmed, she had a ring placed around her leg in Nottinghamshire back in 2007, allowing tracking of the bird.

I came across the post about Milk-V Titan, and there was a comment asking about the lack of the V extension would hinder running Ubuntu 25.10 which was targetting a particular RISC-V configuration, and it made me wonder if there were an opportunity for micro kernels to exploit.

Now, up-front: it's been literally decades since I had an OS design class, and my knowledge of OS design is superficial; and while I've always been interested in RISC architectures, the depth of my knowledge of that also dates back to the 90's. In particular (my knowledge of) RISC-V's extension design approach is really, really shallow. It's all at a lower level than I've concerned myself with for years and years. So I'm hoping for an ELI-16 conversation.

What I was thinking was that a challenge of RISC-V's design is that operating systems can't rely on extensions being available, which (in my mind) means either a lot of really specific kernel builds -- like, potentially an exponential number -- or a similar number of code paths in the kernel code, making for more complicated and consequently more buggy kernels (per the McConnell rule). It made me wonder if this is not, then, an opportunity for micro kernels to shine, by exploiting an ability to load extension-specific modules based on a given CPU capability set.

As I see it, the practicality of this depends on whether the extensions would be isolatable to kernel modules, or whether (like the FP extension) it'd just be so intrinsic that even the core kernel would need to vary. Even so, wouldn't having a permutation of core kernel builds be smaller, more manageable, and less bug-prone than permutations of monolithic kernels?

Given the number of different possible RISC-V combinations, would a micro kernel design not have an intrinsic advantage over monolithic kernels, and be able to exploit the more modular nature of their design?

edit clarification

Remember the "I want a white one" video? That's the first video I clearly remember having a text-to-speech voice-over. It was really bad TTS, and it was awesome. Lately, though, I find myself wishing video hosting services like Youtube and Peertube (to a lesser degree) had a filter so that I could filter out any videos with TTS voice overs. Does this bother anyone else?

I'm a little torn about it. There are legitimate reasons for people to use them; I've seen commentary from posters about social anxiety that makes even recording audio difficult, and TTS must be fantastic for ~~mute~~ non-verbal(?) folks. Non-native English speakers may be more comfortable with it. I'm sure the platform doesn't help... how many videos do you have to post where the peanut gallery mocks your verbal mistakes before you give up and just have an engine read your written text? I've also noticed that the use of TTS is far, far worse on Youtube -- I have yet to come across a single video on any Peertub site that uses it, although it must exist.

Like a lot of technology, generated speech is getting abused, and since TTS has valid uses, I put it in the "enshittification" category. It's used on every bulk, low-effort "N greatest/funniest/random-adjective" videos; I hear it in increasingly in those suspiciously AI-smelling, ad-ish "reviews" that just read specs and make an odd comment about how cool it is; and there's so much more low-quality, low-information content that feels AI generated uses it -- or maybe it feels AI generated because it uses it. It's almost always on just awful content.

TTS on video content is a perfect example of "this is why we can't have nice things." I am starting to hate it so much, I abort whatever I'm starting to watch as soon as I hear the absurd cadence and mispronunciations -- I'd rather hear an honest non-native speaker making mistakes than that terrible TTS crap.

Whatever the reason, the use of TTS is a trend I'm putting firmly in the "enshittification" category, but am I overreacting here? Do you have a way of dodging or identifying content that uses TTS, in advance?

Picture unrelated to question; built for style, not functionality. I've learned that the most efficient (and boring) platform design is a spear.

I think of all the planets, I like Fulgora the least. I have tried two or three approaches to dealing with the sushi belts of parts; my biggest issue is the monomanical logic of inserters, which -- given a storage chest of a dozen different items, seem to get stuck on one item for extended periods. For instance, unloading a train of random stuff, I'll get 15 inserters all pulling out gears for several minutes, ignoring everything else in the chests. It's frustrating beyond belief, so I think I'm not looking at this the right way.

The biggest issue is buffering. I'll get nothing but gears for a few hours, but then they'll dry up and I'll get nothing but low density structure for a few hours and almost no gears. If I were paranoid, I'd think the devs did this on purpose to maximize jamming.

What I'm going to try next is building a train system with per-item trains, or maybe cars, and see if that helps. Transport raw to an island, recycle it, and load up trains with product and send them to a big factory island. I suspect it's simply going to get jammed up at the recycling center and I won't be any further ahead, but maybe I can mitigate that by just having one, really long train that stops every 12 cars and every series of 12 cars has each car containing a single item.

I don't know. Fulgora just feels stupid, or makes me feel stupid. How do you folks handle Fulgora?

Update edit

I completely redesigned everything on Fulgora, and it doesn't get jammed, and I'm only having to "throw away" steel (the plate, not the girders; I'm not sure why the game calls "girders" "plate", but whatever).

My solution, as it is, is based on the suggestion of having a recycling plant rather than recycling at the miners. I'm using trains: I mine ore into trains and ship it to a recycling island, where the output is filtered into train cars - one type per car. I run the trains full of product to wherever I have factories set up, and pull specific items needed there. I avoid sushi belts and sushi boxcars; my production islands are consequently much simpler, and as yet I'm not having to waste product.

I will point out that I initially used recyclers to reduce the amounts out items, but found I had to keep changing what I was recycling because what was overflowing kept changing, and by recycling I was regularly running out of items; this, again, is related to whatever the RNG is doing to me. Honestly, I have a mind to actually keep a counter, because it appears as if I'll get a run of copper coil, where it's the dominant item mined for dozens of minutes, then it'll be blue chips, and so on, cycling through each of the items. It swamps me with one thing that I can't even manage with belt weaving, then suddenly that'll dry up and I'll get only a trickle of that thing for the next couple of hours. I've frequently had launches completely stop because I had to recycle one component to built rocket parts, and then it dries up and I have to built an assembler to produce the product until the RNG deems me worthy to have it start being a mined item again. If the cycle happened over a period of less than hours, I'd record it. Although, the fact that the inserters (almost) all get stuck on the same item pulling from sushi boxes, I could easily show. If I, of anyone else, cared enough.

In any case, with trains and enough storage boxes I have it set up to weather the droughts and floods of specific items, and am assuming either it's coded this way on purpose, or only doing it on my machine because I don't hear anyone else complaining about it.

This might be a client thing, but... I'm subscribed to several overlapping communities: !linux on one server, !linux on another, !linux on two others. Same with !lemmy, !commandline, and a couple other communities with the same topic and slightly different membership and/or focus.

Crossposting is a valid and useful tool, but I'm noticing an increase of crossposting where the submitter automatically crossposts to 4 similar communities at the same time. Seems reasonable, and yet... I'm starting to get annoyed by seeing the same post 4 or 5 times in a row. I sort by New and since the posting happens concurrently, they just spam my feed with a page of identical posts.

I could unsubscribe from some similar communities, but the content doesn't exactly overlap and I feel like this is solving the wrong problem. I could decide that automatic crossposting by the same author is "bad behavior" and downvote crossposts, but I feel like this solves the wrong problem and violates a valid use case.

What I think a solution might look like involves a unique ID that persists between crossposts, and a corresponding way to filter s.t. only one post is shown. Some communities are more active than others, and comments on a filtered crosspost would be invisible, so it would be necessary to aggregation crosspost comments, interleaving them under the single, unique, unfiltered post. All comments on all subscribed communities where the post was crossposted would be aggregated; replies to any specific comment would reference the comment in its source community and therefore show up in the right community, for folks who aren't subscribed to multiple duplicate communities.

It requires a more complex solution than it might initially seem. Whatever the solution, I feel as if something should be done, because there's an increasing noise-to-signal ratio resulting from increased crossposting.

Something like this? The heavy stagger is great, 42 keys is almost perfect, but the thumb placement is -- for me -- horrible. Having to move my thumb to practically under my palm is just terrible ergonomics.

This thumb layout reminds me more of the ErgoDox variants, and is far better placement. Is there a layout close to this?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45188439

Has anyone ported, or recreated, urob's timeless homerow configuration for ZMK to Vial, or to vial-qmk?

I have a Piantor Pro, built by BeeKeeb; it is a QMK keyboard, and specifically uses vial-qmk. Vial, or flashing directly from the vial-qmk repo, is the only way I've ever successfully flashed or configured it.

I've never been able to use the homerow for anything other than layer switches because they're the only things I can put a long enough delay on that I don't get unintended modifier hits. urob's Timeless Homerow mods for ZMK looks like just the thing, but given my failure to flash the board with anything other than vial-qmk (including vanilla qmk), I'm assuming ZMK is going to be a no-go.

Is anyone who's a fast touch-typer using homerow keys for MACS with Vial, or vial-qmk, and if so, what's your magic sauce for avoiding mis-keying?

Edit 2025-05-19

I was looking at Paul Getreuer's very nice page mechanical keyboards, where he discusses homerow mods on a variety of firmwares, and it mentions using the *_T Quantum keys for homerow mods as being better than tapdance. Maybe it is, but it doesn't completele solve the mis-strikes; they're what I used when I hacked together my version of Miryoku for Vial. They were better, but not foolproof, and from reading urob's description, the ZMK mods go a lot further than Vial's *_T mods. So I'm still looking.

Quick followup

I went back and reviewed Paul's notes, and I'd had Permissive Hold disabled, because it'd brought me nothing but grief in other configs. After enabling it, my 5th run of typioca came away slower than normal, but not unacceptable:

Having only to focus on the new shift location helps; I slow way down when I need layer shifts or in environments like Helix, with heavy ACS and arrow key use. That'll improve with practice. I'm also still getting a lot of accidental layer shifts with those thumb keys, but I think I can fix that with a layer shift delay. I also do not like the repeat delay on some thumb keys that having the layers introduces; backspace, in particular, is a PITA. Again, I hope that this is fixable by tweaking the layer switch mechanism -- I may have to resort back to tap-dance for layers. The key win is that the home row modifiers seem to be working well, and that was my main blocker.

The upshot is that I believe, for now, that my question is answered. Hopefully this post will help someone else on the same journey.

Here's my Vial config. It's basic (not "programmer") Dvorak for the Piantor Pro, with home row mods and heavy right-hand dominant. It attempts to preserve inverse-T movements (arrows) and layer shifts on the right hand; I use a track ball, and use keyboard mouse movement only rarely, so that's a layer relegated to the left hand. There's a layer dedicated to switching to QWERTY, for games, that's not currently bound to anything; I used to have it bound to LShift+RShift, but I'll need to find a new home for it since that's no longer possible. I'm attaching it mainly as an example that's working for me.

Is T-Mobile Fiber (in the US) friendly to Wireguard, or am I going to have blocking issues?

T-Mobile is installing fiber throughout our neighborhood. While I'm not a huge fan of T-Mobile, I actively loath Comcast, and that (or DSL) are currently our only options. At less cost for guaranteed Gb up/down, it's a no-brainer switch.

Except that we're always on VPN. I've got a perma-connection through Mullvad on the router, and a bypass for VPN the company my wife works for uses; there's no unencrypted anything going through the network provider. Comcast has never been an issue, but before I go through switching to T-Mobile it'd be nice to confirm that they aren't going to try to block VPN traffic.

As in the title, it's Wireguard; does anyone use anything else anymore? Don't answer that; it's rhetorical.

Can anyone in the US confirm they're successfully using Wireguard on T-Mobile Fiber?

Ok, Lemmy, let's play a game!

Post how many languages in which you can count to ten, including your native language. If you like, provide which languages. I'm going to make a guess; after you've replied, come back and open the spoiler. If I'm right: upvote; if I'm wrong: downvote!

Bonus question: do you ever do your counting in a non-native language, just to make it more interesting?

Several times now, I've tried to reply to a comment -- usually, I'm doing this on a mobile app -- and when I hit "post" I get an error. Then, when I refresh, I get a "post not found" error. Until now, I just move on, because, it's only Lemmy.

But this morning, I got the same error, and in frustration I opened the post in Firefox, and went to reply to the comment, and in the web page all of the post editing stuff was disabled. I mean, I could click "Reply" and open the reply widget, but the text editor area and all of the buttons are disabled. The post in question is this one.

Before, I speculated that the mobile app would only load so many posts back in time, and maybe they were aging out or something. Or, perhaps, some were removed by mods or the author. Although irritating, I didn't much care.

This, though, is weird, and I wonder how many of the posts I've had this issue with is because of it. It's as if the post is locked, except that there's no indication I can find that it's locked. On the web site, it at least prevents you from trying to reply -- on Voyager, it'll merrily let you spend ten minutes composing a reply only to fail to submit, but that's just a Voyager bug. However, the fact that the post is for all intents and purposes locked, but the official Lemmy UI provides no indication of this ... is this also a bug?

And is is "locked", or is this some behavior relating to cross-site blocking, where blaha.zone won't let midwest.social users post, and the server knows it and so prevents the user from trying to post? Or is it because I've blocked the poster, and Lemmy will show me, but won't let me comment on, posts by blocked users? Or is this some weird situation where the poster deleted the post but it's still showing up?

In any case, this feels like a bug. The site should clearly indicate that posts are locked, or blocked, or whatever the reason commenting is disabled. The web interface clearly knows that the post is un-comment-able; it should show this, and preferably, display why.

Or, am I missing something obvious?