Robey ☠️
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robey.messydesk.social.ap.brid.gy
Robey ☠️
@robey.messydesk.social.ap.brid.gy
A wizard appears. He looks grumpy.

I was the guy behind eggdrop, paramiko, the sidekick ssh client, kestrel, and many smaller projects. I've been in 3 unsuccessful […]

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://messydesk.social/@robey, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
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Hi! I'm Robey, a grizzled coder (tw----r, paramiko, eggdrop) and this is my new fediverse home! If you received a follow request from me, it was my account migration.

If we've interacted online (or in person) in the past and you're looking for an account, send me a private message. This server […]
Original post on messydesk.social
messydesk.social
i set up a bot here to test your server's support for RFC HTTP signatures and signed posts:

@echobot

just send it a DM, and it will write back telling you what kind of HTTP signature it found (RFC or old) and if the post was signed.

(this is mostly for people working on servers & proxies)
January 26, 2026 at 9:28 PM
so how does that "$instance$host" thing work? is it part of mastodon, or was it interpreted by the sending server?
January 25, 2026 at 11:52 PM
the moment when megan 2 starts singing a kate bush song: *chefs kiss*
January 24, 2026 at 9:36 AM
how do you get rid of the notification bubble on "settings" on the iphone?

(it wants me to upgrade to liquid glass, but i've decided to skip that version)
January 23, 2026 at 9:51 PM
one thing trashy 20th century scifi instilled in me as a teen was that there are two sets of laws:

- "real" laws based on your moral code and sense of justice

- "state" laws installed by the current regime, which may overlap a lot or only a bit with the real laws

and a lot of life is […]
Original post on messydesk.social
messydesk.social
January 22, 2026 at 8:58 PM
Reposted by Robey ☠️
Memo to nearly every single fucking website: I don’t want you to log me out “due to inactivity”

Don’t be clingy; I use my computer for lots of other sites. I’ll come back to yours, I promise. Let me take my damn time, though!
January 20, 2026 at 11:21 PM
wait the dictionary is telling me that the american pronunciation of "quixotic" isn't "quixotic" but: "quick-sot-ick"

i'm literally not sure i've ever heard anyone pronounce it that way... "quick"?!?!
January 21, 2026 at 8:38 PM
Reposted by Robey ☠️
Blockchain + GenAI + Yegge, the world is going insane: https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/217139
Money Stuff: Memecoin Venture Capital | NewsletterHunt
RSS-like feeds for all of your favorite newsletters
newsletterhunt.com
January 20, 2026 at 7:56 PM
Reposted by Robey ☠️
Mozilla is asking for your opinion about what it's doing, and the survey appears to be aimed at getting you used to the idea that "AI" will become an integral focus area.

I told them that I want Mozilla to focus SOLELY on improving Firefox and Thunderbird, with zero AI in the product.
January 20, 2026 at 6:24 AM
Reposted by Robey ☠️
some napkin math on the collapse of facebook's legless 2nd life:

- 1500 people: the total number of employees for netscape's entire browser & server business at its peak

- 77 G$: the GDP of venezuela

- 5 year project

so each person working on "project ursula" (to discover legs) spent 10 M$ a […]
Original post on messydesk.social
messydesk.social
January 20, 2026 at 7:12 AM
some napkin math on the collapse of facebook's legless 2nd life:

- 1500 people: the total number of employees for netscape's entire browser & server business at its peak

- 77 G$: the GDP of venezuela

- 5 year project

so each person working on "project ursula" (to discover legs) spent 10 M$ a […]
Original post on messydesk.social
messydesk.social
January 20, 2026 at 7:12 AM
Reposted by Robey ☠️
My biggest political regret of all time is using Act Blue to make donations.

The endless text and email spam generated by that decision is literally unstoppable.

There's no universal opt out option available, and they claim zero responsibility for the actions of any entity that uses the data […]
Original post on mstdn.social
mstdn.social
January 18, 2026 at 8:14 PM
free rain jacket
free rain jacket
calling you
calling you
telephones are ringing
telephones are ringing
cling clang clong
cling clang clong
January 19, 2026 at 12:35 AM
wait, hytale (the new minecraft clone) is not on steam?! is windows only?!?!

uhhhh who is the perceived audience exactly?
January 18, 2026 at 9:03 PM
Reposted by Robey ☠️
During the McCarthy era, my dad — a University of Michigan professor — was asked by the FBI to name communists or other subversives at the University. He refused. He told us they came several times to his office to pressure him, even threatening him with being called before the Committee (a […]
Original post on c.im
c.im
January 16, 2026 at 5:01 PM
Reposted by Robey ☠️
"godot has entered the chat"

[surely someone has made this joke before!]
January 16, 2026 at 8:32 PM
admittedly i don't understand why the w3c wants to get back involved in activitypub (the fediverse) after all this time.

i guess best case, they iterate and formalize the integration work the community has done in the meantime with FEPs and such.

but if you have to pay-to-play (and only […]
Original post on messydesk.social
messydesk.social
January 17, 2026 at 9:09 AM
"godot has entered the chat"

[surely someone has made this joke before!]
January 16, 2026 at 8:32 PM
the author apparently wasn't around for any of the many group chat systems between irc and discord (campfire, g-chat, skype, hipchat, slack, ...), so they credit discord with "inventing" most modern group chat features.

i think this is probably the experience of most discord users tho, so no […]
Original post on messydesk.social
messydesk.social
January 14, 2026 at 7:00 PM
i've been pondering a way to hook up a better search engine to my gmail, because their search is (or has become) awful...

and i just realized that's a pretty brutal review for a SEARCH ENGINE COMPANY
January 13, 2026 at 9:18 PM
always sad to see how far apple's design has fallen... what a tire fire

https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-windows-on-macos-tahoe/
The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
A lot has already been said about the absurdly large corner radius of windows on macOS Tahoe. People are calling the way it looks comical, like a child’s toy, or downright insane. Setting all the aesthetic issues aside – which are to some extent a matter of taste – it also comes at a cost in terms of usability. Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing. This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden? It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19 × 19 pixels, located near the window corner. If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62% of that area would lie **inside** the window: But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it – about 75% – now lies **outside** the window: Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them: So I instinctively try to grab the window corner inside the window, typically somewhere in that green area, near the blue dot: And I assume that most people would also intuitively expect to be able to grab the corner there. But no, that’s already outside the accepted target area: So, for example, grabbing it here does **not** work: But guess what – grabbing it here **does** : So in the end, the most reliable way to resize a window in Tahoe is to grab it **outside** the corner – a gesture that feels unnatural and unintuitive, and is therefore inevitably error-prone.
noheger.at
January 13, 2026 at 2:40 AM
was going to try "bazzite" out on this laptop, but to my surprise, it appears to be impossible to install a custom keybord layout on fedora-based distros!

something about the combo of immutable OS and wayland?
January 12, 2026 at 8:48 PM
whoa, now even that guy who used to lick steve jobs nuts has been radicalized!

https://daringfireball.net/2026/01/fuck_you_make_me_without_saying_the_words

(don't worry, he still finds plenty of screen real estate on boot licking during the outrage. he has a brand to maintain you know)
★ ‘Fuck You, Make Me’ Without Saying the Words
Make the Trump administration object. Make them defend the indefensible — in public. Make clear why the apps were removed from the app stores and force Musk — and Trump, if he chooses — to argue that those things are A-OK by them. In court.
daringfireball.net
January 12, 2026 at 2:26 AM
i was just whining a few days ago that older crypto standards like RSA are harder to support in current languages (like ts & rust) than modern ones like ed25519, and today i hit *exactly* that kind of bug, while working on support for RFC 9421 HTTP signatures.

i wrote some typescript to import […]
Original post on messydesk.social
messydesk.social
January 10, 2026 at 3:45 AM