Nevkontakte
@me@m.nevkontakte.com
Lawful neutral. Definitely not a cat in a hat. Opinions are of Cthulhu. what/why.
Nevkontakte shared a day ago
Using #vim is easy once you learn a few basic keybindings.
h and l - move left and right
j and k - move down and up
η and λ - move backwards and forwards through time
ξ and κ - translation through additional temporal dimension (if applicable)
ᚻ, ᛄ, ᚳ and ᛚ - moving left, down, up, and right through celestial spheres
𐤄 and 𐤋 - switch deity to pantheon member to left or right
𐤉 - supplicate to chosen deity
𐤊 - challenge chosen deity (dangerous)
:q - exit
Nevkontakte shared 3 days ago
Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025. Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer. But what if you could make your current one fast and secure again?
Check out the End of 10 initiative to learn more! If you know anyone else who might find this useful, share it with them!
A small quality of life tip for when you are tinkering with your dotfiles (shell, in particular):
$ bash --norc --noprofile # bash is everywhere, and disable user configs in case they are in a busted state. Feel free not to do. bash-5.2$ while zsh; do true; done my-fancy-zsh> cd ~git/dotfiles # Try the current config, see if it works. my-fancy-zsh (errror, your git prompt is busted!)> # Oh no! Let's fiddle with .zshrc some more. my-fancy-zsh (errror, your git prompt is busted!)> ^D # Ctrl-D to exit the shell. my-fancy-zsh> # Restarted in a clean state! my-fancy-zsh> cd ~git/dotfiles # Try again. my-fancy-zsh (omg, something is not checked in)> # That's much better! my-fancy-zsh (omg, something is not checked in
This works much better than source ~/.zshrc because not everything in the rc file is idempotent and broken state from a bad attempt can mess with things. It spares me a lot of frustration of opening and closing terminal tabs, which is what computers are supposed to do for us.
Been to a book store today. Purchased myself some old religious texts…
Dark Tranquility is the band I often come back to when I feel stressed or need some comfort. The recently released song "Not Nothing" is... strangely reassuring? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBsVsLRSgfE There is no guide to light our way, but ourselves. And that'll have to be enough.
"Clockwise" is British for "smart watch".
I am pleased to announce V, a social network that's only half as bad as X.
Nevkontakte shared 11 days ago
With bluesky (mostly) going down for a few hours today, I got to wondering about how decentralized the fediverse really is in terms of where its servers are hosted. I grabbed a server list from fedidb, with network information coming from ipinfo.io .
[EDIT: I did a better analysis on a dataset of 10x as many servers, see https://discuss.systems/@ricci/114400324446169152 ]
These stats are by the number of *servers* not the number of *users* (maybe I'll run those stats later).
fedidb currently tracks 2,650 servers of various types (Mastodon, pixelfed, lemmy, misskey, peertube, etc)
The fediverse is most vulnerable to disruptions at CloudFlare: 24% of Fediverse servers are behind it. Also note that this means that I don't have real data on where this 24% are located or hosted, since CloudFlare obscures this by design.
Beyond CloudFlare, the fediverse is not too concentrated on any one network. The most popular host, Hertzner, only hosts 14% of fediverse servers, and it falls off fast from there.
Here are the top networks where fediverse servers are hosted:
504 Cloudflare, Inc.
356 Hetzner Online GmbH
130 DigitalOcean, LLC
114 OVH SAS
56 netcup GmbH
55 Amazon.com, Inc.
55 Akamai Connected Cloud
36 Contabo GmbH
33 SAKURA Internet Inc.
32 The Constant Company, LLC
31 Xserver Inc.
28 SCALEWAY S.A.S.
24 Google LLC
23 Oracle Corporation
16 GMO Internet Group, Inc.
14 IONOS SE
14 FranTech Solutions
11 Hostinger International Limited
10 Nubes, LLC
Half of fediverse servers are on networks that host 50 or fewer servers - that's pretty good for resiliency.
There is even more diversity when it comes to BGP prefixes, which is good for resiliency: for example, the cloud providers that have multiple availability zones will generally have them on different prefixes, so this gets closer to giving us a picture of the specific bits of infrastructure the fediverse relies on.
The top BGP prefixes:
55 104.21.48.0/20
50 104.21.16.0/20
48 104.21.64.0/20
41 104.21.32.0/20
41 104.21.0.0/20
38 104.21.80.0/20
32 172.67.128.0/20
31 172.67.144.0/20
28 172.67.208.0/20
28 162.43.0.0/17
27 104.26.0.0/20
26 172.67.192.0/20
26 172.67.176.0/20
23 172.67.160.0/20
19 116.203.0.0/16
17 172.67.64.0/20
17 159.69.0.0/16
16 65.109.0.0/16
14 88.99.0.0/16
14 49.13.0.0/16
13 78.46.0.0/15
13 167.235.0.0/16
13 138.201.0.0/16
11 95.217.0.0/16
11 95.216.0.0/16
11 49.12.0.0/16
11 135.181.0.0/16
10 37.27.0.0/16
10 157.90.0.0/16
75% of fediverse servers are behind BGP prefixes that host 10 or fewer servers, meaning that the fediverse is *very* resilient to large network outages.
Top countries where fediverse servers are hosted:
871 United States
439 Germany
156 France
148 Japan
75 Finland
57 Canada
49 Netherlands
38 United Kingdom
26 Switzerland
26 South Korea
21 Spain
19 Sweden
18 Austria
17 Australia
15 Russia
12 Czech Republic
10 Singapore
10 Italy
And finally, a map of the locations of fediverse servers:
https://ipinfo.io/tools/map/91960023-e8c6-4bee-9b07-721f2c8febab
Nevkontakte shared 12 days ago
Here we have the common boneless cat aggressively relaxing down the stairs
Nevkontakte shared 12 days ago
Buy books. But not from Amazon. Buy them from Bookshop.org, the independent site. This move by Amazon is shameful.
Here is a link to my book on Bookshop.org.
Nevkontakte shared 12 days ago
TIL that if I ever lose a UUID there's a website I can use to go find it https://everyuuid.com
Lately I've been reading a lot of fiction online, and decided to contribute a bit. I think I did well?
Lately I've been reading a lot of fiction online, and decided to contribute a bit. I think I did well?
Later, the historians would call these times The Golden Era of the New Galactic Republic. The Sith were definitively defeated, their feeble vessels perishing in the anti-matter fire of precision Jedi strikes. The wannabe copycats destroyed themselves from the inside, petty infighting turning what could have been an unstoppable war machine into a strategic joke. Republic's citizens were enjoying prosperity, democracy and freedom in equal parts.
Alas, not all was well. The minions of the dark side scattered and found shelter on the Peripheral Worlds, outside of the tender embrace of the Republic. Scheming, planning their revenge. Stripped of the military power, they turned to deceit and trickery to bring woe and ruin on the defenders of galactic freedom. In their hateful minds a devilish plot was concocted, aimed at draining the Republic of its most valuable asset: the people. For there is no king without subjects, nor there is a senate without people to represent.
And so, the agents of the dark side sought to lure the people of the Republic by turning the forsaken Peripheral Worlds into shining jewels of prosperity. They built the leading schools and universities to trick the gullible youth away from the traditional values of Freedom and Democracy. They offered free medical care to the old and sick to destroy the Republic's medical sector and ruin its numerous shareholders. They offered lucrative jobs to the poor and unemployed to strip the Republic of its industrial workforce. And as a final insult to those loyal citizens who chose to remain, they started buying goods from the Republic, buying so much that even the richest citizens of the only true democracy in the galaxy wouldn't have enough luxuries to fill their homes with.
That couldn't stand. In the unprecedented move, Chancellor Sp'ades in his first public address announced creation of the Trade Enforcement Agency and its enforcement branch Corps of Unilateral Protection. The agency would be led by Doggo Goodboy whose distinguished career traced all the way back to the Old Republic and Trade Federation. Chancellor's PR representative described Mr. Goodboy as the embodiment of traditions of freedom and democracy and a fearless leader who is all bite and barely any bark.
Only days later, Mr. Goodboy announced that his agency will ensure that for every galactic credit of goods shipped to the Peripheral Worlds, the New Republic would purchase at least 1.3106 galactic credits worth of goods from the Peripheral Worlds to guarantee that welfare accumulation happens on the right side of freedom. He reminded that TEA is empowered to send in the elite CUP units to facilitate goods and population acquisition and transfer, should Republic's trade partners put up unfair and exploitative obstacles to the free trade.
Later that day, Chancellor Sp'ades addressed the Senate, announcing Order 67, which established the free citizen's obligations with regards to the minimal amount of goods purchased from the Peripheral Worlds for coming financial year, and placing additional responsibilities on CUP to perform spot checks ensuring that the goods were actually present on premises of the purchaser. He reminded the senators of the unparalleled dominance of the Republic's true free economy and unacceptable exploitation its industries were subjected to by the dusty dirtballs that call themselves Peripheral Worlds Or Something. The order stirred a lot of controversy and fierce opposition with Senate members pointing out additional storage costs the order would place on the population, and the negative effect it would have on the government's affordable housing budget. The tension was resolved when the Order was later amended to offer an Excessive Goods Removal program for families struggling with the storage space, TEA agents additionally tasked with inspecting family homes and removing least space-efficient goods free of charge.
The New Galactic Republic citizens are now eagerly awaiting the fall of the corrupt regimes of the Peripheral Worlds.
I’ve been enabling XCompose on all my Linux machines and WinCompose on (guess what) Windows for the express purpose of typing m-dashes. But maybe I’ve been an AI all along, you’ll never know 
https://drupal.community/@mikemccaffrey/114368157577514301
Nevkontakte shared 17 days ago
We've created a society where being confidently wrong pays better than being cautiously right. Is it any wonder we're drowning in bullshit merchants?
Nevkontakte shared 21 days ago
Modernizing an Enigma Machine
https://hackaday.com/2025/04/17/modernizing-an-enigma-machine/
Nevkontakte shared 21 days ago
Made this picture in 2019, updated just now with 2025. Can you guess what’s the next step will be?
Nevkontakte shared 22 days ago
A happy Japanese pun from
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1jyr6ci/transitioning_from_oop/mn5zgcd/
===
Fun fact from Japan! We have a saying "郷に入っては郷に従え" (gō ni itte wa gō ni shitagae) which is our version of "when in Rome, do as the Romans do." Here "郷" (gō) means "village" or "hometown" - equivalent to "Rome" in the English proverb.
The funny part - in Japanese, "郷" (gō) sounds exactly like "Go"! So Go programmers here often joke: "Goに入ってはGoに従え" (Go ni itte wa Go ni shitagae) or "When in Go-land, follow Go's ways." A perfect bilingual pun that just works!
Nevkontakte shared 27 days ago
An early version of AI by CatGPT
- more CPU processors
- but very complex to install ...
Nevkontakte shared 30 days ago
Ideological purity is incompatible with understanding complexity.
On a broader note, today worldwide we are observing several practical demonstrations of why it's more important to vote for people with some sense of ethics than for jerks that say things you like.