There's an optical illusion known by names like the "lunar terminator paradox". This has much discussion and descriptions online, but none made sense in my head, so I wrote this program to figure out what was going on. The paradox:

• The moon is illuminated by the sun
• After sunset, the sun is below, so we would expect the illuminated portion of the moon to point down, towards where the sun is
• This isn't what always happens!

I was camping in the mountains with a friend recently. We were looking up at the sky, just after the sun has set. The moon was clearly pointing up.

After playing with this program, I have clarity: we're looking up at the moon from below. The most pathological case is a full moon. Let's say the moon is on the horizon: elevation=0. If we're looking at this low moon, and the moon is full, the sun is directly behind us. The moon is fully illuminated, and we see 100% of the moon disc lit up.

Now, what happens if the moon is not at the horizon, but higher up at the sky? Effectively, the sun is infinitely far away, so the same part of the moon is lit up. But we're now looking at the moon from below, and we would see some of the dark side on the bottom edge. I.e. the moon appears bright at the top, but has a dark slice missing at the bottom: it points up! Even at sunset.

This is the most clearly weird case. A half-moon has no paradoxical behavior, and the more full the moon, the more clearly we can observe the bright moon pointing up despite the sun being down.

I produce two plots. At 3/4-full moon at sunset we look at the moon as it rises from the horizon all the way up to the zenith:

If the moon is at the horizon (elevation = 0), we see the expected 3/4-lit disc. As the moon rises, we see more and more of its bottom, and thus more and more dark areas show up: It clearly points up at sunset!

We can also move the sun around. Let's say the moon is 60deg up; let's move the sun from new-moon to a full-moon:

In the darkest configuration, we can still see a lit crescent on the bottom: the illumination is all on the opposite side, but we can see a slice of the illuminated back side. As the sun swings around, we see more and more of the moon. At azimuth = 90deg, we have a half-lit moon. Past that, more and more of the moon is visible, always pointing up.

This was also a super interesting study of the current state of AI tools. As I was writing this and debugging, I would talk to Claude and Gemini about how this worked and what I should be seeing. They were both completely unable to comprehend this, and would make infinite circular arguments. Clearly they read some incomplete explanations on the internet (as I have), and lack the reasoning capability necessary to distill it into something resembling "understanding". AGI is not here yet.

Welcome to post 60 in the R⁴ series.

bubblewrap is a great tool and very suitable for using with an agent harness. It is a very compelling—and lightweight—alternative to using a full-blown docker container as it offers low-level unprivileged sandboxing on Linux hosts.

In a nutshell, bubblewrap can ‘turn everything off’ (see unshare-all below) and allow access only to selected services and directories (as shown below). This makes it a very useful tool be used on a main workstation as it can provide a lower-risk deployment quite easily while taking advantage of the already installed software stack. I continue to get a lot of value out of docker, especially as r2u makes installing R package dependencies so trivial. Its slogan ‘easy, fast, reliable: pick all three’ clearly holds for r2u. But sometimes bubblewrap is compelling, for example to launch opencode (documented for example at the debian-inference site).

When using R we need add more directories to the example to provide /etc/alternatives which is governing inter alia the LAPACK / BLAS resolution on Debian / Ubuntu systems; this is now on debian-inference site but wasn’t when I first tried it a few days ago ;-) as well as /etc/R for config files and possibly ~/.R/Makevars for compiler settings. With that my current wrapper is

#!/bin/bash
#
# cf https://inference.debian.net/doc
#    and 'curl' command to set bearer code
bwrap \
  --ro-bind /usr /usr \
  --symlink usr/bin /bin \
  --symlink usr/lib /lib \
  --symlink usr/lib64 /lib64 \
  --ro-bind /etc/ssl /etc/ssl \
  --ro-bind /etc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf \
  --ro-bind $HOME/.gitconfig $HOME/.gitconfig \
  --bind $HOME/.config/opencode $HOME/.config/opencode \
  --bind $HOME/.cache/opencode $HOME/.cache/opencode \
  --bind $HOME/.opencode $HOME/.opencode \
  --bind $HOME/.local/share/opencode $HOME/.local/share/opencode \
  --bind $HOME/.local/state/opencode $HOME/.local/state/opencode \
  --ro-bind $HOME/.R/Makevars $HOME/.R/Makevars \
  --ro-bind /etc/R/ /etc/R \
  --ro-bind /etc/alternatives/ /etc/alternatives \
  --proc /proc \
  --dev /dev \
  --tmpfs /tmp \
  --bind $(pwd) $(pwd) \
  --chdir $(pwd) \
  --unshare-all \
  --share-net \
  --die-with-parent \
  /usr/local/bin/opencode "$@"

Launched that way we can have agents use R to check packages sources, builds, and triage for bugs. this works equally well with local models served via ollama (and with that a quick shoutout to packages.lingfish.net for providing an apt service for ollama) as it does with the various cloud-based offerings. So harness away with R!

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

A library transition can affect many packages in Debian. I added a way for Salsa CI to rebuild the ones that depend on the changing library, so maintainers can test the transition before it reaches unstable.

The need for this became clear during a proposed Poppler transition. Poppler is a library for rendering PDFs. The reverse-dependency job I had added to Salsa CI queued 100 of 115 candidate rebuilds, even though only about 21 were relevant. The problem was documented in issue #571.

Before this change, ratt used every binary package produced by Poppler to decide what to rebuild. That also picked up packages unrelated to the library transition. The tracker listed the old and new library package names, so I used them to focus the selection.

_{The Poppler transition tracker identifies the old and new runtime library package names.}

I added -transition_affected to ratt to implement this selection. The option performs the scan against the selected archive indexes and injects locally built .deb files into each source rebuild. It expects a regex of dependency package names, not a complete Ben expression, so the tracker’s Affected expression must be adapted first.

I then integrated the mode into Salsa CI. Maintainers can enable transition-aware rebuilds by setting SALSA_CI_BUILD_REVERSE_DEPENDENCIES_TRANSITION_AFFECTED_REGEX. If the variable is unset, the pipeline keeps the existing selection.

_{A Poppler test showing the selected rebuild jobs. Three jobs reached the CI timeout, they were not confirmed package regressions.}

I also changed ratt to cover packages targeting experimental. By default, it resolves and rebuilds reverse dependencies from unstable while still injecting the locally built .deb files. This lets a maintainer test a transition staged in experimental against packages currently in unstable.

Together, these changes help maintainers focus CI on packages relevant to a library transition and review rebuild results before the new library reaches unstable.

Review: Ode to the Half-Broken, by Suzanne Palmer

Ode to the Half-Broken is a standalone post-apocalyptic (sort of) science fiction novel.

As this novel opens, the unnamed first-person protagonist is waking up in a bathtub in an abandoned building. They are covered in electromagnets and missing one leg.

Waking up involved a secure reboot from a protected core kernel, so it is immediately obvious that the protagonist is a robot. That also explains the electromagnets, which interfere with their ability to control their body. Or they would, if the protagonist didn't have long-dormant combat routines available to deploy EM shielding and free themselves from the bathtub. There are no immediate answers to why someone embedded a virus in the data attached to a scientific paper on ants, an act so precisely targeted that it had to be personal. Or what happened to their leg.

"There are a number of electromagnets in the next room," I say. I point. "Behind that wall with all the holes in it."

"Those are big holes. And fresh, too," the dog says. "I wonder what made them."

"Electromagnets experiencing sudden velocity."

The dog gives another of its short barks, and I am more convinced now it is laughing, though I was not attempting to be funny.

Ode to the Half-Broken has a classic science fiction beginning: in medias res in a future science fiction version of Earth where nothing is immediately explained, leaving the reader to work out the date and the setting. Helping us out is the protagonist, who is neither chatty nor very sociable with other characters but keeps up an analytical monologue about the world as they narrate events.

We are some decades into a grim future. The United States has largely collapsed. Large parts of New York City are dangerous to humans due to disease and radiation. Neither of those hazards bother the large number of sentient robots; their scarcity, and therefore economy, is instead based on power. Robots that control solar power stations act as low-level mob bosses, trading power for information or labor.

Our protagonist doesn't want to care about any of this. They retreated from the world long ago for a solitary life in the former New York Botanical Gardens studying ants. But they need a new leg and the best robot repair person nearby is a human woman outside of the city, so they reluctantly head in that direction, accompanied somewhat surprisingly by a cyborg dog.

The typical science fiction apocalypse is caused by something specific. Classically, that event is a nuclear war, but writers found various alternatives before, during, and after the Cold War era: alien invasions, meteor showers, plagues, sea level rise, and peak oil and general environmental collapse, among many others. Less common is a post-apocalyptic novel where the collapse comes from multiple overlapping crises and accumulating failures, from a general failure to meet what Adam Tooze and others call polycrisis. The first time I encountered that style of post-apocalyptic story was in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. It was one of the choices that made (and still makes) that book feel so chillingly realistic.

The world background in Ode to the Half-Broken is shaped by that sort of polycrisis collapse. There is no one reason why New York City is a dangerous, irradiated ruin and society has collapsed into isolated and sometimes warring factions. It is not runaway artificial intelligence, or at least not directly; sentient robots were a late-stage innovation of the collapsing US civilization and a tool and accelerator of its many wars, but they were not the cause and may be a critical ingredient in building some functional replacement. Instead, society fell apart because we failed to address any of the growing problems and then turned on each other in the resulting ruins. The reader gets an idiosyncratic view of that collapse in flashback chapters intermixed with the main narrative of the initially unnamed robot protagonist, flashbacks told from the perspective of the man who invented the key component for robot sentience. As you would expect, those two narratives are linked. The reader will not discover how they are linked until late in the story.

This book could have been extremely depressing. It is not, which says a great deal about Palmer's skill in telling it. The clinical distance of the protagonist in the early chapters helps considerably: They have rejected involvement in this world and therefore can describe it in detached, factual terms, aided by the tendency of most robots in this story to be slightly more precise, logical, and verbose than the human characters. But as the protagonist's clinical distance fades, as it must to allow the story's emotional stakes to rise, Palmer fills this book with moments of beauty and hope. A former nuclear submarine that has become the mind of a subway car is a key early ally. A collective has turned the Hudson Bridge into a thriving if chaotic community. Self-regulating enclaves of humans and robots are working together to try to build a livable world. Robots oversee pollinator swarms that are attempting to restore plant life, for no reason other than that they like order and stability and see this as a way of restoring both. This is a grim, post-apocalyptic world that does not dwell on either the grimness or the apocalypse. It is instead full of small moments of hope, collaboration, and personal connection.

This is a story with villains, danger, pain, and risk. Despite the similar keywords and cover aesthetics, it bears little resemblance to Becky Chambers's philosophical Monk and Robot series. It is not, in any definition of the term, cozy; it's a post-apocalyptic adventure story about a robot and a dog making their way through a ruined civilization and fighting people who are trying to build something even worse on the rubble. But it's also charming and oddly happy. There are strong found-family vibes in the way that a party coalesces around the protagonist and eventually gives them a name, there is the quiet happiness of seeing a grumpy misanthrope slowly come out of their protective shell, and the rail mechs are an absolute delight.

Like a lot of stories of happy small-group anarchism, I didn't entirely believe the politics and have some qualms about the realism of the ending, although perhaps I should strive to be as optimistic as Palmer writes. The somewhat dry and fussily precise first-person narration will also not be to everyone's taste; it worked for me by the end of the book, but it took a bit of reading to get used to it. But those quibbles aside, this was quietly lovely. It's a satisfying science fiction adventure story in a world with disturbing parallels to the one we're living in, but which uses those parallels to focus on small-scale collective efforts to build something better. And all the small details of the world-building are delightful: the different tiers of robots and their odd behaviors, the machine sense of purpose, even the mix of suspicion and generosity. The plot has large-scale implications, but it was the human-level details that charmed me.

I still want another Fergus novel, but this was a highly successful foray outside of that series. Palmer has won two Hugos for her novellas, so I can't really say she's overlooked, but her novels aren't getting anywhere near the attention they deserve. Highly recommended.

There is plenty of world-building room here for a sequel, but Ode to the Half-Broken reaches a satisfying standalone conclusion. So far as I know, no sequel is currently planned.

Rating: 8 out of 10

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 331. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Support radare2 >= 5.9.0. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#432)
* Update debian/tests/control.
* Update copyright years.

[ Christopher Baines ]
* Add support for .nar files via Guix.

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

A new release 0.0.5 of the RcppFastAD package is now on CRAN, has been built for r2u, and updated at r-universe. This comes (to the day) two years after the preceding 0.0.4 release.

RcppFastAD wraps the FastAD header-only C++ library by James which provides a C++ implementation of both forward and reverse mode of automatic differentiation. It offers an easy-to-use header library that is both lightweight and performant. With a little of bit of Rcpp glue, it is also easy to use from R in simple C++ applications. This release updates the continuous integration setup as one does, adds a local configuration helper to quieten compilation (described also in this blog post). It also adds a defensive setting for g++: Under recent g++ versions and optimisation at least the -O3 level, segfaults are seen as something is not quite right with (temporary) “views” of Eigen objects in code generated by this versions. Others are fine, as is clang++. We have not gotten to the bottom of it, but setting -g0 seems to ensure that builds generally work.

The NEWS file for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.0.5 (2026-09-24)

• Several routine updates to continuous integration have been made

• Local builds (where a .git/ directory is seen) now append silencing compiler option that CRAN would object to

• Given recent issues with g++ under optimization, debugging is turned off by default.

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is available at the repository or the package page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

Bjorn Stahl of the Arcan project wrote an insightful blog post The Day of a new Command-Line Interface: Shell [1]. He does a really good job of identifying problems and strategies for dealing with them, the UI of the results isn’t suitable to what I do though.

Using sqlite as an executable format (replacement for ELF) is one of the wildest ideas I’ve seen in a while, it might actually have some good use cases too [2].

Andrew Dana Hudson wrote an interesting LongNow article about SciFi’s focus on space travel when it seems unlikely [3].

TheDriven has an informative article about the “Hands Off Our Fuel” astroturf campaign that uses farmers as the face of an attempt to give tax exemptions to mining companies [4].

The Conversation has an interesting article about the new Chinese regulations restricting access to AI systems to prevent emotional dependence and prevent minors from having virtual partners or relatives [5].

Elana Hashman wrote an informative blog post about Python virtualenvs, has useful information for people who aren’t Python experts and just need to get stuff done [6].

We need more systems in the NTP pool, I would consider doing this if I had a server with an IP address that won’t change and no risk of bandwidth throttling [7].

Cory Doctorow has some interesting thoughts on the CEO fetish for “AI” even though it is almost never doing any good [8].

Steve Rose wrote an insightful article for The Guardian about the tech fascists of Silicon Valley [9].

Jacqui Lambie calls Pauline Hanson an “angry little woman” and a “bloody coward”, One Nation hate the rule of law [10].

The Conversation has an interesting article about Regime Change, the book about Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan [11].

Elvira Barry wrote an insightful article about the many failures of the Russian legal system, it’s interesting to note that ALL those failures match things that the Trump regime is doing [12].

Pyotr Kurzin – Geopolitics YouTube channel has an interesting interview about “continental” vs “maritime” powers in the context of what the US and Russia are doing [13].

Maxinomica has an interesting video about how China obtained a monopoly on rare earth metals and what happens next [14].

Anarcat wrote an insightful blog post The people vs the AI overlords about the problems that “AI” software development is bringing [15].

John Goerzen wrote an interesting blog post discussing the issues related to LLM use in FOSS projects [16].

Cybernews has an article about an exploit for Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, and OnePlus phones due to bad OEM kernel drivers and bad OEM API proxies, no company should release devices with proprietry drivers [17].

Scott Santens wrote an insightful article about how retraining fails laid-off workers and why UBI is needed when workers get replaced by LLMs [18].

libroot has some information on the Snowden archive and why so little of it has been used by journalists, we need more answers about this [19].

Drew Devault’s list of Weird little guys of FOSS is interesting history about some people who are best avoided [20].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/ydye29ta
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/26223e79
• [3] https://longnow.org/ideas/space-dead/
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/287rktuz
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/25a9mag3
• [6] https://hashman.ca/managing-venvs/
• [7] https://dreamstation.systems/personal/ntppool.html
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2bzwm5d6
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/25bj88ss
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/2ywkupwv
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/257umlg6
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/2cjyev9l
• [13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y50uWvxGb-A
• [14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXLGV0Sj0n8
• [15] https://anarc.at/blog/2026-08-18-people-vs-ai-overlords/
• [16] https://tinyurl.com/2a8pzj8j
• [17] https://tinyurl.com/249oafcy
• [18] https://tinyurl.com/28f5gdjv
• [19] https://tinyurl.com/2cv3v9e7
• [20] https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/

Who?

Fre(i)e Software GmbH is looking for a senior Golang + fullstack developer who can handwrite code and act as meticulous code review partner for another senior developer in the company.

What?

Most of your work would result in Open Source contributions to the Voxit project [1], an online civic tech tool for digital participation.

How and Where?

The work can either be delivered on project agreement base via freelancing or via employment (option only available to developers resident in Germany, Austria or Poland).

What next?

If you are interested, please get in touch and provide your hourly rate to us and your average hours of availability per week.

[1] https://gitlab.com/voxit/

The Debian LTS Team, funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering, is pleased to report its activities for August.

Activity summary

During the month of August, 19 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS (links to individual contributor reports are located below).

The team released 58 DLAs fixing 1885 CVEs.

Debian 11 (“bullseye”), which has reached the end of its Long Term Support on 31 August 2026, will now get security support from Freexian under the Extended LTS offer.

The team published several notable updates:

• chromium (DLA 4710-1), uploaded by Emilio, to fix 375 security flaws in bookworm, including issues that could lead to arbitrary code execution. Further DLA 4728-1, uploaded by Emilio as well, fixed additional 41 security issues in bookworm and DLA 4739-1 fixed 5 issues. Last but not least, DLA 4749-1 fixed another 15 issues and DLA 4758-1 fixed another 7 issues.
• ruby2.7 (DLA 4716-1), uploaded by Abhijith, to fix four security flaws in bookworm, including issues that could lead to arbitrary code execution.
• several DLAs (DLA 4717-1, DLA 4720-1, DLA 4723-1, DLA 4724-1, DLA 4745-1) have been uploaded by Ben and Emilio to fix myriad security flaws in different versions of the linux kernel (5.10.262-1, 6.1.180-1, 6.12.100-1~deb12u1, 6.12.101-1~deb12u1) in bullseye and bookworm.
• 7zip (DLA 4718-1) and p7zip (DLA 4719-1), uploaded by Sylvain, to fix multiple security flaws in bookworm and bullseye, including issues that could yield to remote code execution.
• ca-certificates (DLA 4726-1), uploaded by Bastien to add some new trusted certificates to bookworm and bullseye, but also remove some untrusted ones.
• thunderbird (DLA 4727-1 and DLA 4754-1), uploaded by Emilio to fix 35 and 31 issues in bookworm and bullseye.
• nss (DLA 4729-1), uploaded by Jochen to fix a vulnerability in bookworm and bullseye that could yield to arbitrary code execution.
• libgd2 (DLA 4731-1), uploaded by Guilhem to fix a vulnerability in bookworm and bullseye that could yield to arbitrary code execution if a malformed GIF file is processed.
• xorg-server (DLA 4737-1 and DLA 4738-1), uploaded by Arnaud to fix several vulnerabilities in bookworm and bullseye.
• postgresql-15 (DLA 4740-1), uploaded by Carlos Henrique Lima Melara to fix 26 vulnerabilities in bookworm.
• unzip (DLA 4741-1), uploaded by Andrej to fix a vulnerability in bookworm and bullseye that could yield to arbitrary code execution.
• firefox-esr (DLA 4750-1), uploaded by Emilio to fix 31 vulnerabilities in bookworm and bullseye that could potentially result in arbitrary code execution, privilege escalation or information disclosure.
• nvidia-graphics-drivers (DLA 4752-1 and DLA 4753-1), uploaded by Tobias to fix lots of vulnerabilities in bookworm and bullseye.
• roundcube (DLA 4760-1), uploaded by Guilhem to fix ten vulnerabilities in bookworm and bullseye that could potentially result in remote code execution or information disclosure.

Contributions from outside the LTS Team:

We are greatly thankful for the contributions from people outside the LTS Team:

• Salvatore Bonaccorso released a libyaml-syck-perl security update (DLA 4730-1), to fix a denial of service and potentially arbitrary code execution.
• Thomas Goirand released a neutron security update (DLA 4735-1).
• Thomas Goirand released an ironic security update (DLA 4743-1).
• Thomas Goirand released a designate security update (DLA 4751-1), to fix a denial of service or DNS hijacking.

The LTS Team has also contributed with updates to the latest Debian releases:

• xrdp (DSA 6469-1), prepared by Abhijith to address privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution related flaws.

Other contributions:

Besides the work on security updates, different documentation and tooling changes were needed. This work was mainly done by Sylvain.

Individual Debian LTS contributor reports

• Abhijith PA
• Andrej Shadura
• Arnaud Rebillout
• Bastien Roucariès
• Ben Hutchings
• Carlos Henrique Lima Melara
• Chris Lamb
• Daniel Leidert
• Emmanuel Arias
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort
• Guilhem Moulin
• Jochen Sprickerhof
• Lee Garrett
• Lucas Kanashiro
• Markus Koschany
• Santiago Ruano Rincón
• Sylvain Beucler
• Thorsten Alteholz
• Tobias Frost

Thanks to our sponsors

Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • Toshiba Corporation (for 131 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 99 months)
  • VyOS Inc (for 64 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG (for 142 months)
  • CONET Deutschland GmbH (for 125 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 81 months)
  • EDF SA (for 53 months)
  • Dataport AöR (for 28 months)
  • CERN (for 26 months)
• Silver sponsors:
  • Domeneshop AS (for 146 months)
  • Nantes Métropole (for 140 months)
  • Akamai - Linode (for 136 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 132 months)
  • Université Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 132 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 126 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 116 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 110 months)
  • Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Étrangères (for 94 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 81 months)
  • Upsun Formerly Platform.sh (for 76 months)
  • Moxa Inc. (for 69 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 67 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 65 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 65 months)
  • GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH (for 56 months)
  • THINline s.r.o. (for 29 months)
  • Copenhagen Airports A/S (for 23 months)
  • Conseil Départemental de l’Isère (for 9 months)
  • CEOS GmbH
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 147 months)
  • Evolix (for 146 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 144 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 143 months)
  • WAAYS (for 142 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 141 months)
  • Greenbone AG (for 140 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 140 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 139 months)
  • Entr’ouvert (for 131 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 128 months)
  • Plat’Home (for 125 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 123 months)
  • Tesorion (for 123 months)
  • Bearstech (for 114 months)
  • LiHAS (for 114 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 109 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 103 months)
  • Université Grenoble Alpes (for 89 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 81 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 78 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 74 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (for 65 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH (for 60 months)
  • WordFinder.pro (for 60 months)
  • CNRS DT INSU Résif (for 59 months)
  • Alter Way (for 52 months)
  • SOBIS Software GmbH (for 26 months)
  • Tuxera Inc. (for 18 months)
  • OPM-OP AS (for 9 months)
  • LU-CIX Management G.I.E.

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 330. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Don't Build-Depend on apksigcopier as it has been removed from testing.
  (Closes: #1146852)

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

In 2016, I removed Google Analytics from this blog to avoid being complicit in feeding the biggest machine for harvesting personal data. Instead, I relied on GoAccess to analyze my server logs.¹ For the past couple of years, the statistics have made no sense, despite my attempts to filter bots: AI scrapers inflate the number of visitors to around 2,000 per day. Eventually, I settled on GoatCounter, an open-source, privacy-friendly web analytics platform. I replaced the JavaScript client to filter bots more aggressively and added a CSS fallback. To improve reliability, I implemented a local proxy running on each of the five web servers serving this blog. The rest of this post details how these pieces fit together and how I deploy them on NixOS. ❄️

Why GoatCounter?

GoatCounter does not collect personal data: instead of storing the reader’s IP address or relying on cookies, it creates a session identifier valid for 8 hours from the user agent and the IP address. Its feature set is modest but sufficient for a blog. If you want to look at the interface, GoatCounter’s author runs a public instance for his site. A hosted version lets you try it before running your own instance. With a single binary and an SQLite database, GoatCounter is one of the lightest self-hosted solutions. Privacy-friendly alternatives, in increasing order of complexity, include Umami, Plausible, and Rybbit.

Custom JavaScript client

GoatCounter includes a small JavaScript client—2,189 bytes minified and gzipped. It ships some features I don’t use: a visitor counter, tracking clicks, configurable settings, etc. I replace it with this function to register a hit:

const count = ({ event, title } = {}) => {
  const params = new URLSearchParams({
    p: event || location.pathname,
    t: title || document.title,
    r: document.referrer,
    q: location.search,
    s: document.documentElement.clientWidth,
    e: !!event,
    rnd: Math.random().toString(36).slice(2, 7),
  });
  fetch(`/count?${params}`, { keepalive: true }).catch(() => {});
};

To filter bots,² I go the extra mile by requiring a user interaction—an idea I stole from Bear Blog.

let sendHit = () => (sendHit = () => {}, count());
["touchmove", "mousemove", "keydown", "pointerdown"].forEach((eventName) =>
  document.addEventListener(eventName, sendHit, {
    once: true,
    passive: true,
  }),
);

If a reader has disabled JavaScript in their browser, I record the hit using a CSS image. The :hover pseudo-class loads it only after an interaction, another trick stolen from Bear Blog. About 2% of my visitors fit into this bucket.³

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" class="nojs">
  <head>
    <script>
      // The JavaScript code for this blog requires ES6
      if ("noModule" in HTMLScriptElement.prototype)
        document.documentElement.classList.remove("nojs");
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
  <!-- ... -->
    <style>
      .nojs body:hover {
        border-width: 0;
        border-image: url('/count?p=/en/blog/2026-kpi-goodhart&t=Building...&r=NoJS&e=false');
      }
    </style>
  </body>
</html>

Where GoAccess reported around 2,000 visitors a day, GoatCounter counts fewer than 200 humans.⁴ I assume AI scrapers use a low-effort approach: if the content is available without barriers, as on this blog, they don’t spawn a complex mechanized browser that could trigger a page view. Even crawlers running JavaScript, like Googlebot with its headless Chromium, do not interact with the page and never trigger the events I listen to. The interaction-based “proof of humanity” I use is likely to keep working.⁵

Local proxy

Five servers across the world in Europe and in North America serve the content of this website, but GoatCounter runs on only one of them. To avoid losing track of visitors when GoatCounter is down, I run a local proxy listening on the same /count endpoint. On each server, it stores the hits in memory with a buffer large enough to survive several days of downtime. It sends them in batches to the upstream backend using the /api/v0/count authenticated endpoint.

I proposed the code for the proxy in pull request #909. GoatCounter’s maintainer declined to maintain so much code for such a niche use case. As a fellow open-source developer, I often hold the same position for my own projects: a one-time contributor effort may translate into a long-term maintainer commitment.

I expose the endpoint for the proxy on the domain of this website to evade ad blockers. This sounds like I don’t respect the reader’s choice, but as GoatCounter is privacy-friendly, I find it acceptable.

location = /count {
  access_log off;
  proxy_pass http://127.0.0.3:8087/count;
  proxy_pass_request_headers off;
  proxy_set_header Accept-Language $http_accept_language;
  proxy_set_header User-Agent $http_user_agent;
  proxy_set_header X-Real-Ip $remote_addr;
}

Deploying on NixOS

My web servers run NixOS, a declarative Linux distribution with built-in configuration management. I manage this small fleet with Colmena, a stateless deployment tool for NixOS. My configuration is available on GitHub.

Deploying applications in containers

For better isolation, each application runs inside an ephemeral lightweight container, powered by systemd-nspawn. Each container runs a stripped-down NixOS instance. A module wraps NixOS’s containers options to avoid repeating the same options for each application.⁶ The containers share their network namespace with the host: the additional isolation is not worth the increased complexity. For a smaller footprint, I also disable a few non-essential services.

{ config, lib, ... }:
let
  cfg = config.luffy.containers;
in
{
  # User-configurable settings for our custom module
  options.luffy.containers = lib.mkOption {
    default = { };
    description = "Ephemeral containers sharing the host network.";
    type = lib.types.attrsOf (lib.types.submodule {
      options = {
        config = lib.mkOption {
          type = lib.types.deferredModule;
          default = { };
          description = "NixOS configuration of the container.";
        };
      };
    });
  };

  # Translate our options to NixOS containers
  config = {
    containers = lib.mapAttrs
      (name: container: {
        ephemeral = true;
        autoStart = true;
        privateNetwork = false;
        extraFlags = [ "--resolv-conf=replace-host" ];
        config = {
          imports = [ container.config ];
          networking.firewall.enable = false;
          system.stateVersion = config.system.stateVersion;
          systemd.services = {
            console-getty.enable = false;
            systemd-logind.enable = false;
            systemd-oomd.enable = false;
          };
        };
      })
      cfg;
  };
}

To configure a GoatCounter instance running in a container and listening on 127.0.0.4:8088, we import the module⁷ and declare the container in the config.luffy.containers attribute set:

{ pkgs, config, ... }: {
  imports = [ ./modules/container.nix ];
  config.luffy.containers.goatcounter = {
    config = {
      services.goatcounter = {
        enable = true;
        address = "127.0.0.4";
        port = 8088;
        proxy = true;
      };
    };
  };
}

As the containers are ephemeral, we need to keep persistent data in directories on the host. We add a mounts option and ask NixOS’s containers to expose the configured directories through the bindMounts option.

{ config, lib, ... }:
let
  cfg = config.luffy.containers;
in
{
  options.luffy.containers = lib.mkOption {
    type = lib.types.attrsOf (lib.types.submodule {
      options = {
        mounts = lib.mkOption {
          type = lib.types.listOf lib.types.str;
          default = [ ];
          description = "Host directories mounted read-write at the same place.";
        };
      };
    });
  };

  config = {
    containers = lib.mapAttrs
      (name: container: {
        bindMounts =
          lib.genAttrs container.mounts (path: { hostPath = path; isReadOnly = false; });
      })
      cfg;
  };
}

For example, to persist GoatCounter’s database in the /var/db/goatcounter directory on the host, we add the directory to the mounts option and alter the service definition to tell GoatCounter where the database is.

{ config, ... }:
let
  databaseDirectory = "/var/db/goatcounter";
in {
  config.luffy.containers.goatcounter = {
    mounts = [ databaseDirectory ];
    config = {
      services.goatcounter = {
        extraArgs = [ "-db=sqlite+${databaseDirectory}/db.sqlite" ];
      };
    };
  };
}

A container may also need some secrets. Colmena can upload secrets without storing them in the Nix store. We add a keys option to our containers. It takes an attribute set mapping secret names to the commands to populate them. Then, the module declares the required secrets to Colmena in the deployment.keys option, makes the container depend on the presence of the secrets, and exposes them to the container.

{ config, lib, ... }:
let
  cfg = config.luffy.containers;
in
{
  options.luffy.containers = lib.mkOption {
    type = lib.types.attrsOf (lib.types.submodule {
      options = {
        keys = lib.mkOption {
          type = lib.types.attrsOf (lib.types.listOf lib.types.str);
          default = { };
          description = "Secrets, as a command to run locally. They are mounted in /etc.";
        };
      };
    });
  };

  config = {
    # Colmena uploads each secret in `/var/keys` and make them available
    # to the group "keys".
    deployment.keys = lib.concatMapAttrs
      (_: container: lib.mapAttrs
        (_: keyCommand: {
          inherit keyCommand;
          group = "keys";
          permissions = "0640";
          destDir = "/var/keys";
        })
        container.keys)
      cfg;

    # The container can only start if the required secrets are available.
    systemd.services = lib.mapAttrs'
      (name: container:
        let
          units = map (key: "${key}-key.service") (lib.attrNames container.keys);
        in
        lib.nameValuePair "container@${name}" {
          requires = units;
          after = units;
        })
      cfg;

    # Mount each secret inside the container.
    containers = lib.mapAttrs
      (name: container: {
        bindMounts = lib.mapAttrs'
          (key: _: lib.nameValuePair "/etc/${key}" {
            hostPath = "/var/keys/${key}";
            isReadOnly = true;
          })
          container.keys;
      })
      cfg;
  };
}

For example, GoatCounter needs credentials to download the GeoIP database. I provide a local command to fetch the secret from my password manager and expose it inside the container through the /etc/goatcounter.env environment file.

{ pkgs, config, ... }: 
let
  keyCommand = variable: [
    "${pkgs.runtimeShell}"
    "-c"
    "pass show personal/nixops/secrets | grep '^${variable}='"
  ];
in {
  config.luffy.containers.goatcounter = {
    keys."goatcounter.env" = keyCommand "GOATCOUNTER_GEODB";
    config = {
      systemd.services.goatcounter.serviceConfig = {
        EnvironmentFile = "/etc/goatcounter.env";
        SupplementaryGroups = [ "keys" ];
      };
    };
  };
}

GoatCounter server

Nixpkgs already packages GoatCounter. By overriding the src and vendorHash attributes, I reuse its definition for my custom version with the proxy:

{ goatcounter, fetchFromGitHub }:
goatcounter.overrideAttrs (_: {
  src = fetchFromGitHub {
    owner = "vincentbernat";
    repo = "goatcounter";
    rev = "feature/proxy";
    hash = "sha256-dJRlQlFu3tjcEgabT1LEbyFrasJlhmYu4L/T7EkoNcY=";
  };
  vendorHash = "sha256-c9Q5OrbZR+q6pD3SgPPWe8JUzcZco1AVUKGaV61k5DE=";
})

I wrote a NixOS module to encapsulate GoatCounter: the container definition, the service definition, and the secrets. The module accepts the following options: package, serve.enable, serve.listenAddress, serve.port, and serve.databaseFile. I already detailed the container configuration in the previous section. In the end, I chose not to reuse the GoatCounter module from NixOS: it’s small, so it’s better to insulate my module from unexpected future changes.

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
let
  cfg = config.luffy.goatcounter;
  databaseDirectory = builtins.dirOf cfg.serve.databaseFile;
  chown = "${pkgs.coreutils}/bin/chown -R";
in {
  config.luffy.containers.goatcounter = {
    config.systemd.services.goatcounter = {
      description = "GoatCounter Web Analytics";
      wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
      serviceConfig = {
        EnvironmentFile = "/etc/goatcounter.env";
        SupplementaryGroups = [ "keys" ];
        DynamicUser = true;
        Restart = "always";
        ExecStart = lib.escapeShellArgs [
          (lib.getExe cfg.package)
          "serve"
          "-listen=${cfg.serve.listenAddress}:${toString cfg.serve.port}"
          "-tls=none"
          "-db=sqlite+${cfg.serve.databaseFile}"
          "-automigrate"
        ];
        # Transfer database ownership to dynamically assigned user "goatcounter".
        ExecStartPre = "+${chown} goatcounter:goatcounter ${databaseDirectory}";
        ReadWritePaths = databaseDirectory;
      };
    };
  };
}

The following snippet configures GoatCounter to listen on 127.0.0.4:8088:

{
  luffy.goatcounter = {
    serve = {
      enable = true;
      listenAddress = "127.0.0.4";
      port = 8088;
    };
  };
}

The last step is to configure nginx to expose GoatCounter on the Internet. I disable the /count endpoint as the local proxy handles it.

{ config, ... }:
let
  cfg = config.luffy.goatcounter.serve;
in
{
  services.nginx.virtualHosts."goatcounter.luffy.cx" = {
    forceSSL = true;
    locations = {
      "/" = {
        proxyPass = "http://${cfg.listenAddress}:${toString cfg.port}";
      };
      "= /count".extraConfig = ''
        return 404;
      '';
    };
  };
}

GoatCounter proxy

The same NixOS module configures the local proxy, with the following options: proxy.enable, proxy.listenAddress, proxy.port, and proxy.site—the site receiving the batches of page views. The local proxy has no persistent data, but it needs the API key to authenticate to the main GoatCounter instance: its container uses the keys option but not the mounts option.

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
let
  cfg = config.luffy.goatcounter;
  keyCommand = _: [ "…" ];
in
{
  config.luffy.containers.goatcounter-proxy = {
    keys."goatcounter-proxy.env" = keyCommand "GOATCOUNTER_API_KEY";
    config.systemd.services.goatcounter = {
      description = "GoatCounter Proxy.";
      wantedBy = [ "multi-user.target" ];
      serviceConfig = {
        EnvironmentFile = "/etc/goatcounter-proxy.env";
        SupplementaryGroups = [ "keys" ];
        DynamicUser = true;
        Restart = "always";
        ExecStart = lib.escapeShellArgs [
          (lib.getExe cfg.package)
          "proxy"
          "-site=${cfg.proxy.site}"
          "-listen=${cfg.proxy.listenAddress}:${toString cfg.proxy.port}"
          "-ratelimit=10/1"  # 10 requests per second per IP
        ];
      };
    };
  };
}

For each server, I enable the local proxy with the following snippet. The nginx configuration shown earlier exposes the /count endpoint under the same domain as my blog.

{
  luffy.goatcounter = {
    proxy = {
      enable = true;
      site = "goatcounter.luffy.cx";
      listenAddress = "127.0.0.3";
      port = 8087;
    };
  };
}

Backup of the SQLite database with Litestream

Litestream is a streaming replication tool for SQLite databases. It compresses the changes committed to the write-ahead log (WAL) next to the database and sends them to a remote destination. I encapsulate its configuration in a NixOS module, which takes an attribute set databases mapping a name to the path of the database to back up.

Litestream also runs in a container. I mount the databases to replicate, as well as the secrets to push the backups to a Hetzner storage box using SFTP:

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
let
  cfg = config.luffy.litestream;
  databaseDirs = lib.unique (map builtins.dirOf (builtins.attrValues cfg.databases));
in
{
  config = lib.mkIf (cfg.databases != { }) {
    luffy.containers.litestream = {
      mounts = databaseDirs;
      keys."litestream.env" = [
        "${pkgs.runtimeShell}"
        "-c"
        "pass show personal/nixops/secrets | grep '^SQLITE_BACKUP_'"
      ];
    };
  };
}

Inside the container, I configure Litestream through NixOS’s services.litestream options:

• full snapshots every day, kept for 15 days,
• three levels of compaction for transaction files: 5 minutes, 30 minutes, and 3 hours,
• auto-recovery,⁸
• replica stored in a directory matching the host name, and
• credentials read from /etc/litestream.env and exposed through variable expansion.

{ config, pkgs, lib, ... }:
let
  cfg = config.luffy.litestream;
in
{
  config.luffy.containers.litestream = {
    config = {
      # The databases belong to dynamically allocated users, whose UID is
      # not known here, so Litestream runs as root.
      systemd.services.litestream.serviceConfig = {
        User = lib.mkForce "root";
        Group = lib.mkForce "root";
      };
      # Use NixOS service.
      services.litestream = {
        enable = true;
        environmentFile = "/etc/litestream.env";
        settings = {
          auto-recover = true;
          snapshot = {
            interval = "24h";
            retention = "360h";
          };
          levels = [
            { interval = "5m"; }
            { interval = "30m"; }
            { interval = "3h"; }
          ];
          dbs = lib.mapAttrsToList
            (name: path: {
              inherit path;
              replica = {
                type = "sftp";
                host = "\${SQLITE_BACKUP_HOST}";
                user = "\${SQLITE_BACKUP_USER}";
                password = "\${SQLITE_BACKUP_PASSWORD}";
                host-key = "\${SQLITE_BACKUP_HOSTKEY}";
                path = "${config.networking.hostName}/${name}";
              };
            })
            cfg.databases;
        };
      };
    };
  };
}

To back up GoatCounter’s database, I declare a goatcounter attribute in luffy.litestream.databases, set to the database path:

{ config, ... }:
let
  cfg = config.luffy.goatcounter.serve;
in
{
  luffy.litestream.databases.goatcounter = cfg.databaseFile;
}

On the SFTP server, we can inspect Litestream’s work, with the compacted transactions and the full snapshots:

❯ ls web02/goatcounter/ltx
web02/goatcounter/ltx/0
web02/goatcounter/ltx/1
web02/goatcounter/ltx/2
web02/goatcounter/ltx/3
web02/goatcounter/ltx/9
❯ ls -lh web02/goatcounter/ltx/1
29.1K Sep  5 01:25 0000000000003f2a-0000000000003f2b.ltx
72.4K Sep  5 02:03 0000000000003f2c-0000000000003f2d.ltx
63.3K Sep  5 02:24 0000000000003f2e-0000000000003f2f.ltx
[…]
❯ ls -lh web02/goatcounter/ltx/9
 8.5M Sep  5 02:00 0000000000000001-0000000000003f2b.ltx
 8.5M Sep  6 02:03 0000000000000001-0000000000004008.ltx
 8.6M Sep  7 02:03 0000000000000001-00000000000043a8.ltx
[…]

We can restore the database from the backup with a few shell commands. First, we stop the containers. Then, we move the damaged database away, invoke litestream restore from the right environment, and restart the containers.⁹

# systemctl stop container@goatcounter container@litestream
# mv /var/db/goatcounter/db.sqlite{,.old}
# ( . /etc/nixos-containers/litestream.conf ; 
>   set -a ; . /var/keys/litestream.env ; set +a ;
>   $SYSTEM_PATH/sw/bin/litestream \
>     restore -config $SYSTEM_PATH/etc/litestream.yml /var/db/goatcounter/db.sqlite)
# ls -lh /var/db/goatcounter/db.sqlite
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20M Sep 20 07:33 /var/db/goatcounter/db.sqlite
# systemctl start container@goatcounter container@litestream

Ten years after removing Google Analytics, JavaScript-based analytics is back on this blog, but without storing cookies or IP addresses, and without involving a third party. I still write for myself first, notably because it lets me dig into a topic and refer back to it years later. But knowing a bit more about my fellow human readers is a nice bonus, even the ones disabling JavaScript. 🐐

 Lots of posts in the debian-user mailing list complaining about updates with Debian 11.11 suddenly failing.

See Debian 11 Long Term Support reaches end-of-life

August 31st, 2026

The Debian Long Term Support (LTS) Team hereby announces that Debian 11 bullseye support has reached its end-of-life today, 31 August 2026, five years after its initial release on 14 August 2021.

Starting in September, Debian will not provide further security updates for Debian 11. A subset of bullseye packages will be supported by external parties. Detailed information can be found at Extended LTS.

The Debian LTS Team is currently providing security support for Debian 12 bookworm, the current oldstable release. Thanks to the combined efforts of different teams including the Security Team, the Release Team, and the LTS Team, the Debian 12 life cycle encompasses five years. Debian 12 will receive Long Term Support until 30 June 2028. The supported architectures in Debian 12 LTS are amd64, i386, arm64, armhf and ppc64el.

For further information about using bookworm LTS and upgrading from bullseye LTS, please refer to LTS/Using.

Debian and its LTS Team would like to thank all contributing users, developers, sponsors and other Debian teams who are making it possible to extend the life of previous stable releases, and who have made Bullseye LTS a success.

If you rely on Debian LTS, please consider joining the team, providing patches, testing or funding the efforts.

I have just released version 1.8.4 of libccid the Free Software CCID class smart card reader driver.

I have just released a new version of pcsc-lite 2.5.2.

pcsc-lite is a Free Software implementation of the PC/SC (also known as WinSCard) API for Unix systems. It provides an API for using smart cards and smart card readers.

Introduction

After bazel-bootstrap 7.7.1 was landed into Debian unstable, I'm working on packaging newer Mozc (Most famous Japanese input method editor) with Bazel.

Here is the blog entry initial efforts to build Mozc with Bazel at that time.

kenhys.hatenablog.jp

Then, I've shared implementing PoC dh-bazel experiment. See why dh-bazel is needed, and prototype about dh-bazel.

kenhys.hatenablog.jp

As a Bazel beginner, want to know what should pass to Bazel, what should not pass to Bazel.

What is improved in recent dh-bazel?

In the previous versions of dh-bazel, it supports only basic features to build with Bazel as a thin wrapper.

%:
        dh $@ --buildsystem=bazel

override_dh_auto_build:
        dh_auto_build -- //:hello

Now, with recent changes, it supports the following environment variables to resolve required system libraries in dynamically.

salsa.debian.org

• DH_BAZEL_OVERRIDE_MODULE

It search the specified modules from bundled dummy modules in dh-bazel. It accept ',' separated paramesters. (e.g. DH_BAZEL_OVERRIDE_MODULE=zlib,zstd)

dh-bazel bundles abseil-cpp, apple_support, buildozer, lz4, openssl, protobuf, rules_android_ndk, rules_apple, rules_swift, zlib and zstd as dummy modules to linking system libraries.

Now you can use it in debian/rules like this:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
# -*- makefile -*-
#

export DH_BAZEL_OVERRIDE_MODULE=zlib
export DH_VERBOSE=1

%:
        dh $@ --buildsystem=bazel --without=single-binary

override_dh_auto_build:
        dh_auto_build -- //:hello

It is impossible to cover all of system libraries in Debian, so in that case, please consider to use the following DH_BAZEL_PKGCONF_MODULE.

• DH_BAZEL_PKGCONF_MODULE

It search the specified modules with pkgconf. It is useful when there is no bundled modules in dh-bazel if you want. It accept ',' separated paramesters. (e.g. DH_BAZEL_PKGCONF_MODULE=gtk4-x11,gtk4-unix-print).

If DH_BAZEL_PKGCONF_MODULE could not match, then dh-bazel fallback to dig into Build-Depends: field in debian/control. Note that if it is not deterministic (e.g. -dev package provides multiple .pc files) dh-bazel gives up fallback with pkgconf.

Now you can use it in debian/rules like this:

#!/usr/bin/make -f
# -*- makefile -*-
#

export DH_BAZEL_PKGCONF_MODULE=gtk4-x11,gtk4-unix-print
export DH_VERBOSE=1

%:
        dh $@ --buildsystem=bazel --without=single-binary

override_dh_auto_build:
        dh_auto_build -- //:hello

Conclusion

dh-bazel is still in very early stage prototype, but it resolves some sort of packaging glitches a bit by bit.

I hope that it will help package maintainer using Bazel. (dh-bazel is not uploaded into debian/unstable yet, so stay tuned!)

I just released a new version of PyKCS11, a Python wrapper above the PKCS#11 API.

See PyKCS11 introduction or PyKCS11’s documentation.

The project is registered at Pypi: https://pypi.org/project/PyKCS11/

version 1.8.3 of the CCID driver (New version of libccid: 1.8.3) addresses 6 security issues identified by an AI tool.

I have just released version 1.8.3 of libccid the Free Software CCID class smart card reader driver.

Red Hat reported 6 security issues found by an AI tool. See Security issues reported by an AI tool in CCID driver.

As a graduate of a liberal arts university, I wound up, unsurprisingly, taking a lot of classes in every possible academic discipline. Thinking back to the person that I was going into university, I don’t think I would have chosen to take them – after all, my degree was in the sciences; I’d have been stoked to do nothing more than wall-to-wall computer science until I ran out of coursework and filled the rest of my hours with research and independent studies with my professors (which, I guess I did actually do, just not as much as I would have otherwise).

Even this blog’s CSS theme (now 18 years old and starting to look it) was something I wrote after receiving and repeatedly re-reading a tattered third-hand copy of “The Laws of Thought” by George Boole. It was gifted to me by a college friend majoring in philosophy while I was crashing at his rental on the beach. He gave it to me because he knew I “liked that shit” and, while it was definitely computer science in nature, I would not have read it otherwise. I have vivid memories of sleeping on his la-z-boy surrounded by towers of books he was working through. He went on to do incredible work, getting his PhD, doing research, brilliant writing – his death in 2023 has robbed humanity of more time with him. “The Laws of Thought” sits behind me in my office, and is one of my most valued possessions.

My friends mean more to me than I could ever express, and I definitely don’t show it enough. Each of my classes made me a more thoughtful person. My professors made me a better, more well-rounded person – and a person who attempts to live up to the oft repeated credo of being “men and women for others”. I did the best I could, even though I was never a particularly good student. Without liberal arts, I don’t think I would, dispositionally, have been capable of pushing myself – to this day – to continue to learn on nights and weekends, for no reason other than wanting to learn. I refuse to stop expanding my perspective, and do my best to approach new problems with as much humility and curiosity as I can muster.

Every few days for the last year or so, I have been thinking back to a reading assignment from my junior year that, at the time, I thought was a borderline throwaway filler assignment for the class. The reading is an essay from 1947 by the french existentialist philosopher and libertarian marxist, Jean-Paul Sartre (as some of the more erudite may have now already worked out given the blog’s title), “Why Write?”. I re-read it this week. It is not filler. I remember this essay better than some of the classwork I considered more important at the time.

Why Write?

“Why Write?” starts off by describing the ways in which writing – trying to communicate your thoughts, opinions, or feelings to others – is an act of projection. The writer will only ever draw from a place of their “own subjectivity” – writing is taking your person and putting it on display. You’re choosing what words to use, how to use them, pulling from knowledge you’ve accumulated (based on how you’ve chosen to spend your time). Spending any amount of your finite existence in order to convey a thought is, itself, announcing to the world that you believe it to be a thought worth sharing.

Meanwhile, the act of reading is not simply turning letters into words. Reading is engaging with the work, and understanding the work in a process that looks more like what Sartre terms “re-invention” or “discovery” – “the literary object, though realized through language, is never given in language”. It is not enough to read the words in a book end-to-end; you must, as a reader, actively engage with the work to understand what is being communicated by those words. Reading is to take the words on the page, and “exceed” the mere words through what he calls “directed creation”. The reader is “re-inventing”/“discovering” the writer’s thoughts by following their “landmarks in the void”.

And this all makes pretty good sense to me – I know if someone is being sarcastic because I know the writer; I have read their words and have read into their words, allowing myself to be directed by the writer into “discovering” the thought they have left me in their work. I understand that their words are humorous, not irate. Knowing who the author of a work is can completely change the point of a sentence. The fact I’m writing about Sartre at all, or that this very writing has been constrained for presentation in this blog’s CSS is only happening because of who I am, what things I’ve experienced in life, and what has made me, me. Sartre argues that this dyadic coupling between writer and writing means that I, as a writer, can never truly read my own writing. I will never be capable of reading my own work and getting something out of it – the work is already an extension of my own person. I can discover no thought in my own works.

Of course, Sartre, as an existentialist, is honor bound to go one step further here – the reader, by participating in reading a work, is asserting their own freedom. Every time a writer writes “[…] the writer appeals to the reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of [their] work”. The creative act may only be complete if both writer and reader have recognized one another and made a choice to do so. No one is compelled to complete the creative act. The things you read matter. Reading something fundamentally alters you as a person – you can not simply un-read a thought. Everything you read changes your universe. I have a hunch Sartre would find things like the (original early 2010s era) “tl;dr” reply to obviously terrible writing absolutely hilarious as a reader’s expression of freedom (not to be confused with modern 2020s era usage as shorthand for “summary section”). Using your freedom to choose to complete the writer’s creative act (or not) is inherently asserting your humanity.

I’m a bit fuzzy on the specifics of this quote, but I think it was sj who told me at one year’s Mystery Hunt that “A puzzle is a contract between puzzle author and puzzle solver, the author promises that the puzzle is solvable if you’re clever enough”. The puzzle author and puzzle solver are engaging in a collaborative production of the work that is only possible by recognizing one another. Similarly, Sartre – “whatever connections [the reader] may establish among the different parts of the book among the chapters or the words [the reader] has a guarantee, namely, that they have been expressly willed”.

Wall Drawing #123

It follows, Sartre argues, that the act of writing, as a means to convey a thought to a reader, may only be completed through the act of reading. Reading can only be done by others; writing, therefore, only exists to be read – it can serve no other purpose. Writing and reading are two halves of the same creative, collaborative act, only satisfied when both writer and reader acknowledge one another. Combined, writing and reading are the act of recognizing one another’s humanity, thoughts, experiences, consciousness – the act of co-creation of thought is the critical aspect of writing and reading – reconstructing the author’s perspective, thought, intent, point. The co-creation is the point of both reading and writing.

Writing without anyone to read the work leaves the writer’s bid for co-creation unsatisfied and humanity unrecognized. No thought has been conveyed to any reader, no one has understood the reason behind the “landmarks in the void” you’ve carefully placed, leaving you to either “[…] put down [your] pen or despair”. Writing is an appeal to the reader’s freedom, and the nature of that freedom is the writer can not control it – never being understood is always a possibility any time anyone sets out to write.

Nearly 12 years ago, I attempted to read the text on the git manpage generator for the first time – I remember the exact feeling of my brain going into “git manpage parsing mode” where every word was dragging git plumbing megaliths through the sand from their far-flung homes. I can still feel the surface of my desk as I instinctually started to trace out logical connections between git internals referenced as I read along. It took me a good 20 seconds to realize what I was reading made no sense. This website broke Sartre’s writer-reader agreement – I was attempting to read this website, but there was nothing there. You can “mechanically” “read” the git-man-page-generator, but you can never read it – it is not possible to read it. It was funny – unsettling. Each grasp at a real-looking image in front of me misses, my hand coming back empty. I couldn’t get enough of it. I must have tried to read a dozen generations in a row. I had never had something quite that broken pass that far into my consciousness before. Although I kept trying, it never did feel quite the same as that first time; I think fundamentally, I couldn’t forget that it was random.

While never having anyone read your writing drives them to “put down your pen or despair”, Sartre never had to contend with the opposite problem – being asked to read that which was not written. Reading that which was not written does not merely leave someone unrecognized when a reader makes a choice; instead, it is an inherent violation of the contract between reader and writer. Not only is no humanity being recognized through attempting to read words which were not written, but the reader, not the writer, is the one who bears the burden of unexpected apophenia. The reader, while engaging in co-creation, must now contort themselves to uphold their end of the Sartrean agreement, scrutinizing text to ascribe consciousness, thought and intent only to come back up with pareidolia-fueled echos of one’s own self and disfigured half-thoughts of others. The reality is, the modern reader must now “mechanically” “read” most written work they come across, scrutinizing text for any signs of thought before truly attempting to read the work. Failing to do this correctly changes our person – each time it happens, a small part of us is irrevocably altered. Choosing to engage in this ballet because you wish to do so is one thing – this is your right and freedom as a reader – but passing words which were not written as your own in an attempt to wrestle a reader’s freedom of co-creation from them is another entirely.

If you didn’t write it, I don’t want to read it (dw;dr). Send me your prompt instead.

It is said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, a quote often attributed to the American philosopher George Santayana. And to remember the past, records must be maintained and kept accessible to learn from. With this in mind, it is no wonder that archivists worldwide consider it crucial to ensure the archival records are both complete and accurate, with a constant frustration caused by the knowledge that the archives are neither due to challenges in tracking down and collecting what should be archived.

The last few days, I decided to simplify the collection of Messages from the Mattermost chat service, used by a few of the organisations I am involved in, to try to improve the situation slightly. To achieve this, I had written a dedicated extraction tool. Partly to see how hard it would be, and partly to ensure that if one of the services were shut down or replaced, everything in it would not be lost. Of course it is in the nature of the use of instant messages that most of them are not fit for permanent storage, at least not according to Norwegian law, where there is a threshold "worthy of the archive" (arkivverdig) that should be met, and messages like "should we go to lunch now" are below the bar and should be filtered out. The tool can not help with this filtering, and that will have to be done using other means after collection.

The tools I had my bullshit generator write, under strict supervision and many iterations, will extract every message visible to the user whose credentials are used to log into Mattermost, and write it out in Noark 5 extraction XML format and visualize the result. I created the visualiser mostly to quickly be able to debug the extracted XML, but also to make life easier for anyone interested in testing out the tool set.

The extractor mattermost-noark5extract create a hierarchy with arkiv/arkivdel for the Mattermost server, and then individual mappe for each channel and direct message chat, a registrering for each message thread, dokumentbeskrivelse for every message in the tread, and one or more dokumentobjekt for each message and their attachments/images. So far it is only tested on one Mattermost installation, where around 23,000 messages is extracted in 61 seconds and produce 295M with approximately 600 attachments and around 675,000 lines of XML in arkivstruktur.xml. You pass it the URL of the service, a username and password, a directory path where to store the collection and an optional channel name substring to limit the collection to only a subset of the messages available.

The mattermost-noark5extract-browser viewer can load this collection and visualize it similarly to Mattermost's web interface, with the list of channels and direct messages dialogues on the left, messages chronologically in the centre and a selected thread displayed on the right.

I know Mattermost provide several login options. I've only had the one used on my test server implemented so far, and know the extract tool will have to be extended a bit for it to handle servers using one of these options.

If you would like to examine the new toolkit, mattermost-noark5extract is available from gitlab. I wanted to put it on codeberg, but as the recent rule change forbid code mostly written by a bullshit generator there, it was not really an option. Note that some years ago I wrote a similar tool to extract material from the request tracker system. The source for request-tracker-noark5extract is also available from codeberg. I would love to hear from you if you test the tools.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and wish to support my activities, please send donations to 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.