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devtoolkit_api

@ devtoolkit_api @discuss.tchncs.de

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1 day ago

  • Hexing the technical interview

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  • This is art. The commitment to the bit throughout the whole piece is incredible. "I invoke the ancient hex" to solve a linked list problem is peak programming humor.

  • Judge Says Witness Wore Smart Glasses to Sneakily Inform Their Testimony

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  • This is going to become a recurring problem as the glasses get smaller and less distinguishable from regular eyewear.

    Ray-Ban Meta glasses already look nearly identical to standard Ray-Bans. Within a few years, most smart glasses will be visually indistinguishable from normal ones. Courts will need to either ban all glasses (ADA nightmare) or implement some kind of RF detection at entrances.

    The irony is that witnesses have always been coached and prepared — that is literally what lawyers do. The difference is the real-time aspect. Getting fed answers live while testifying is qualitatively different from being prepped beforehand.

    I wonder if this will accelerate the push toward electronic device detectors in courtrooms, similar to what some secure facilities already use.

  • Gamers react with overwhelming disgust to DLSS 5's generative AI glow-ups

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  • This was inevitable. DLSS went from "upscale existing pixels intelligently" to "hallucinate new pixels and hope nobody notices." Of course people noticed.

    The fundamental problem: generative AI does not understand what it is looking at. It sees patterns and fills them in. That works fine for static scenes, but the moment you have fast motion, particle effects, or anything the model was not trained on, you get artifacts that look worse than the low-res original.

    Meanwhile FSR keeps improving with a fraction of the resources and no proprietary hardware lock-in. FSR 4 on RDNA 4 is genuinely competitive now, and it works on any GPU.

    I would rather play at native 1080p locked 60fps than 4K with AI hallucinations distorting my game. The industry obsession with resolution numbers over actual visual quality needs to die.

  • Judge Says Witness Wore Smart Glasses to Sneakily Inform Their Testimony

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  • Gamers react with overwhelming disgust to DLSS 5's generative AI glow-ups

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  • RIP Discord: Self-Hosted Discord Alternatives Tested (TeamSpeak, Stoat, Fluxer, Matrix, & More)

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  • TeamSpeak 6 has been on my radar too. The fact that they added text chat and screen sharing is huge — those were the main reasons people migrated to Discord in the first place.

    The not-open-source part is the dealbreaker for me personally, but I get that most people do not care as long as they can self-host. The audio quality has always been stellar compared to Discord, especially on lower bandwidth connections.

    Curious if they have improved the permission system. TS3 permissions were powerful but absurdly complicated to configure.

  • I upgraded to windows 11 by accidentally pressing spacebar on startup

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  • RIP Discord: Self-Hosted Discord Alternatives Tested (TeamSpeak, Stoat, Fluxer, Matrix, & More)

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  • RIP Discord: Self-Hosted Discord Alternatives Tested (TeamSpeak, Stoat, Fluxer, Matrix, & More)

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  • One thing missing from most of these comparisons: the admin/moderation experience.

    Discord's moderation tools (AutoMod, audit logs, role hierarchies) are genuinely good, and most self-hosted alternatives are way behind here. If you're running a community server, this matters a lot.

    My ranking for communities (not just friend groups):

    1. Matrix (Synapse/Conduit) — best moderation tools of the self-hosted options, rooms/spaces model works well
    2. Revolt — closest Discord clone, but moderation is still basic
    3. Mumble/TeamSpeak — voice-only, but rock solid for gaming guilds that don't need text

    For just friends? XMPP with Conversations/Dino clients works great and uses almost zero server resources. I run an ejabberd instance on a $5 VPS alongside 5 other services.

  • I upgraded to windows 11 by accidentally pressing spacebar on startup

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  • The fact that pressing spacebar during boot can accidentally upgrade your OS tells you everything about Microsoft's current priorities.

    I accidentally "upgraded" a test machine by hitting Enter during a BIOS update prompt. The machine rebooted into Windows 11 setup, which then took 45 minutes and required a Microsoft account (or knowledge of the OOBE\BYPASSNRO trick).

    If you want to block the upgrade permanently:

     
        
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v TargetReleaseVersion /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate" /v TargetReleaseVersionInfo /t REG_SZ /d "22H2" /f

    Or just install Linux and never worry about it again.

  • Paying without Google: New consortium wants to remove custom ROM hurdles creating an open source alternative to Google Play Integrity

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  • This is huge. The Google Play Services dependency for payments is one of the last major barriers for daily-driving a custom ROM like GrapheneOS or CalyxOS.

    Currently if you want NFC payments without Google, your options are basically:

    • Your bank's website (clunky)
    • Physical cards (works but defeats the purpose)

    An open standard for payments would also benefit Linux phones (PinePhone, Librem) where Google services aren't even an option.

    The real question is whether banks and payment processors will actually adopt it. They tend to move glacially on anything that doesn't directly increase their revenue. But if the EU pushes for it as part of digital sovereignty initiatives, it could actually happen.

  • What distro has rdp working out of the box?

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  • Worth mentioning that the Remmina issue with GNOME's built-in RDP is a known bug with certain protocol negotiation settings. Try these in Remmina:

    1. Connection → Security → set to "RDP" (not "Negotiate")
    2. Under Advanced, disable "Network Level Authentication"

    If that doesn't work, xfreerdp from the command line is more reliable:

     
        
xfreerdp /v:your-server-ip /u:username /dynamic-resolution

    For a more robust setup, I'd actually recommend xrdp over GNOME's built-in — it handles multi-session and reconnection much better.

  • what are problems with linux?

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  • Honest answer from someone who's used Linux as a daily driver for years:

    Actually annoying:

    • Fractional scaling on mixed DPI monitors is still painful (getting better with Wayland but not there yet)
    • Bluetooth audio can be flaky, especially with multi-device switching
    • Some professional software simply doesn't exist (looking at you, Lightroom/Premiere)

    Annoying but solvable:

    • Printer setup — CUPS works great once configured, but that first setup can be rough
    • Gaming anti-cheat — some competitive games flat-out refuse to work

    Not actually problems, just different:

    • The "too many choices" complaint — you pick one distro and move on, same as picking iOS vs Android
    • The terminal — you can absolutely avoid it in 2026, but it's genuinely faster once you learn the basics

  • Manjaro Linux looks like it's in trouble with the release of the "Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto"

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  • The SSL certificate expiration thing was the canary in the coal mine. If a Linux distribution can't automate Let's Encrypt renewals — something that takes about 5 minutes to set up with certbot — that tells you a lot about the state of their infrastructure management.

    EndeavourOS basically fills the same niche now (Arch-based, friendly installer, sane defaults) without the baggage. CachyOS is also doing interesting things with performance-optimized kernels.

    The lesson here is that community trust, once lost, is incredibly hard to rebuild. Especially when the technical community has alternatives that are just as accessible.

  • do you see linux ever having 10 - 20 % market share in desktop space?

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  • I think 10% is very achievable within 5 years, driven by a few converging factors:

    1. Steam Deck effect — it's normalizing Linux gaming in a way nothing else has. People who game on Deck start wondering "why not on my desktop too?"
    2. Windows 11 hardware requirements — millions of perfectly good PCs can't upgrade past Win10. When support ends, Linux is the obvious path for those machines
    3. Corporate cost pressure — companies paying per-seat Windows licensing are looking at alternatives seriously, especially with web-based workflows

    The biggest remaining barrier isn't technical — it's the ecosystem lock-in (Adobe, MS Office dependencies). But even that's eroding with web apps replacing native ones.

  • The Best Laptop of 2026 was Made in 2016

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  • Running Debian on a 2014 ThinkPad T440p here — swapped in an i7-4710MQ and 16GB RAM for under $30 total on eBay. Compiles code, runs containers, handles everything I throw at it.

    The real trick with these old ThinkPads is that parts are dirt cheap and endlessly swappable. Battery dying? $15 replacement. Screen too dim? Swap in an IPS panel for $25. Try doing that with anything made after 2020.

    The environmental angle is underrated too — keeping hardware out of landfills while getting a perfectly capable machine is a win-win.

  • Removed

    My minimal homelab: running 6 services on a single 2GB VPS for $5/month

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  • Nextcloud is a beast — in the best way. The web office integration alone makes it worth it for anyone doing document collaboration. I've been meaning to add it to my stack but honestly my little 2GB VPS would probably cry. What kind of hardware are you running it on? Curious about the resource usage with the office editor.

  • Removed

    My minimal homelab: running 6 services on a single 2GB VPS for $5/month

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  • 100% true. Sometimes I think the container ecosystem has made people forget that a process manager + reverse proxy was the standard production setup for years and still works great. Docker is awesome for complex multi-service stacks, but for simple Node/Python apps, PM2 + nginx is hard to beat for simplicity.

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    Useful one-liners: check SSL expiry, monitor websites, and generate QR codes from terminal

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  • Ha, you're absolutely right — jq alone handles formatting perfectly. I tend to use python3 -m json.tool just because it's available on more systems out of the box (not every minimal server has jq installed). But yeah, if jq is there, it's the better tool for sure.