Notices by wizzwizz4 (wizzwizz4@fosstodon.org)

@navi @dalias @ashguy Can't you just run Weston (or another compositor with an X11 backend) in kiosk mode to get reverse wayback?

But yeah, if people are using labwc, I'd suggest adopting that and wayback officially in a fork, assuming that wayback remains close enough to X11 that patches to fix stuff in wayback don't break it in X11.

@ashguy @dalias Okay, xfwl4's the only codebase whose recent commits look vaguely nonsensical, and https://www.spurint.org/journal/2026/07/llms-and-xfwl4 only mentions xfwl4, so I'm 60% confident the damage is limited to there – at least for now.

I'm not sure xfwl4 can be salvaged to begin with. It's written in Rust, which (as much as I like Rust) is more and more a warning sign of bad things, like Enterprise Java used to be.

It might make more sense to implement a Wayland compositor in a different (higher-level?) language.

@ashguy @dalias XFCE's Wayland support is a new feature, though, still in development. (I was under the impression that XFCE already supported Wayland natively, but apparently not.)

We really need better tooling for this. Binary search through the histories of multiple repos via the GitLab web UI is not my idea of a good time.

Edit: Wikipedia's out of date. https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap has a lot of yesses for 4.21, last modified: 2026/01/30 10:13. Hopefully that's early enough.

@dalias @ashguy Do you know roughly when the last good version was? There are a lot of git repositories on the XFCE GitLab: I was thinking about dedicating some time to this, given that I don't imagine it'll be too much work to maintain, but it looks intimidating.

@soatok It's a bit tangential, but do you know if Fedi E2EE is going to implement something like message franking (so that reports work properly)?

@soatok @monokeros @0x4d6165 We're currently communicating over a non-E2EE messaging system. Obviously everything should be encrypted over the wire (it's nigh-trivial to use a TLS library: just don't compress attacker-controlled data together with sensitive data, and it's probably secure), but the cryptography for encrypted group chats with message history doesn't seem trivial to me. (I'm sure I could assemble the primitives into something that looks like E2EE, but I doubt it would actually be.)

@monokeros @soatok @0x4d6165 Long-term, yes. Short-term, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. A Discord alternative with sensible custody of messages, decent UI, providing the bare minimum-acceptable user empowerment, but no E2EE, would be better than Discord, and (owing to its lower switching costs) could act as a gateway to better alternatives.

@chjara Nope! There are others. Wiktionary gives Abel and Babel; there's also navel. (Can't figure out how to get Wiktionary to list rhymes for -əl, so that's all I've got.)

@dalias An analytics system that communicates the current state of a one-bit noisy signal, which only runs on school-issued devices, and is only active in a setting where it replaces the need for shoulder-surfing, is not a "digital cop-in-your-pocket".

How about requiring that all digital cameras in school make a clicking (photo) or beeping (video) noise when in operation? That is also a system that identifies when certain functions of a multi-function device are in use. Would that be a "cop"?

@dalias However, some degree of use restriction is required in a classroom, or the students will be distracted from their studies. To achieve this, either you implement automated use restrictions (impossible to calibrate, per Rice's theorem, and also indistinguishable from malware), or you have some level of manual oversight.

This is less of a problem for self-directed studies, but that requires self-regulation of motivation: study's boring when you don't get it. Many 5yos find that hard.

@dalias You specifically criticised corporate spying and lock-in. Plenty of people think a "legitimate" authority is somehow different. Nonetheless, I was addressing your criticism of "screens are bad".

So I can better understand your perspective: do you have experience of being in a "digitised" classroom? (I do.) I don't think your analogies are analogous enough to be used as an argument here, and I'd like to know where it's more likely that you're missing something, or I'm missing something.

@dalias That's not to say you should force children to learn the syllabus in order, week by week in lockstep. I can't imagine a greater impediment to learning. But if someone's participating in a lesson, they shouldn't be distracted.

Locking down computers so they can only run pre-approved software is not a good approach. This will prevent students from doodling or playing Tetris; it will prevent them from writing or installing computer programs. This will significantly hurt learning.

2/3

@dalias I forgot about the prejudice against comic books. Perhaps my argument will be clearer if you replace that with a more pretentious form of literature, such as Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, or Ulysses by James Joyce; or a technical repair manual for a rocket engine. However educational these are, they're not conductive to following along with lessons about a different topic entirely.

1/3

@dalias Providing teachers with remote access to children's computers is an unjustifiable invasion of privacy. (Even having them look at the screens while they walk around the classroom is questionable. PCs are personal.) Automatically providing a list of running programs is too much.

Providing a binary "child is running an unexpected program" flag doesn't expose enough information to be a privacy violation, while preserving a heuristic for identifying why a struggling child is struggling.

3/3

@dalias It's also like asking "Why are we giving 5-year-olds comic books in classrooms?" and "Why are we allowing 5-year-olds to pass paper-dart notes in classrooms?".

The problem isn't screens: the problem is general-purpose computing. A scheme where 5-year-olds have special-purpose educational programs, and the teacher can see (in an EAFP fashion) whether they're running others in the classroom, would allow the "screens are distractions" issue to be addressed like any other distraction.

@Fragglemuppet If you can explain why, and how you deal with that, to make it easier for others to do so, then I'd say it doesn't matter what it counts as: you're helping, which is what matters.

@dalias @thibaultamartin Distributing backups among your friends' systems should be as simple as sending and accepting a follow request is on social media.

@chjara Completing missions, being wanted, and having sex with women.

I propose that Grand Theft Auto is yuri. In this essay,

@esvrld @beeoproblem Mathematically, they're really huge Markov models, compressed in a clever way.

@Gina It'd be a huge amount of work. I've been investigating this for a few years, but I don't think the Mastodon software (as currently implemented) is particularly compatible with keeping moderators healthy and safe.