Notices by Hugo 雨果 (whynothugo@fosstodon.org)

It's driving me crazy how we're increasing dependency on Google and Apple for online payments, while calling it a "European, independent, future-proof" system.

https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2026/02/25/entrenching-american-corporations-into-local-european-payments/

So Dutch banks want to stop relying on American corporations like Visa and Mastercard, and are launching "Wero" a new online payment mechanism which is only usable via an "app" for iOS or Android, and not usable on the web or regular computers.

Do I really need to point out that Google and Apple have the exact same risks as Visa and Mastercard? I can't believe this isn't obvious to everyone else, sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy.

@annika the discourse webspp is so bloated and heavyweight. It’s pretty hard to use on lower end hardware or slow/high-latency connections. Granted, not as bad as discord, but still pretty far from being universally usable.

@nikitonsky historically, shift-click selects multiple consecutive objects, and ctrl/cmd-click selects multiple objects excluding intermediate ones. It’s been like so since the nineties (eg: file managers, etc).

@bagder whenever I ask an LLM something, I prefix my question with “briefly:” or “be concise”.

I’m curious if this would work, considering that many may copy-paste your response into an LLM.

@bagder Same, I’m just staying within the domain of what’s feasible.

@lanodan Yeah, syscalls ought to take a byte slice, and leave the rest to the call site.

@lanodan The stlib only supporting utf-8 path names is a big mistake IMHO. I have old back-ups in DVDs which can't be accessed with anything written in hare. It seems like a very high-level decision for such low-level interface.

@lanodan The nomem changes address a huge deal of errors. Slice indexing and alike is still panicky instead of fallible.

It’s extremely annoying that so many APIs in Rust (both the language and the stdlib) panic instead of returning an error. At least there are linters for many of these, but we do need to enable those lints manually.

@lanodan Ever since I moved to Netherlands in 2019 I've found it ridiculous how I need to use the American card system to buy online from Belgium or Germany. I hear that Ideal is expanding to these countries in 2026.

Every time I visit another European country I’m sorely disappointed that paying with European money is so hard.

Configuring #alpine to resolve .local domains via mDNS was far simpler: https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2025/12/16/resolve-.local-mdns-domains-via-avahi-using-unbound/

Also dirtier than I expected. We need dedicated mDNS<>DNS bridges without so many moving parts.

@stacyharper Tangential: I don't like resolvconf at all: it blindly trusts any DNS server provided and terrible fit for any network where you don't have absolute trust on every other host on the network.

@stacyharper I like the idea of it. Are this kind of "configuration packages" generally acceptable upstream?

@ariadne @lynn Flutter is awful. It’s a pain to build and package. Pasting images doesn’t work on any flutter tool that I know of. The UI elements aren’t clear and obvious.

But that’s probably why we don’t have good GUI clients, we don’t have good toolkits for *nix.

I don't get this trend to show navigation, menus, or important information in tiny overlays floating on top of the previous screen. I can see how it looks kinda cool in screenshots, but it's never functional to have all content crammed into a tiny container when I have a huge monitor in front of me.

@navi @lanodan Given that text is typically left aligned, if the monitors are centred, the left one will have text further away than the right one.

Why does #GitLab love copying awful design decisions from #GitHub?

@Charlie nice, thanks for documenting this! Is there some intrinsic dependency on Ubuntu/systemd/glibc, or can we potentially package FEX natively on postmarketOS?