NotAwfulTech

I’m not gonna dig up the links since I’m sure y’all’re already tired of talking about quantum computing. I am going to insist that, while I professionally disagree with Filippo about plenty of things, I do not see any mistakes in their analysis here. Please start thinking about post-quantum cryptographic tooling today.

Welcome to the carnival! We’ve got fun and games. I asked vibecoders to complete three tasks. When folks complained about that, I offered up five more tasks. I did half of these and got average scores. How well did the community do? Scroll to the end to find out!

Was looking for a terminal that can render LazyVim. It’s looking like Alacritty (definitely not ghostty).

Too early to see if it’s viable. I’m doing my part in the GitHub trenches.

Okay, previously, on Awful, we established that vibecoding can’t produce working compilers. Let’s try some other side projects of mine. I have important stuff to work on and a deadline, so I’m not matching these projects with my own submissions. Instead, I’ve laid out a psuedo-objective rubric and I’m going to say that par is 10/10 points.

I’m tired of hearing about vibecoding on Lobsters, so I’ve written up three of my side tasks for coding agents. Talk is cheap; show us the code.

Happy Holiday and merry winter solstice! I’m sharing a Nix flake that I’ve been slowly growing in my homelab for the past few months. It incorporates this systemd feature, switches from CppNix to Lix, and disables a handful of packages. That PR inspired me, and I’m releasing this in turn to inspire you. Paying it forward and all that.

Cassandra Granade writes:

The (imo) best splinter group of the former Disco Elysium game studio ZA/UM announced their first product. Hard to imagine they will actually deliver on all the hype they are building but the vibes are so so good right now. Also the website design is quite fresh.

A well-done mockery of the state of open-source, with a solid parody license as a bonus.

Cross-posting a good overview of how propaganda and public relations intersect with social media. Thanks @Soatok@pawb.social for writing this up!

Tired of going to Scott "Other" Aaronson's blog to find out what's currently known about the busy beaver game? I maintain a community website that has summaries for the known numbers in Busy Beaver research, the Busy Beaver Gauge.

Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.

stumbled over this in my feed earlier, looks interesting

A crossover between Godot and Blender was not on my bingo card for 2025, but I'm still pretty happy to see - not just because we got a cool little game out of it, but because interop between the two got a major boost.

seen via this

Just ran across this and figured I’d link to people, looks interesting

“Not awful” is maybe a bit suspect, but at least they’re entertaining :)

I forgot to post it here earlier but it's revision weekend!

For anyone not in the know, EasyRPG is a free and open-source reimplementation of the RPG Maker 2000/2003 engine. Its a pretty cool little community project, I recommend checking it out.

archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20241206205437/https://www.404media.co/brian-thompson-social-media-reactions-reddit-facebook-twitter/

skeet: https://bsky.app/profile/kezz.io/post/3kpzm7ya6tb2g

A follow-up to this TechTakes post

Netrunner is a collectible card game with a very long history. in short:

I found that the SerenityOS project also has a web browser with a completely new set of engines. It looks reasonably capable too.

copy pasting the rules from last year's thread:

Looks like a local boy did good.

'cuz I definitely do

found this kicking around on one of the feeder sites a few days ago and only got to read it now

found via someone running a server at revision

Amaranth is a simple-but-expressive hardware description language (the type of language you use to define integrated circuits for FPGAs, ASICs, and similar hardware) implemented as a Python DSL. I'm not the biggest Python fan, but Amaranth is worth it -- even though it's in heavy development and its documentation is incomplete, it's by far the most comprehensible HDL I've ever used, and I've tried many of them.

You could get a robot limb for your blown-off limb

Remember how we were told that genAI learns "just like humans", and how the law can't say about fair use, and I guess now all art is owned by big tech companies?

this is pretty cool. it’s a tutorial with interactive exercises that explores the Nix language as a general-purpose functional programming language, outside of its role as the configuration and package definition language for NixOS. understanding Nix better as a language makes more complicated packages easier to write (and is necessary to understand the guts of nixpkgs and the parts of Nix written in itself), but it also has a number of unique advantages as a programming language within a very specific domain.

"AI for dummies" interview from Irish radio with Dr Abeba Birhane, who's on a UN advisory board about AI.

I don't really know enough about the C64 to say anything one way or the other, but this comment on youtube did okay:

having recently played and refunded a terrible “modern” text adventure, I’ve had the urge to revisit my favorite interactive fiction author, Andrew Plotkin aka Zarf. here’s a selection of recommendations from his long list of works:

A RISC-V assembly cracking board game. Can't comment on the gameplay experience, but what a cool idea.

my comment over there just made me recall this

Hypnospace Outlaw is that funny meme game with the pizza dance. it’s also a leftist parody of the California Ideology and some of the factors that led to the bursting of the dot com bubble. crucially, it’s also a whole lot of fun to play — it’s a very good point and click mystery adventure that takes place on a faithfully rendered and authentic-feeling version of a networked computer in the 90s, crafted by someone who absolutely knew what they were doing with the time period and aesthetic.