Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 01, 2026

• The Register UK ☛ Open source package repositories face sustainability crisis

  How bad is it? Fox revealed that last year, major repositories handled 10 trillion downloads. That's double Google's annual search queries if you're counting from home and they're doing it on a shoestring. Fox described this as a "tragedy of the commons," where the assumption of "free and infinite" resources leads to structural waste amplified by CI/CD pipelines, security scanners, and AI-driven code generation.

• [Old] Geo Carncross ☛ fast-servers

  There's a network-server programming pattern which is so popular that it's the canonical approach towards writing network servers: [...]

• Mozilla

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Firefox AI Killswitch

    Nice to see that the Firefox team have actually implemented their "AI killswitch" in the way that they said they would. Here's a screenshot from my copy of Firefox 148: [...]

  • Servo (Linux Foundation) ☛ The Servo Blog: January in Servo: preloads, better forms, details styling, and more!

    Servo 0.0.5 is here, bringing with it lots of improvements in web platform features. Some highlights: [...]

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Spellbound Echo with Raku

    This is my response to The Weekly Challenge #362.

• Python

  • Eric Turgeon ☛ How I Used SIGUSR1 To Avoid Python Process Conflicts

    Lately I was looking at a solution to avoid update-station check-now starting a new process that could potentially clash with the tray process. I learned how to use SIGUSR1 for IPC to avoid starting a second instance of Update Station when doing a check-now for updates.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • University of Toronto ☛ On the Bourne shell's distinction between shell variables and exported ones

    One of the famous things that people run into with the Bourne shell is that it draws a distinction between plain shell variables and special exported shell variables, which are put into the environment of processes started by the shell. This distinction is a source of frustration when you set a variable, run a program, and the program doesn't have the variable available to it: [...]