Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 24, 2026

• Beej ☛ 10 REM"_(C2SLFF4

  But the interesting part was this "_(C2SLFF4 mess. A typo or garbage? No. It appears verbatim in the source code as originally published in the July, 1980 issue of Recreational Computing.

  What the heck is it?

• Hackaday ☛ BASICally, Its Retro Machine Language

  We enjoyed [Beej’s] trip down memory lane looking at a BASIC game, The Wizard’s Castle, written for the Exidy Sorcerer. It appeared in a 1980 magazine that included the title graphic above. It reminded us how, back in those days, we did things with BASIC that you shouldn’t be able to do and it often looks, today, rather cryptic.

  In particular, even if you know modern BASIC, these few lines might give you a pause: [...]

• LinuxStans ☛ Codeberg Says No More Hey Hi (AI) Slop, But Can Anyone Actually Prove It?

  Codeberg, the nonprofit code forge a lot of developers have been quietly moving to as a Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub alternative, just voted to ban vibe-coded projects, meaning repositories that mostly consist of code written by Hey Hi (AI) rather than a human. The vote passed by a wide margin. The reaction to it hasn’t been nearly that clean.

• LWN ☛ Codeberg: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

  The Codeberg forge has adopted a pair of new policies, promising not to use

  hosted projects to train LLMs and, more controversially, banning the

  hosting of LLM-generated software. The site's blog describes

  and justifies these policies.

• OMG Ubuntu ☛ Codeberg members vote to ban AI-generated code

  Codeberg, the nonprofit alternative to Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub used to host FLOSS projects, will no longer host software that’s “mostly” AI-generated. A vote closed yesterday (22 July, 2026), passing 358 to 144 with 14 abstentions on roughly 50% turnout to stop hosting software that’s largely vibe-coded. A second motion, also passed, commits Codeberg to never training Hey Hi (AI) models on hosted code or user data. Not that it was ever likely to. A Terms of Use amendment now prohibits projects that “mostly consist of code written by” generative Hey Hi (AI) tools.

• Nishant Shukla ☛ Spatial languages: writing code in 2D

  All this time we’ve been writing expressions in 1D space, but what happens when we unlock an extra dimension?

  Of course the IDE and parser need to play nicely for all this to work. Even then, what’s the point? Well, let’s take a look at these examples below.

• SimpleBLE 1.0 Streamlines Bluetooth Low Energy Testing Across Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android

  Currently testing Bluetooth devices regularly halt at a manual check in a phone app, however, SimpleBLE now provides the same BLE functions into repeatable test benches, production tools, and device SDKs.

• Python

  • Eric Matthes ☛ Inspecting your own code

    Recently I was considering how to best explain a snippet of code, and I realized I've developed some habits for inspecting code blocks that people newer to Python might not know about. Most people using Python today are probably aware that documentation exists for the libraries they use, and many people regularly get help from a variety of AI-based tools. But are you aware of how much you can learn about your code with just a little inspection?

    In this post I'll show how much you can learn about the code you're working with from just a brief debugging session, even if there are no bugs in your project.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ controller: tidy messy terminology in R with controlled vocabularies

    controller is an R package for working with controlled vocabularies. It’s first release (v0.1.0) is now available now on CRAN.

  • Rlang ☛ Mapping Live U.S. Wildfire Smoke in R with sf and ggplot2

    NOAA analysts trace wildfire smoke plumes from satellite imagery every day and publish them as open GIS shapefiles.