Programming

Alternative press article: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/self-spreading-glassworm-malware-hits-openvsx-vs-code-registries/

Identified extensions are mainly on OpenVSX - an alternative VS Code Extension Marketplace.

Update (Oct 19, 2025): A new infected extension detected in Microsoft's VSCode marketplace - still active.

Bleepingcomputer:

Microsoft has removed the malicious extension frrom its marketplace following the researchers' alert.

A fascinating paper in which the authors write a probabilistic program that infers its own source code based only on its past guesses at what its own source code is. It was at the Onward! conference, and is written in a really unusual humanistic style. One of the coolest papers I’ve read all year.

Hey everyone,

I’m Ronen — I’m a hobbyist programmer, poet, and game dev enthusiast from Israel. I grew up in the 80s and 90s when BASIC was many people’s first window into programming and imagination.

These days, I’m rediscovering that old magic through retro-style BASIC projects — small text and DOS-like games, creative experiments, and tutorials — and I’m sharing them on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@ron77-r5l

But this journey is more than just coding for me. I live with mental health challenges, and programming — especially in the simplicity of BASIC — has become a kind of therapy: it helps me focus, calm down, and build something meaningful even on difficult days.

I’m not here just to promote, but to connect. If anyone else finds comfort, focus, or healing in programming, I’d love to hear your experiences too. How has coding helped you through life challenges or tough mental states?

Thank you for letting me share a bit about myself — and if you want to see some of my BASIC experiments or talk retro dev, I’d be really happy to connect.

Ronen

In my decade-plus of maintaining my dotfiles, I’ve written a lot of little shell scripts. Here’s a big list of my personal favorites.

• Evan Hahn

The ghosts of ancient Hackers past still roam the machines and—through the culture they established—our minds. Their legacy of the forging of craft lingers. A deep and kinetic craft we’ve extended and built a passionate industry on. We are driven by the same wonder, sense of achievement, and elegance of puzzle-solving as they were. Still driven by “The Right Thing.” These constitutional ideas, the very identity of programmers, are increasingly imperiled. Under threat. The future of programming, once so bright and apparent, is now cloaked in foreboding darkness, grifts, and uncertainty.

Hello,

I’ve built a set of Python scripts to create a custom Magic: The Gathering legality checker using Scryfall and Moxfield. It fetches a card pool, converts Moxfield CSVs to JSON, and validates decks against that pool.

Right now, I'd have to update the format manually every few months. I host my repo on Forgejo, but I’m not sure if it supports GitHub-style workflow automation.

What’s the best way to automate this update process? Should I use a cron job, or are there other alternatives I should consider for a Forgejo-hosted repo?

I don’t have much experience with CI/CD or scheduled automation, so any guidance or examples would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/20437303

This is Akkudoktor's (Andreas Schmitz) home energy management and optimization system. Some people will know Andreas by his YouTube channel @akkudoktor in which he discusses DYI home energy systems. That channel was born out of a frustration how unnecessary technical and regulatory hurdles, as well as lack of good system integration were obstructing the energy transition in Germany. Among other things, Andreas showed that one can build a home battery from refurbished cells with a fraction of the cost of commercial systems - provided that one has solid engineering knowledge - and he is a control engineer.

So, because just before, I did post a link to the evcc project, I should explain what are the differences between evcc and Akkudoktor's EOS:

evcc is mainly concerned with charging electrical vehicles (EVs) from home solar or dynamically priced power from the grid.

• it is set up to be easy to use with phone interfaces etc.
• it already supports a wide range of hardware
• it is comperatively mature
• it is limited in optimization capabilities
• it is written in Go language

Akkudoktor EOS has the top priority of high level optimization - getting the most bang out of each buck

• it is a rather new project in alpha stage. So, it might be more interesting for people looking to contribute - or scratch their own itch.
• it tries to optimize home photovoltaics, home batteries, heat pumps, grey water heat pumps, other heating and manageable devices, and the remaining household demand
• electrical vehicles are supported (and currently, they are an important economical use case because batteries are still expensive and the only other large type of consumers are heat pumps).
• Such an optimization is complex because it requires predicting renewable generation (both in the home and as wind power from the grid), electric power price prediction (if dynamic or day/night prices are used), and also the individual consumption (which could depend on the forecasted weather, time of the day, day of the week, or time of the year). Things like the insulation of the house modify the impact of the weather. Also, usage pattern of components such as heat pump or battery can have influence in their life time. So that's a complex optimization problem.
• And a good optimization also requires sufficient input data. This also needs to observe data privacy aspects (I guess you don't want to give a burglar info on when nobody is at home)
• The interface is a REST service.
• The targeted integration is via Home Assistant, or HA.
• written in Python

Oh, last not least, there is also a (mostly German-language, but engineers do speak English) forum on home energy systems which is also used to discuss the software:

https://www.akkudoktor.net/

Background:

• The System That Could Replace Binary And Change Computers FOREVER - Codeolences
  • https://youtube.com/watch?v=R4achTEgXEw
• Ternary Computing the Way to Go Beyond Moore's Law? | Dr Steven Bos - Codeolences
  • https://youtube.com/watch?v=mqEOxQuOdog

• https://openzl.org/
• https://engineering.fb.com/2025/10/06/developer-tools/openzl-open-source-format-aware-compression-framework/

At the start of the calendar year there was a proposal for a new GCC front-end for the Algol 68 programming language. GCC developers deferred merging Algol 68 support into GCC for this rarely talked about vintage programming language. But as talked about back at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2025, the developer is still working on the support. Sure enough, this week brought a new version of this GCC front-end.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/20433891

This is a FOSS project that supports to connect a charger for an electric vehicle (EV) with a photovoltaic generation system.

Using these two things in combination is much more economical than using them separately: The PV system provides energy to the EV that is much cheaper than electricity from the grid. In addition, using the car's battery makes the PV installation more useful - it could also serve to store extra energy for the house.

But why open source? In many areas, vendors try to sell integrated systems, trying to get higher prices. And customers sometimes like the convenience.

But here, there are clear advantages to open systems with open Interfaces:

• You don't want to buy a new car when you move house or get a new home battery.
• You might want to start with an ultra-cheap balkony solar panel which you can put just on top of your garage. And later you might want to install a heat pump when you have the money or subsidies are available. This requires flexibility, which integrated systems ain't (ever tried to add more RAM to your old Macbook?)
• Technology is changing at a rapid pace. Especially battery prices are falling fast. So, things like extra batteries for the house will become economically interesting long before your car reaches its end of life.
• The cost structures: For rooftop solar, costs for plumbing and electrical installation are already often the most exoensive part. Prices for solar panels are falling rapidly along an exponential curve.
• Software quality: While home power systems often provide great hardware, the software quality is often pretty shite. (My brother just confirmed that, he bought a heat pump and its Modbus interface does not match documentation...).
• Complexity: Charging a car from the grid, at a fixed price, is not so complicated. But taking into account battery storage, variable solar production and dynamic prices makes this a complex task. Plus, every household has different individual needs. Pre-canned systems are unlikely to get the most out if it.
• Breadth of hardware support: Panels, cars, wall boxes, inverters, batteries, controls: There are thousands of components on the market. Hardware vendors can however usually only support a few interfaces. Interacting with every common piece of hardware is beyound their capabilities, and impossible to fit to their business model. Open source in contrast can muster the manpower (and womanpower) to make many things work, as the Linux kernel shows.

Open source is a collaborative project, where many people contribute to something which is much more than the sum of its parts.

Enters the transition to renewable energy. Bidding farewell to fossil energy is urgently needed to ensure our survival as a human civilization. And if you think about it, it is perhaps the biggest and most far-reaching technical endeavour since the invention of fire. In future, we must survive and operate without burning things (or liquids), and this is not a small feat, as it means re-inventing so many things we do. Nobody can do this alone. We'll need every intelligent person and every alive brain cell to get there.

Does the NewPipe YouTube client expose RSS feeds for my subscribed feed, individual channels or playlists? If so, where can I find the RSS URLs (or how do I generate it) for a given YouTube channel or playlist?

cross-posted from: https://gregtech.eu/post/21117342

Elixir v1.19 released: type checking of protocols and anonymous functions, broader type inference, improved compile times, and more

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/55628224

I’ve been thinking about discovering underappreciated Lemmy instances. GitHub’s awesome-lemmy-instances used to serve a similar purpose, but it hasn’t been updated in a long time, and I haven’t found anything else like it.

I got the idea from this post about finding decentralized communities in the Fediverse. I’m thinking of a Lemmy bot that tracks Lemmy instances, calculates the average number of active users and standard deviation, and identifies instances with activity below the average plus two standard deviations. It would then rank these underutilized instances by performance metrics like uptime and response time, and periodically update a curated list on Lemmy to guide users toward instances that could use more participation.

I'd love feedback on how you would go about doing something like this. And specifically how to rank by performance.