Terminal Update Gets GPU Acceleration.
Also, Mandatory Code Sharing and Closet Servers

The New Terminal Has Better Fonts, Shut Up About It

The office supply drama continues as the Ghostty 1.0 terminal emulator has finally arrived, meaning another piece of infrastructure will now require a dedicated GPU to render plaintext correctly. This is, apparently, crucial for productivity. The development team has optimized the thing to within an inch of its life, focusing entirely on a custom rendering engine that ensures your `ls -la` output is mathematically precise and color-accurate. The official justification is "true colors," which is what you say when you have perfected an area of computer science that no end user actually requested in the first place. The terminal experience needed to be faster, but the real bottleneck is not the display; it is always the user's ability to remember command line flags. We have simply outsourced our impatience to the graphics card, a solution I am sure will not cause any thermal throttling issues in the server closet.

The 681 comments on the announcement are exactly what you would expect; a furious and highly technical debate on why this particular flavor of text display is marginally superior or inferior to the six other highly performant terminal options. This is the tech equivalent of arguing over which brand of staple remover is ergonomically best for the mandatory all hands meeting. The Ghostty team, God bless their hearts, just wanted to make the text look crisp. And now they have to manage a support thread full of people complaining about an invisible microsecond of latency. A lot of effort for an aesthetic improvement that will be entirely covered up by the user's collection of ASCII art fire hydrants.

Government Passes "Share Your Mess" Code Act

Bureaucracy has achieved the impossible: making the concept of open source software feel like mandatory extra homework for the entire country. The new SHARE IT Act now requires US federal agencies to share custom-developed source code with each other. This is an attempt at inter-departmental cooperation that has historically failed with the simple "reply all" button, so the odds of success here are looking great.

The idea is to save taxpayer money by preventing, for example, the Department of Energy from paying a contractor to build the exact same glorified Perl script the Department of Agriculture finished three years ago. The reality is that the new law guarantees a shared repository of thousands of codebases written by the lowest bidder, documented entirely with comments like // do not touch this or everything breaks, and maintained by a single intern who quit six months ago. We are now legally obligated to read each other's spaghetti code, which is a new level of federal oversight that not even the Patriot Act dared to inflict.

The Sisyphean Music Server in Your Closet

Another Monday, another person decides they have had enough of the subscription economy, hence the rising popularity of Blackcandy, a self-hosted music streaming server. We have all been there; Spotify raised its prices again, and now you must invest dozens of hours setting up a Ruby on Rails instance just to listen to the same three albums you downloaded illegally in 2007.

This is the inevitable cycle of the self-hosted life: you spend more time maintaining the operating system, the database, the reverse proxy, and the SSL certificate than you ever spend actually enjoying the service you built. The Blackcandy project is fine, it is great, it does exactly what it promises; but the true cost of "free" software is not the license, it is the two AM wake-up call when your hard drive decides it is done with your entire music library.

Briefs

• Legacy Systems Flexing: A person wrote a Minecraft server entirely in COBOL, which is perhaps the best argument for mandatory retirement I have ever seen. This is what happens when you let the mainframe guys play video games.
• AI as a Utility Monopoly: A very clever person wrote that OpenAI is Visa, comparing the AI giant's lobbying to the regulatory capture efforts of legacy payment processors. They are not building Skynet; they are just making sure the toll booth stays expensive and mandatory.
• The Wheel is Round and in Rust: The Egui framework is yet another immediate mode GUI written in Rust. At this point, writing a new Rust GUI framework is simply a required rite of passage before a developer is allowed to get into actual profitable work.