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• Post #4138471

  "We have proof automation now": https://www.imperialviolet.org/2026/07/26/zstd-lean.html In which someone who's terrible at using interactive theorem provers wonders whether dependently-typed languages might be interesting now that the machines can easily write the proofs for you. Also there's zstd involved.

• Post #4118198

  @evmar@inuh.net I think because shifting by 16 would have required 64KiB alignment for segments and you couldn't waste memory like that. (Also, would it have been future-proof? I bet people would have encoded all sorts of stuff in the upper bits of the segment registers!)

• Post #3169754

  For whoever needs to hear this: Your monitor should turn on promptly when the machine wakes up. It turns out that my monitor cable has been slowly getting worse over years and, because the degradation was so gradual, I became insensitive to it. It would take five or more seconds for my monitor to switch on after waking my machine. Occasionally it wouldn't manage to come on at all and I would have to press the key combo to lock the screen and then wake it again. Finally it got to the po...

• Post #3169753

  @0x00string This is only about three years old. Now that I’ve replaced the cable, it’s doing great! I think the devices were struggling to negotiate the connection with the bad cable.

• Post #3169752

  @0x00string oh, sorry: I mean I replaced the USB-C cable. If the power cable was causing problems, that would be a lot more worrying in the “likely to cause a fire” sense!

• Post #3169751

  If you find yourself traveling, cooking, cleaning, etc by yourself in the coming week, one of my favourite podcasts has had a great series on tracking down some nasty bugs recently. Consider it like a murder mystery podcast, but for systems issues. If that sounds fun to you, peruse: https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/futurelock https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/grown-up-zfs-data-corruption-bug https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/death-by-uptime

• Post #3169750

  How come James Cameron is the only person who can make 3D movies? There were trailers before it, in 3D, and they looked bad. But then Avatar itself is visually stunning — again. ("IMAX" 3D.) The first Avatar was revelatory but audiences (including me) quickly learnt that in every other case 2D movies were actually better than than the 3D version. Except Avatar movies, which continue to be astonishingly pretty. This one is even better looking than the last due to mostly avoid...

• Post #3169749

  Since custom little utilities are now almost free for the technically-minded, I guess I value of ideas for them has increased. In light of that, two things that have been making my life slightly better this week: * A Chrome extension that lets you select any div on a page and then downloads the contents of that div (including images) as an EPUB for putting on an ereader. * A job that runs on a little server that monitors my email and, based on a YAML file of regexps for sender, subject, etc,...

• Post #3169748

  Recent podcast episodes that I particularly enjoyed, and that might be worth your time. Deliberately, none of them are about current affairs. Not that you should be cut off from the world, but I need to measure my intake of it in times like this. (The second and last are more anchored in the current moment, so choose your own mixture as desired.) * Ada Palmer on understanding the Renaissance: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer * Joe Weisenthal on literate and oral cultures: https://www.ther...

• Post #1950095

  It seems that py/cryptography's thoughts about OpenSSL (https://cryptography.io/en/latest/statements/state-of-openssl/) are doing the rounds at the moment. I've not touched OpenSSL directly in a long time. In fact, it appears that the 10-year anniversary of that (https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/10/17/boringssl.html) passed by a few months ago! So I've no direct comments on the piece but, a long time ago, I was in the position where I was landing changes in both Open...

• Post #110119

  Even when the underlying reality changes, the status quo has a strong grip. People are deeply creatures of habit. It's also difficult for the emerging understanding to overcome the barrier of becoming "common knowledge" and, prior to that, people will follow old patterns because they assume that it's expected. High-salience events create new common knowledge and so lead to larger changes in behaviour than might otherwise be justified. For example, the '56 Suez crisis was a...