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• Post #4477317

  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mjk/117044034810143202 "Why do they need to keep raising money?" ask the commenters. Ah, I see you're from software!

• Post #4477316

  Kinda want to write a bot that just replies to any really long, unsolicited, probably-LLM-generated pull request with this picture of me at, like, five

• Post #4477315

  I am bewildered and disappointed to report that Android's onboard emoji search stops working if you have a flaky Internet connection. Meaning, it is not local. Meaning, they're going out to the goddamn Internet to see if any of O(1000) records match the word "fish." I can't even.

• Post #4477314

  In the early 90s, PKWare offered their Data Compression Library as a way to put basic compression into other applications. It uses a different algorithm from PKZIP. I encountered it because it's used by the proprietary recipe program that my mom used, and I've been recovering her database. Turns out it's had an input-controlled buffer overrun since, well, forever! The library itself won't produce streams with the property required to trigger it, but it also doesn...

• Post #4389866

  My partner's been running a D&D campaign for our friend group for ~4 years now. A plot point had us moving 38 years forward in time (fae stuff). So obviously she's worked out the inflation rate and redone the equipment cost lists.

• Post #4152263

  Since Rust still doesn't implement Default for [u8; 2048], I find myself pulling in the (fantastic) zerocopy crate just to get new_zeroed. Because zerocopy::FromZeroes is _absolutely_ implemented for arrays of all sizes, unlike Default.

• Post #3927042

  This post captures a lot of my discomfort with generating code using LLMs: you might review it today, but so far everyone I know stops reviewing it eventually. https://dustycloud.org/blog/faulty-towers-vibe-sickness-and-the-vibe-bobsled/ Seriously considering dusting off my degree, I could start being useful in about two years of school plus supervision.

• Post #3609677

  When I started writing my accounting software in 2021, I took a shortcut that has served unexpectedly well. I wanted it to be able to read all the various CSVs and whatnot that banks and credit card companies produce, in addition to files with my own additions. The obvious choice would be "importing" these into some sort of formal database, for speed of access. But for simplicity I decided to just re-parse all of the source files -- a year or more of statements and downloads -- every...

• Post #2493865

  Couldn't sleep this morning, so I decided to clean up and publish my Smalltalk-80 VM, which is now named Verdigrist. https://codeberg.org/cliffle/verdigrist It's not complete, but it's complete enough to poke around most of the default environment, and it appears to be significantly faster than the other "toy" (bluebook-based) implementations. I also find it easier to understand, because I introduced types, eliminated global variables, and ensured tha...

• Post #2171020

  My firmware crashes, taking a code path that shouldn't be possible. The bug flickers in and out as I move code around, sensitive to alignment or code layout or something. In my C codebase: "welp, I'm clearly corrupting memory, better go hunting." In my Rust codebase: "...this seems like a CPU bug." And, yes, it appears I have found an unlisted STM32 erratum. @mjk we should issue badges or coffee mugs or something.

• Post #2171014

  Fellow infosec folks: If I wanted to incentivize people to try and exploit Hubris, what should I do? What would you want to see? While open source, the system is mostly used by Oxide, a for-profit company, so I would expect "am I doing this for free" to come up. Explicit threat model is also good. What else? We've hired firms for this but with mixed results (they mostly know C). I wanna open it to everyone else. I would be _delighted_ to give guidance. Boost away....

• Post #2116778

  An oldie but a goodie: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259 Good thing this is purely a thought experiment, right? ...right?

• Post #1957368

  hey hey kid yeah, you wanna see Jean Paul Sartre kick Sam Altman in the nuts https://existentialcomics.com/comic/652

• Post #1957367

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116477568123660243 I'm excited to read this. You might be too.

• Post #1957363

  Well, Tindie has been back up for a few days but is still refusing to pay out money owed, so... I've set all my products to 0-in-stock and attempted to redirect buyers to my Lectronz storefront. Amusingly, they won't let me set my store banner message to include a Lectronz URL. I bet it blocks any URL, but, given how much trust they've squandered, this isn't a great look. #tindie

• Post #1957361

  I've been intermittently poking at my Wordle solver from this weekend. Haven't published the code yet. But in case you're curious, - Using a parallel search strategy, it solves 2272/2315 (98.1%) of possible puzzles in original-Wordle in 6 tries or less (94.7% in <=5, 83.5% in <=4) - When solving any single puzzle, most are under 700ms, the worst I've found are around 3s. - When solving _all_ puzzles, I added some simple memoization to reuse some e...

• Post #1896585

  Probably the favorite ADHD engineering trick that I use: I have notes for every project. If it's a computer project, I have a notes/ folder containing dated markdown files with stream of consciousness stuff. They seem useless at the time, but help me focus and maintain my train of thought... and more often than not prove invaluable later. Example: https://github.com/cbiffle/m4vga-rs/tree/master/notes If it's not a computer project, I have paper notebooks. For me it works best t...

• Post #1786967

  Me: "By ensuring that illegal states can't be represented and expressing the logic as a total function, we can easily reason about what the computer can and cannot do when it hits this point." The rest of my industry, sometimes: "Please. I beg you. Stop producing output about goblins. You are supposed to produce code. Why are there goblins." https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/openai-codex-system-prompt-includes-explicit-directive-to-never-talk-about-goblins/

• Post #1725529

  Of Helix's various quirks and limitations, I think its incredibly low key "lol I decided not to save even though you just asked me to" warning on the very bottom line of the screen is the one that messes me up the most.

• Post #1638530

  Got nerd-sniped into thinking about modeling Wordle as a constraint-solving problem by my partner this morning, and bootstrapped something basic over lunch. It's doing _okay_ but not, like, amazing. ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ nidal ⬜🟨⬜🟨⬜ frosh ⬜🟨🟩⬜🟨 yurts 🟩⬜🟩🟩⬜ sprug 🟩⬜🟩🟩⬜ serum 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 scrub

• Post #1638529

  So Tindie was apparently working enough to send me an email that I have an order, but not well enough for me to actually view the order or fulfill it. I've joked in the past that Tindie's rate of feature development suggests that the average number of people working on the site is zero. It's been totally down for several days at this point, and I'm not delighted about being right.

• Post #1463301

  It is always a good day when I get the opportunity to introduce someone new to the works of Victor Borge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIf3IfHCoiE

• Post #1463300

  It has been difficult to motivate myself to write new articles, knowing that they will just be collected by scrapers I've asked to stop scraping, and then regurgitated to people looking for answers. The only benefit I get from my writing is engaging with people who found it useful. I don't run ads on it, and theoretical licensing fees from the AI companies (not that they've offered, of course) would not actually be much of a motivation. I write for people. So I'...

• Post #1013129

  Somehow, none of my local friends are interested in rehoming this street score I found down the block. (It's a lab bench top centrifuge.) (That's also the alt text.)

• Post #926895

  For my part, I'm having a nice time celebrating Cis Day Of Shutting The Fuck Up And Boosting Others

• Post #926892

  Interesting. A very cute cafe has opened near my house. Its name is a made up word from a Jorge Luis Borges story, which is an excellent way to catch my attention. (Seems an unlikely coincidence, but you never know!) And then I notice their events list mentioning @mikeolson , who's in the extended social circle of my day job. So, small world. https://www.uqbarthecafe.com/

• Post #745782

  Collected this weekend's updates to my Smalltalk-80 VM into a new wasm build. (You may need to shift-reload it to get it to work if you've visited before.) https://cliffle.com/tmp-st80/ There's now a speed selector to experience what was considered "barely usable" back in 1983 (5000 bytecodes/sec, not remotely usable by modern standards). And the VM is complete enough to run "Benchmark testStandardTests." If you crank up the speed kn...

• Post #683184

  I find most of the discourse on "AI" right now really painfully polarized, which is why I've been avoiding talking about it -- I have no interest in getting sucked into it on either "side." I obviously have thoughts (as an author and programmer) but they contain nuance and complexity, and I don't think there's a lot of room for that at the moment.

• Post #649605

  Excellent post from Ralf Jung on how to think about all the scary systems stuff we do, from the perspective of Rust's abstract machine model. https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2026/03/13/inline-asm.html

• Post #649604

  I really appreciate that the kids have picked another funny number, sometimes I need more than three example constants in my tests.