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• Post #4460817

  oh hey cargo-show-asm is really quite nice. Really handy to have around as I figure out how to write code that both looks nice and that rustc/LLVM can SIMD optimize the snot out of. Also TIL that #[inline] both hints at LLVM to inline a bit more aggressively than the default, but also dumps the function's MIR into the crate metadata so that callers in other crates get a chance to inline it as well. In theory LTO should also take care of cross-crate inlining, but it seems fiddlier to make h...

• Post #4152465

  hmkay so a few teeny tiny teething problems with my simd bitpacking code, it seems...

• Post #4014358

  I enjoy that in Balatro, the score is a float, so with a sufficiently broken setup you can score NaN. Furthermore, with a broken enough setup you can keep playing rounds until the score you have to hit is also NaN. At which point you must lose, because NaN != NaN. I just find it funny that two arguably bugs combine into forcing even the stupidest possible run to end.

• Post #3951952

  Today I was surprised that rust's Iterator::collect() can transform an Iterator> into a Result. That is, given an iterator where each item can be either a value or an error, it can give you a result that is either a collection of values if the iterator never yielded an error, or the first error encountered by the iteration. Figuring out how this worked let me into Result's implementation of FromIterator, which itself led me into core::iter::adapters::try_process, which bottomed out...

• Post #3732190

  Bahahah it works, oh my god it's so horrible and it works

• Post #3594951

  Zero days since reading a blog post about switching programming languages that reminded me of advice I once saw: "this isn't an airport, you don't have to announce your departure"

• Post #3382891

  KDE updated on my work machine, and dragging windows around now does the compiz jello wibble effect. I suspect it wasn't intentional to turn that effect on in the update, but it's giving me a surprising amount of joy. Remember when computers were a bit silly and people did stuff with them for fun? KDE remembers.

• Post #2001046

  It's all over my feed already, but in case I get to give you good news: VOYAGER ONE LIVES! Its incredible team managed to work around the damaged region of memory, and they're getting engineering data back again! https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth I went digging for more details, and quickly ended up out of my depth, but 🧵 of the bits and pieces I put together...

• Post #1952394

  Deepmind: we have published a philosophy paper about the nature of consciousness and whether AI can be conscious Tech bros: this is just a bunch of complicated words in a field I've never engaged with! I cannot easily understand and reduce this argument to a short linkedin take! There is no obvious way to flatten this into an algorithm! This makes me confused and angry! Why won't philosophy just give me a definite, easy to skim answer about the nature of consciousness! They must...

• Post #1943378

  This morning for no obvious reason, I remembered the Fuel Rats. Elite:Dangerous is an MMO space sim game, with a big galaxy in which you fly a spaceship doing stuff. Spaceships need fuel, which you buy at stations, or if you have a fuel scoop you can skim the surface of certain stars to get usable fuel. Space is big though, and it's quite possible to run yourself low on fuel in a way that you can no longer warp to any inhabited system to refuel. At which point you're screwed.

• Post #1941699

  For Reasons, I needed an illustration for a slide deck, and I made this. No LLMs were involved in the creation of this nonsense, just good old fashioned tired meat.

• Post #1678455

  Some people just have too many skillz. I was watching the video for the new mountain erosion shader that's been going around (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4V21_uUK8Y , it's a treat! There's also a blog post if you prefer reading). So then I went looking at what other videos the channel has, and found one on using pathfinding to draw plausible/realistic paths in a procedurally generated world (https://blog.runevision.com/2016/03/note-on-creating-natural-paths-in.html...

• Post #1273808

  Anyone know what circuit board this easter egg is from, and who made it? I'm trying to find a source to attribute. Not the quote itself, I know that's from System Shock. I mean the board that had this printed on it. Looking at reverse image search, it's one of those meme images that's been around for ever and has gone through the social media human centipede so many times that the source is just "idk internet engagement farming bots". I'm hoping the six degrees of...

• Post #1137322

  huh, someone did the thing I was wishing for to the port control protocol, and I somehow missed it. There's a specified anycast IP you can send port mapping requests to, to hit the nearest on-path PCP server. The spec's 10 years old, what are the chances anyone bothered to implement it...

• Post #1137321

  Today in little software microaggressions: Google's slides thing calls this font "Sans Serif". Look I don't mean to be picky, but THIS FONT LITERALLY HAS SERIFS, THEY'RE RIGHT THERE. This wasn't wrong at some point in the past. I swear to fucking god the AI gold rush is corroding and rotting even basic things like "maybe the font name should describe the font". What the fuck are we even doing

• Post #1137320

  In the wake of my Adventure with text rendering earlier, a horrible idea has lodged itself into my brain: someone should make a typeface called Sans, and that typeface should have a serifed font within it called Sans Serif.

• Post #1076724

  Very slightly work adjacent: a "we've updated our privacy policy" email in my inbox reminded me of a thing that $work did, and that I wish every company did: we checked all our ToS and similar documents into a git repo and published it, so that when they change you can just go look at the damn diff and see what changed (https://github.com/tailscale/terms-and-conditions). If you work someplace and have the authority to do this, I wish this was normalized and expected of...

• Post #1001438

  I have the very first few series of Have I Got News For You (early 1990s) on as background noise, and the news stories are bizarrely timeless: UK court being transphobic, war in the middle east, Keir Starmer being a berk, jokes about the sex pest formerly known as prince Andrew...

• Post #1001437

  In the midst of all the spam (particularly AI startup spam these days, fuck off unsolicited pitches), I now genuinely look forward to the periodic Misumi marketing email I apparently signed up for at some point. Amid all the "AI for making soup" dross, they just come along with "look at this neat linear actuator! Also we have Aluminum Beam in 4 more shapes now! Here's a deep dive into pneumatic motion systems!" My only complaint is that they frequentl...

• Post #1001435

  Wow due to reimaging a machine I was exposed to youtube without DeArrow today, and jfc, it's hilariously hostile. I can't recommend buying DeArrow enough. $1 minimum purchase (secretly $0 if you really can't afford it), pay as much as you like, and it replaces the clickbait thumbnails and titles with stills from the video and sane, informative titles. I can't overstate how much it improves the experience of existing near youtube.

• Post #1001434

  Another bit of praise for incus. Chatter about Archive Team earlier reminded me that I have a server could use an archive warrior. The VM is distributed as a .ova, so I was expecting some annoyance to get it ported to incus. But no, incus once again defied my expectations by having an incus-migrate tool that seemingly can import pretty much any VM image, or container image, or disk image. It popped up a wizard, I told it I wanted to import a .ova, pointed at the image (I'd downloaded it...

• Post #1001433

  The Nom parser combinator library in rust has a book, like many rust libraries. Naturally it's called the Nominomicon. I approve.

• Post #1001432

  To celebrate yet another article speculating on the identity of satoshi nakamoto, I've decided to make up the strangest thing I can think of and just declare that canon instead. By fiat, if you'll excuse the irony. So, it's official: Satoshi Nakamoto was in fact Margaret Thatcher. The timeline fits, she needed a hobby in retirement and Satoshi vanished right as Thatcher's health declined. Satoshi did re-emerge briefly in 2015, well after Thatcher's death...

• Post #817484

  Incus is so nice. You can really tell that it's being built by people who give a shit about UX and doing things right. Case in point, I created and booted a VM, then started adding host bind mounts to it. First of all the UX is the same for containers and VMs, you just tell it you want a disk with a particular source/destination, and Incus figures out internally whether to materialize that as bind mounts, virtio-fs mounts, 9p mounts, whatever. But also as I was creating the new disks,...

• Post #817483

  Today I'm finally learning about nftables in detail, and the result is that I'm quite sad. It comes very close to replicating the really useful, composable semantics of the Windows packet filter, but a couple blunders result in a system that ends up being _less_ expressive than classic iptables for common modern needs like "docker needs to have a few specific opinions about a few packets, in addition to global system policy".

• Post #817482

  Playing more Oxygen Not Included, and I'm really enjoying playing it somewhat realistically, without exploit-adjacent mechanics. Stuff like liquid locks that can somehow hold back multiple atmospheres of pressure differential or hold a perfect vacuum without the liquid boiling. Or contraptions that rely on the specific details of the physics simulation to magically sort gasses or teleport objects. It makes things messier, which I find fun because it forces you to compensate for things l...

• Post #727333

  Canadian friends who drive: Transport Canada is soliciting feedback on ultra-bright vehicle headlights and headlight glare at night. I encourage you to give them data on your experience, so that they might update the regulations to stop SUVs from routinely blinding me with their factory-fitted Nuclear Fireball 9000 LED Darkness Devastators Shock And Awe Edition headlights aimed directly into my face and eyes. https://tc.canada.ca/en/corporate-services/consultations/canadian-experience-vehicle-...

• Post #384614

  > “Ford,” he said, “you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.” I'm sad Douglas Adams is gone from this world, but I'm grateful that he left it better than he found it.