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  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@rain/117446083340236126 This is why, when people say things like "omg the LLM can generate an embedded kernel for me!!!" I can't help but think "Yeah, it was trained on _at least_ three of mine, plus immeasurable training load on my webserver serving the docs." By claiming ownership of the result, or even just claiming to have managed the machine while it spit it out, you're basically just stripping all attribution for the actual work that...

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  Been letting my Mandarin lapse this year, but, it appears I remember how to say "I don't eat beef" intelligibly 👍 (Trying a new knife cut noodle place, around here they're often from Chengdu and put beef in everything)

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  RE: https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/117406074421025473 This is a great thread on the complexity of secure hibernate. I think a lot of people have a habit of looking at secure boot and these defenses as being anti user. They're not. We really need to rename userland. Userland is where every website runs. The kernel is the program that you, the user, use to defend yourself from userland. Secure boot ensures it isn't subverted against your will.

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  I'm not sure which of you needs to hear this, but: lrzsz-sx has at some point started defaulting to YMODEM. You have to add -X to get actual OG XMODEM. Yeah, no idea. But that's why your firmware transfer is failing.

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  I feel like Bryan's blog post buries the lede a little bit here with its choice of headline -- yeah Oxide took more money, but, the important thing is why: We've been quietly profitable since the start of the year and have been receiving more orders than we can fill. In this current economy of "give me more money so I can light it on fire" and companies filing to IPO proud to spend $3 to make $1, it's nice to be able to tell investors "if you...

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  In honor of Spooky Season, a PicoCalc horror vignette! "Oh I see you've got a graphics thing running on your PicoCalc, let me just ... oh ... oh no ... WHERE IS ITS BRAIN‽ YOU MONSTER 😱" (I thought it would be a nice body for my Forth machine, so I'm prototyping before building a Pico-sized module)

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  Any KiCad 10 users out there who can tell me why pressing a key repeatedly, fast, only recognizes the first press until a delay elapses? (Edit: I appear to have gotten 10.0.5 which has an input bug! Thanks @remmy ) Like, open schematic, select item, start moving, then press R-R-R to rotate it three times... it rotates only once if you press too quickly. Some kind of type-ahead search in the hotkey mechanism maybe? The part that really bothers me is that this affects cursor keys, when nudging...

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  Physical therapist: "Do you have any resistance bands at home?" Me: "Are you thinking more Rage Against The Machine, or, like, Woody Guthrie?" Physical therapist: 😑

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

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  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

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  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.

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  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...

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

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  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...

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  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...

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  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.

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  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....

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

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

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

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  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

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  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...

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  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...

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  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/

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  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.

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  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

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  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.

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  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