from my link log —
BLUF: make your writing more powerful with the bottom line up front.
https://www.animalz.co/blog/bottom-line-up-front/
saved 2019-09-13 https://dotat.at/:/RAR32.html
Remote
Tony Finch
@fanf@mendeddrum.org
mastodon 4.7.2unix / internet / open source software bodger
• 🏳️🌈🇪🇺🇬🇧 • he/they • 🚴 • 🦀 • 💉😷 • 🏳️⚧️ • 🇺🇦 • 🇵🇸 • ✊🏿 • tfr
1886 Followers
2213 Following
50 Posts
Joined November 15, 2022
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
from my link log —
The bubble sort curve.
https://linesthatconnect.github.io/blog/a-rigorous-derivation-of-the-bubble-sort-curve/
saved 2024-04-23 https://dotat.at/:/5F0BK.html
from my link log —
Rust for Morello ARM CHERI: always-on memory safety, even in unsafe code.
https://drops.dagstuhl.de/storage/00lipics/lipics-vol263-ecoop2023/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.39/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.39.pdf
saved 2026-07-21 https://dotat.at/:/9MIM0.html
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
from my link log —
A 40-year-old bug in BSD unix domain socket inode allocation discovered on the DEFCON 34 main stage.
https://yuvalino.com/how-can-you-not-be-romantic-about-unix-domain-sockets
saved 2026-09-14 https://dotat.at/:/A1LTF.html
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
from my link log —
RISC-V: they should have known better.
https://dmitry.gr/?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=12.%20RV
saved 2026-08-14 https://dotat.at/:/OEC83.html
oh lovely, french wiktionary has an appendix on swearing in québécois https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Annexe:Sacres_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois
(i love the tutorial on swearing in the movie “bon cop bad cop” which was (if anything) made harder to understand by the subtitles)
pondering how to advise someone who wrote “I want to play devil’s advocate and argue …” that it comes across as “I want to be an argumentative asshole” … but without turning the advice into a vicious flame
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
from my link log —
Verona: a research programming language for concurrent ownership.
https://github.com/microsoft/verona
saved 2020-10-28 https://dotat.at/:/6KY3K.html
Replying to
“do we even have a registration number?!”
several hours of searching later
“uh, will 1571 c. 29 13 Eliz 1 do?”
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Eliz1/13/29
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
anyone know which station this is?
a youtuber used it as a thumbnail on a video about cambridge
RE: https://vmst.io/@DanMorgan/116516129181127637
putting on Mata Zyklek by Angine de Poitrine
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
from my link log —
Learning a regular language by inferring a DFA with the TTT algorithm.
https://rahul.gopinath.org/post/2026/06/09/ttt-grammar-inference/
saved 2026-06-11 https://dotat.at/:/4I4X2.html
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
from my link log —
Debootstrapping without archeology: stacked implementations in Camlboot.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09231
saved 2026-06-10 https://dotat.at/:/LKPL6.html
from my link log —
Documentation and analysis of the Linux random number generator.
https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Publications/Studies/LinuxRNG/LinuxRNG_EN_V5_9.html
saved 2026-07-28 https://dotat.at/:/3YJ5L.html
Replying to
@sash « I stumbled into the first vulnerability while debugging the reverse DNS zone for my IPv6 range in RIPEstat, RIPE NCC’s network information tool. A blue marquee started scrolling across the page, from an XSS payload I had put in my DNS server months earlier. »
actual irl lol, excellent work
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
from my link log —
A floating point bit twiddling toy.
http://evanw.github.io/float-toy/
saved 2020-01-23 https://dotat.at/:/G639G.html
from my link log —
ip2unix: turn IP sockets into Unix domain sockets.
https://github.com/nixcloud/ip2unix
saved 2020-07-08 https://dotat.at/:/5A9WC.html
from my link log —
Servers with personality.
https://caolan.uk/links/servers/
saved 2026-05-02 https://dotat.at/:/6X008.html
from my link log —
The UX of Lego interface panels.
https://www.designedbycave.co.uk/2020/LEGO-Interface-UX/
saved 2020-08-03 https://dotat.at/:/QJ8ZR.html
Replying to
@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems i enjoy technologyconnections’ rants about how feeble they are :-)
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
from my link log —
Fully in-place functional programming with Koka.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3607840
saved 2026-07-06 https://dotat.at/:/PGVVV.html
from my link log —
PostgreSQL PostGIS trajectories through space and time.
https://blog.rustprooflabs.com/2020/11/postgis-trajectory-intro
saved 2020-12-02 https://dotat.at/:/6TANP.html
Replying to
@henryk@chaos.social heh yeah the statute of elizabeth is similarly postdated for oxford and cambridge, by nearly 400 years after their founding dates :-)
Replying to
@dwmalone@mastodon.ie it would be amusing if the eu applies clear product labelling regulations to usb cables :-)
Replying to
@al45tair@pleroma.al45tair.net @joe@f.duriansoftware.com @aburka@hachyderm.io different thing!
i think you’re thinking of the relatively new thing where an unnamed struct or union inside a struct roughly speaking inlines the members of the nested object so you don’t need multiple levels of . . .
a shitty version of it was standardized in c20ish (i forget which version) with irritating limitations that make me think, oh this might be useful? actually no, wtf
the 1970s c struct namespacing thing was much weirder
basically you could use x->member for any x, whether it was a pointer or an integer
there was a single namespace for all struct members: the type of x did nothing to narrow down what ->member meant
which is why the oldskool unix api structs have prefixes for the member names like struct stat st_mode st_ino etc
to avoid accidental name collisions
Replying to
@joe@f.duriansoftware.com @aburka@hachyderm.io it isn’t so common in v7 but in v6 you have things like https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/sys/param.h so kernel code can write PS->integ which nowadays we would write *(int*)PS
cast syntax (type)val was relatively late, after v6, shortly before k&r, so i think the bourne shell shows signs of casts not yet being a thing
Replying to
Replying to
@dotstdy@mastodon.social the context in the “fixes” link makes it look to me like it was caused by deleting the () by mistake when cleaning up some code duplication https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/sys/kern/?id=f373437a01a3
Replying to
@pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz i grew up with john ireland’s “gentle art of making guinness” hung in series along a staircase
lovely illustrations which i think were painted for a calendar in about 1980
Replying to
@typeswitch heh :-) have you seen simon tatham’s article on custom control structures? https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/mp/
from my link log —
A project to restore Interlisp-D to usability on modern OSes.
saved 2020-08-06 https://dotat.at/:/5KGKE.html
Replying to
@tubbydammer@mastodonapp.uk huh, that makes me if even normal councils have corporate registration documents, or if (say) cambridge city council would have to refer to its 1207 charter
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
i’m enjoying alastair reid’s thoughts on designing a language for readability so that nonspecialist programmers can understand intel’s instruction set architecture specification https://intellabs.github.io/isa-tools/
Replying to
@aburka@hachyderm.io @joe@f.duriansoftware.com totally obvious to pdp11 kernel hackers!
(i am not a pdp11 kernel hacker)
Replying to
@joe@f.duriansoftware.com @zwarich@hachyderm.io aren’t rust async / c++ coroutines based on knowing transitive frame sizes?
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
from my link log —
An introduction to canvas in Emacs.
https://monadicsheep.org/blog/an-introduction-to-canvas-in-emacs.html
saved 2026-08-23 https://dotat.at/:/79WDD.html
from my link log —
Finding a goroutine bug with TLA+.
https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/tla-golang/
saved 2020-09-25 https://dotat.at/:/C66CZ.html
Boosted by @joe@f.duriansoftware.com
from my link log —
antcc: a little C compiler.
https://codeberg.org/lsof/antcc
saved 2026-05-25 https://dotat.at/:/C9DRG.html
from my link log —
The tech of ‘Terminator 2’: an oral history.
https://vfxblog.com/2017/08/23/the-tech-of-terminator-2-an-oral-history/
saved 2026-07-12 https://dotat.at/:/FF40O.html
Replying to
i guess i could have thought of the old unix crdelay feature which only went up to 3, which suggests how much slower cr was than bs
(but i still wonder how much the speed was determined by serial baud rate and how much by mechanical limits)
https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=stty&apropos=0&sektion=1&manpath=Unix+Seventh+Edition&format=html
what ios mastodon clients are good?
i’m annoyed by ivory’s crappy ui for filters, which spams the server requesting userpics that i don’t want to see, and pegs the rate limiter
i’ve reported it as a bug but they don’t seem to be making improvements to ivory so i should probably look elsewhere
from my link log —
On the DeepMind AlphaTensor new matrix multiplication algorithms.
https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/on-alphatensors-new-matrix-multiplication-algorithms/
saved 2022-10-07 https://dotat.at/:/5SUXS.html
from my link log —
What exactly was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]?
https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/blog/?p=1035
saved 2021-04-12 https://dotat.at/:/KWNJ4.html
from my link log —
A new online era of The Far Side is coming!
https://www.thefarside.com/
saved 2019-10-01 https://dotat.at/:/W823N.html
from my link log —
Yak shaving #ifdef-style conditional compilation in Rust.
https://bitshifter.github.io/2020/05/07/conditional-compilation-in-rust/
saved 2020-05-15 https://dotat.at/:/Y7K6Z.html
Replying to
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange you might find https://github.com/Latias94/merman is easier (i would be interested to hear how well it works if you try it)