Notices by David Smith (catfish_man@mastodon.social)

@gregtitus @steve @cocoaphony @inthehands I mean eventually something politically unacceptable is going to happen, so “least unacceptable” might still do it

(Reasoning: houses are an investment. An investment is useless if it doesn’t grow faster than inflation. If a necessity grows faster than inflation then by definition it occupies an ever-increasing share of expenses. Therefore houses cannot be an investment indefinitely. Currently we’re absorbing this with roommates/living with parents/etc)

@cocoaphony @gregtitus @steve @inthehands (another similar version I’ve considered is “what if you could pay your property taxes in equity”)

@cocoaphony @gregtitus @steve @inthehands right, it’s interestingly difficult.

One option I’ve considered is to have the state as a guaranteed buyer of last resort, at which point the property is converted to social housing with the original occupants having right of first refusal on occupancy.

So grandma doesn’t lose living in the family house, but the kids can’t get rich off it.

It’ll require many *many* policy changes in concert to do non-disastrously though, my idea is just one tiny angle

@inthehands ah very similar to SF. We even have right-libertarian democrats!

@skinnylatte oh good point, I haven’t actually been there in quite a while.

Several places I used to love (eg the Shanghai Dumpling King location in the Outer Richmond) are faint shadows of what I remember.

@skinnylatte @endocrimes absolutely! The elitism here is exhausting even in the occasional case where it’s aligned with my reaction.

The anecdote I mentioned was in ~2010 when things were a little less… like this :/

@endocrimes @skinnylatte it’s so fascinating to me how tastes differ wildly. I first had tartine’s country loaf at a party, unlabeled. I immediately exited the conversation I was in, found the host, and demanded to know what it was so I could get some.

Takes all sorts I guess

Oddly furious about this Waymo* thing. Like, how the fuck is your disaster response plan “idk I guess we’ll distribute roadblocks randomly across the city, focusing on blocking high traffic areas”?

It’s a good thing this is just a power outage and not, say, a larger follow-up to the four minor earthquakes in the last 24 hours.

*for non-SF folks: power is out across much of the city and waymos cant navigate it

@munin it's kind of fascinating how "clearly a cabal of tens of thousands across the world is doing secretive nonsense via unclear mechanisms" takes hold when "a cabal of hundreds is doing semi-open nonsense via extremely clear mechanisms" exists

@inthehands found the code I was thinking of that handles NSString * being half the size of String in collections while still avoiding a temporary buffer: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-corelibs-foundation/blob/1b514e4242526690c19fad9f53644065dd50b69d/Darwin/Foundation-swiftoverlay/NSDictionary.swift#L102

@steve @inthehands it's like an onion where every layer is made of infuriating consequences

@inthehands I have a feature request in with the linker folks for "weak lazy subclassing", but they understandably are not thrilled with catering to my unhinged whims :D

@inthehands yup. String being two words has other interesting consequences (like making collections of NSStrings change size as they bridge, which is awkward), but overall I'm quite happy with it.

Another fun fact: when not in smol form, the pointed-to buffer is actually an NSString subclass, which allows us to implement String -> NSString bridging by just retaining and returning it.

"But David, isn't Swift below Foundation? How can it subclass a Foundation class"

class_setSuperclass 🫠

@inthehands actually that one works two different ways 😂

1) the smol Strings optimization means we *never* have to allocate for <= 15 bytes of UTF8

2) appending to an empty String will indeed just return the argument (special case in the code), which is a constant in the binary

…or possibly the argument is also smol, I forget how we emit that. It works either way here.

One little thing I love is how Swift helps with my favorite game*: the floor^W^Wmalloc is lava

Allocation counts:

```
NSMutableArray *c = [NSMutableArray array]; //1
[c addObject: @"hello"]; //2
id d = [c mutableCopy]; //3

var a = [] //0
a.append("hello") //1
let b = a //1

NSMutableString *e = [[NSMutableString alloc] init]; //1
[e appendString: @"hello"]; //2
id f = [e copy]; //3

var g = "" //0
g.append("hello") //0
let h = g //0
```

*"malloc is lava" is a survival horror roguelike

Apropos of recent events, reminder that crashing is memory safe behavior. When someone says something is “safe” it’s a good idea to find out what they mean by the word, since it may not be what you mean by it.

Memory safety makes some bugs easier to diagnose, avoids some types of data corruption, and prevents a very large class of security exploit. It does *not* address availability.

The running joke among some of my friends is that we defend against cosmic rays by filling the entirety of memory with high-color-depth high-resolution bitmaps, such that it's wildly unlikely a random bit flip will hit something critical

It's kinda interesting that

a) random bit flips DO happen, and frequently enough that people have been able to measure the per-gigabyte rate in various memory technologies with pretty good precision

b) in 16 years of triaging bug reports from an installed base of >1 billion devices I have *never* seen a "random bit flip" bug report that didn't end up being something else under closer examination

@inthehands "what incentives does this create?" has become a durable meme in at least one of my social circles as a result of that project

@inthehands it's fun how subtle this gets even in "objective" things like software performance.

When we did the iOS 12 launch time improvement push we intentionally chose the "wrong" metric: arithmetic mean instead of geometric mean. The rationale was that over-weighting the slowest apps would actually get us better results for our purposes.