Notices by David Smith (catfish_man@mastodon.social), page 3

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.

This is exactly right, and it feels completely ridiculous the entire time you're watching.

@inthehands I am fully expecting to be the only person who's managed to lose money on SF real estate twice in a row 😂

@inthehands I’m hoping to be selling my house around then so I figure the market will crash exactly as I do

Tired: posting work stuff on Mastodon

Also tired: posting personal stuff on LinkedIn

Wired, apparently: posting lewds on Electron GitHub pull requests??

Some people really are just out here making choices every day.

New ISA proposal: UTF-8 instructions

* variable width but you can count leading bits in the decoder to quickly find out how wide an instruction is
* use zero-width joiners to attach modifiers, e.g. atomic add is “lock zwj add”
* self-synchronizing means it’s easy to disassemble and you can’t jump to the middle of an instruction
* emoji

FYI: Kaiser sent me an email recommending I get a flu vaccine, but I checked their website and covid vaccines are also available starting the 15th!

Irresponsible of them not to headline that imo, but glad to see it.

#covid

Mathematicians are very into optimal packing arrangements but I really think they’ve neglected the subject of packing liquids. Specifically, how to fit 8 cups of chicken broth into 2 cups of rice (and assorted onions, garlic, turmeric, and mushroom seasoning) ❤️ #cooking

@whitequark @pikhq rare context where me groggily misreading this as “on the other one, the third hand, …” made sense still 😂

@inthehands my very favorite variant of this is the ones who think farming would be easy for programmers. Ran across that on Twitter back in the day.

Still can’t get over this error UI 😂

@inthehands also sometimes Chesterton’s Fence is electrified and will just kill you if you try to remove it.

Thinking about how people on Darwin OSs trying to skip the Foundation dependency when doing file IO tend to get blindsided by “oh no iCloud fault files depend on WHAT??” at some later date.

@skinnylatte lol yeah for the price of my janky 1300 sq ft freeway-adjacent house in SF I could get two of the gorgeous architect-designed 2000 sq ft passive solar home in the woods in Portland that my parents live in. People have no idea how ridiculous it is around here.

Paste of fresh grated ginger, lemon zest, salt, pepper, msg, ground coriander, and grated garlic to use as a dry rub ❤️ #cooking

So the bad news is that was supposed to produce “syrup” when roasted for me to baste the chicken with, and it produced “goop” instead, which will probably burn if I do that.

The good news is that means we are now officially Off Recipe, so I can do whatever I want, and this goop is delicious.

#cooking