Notices by cliffle@hachyderm.io

@dalias Since you asked for feedback in the message:

I might consider swapping the position of "automated tools" and "AI" in some of the sentences, because I think a certain subset of people will hit "AI" and decide it doesn't apply to (say, hypothetically) the low quality static analyzer they're beating you with. Making it a slightly more general "no patches generated by automated anything unless you've convinced yourself they're fixing something real" might help stop that noise from good-intentioned actors.

Non-good-intentioned actors, of course, won't be stopped by a policy. So we can ignore those for now.

@dalias just wanted to leave this here:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S0361768814050041

"acceptable quality of analysis (30-80% of true positive warnings"

I'm unfamiliar with this journal.

@dalias if the goal is to poke certain dudes in the insecurity, using gender-neutral language will probably further that goal!

@mekkaokereke there's also increasing evidence (I don't have the study at hand, but I could probably track it down if you haven't seen it) that regions with high "natural" biodiversity in the Amazon are actually heavily cultivated areas, maintained over thousands and thousands of years by the folks living there.

(Who, incidentally, have been saying that the whole time.)

The forests just don't look like European-style row crops, so we don't see them.

@dalias that's true, though it's not great at getting things from _under_ the keys. My J key was being squishier than it should've.

Flipping the laptop upside down and blowing should do, if the keyboard doesn't come out easily.

My tote bag is attracting a lot of questions that I was pretty sure were answered by my tote bag.

Well, great. My #FrameworkLaptop 16 has stopped detecting displayport alt mode connections on any of its expansion ports.

It's been working okay since I replaced the non-functional keyboard and webcam they initially sent me, but I'm starting to run out of patience with the hardware issues on this expensive-ass laptop.

New theory: the Intel microarchitecture naming scheme's secret unifying theme is "places where you could imagine being hunted by wolves"

@thomasfuchs there are things I really miss about Arizona.

We found (and fixed!) a bug in the Hubris kernel last week --- the first one in just over a year! I've posted the story on my blog. It's a spooky computer murder mystery. 👻

(I love it when people find bugs in the kernel, because it's how we improve it. I'm also really happy with the way the system failed, how we diagnosed the problem, and how we were able to fix it.)

(Plus the thought of shipping unknown kernel bugs keeps me awake at night.)

https://cliffle.com/blog/who-killed-the-network-switch/

#rustlang #embedded

Elsevier, everyone's favorite copyright maximalist closed-access publisher, argues that their high costs are necessary because they're the arbiter of quality.

The arbiter of quality keeps publishing LLM-written papers. Thanks for making my argument for me, Elsevier! They didn't even read it.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1930043324001298

"In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I'm very sorry, but I don't have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model."

Here's a subtle thing I like about Rust.

Rustc has what are, in my opinion, best-in-class error messages. Several people have written crates for generating error messages like rustc.

As a result, most Rust tools I'm running into, particularly those that parse a language, have error messages roughly as good as Rustc. Like the (still-experimental) Filament HDL, whose error message are already yards better than Bluespec: https://filamenthdl.com/docs/lang/tutorial.html

I <3 good error messages.

#rust

I've set up a Tindie store as an experiment. Perhaps some of the little widgets I build to solve my own problems will also help solve some of yours!

One product so far, a keypad-to-serial interface gadget. This isn't the first such gadget, but it's the only one I've seen with its feature set. For example, It will interactively figure out the wiring of your keypad for you -- you just need a terminal app.

Plus, the manual has dinosaurs.

https://www.tindie.com/products/30818/

@nova oh crap is it airline open enrollment time already‽

Thanks for the feedback, folks! I've posted a first version of this article: https://cliffle.com/blog/not-thread-safe/

This looks at one of my favorite features of Rust: how it enables me _not_ to write all my data structures as thread-safe... and yet still have concurrent programs without data races.

Less code, less complexity, more reliability. Magic! ✨

...well, ok, type systems, but type systems are a sort of magic. ?

Here's an article I've been meaning to write, gauging interest:

In Java/C/etc a lot of thread safety advice comes down to "always be thread safe because you never know." Synchronized methods, mutexes hiding in data structures, etc.

#Rust makes it easier to write thread-safe code, but it also makes it _possible_ to write code that _can't_ be used across threads, and thus doesn't have to be thread-safe. This reduces complexity and improves performance by avoiding all that defensive coding.