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zev honked back 15 Jan 2025 18:07 -0800
in reply to: https://mastodon.social/users/cks/statuses/113835434728119668

@cks @jschauma While there have probably been occasional other problems I've encountered, refusal to complete an arbitrary filename where I want one (i.e. what @jschauma described) is the most common by such an overwhelming margin that I can't think of any others offhand. FWIW, plain filename completion is bound to M-/ (\e/ in bash/readline parlance) by default, so you can usually use that to manually override obstinate tab completion when needed.

zev honked back 02 Jan 2025 17:09 -0800
in reply to: https://hackers.town/users/GeoffWozniak/statuses/113760754759027756

@GeoffWozniak Same here; the terminal performance hype of recent years is a bit baffling, though I guess not hugely surprising:

  • performance is fairly easily quantifiable
  • widely-used, established implementations such as xterm and gnome-terminal weren't really designed and implemented with performance as the #1 priority (because even a straightforward, non-performance-focused implementation isn't going to be anywhere close to a bottleneck in real-world use)
  • implementation is complex enough to be challenging and more than a few days' worth of work, but small enough to be tractable for a single person to take on (unlike, say, a compiler competitive with gcc or clang), so it can be (or at least start out as) a fun little project to hack on

So a motivated individual can take it on and relatively quickly feel pretty chuffed at outperforming the "major players" by a substantial margin. Sprinkle in some self-promotion and that subset of the population that was doggedly running Gentoo with -funroll-loops 20 years ago and PREEMPT_RT kernels on their desktops 10 years ago and it's the pointless performance obsession du jour.

I often wonder what fraction of the userbase would actually notice if you were to sneakily replace their {kitty,ghostty,alacritty,whatever-else} binary with a build that artificially slowed it to xterm-level performance, and I suspect the answer might approach denorm territory if expressed as a float.

zev honked 29 Dec 2024 23:21 -0800

Freya requires pets.

dog resting chin on human arm, looking up longingly in search of attention

zev bonked 15 Dec 2024 23:21 -0800
original: rk@mastodon.well.com

@VeroniqueB99

My grandfather was a postal worker.

He got a letter with the address of a black line, then a green line, then an orange line.

The letter was successfully delivered to Black’s Florist on Green Avenue in Orange, TX.

zev honked back 15 Dec 2024 18:51 -0800
in reply to: https://social.treehouse.systems/users/mxshift/statuses/113660041544827156

@mxshift @cliffle @artemis I'm guessing this one of those things where most of the time it works fine, but then under specific impossible-to-predict sets of microarchitectural circumstances will just hang the core or something? (I hit a bug like that involving branch prediction and instruction prefetching across page boundaries on the ARM1176JZFS core circa 2009; reporting it to ARM and convincing them of its realness was a fun process.)

zev honked 15 Dec 2024 18:49 -0800

We have nice neighbors. Across-the-street ones invited us over for cookie decorating, where (also in attendance) next door one made an adorable portrait of our dog.

Bowie the dog, in the flesh and in the medium of frosting on cookie.

Bowie the dog, in the flesh and in the medium of frosting on cookie.

zev bonked 04 Dec 2024 14:25 -0800
original: th@social.v.st

@platypus my bank used to allow custom security questions, so I set one to "what are you wearing?" and the answer to "that's very inappropriate please transfer me to your manager". the first time an customer service rep encountered it they couldn't stop laughing and had to actually transfer to a coworker to complete the call.

zev honked back 03 Dec 2024 14:24 -0800
in reply to: https://social.treehouse.systems/users/mxshift/statuses/113591165108018677

@mxshift @weirdunits At my last job I had plans for a little project that would have achieved speeds in that range -- simplex networking over a power cable from a server to its power shelf, transmitting bits by modulating power draw via fan control PWM settings. It would have been a great opportunity for case-sensitive unit jokes ("yeah, it achieves over 100 mbps!" "what?? megabits per second via fan speed changes?" "no, not Mbps silly, haven't you ever heard of millibits before?") but alas I never got around to implementing it.

zev honked back 25 Nov 2024 15:51 -0800
in reply to: https://hachyderm.io/users/oh_that_courtney/statuses/113546155938223421

@oh_that_courtney @rk I try (if somewhat half-assedly) to keep it all...it's currently 6.1MB (287K lines, half of which are timestamps) dating back to 2016-09-30...I've got a commit to my bashrc from 2013-02-30 adding HISTFILE="$HOME/.bash_hist.zev" to avoid accidentally truncating it on the occasional run with --noprofile/--norc, which I figure I must have added after a big loss, but I no longer remember what might have destroyed whatever transpired in the 3.5 years in between the two...

zev honked back 25 Nov 2024 14:46 -0800
in reply to: https://hachyderm.io/users/oh_that_courtney/statuses/113544856745895022

@oh_that_courtney @rk Some years ago (2017 if the timestamps in my .bash_history are to be believed) while playing around extracting real URLs from twitter's t.co mandatory-shortener obnoxiousness I discovered that sending it a User-Agent header including a vertical tab would trigger a server-side error...and it looks like it still does:

$ curl -i -A $'beep\vboop' https://t.co
HTTP/2 520 
date: Mon, 25 Nov 2024 22:44:09 GMT
content-type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
content-length: 15
x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
referrer-policy: same-origin
cache-control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT
server: cloudflare Pingora-Origin
cf-ray: 8e85295fbde62838-SEA

error code: 520

So who knows, perhaps they're using it for some in-band signaling roughly along those lines?

zev honked 22 Nov 2024 23:11 -0800

Seen today: quite a lot of sea lion.

a whole lotta sea lion

zev honked back 16 Nov 2024 16:10 -0800
in reply to: https://mastodon.social/users/regehr/statuses/113494669892003815

@regehr @pervognsen @zwarich Hah, another thing I hacked on in grad school! It would do online perf profiling to discover hot paths in the kernel (geared towards servers running relatively steady, homogeneous workloads), and then recompile a specialized kernel module containing all the code for the path(s) it decided to target with LTO doing hyper-aggressive inlining (including across speculatively devirtualized indirect calls between modules) to provide a single contiguous code path all the way from the syscall entry point down to all the relevant device drivers and then spliced it into the running system as a livepatch.

Had it been a few years or so later it might have seen better results due to the Spectre mitigations that later became necessary slowing down the "before" case more...

zev honked 28 Oct 2024 20:38 -0700

Sigh, (work) gmail and its clunky, weak-ass filtering.

My kingdom for a procmailrc.

zev honked 27 Oct 2024 00:11 -0700

48-hour average TPD (tacos per day) currently sitting at 5.5. Feeling pretty good about my life choices.

zev honked 21 Oct 2024 10:26 -0700

Hot 8 Brass Band was every bit as awesome as expected at the High Dive on Saturday.

Hot 8 Brass Band on stage

Hot 8 Brass Band on stage