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Hoo boy...what have I gotten myself into?

zev honked 21 Mar 2025 22:40 -0700

New frontiers in literature courtesy of this evening's game of Monikers:

"For sale: two babies, no shoes."

zev bonked 13 Mar 2025 11:45 -0700
original: benjojo@benjojo.co.uk

Sometimes I come across a linked in profile like this and then I know I'm probably going to get along with them just fine

Skills  +  Endorsing  10 endorsements  Receiving Endorsements  9 endorsements

zev honked 07 Mar 2025 23:21 -0800

Cocktail menu at dinner this evening was color coded, five drinks labeled White, Black, Blue, Green, and Red. Green sounded good so I ordered one, and when it arrived I discovered the true nature of the color scheme: a Magic the Gathering card provided with each one! So naturally I had to get another.

two cocktails, each with MtG card attached by mini-clothespin, one Green (Ranger's Path), and one Black (Crown of Suspicion)

two cocktails, each with MtG card attached by mini-clothespin, one Green (Ranger's Path), and one Black (Crown of Suspicion)

zev honked 03 Mar 2025 18:17 -0800

Okay, having now dealt with TOML to a degree only incrementally beyond writing foocrate = "1.2" in a Cargo.toml file, I'm thinking the "O" in its name must be a humorous homage to the "S" in SNMP.

From its own damn spec:

3.14159 = "pi"

The above TOML maps to the following JSON.

{ "3": { "14159": "pi" } }

Of course. Obviously.

JSON, for all its boneheadedness, at least manages to be structurally pretty self-explanatory (if still syntactically awkward and semantically murky).

The failure of the industry to coalesce around a halfway-decent language for these sorts of ad-hoc, semi-structured data formats (and the myriad crummy ones all three-legged-racing each other for adoption) is...remarkable.

zev honked 26 Feb 2025 16:31 -0800

Thank you, Docker, for turning the edit/test/debug cycle of an 8-line shell script that runs in ~1 second into a 5m30s process. Constant, ubiquitous technological progress!

zev honked 23 Feb 2025 19:57 -0800

Household dog population has tripled alarmingly rapidly.

Izzy (rightmost) is the enforcer ensuring Bowie and Rocko don't have too much fun, intervening vocally whenever they start to try.

three dogs looking up, wanting treats

zev honked 17 Feb 2025 18:13 -0800

Aboard the Millennium Falcon recently (okay, Disneyland's "Smuggler's Run" ride) I spotted some distinctly terrestrial-looking componentry. I guess LG's beaten out all those puny multinational conglomerates and become multigalactic.

PCB with familiar components (electrolytic capacitors, etc.), and a zoom-in on the upper left corner with the silkscreened text "power supply model of LG" fuzzily readable

PCB with familiar components (electrolytic capacitors, etc.), and a zoom-in on the upper left corner with the silkscreened text "power supply model of LG" fuzzily readable

zev bonked 27 Jan 2025 15:34 -0800
original: aris@infosec.exchange

Fun fact. It's common to say that a broken clock is right twice a day. But a clock turning backwards is right 4 times a day.

zev honked back 23 Jan 2025 14:01 -0800
in reply to: https://mastodon.social/users/jzb/statuses/113878158774980164

@jzb It seems to do that for me regardless of the console state (or anything else). It's very odd -- I see it documented, and the tooltip that pops up if I hover over the reader mode button at the right of the URL bar clearly says "Ctrl+Alt+R", but pressing those keys triggers an immediate browser restart no matter what else is going on.

[...pokes around a bit more...]

Ah -- after starting an instance from a terminal and triggering it, I see:

Crash Annotation GraphicsCriticalError: |[0][GFX1-]: RenderCompositorSWGL failed mapping default framebuffer, no dt (t=6.3471) [GFX1-]: RenderCompositorSWGL failed mapping default framebuffer, no dt

So I guess it's crashing in some special way that leads to a restart -- usually when it crashes it just dies as you'd normally expect. Clicking the button works fine though. (Shrug.)

zev honked 20 Jan 2025 19:44 -0800

Returned from this weekend's cross-country ski outing somewhat the worse for wear, but saw some very interestingly textured snow -- not sure if there's a name for it or by what process it occurs, but it sure looked neat.

untouched snow surface looking like so many tiny shards of glass

untouched snow surface looking like so many tiny shards of glass

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