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cliffle

cliffle@hachyderm.io

<p>Chaotic good artificer/ranger, sending you drive-by bugfix pull requests while sitting in a tree in the middle of nowhere.</p><p>My psych degree hasn&#39;t stopped me from regularly getting nerd-sniped into writing operating systems.</p><p>Making reliable things from unreliable parts, currently at Oxide Computer, previously Loon/GoogleX, NativeClient, etc</p><p>bad at (but occasionally posting in): español, (简体)中文, nederlands</p><p>he/him - Berkeley, CA</p>

Posts

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    Say what you will about *waves hands at the world* -- but I think we can all agree that the de-facto standardization of the terms SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE and SCREAMING-KEBAB-CASE are the best things to come out of software engineering in the last decade.

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    I found the proof sheet for my first general-purpose typeface, which I designed back in 2010 for my first character video generator. I was experimenting with using &quot;book numerals&quot; or &quot;lowercase numbers,&quot; an experiment I later abandoned. You can also see the high waisted capitals, as a Charles Rennie Mackintosh fan.

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    I have just learned about elect.horse, which is a fun game where you use totally above board tactics to make sure the horse wins reelection, independent from the popular vote! https://elect.horse/ (This honestly seems like the best possible way to get people to understand gerrymandering)

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    RE: https://hachyderm.io/@rain/117446083340236126 This is why, when people say things like &quot;omg the LLM can generate an embedded kernel for me!!!&quot; I can&#39;t help but think &quot;Yeah, it was trained on _at least_ three of mine, plus immeasurable training load on my webserver serving the docs.&quot; By claiming ownership of the result, or even just claiming to have managed the machine while it spit it out, you&#39;re basically just stripping all attribution for the actual work that...

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    Been letting my Mandarin lapse this year, but, it appears I remember how to say &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t eat beef&amp;quot; intelligibly 👍 (Trying a new knife cut noodle place, around here they&amp;#39;re often from Chengdu and put beef in everything)

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    RE: https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/117406074421025473 This is a great thread on the complexity of secure hibernate. I think a lot of people have a habit of looking at secure boot and these defenses as being anti user. They&amp;#39;re not. We really need to rename userland. Userland is where every website runs. The kernel is the program that you, the user, use to defend yourself from userland. Secure boot ensures it isn&amp;#39;t subverted against your will.

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    I&amp;#39;m not sure which of you needs to hear this, but: lrzsz-sx has at some point started defaulting to YMODEM. You have to add -X to get actual OG XMODEM. Yeah, no idea. But that&amp;#39;s why your firmware transfer is failing.

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    I feel like Bryan&amp;#39;s blog post buries the lede a little bit here with its choice of headline -- yeah Oxide took more money, but, the important thing is why: We&amp;#39;ve been quietly profitable since the start of the year and have been receiving more orders than we can fill. In this current economy of &amp;quot;give me more money so I can light it on fire&amp;quot; and companies filing to IPO proud to spend $3 to make $1, it&amp;#39;s nice to be able to tell investors &amp;quot;if you...

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    In honor of Spooky Season, a PicoCalc horror vignette! &amp;quot;Oh I see you&amp;#39;ve got a graphics thing running on your PicoCalc, let me just ... oh ... oh no ... WHERE IS ITS BRAIN‽ YOU MONSTER 😱&amp;quot; (I thought it would be a nice body for my Forth machine, so I&amp;#39;m prototyping before building a Pico-sized module)

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    Any KiCad 10 users out there who can tell me why pressing a key repeatedly, fast, only recognizes the first press until a delay elapses? (Edit: I appear to have gotten 10.0.5 which has an input bug! Thanks @remmy ) Like, open schematic, select item, start moving, then press R-R-R to rotate it three times... it rotates only once if you press too quickly. Some kind of type-ahead search in the hotkey mechanism maybe? The part that really bothers me is that this affects cursor keys, when nudging...

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    Physical therapist: &quot;Do you have any resistance bands at home?&quot; Me: &quot;Are you thinking more Rage Against The Machine, or, like, Woody Guthrie?&quot; Physical therapist: 😑

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    RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mjk/117044034810143202 &amp;quot;Why do they need to keep raising money?&amp;quot; ask the commenters. Ah, I see you&amp;#39;re from software!

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    Kinda want to write a bot that just replies to any really long, unsolicited, probably-LLM-generated pull request with this picture of me at, like, five

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    I am bewildered and disappointed to report that Android&amp;#39;s onboard emoji search stops working if you have a flaky Internet connection. Meaning, it is not local. Meaning, they&amp;#39;re going out to the goddamn Internet to see if any of O(1000) records match the word &amp;quot;fish.&amp;quot; I can&amp;#39;t even.

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    In the early 90s, PKWare offered their Data Compression Library as a way to put basic compression into other applications. It uses a different algorithm from PKZIP. I encountered it because it&amp;#39;s used by the proprietary recipe program that my mom used, and I&amp;#39;ve been recovering her database. Turns out it&amp;#39;s had an input-controlled buffer overrun since, well, forever! The library itself won&amp;#39;t produce streams with the property required to trigger it, but it also doesn...

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    My partner&#39;s been running a D&amp;D campaign for our friend group for ~4 years now. A plot point had us moving 38 years forward in time (fae stuff). So obviously she&#39;s worked out the inflation rate and redone the equipment cost lists.

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    Since Rust still doesn&#39;t implement Default for [u8; 2048], I find myself pulling in the (fantastic) zerocopy crate just to get new_zeroed. Because zerocopy::FromZeroes is _absolutely_ implemented for arrays of all sizes, unlike Default.

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    This post captures a lot of my discomfort with generating code using LLMs: you might review it today, but so far everyone I know stops reviewing it eventually. https://dustycloud.org/blog/faulty-towers-vibe-sickness-and-the-vibe-bobsled/ Seriously considering dusting off my degree, I could start being useful in about two years of school plus supervision.

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    When I started writing my accounting software in 2021, I took a shortcut that has served unexpectedly well. I wanted it to be able to read all the various CSVs and whatnot that banks and credit card companies produce, in addition to files with my own additions. The obvious choice would be &quot;importing&quot; these into some sort of formal database, for speed of access. But for simplicity I decided to just re-parse all of the source files -- a year or more of statements and downloads -- every...

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    Couldn&amp;#39;t sleep this morning, so I decided to clean up and publish my Smalltalk-80 VM, which is now named Verdigrist. https://codeberg.org/cliffle/verdigrist It&amp;#39;s not complete, but it&amp;#39;s complete enough to poke around most of the default environment, and it appears to be significantly faster than the other &amp;quot;toy&amp;quot; (bluebook-based) implementations. I also find it easier to understand, because I introduced types, eliminated global variables, and ensured tha...

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    An oldie but a goodie: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259 Good thing this is purely a thought experiment, right? ...right?

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    twice

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    @joe @dysfun hmmmm Helix does appear to allow undo across reload. I feel like it didn&#39;t in the past, but maybe I was holding it wrong. So that&#39;s something.

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    *deep breath* bezel biddy bobby boozy boxer bunny cello corer daunt dolly drown dutch eking erode excel ferry goofy hatch heist hippy hunky hutch jaunt jazzy jumpy kitty leggy nanny patch pinky pound pupal pushy roger rower sassy scram taffy taker tatty tight willy woozy

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    RE: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116477568123660243 I&amp;#39;m excited to read this. You might be too.

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    Well, Tindie has been back up for a few days but is still refusing to pay out money owed, so... I&amp;#39;ve set all my products to 0-in-stock and attempted to redirect buyers to my Lectronz storefront. Amusingly, they won&amp;#39;t let me set my store banner message to include a Lectronz URL. I bet it blocks any URL, but, given how much trust they&amp;#39;ve squandered, this isn&amp;#39;t a great look. #tindie

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    Alright, we are starting to see press discussion of this &quot;scheduled outage&quot; 🤡 https://www.hackster.io/news/supplyframe-sells-tindie-now-in-its-second-week-of-site-outage-to-parties-unknown-17603dfb88b9

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    I think the basic thing that has destroyed my remaining trust in Tindie here is the fact that they&#39;re calling the maintenance &quot;scheduled.&quot; Normally, &quot;scheduled&quot; maintenance is communicated to users in advance, so they can plan. I guess Tindie themselves knew this maintenance was scheduled, but they didn&#39;t tell the sellers. Moreover, they can&#39;t seem to tell anyone when &quot;scheduled maintenance&quot; will _end._ So if it was scheduled at the outset, it&#39;s su...

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    Me: &quot;By ensuring that illegal states can&#39;t be represented and expressing the logic as a total function, we can easily reason about what the computer can and cannot do when it hits this point.&quot; The rest of my industry, sometimes: &quot;Please. I beg you. Stop producing output about goblins. You are supposed to produce code. Why are there goblins.&quot; https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/openai-codex-system-prompt-includes-explicit-directive-to-never-talk-about-goblins/

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    Of Helix&#39;s various quirks and limitations, I think its incredibly low key &quot;lol I decided not to save even though you just asked me to&quot; warning on the very bottom line of the screen is the one that messes me up the most.