Elevators! #

A place I worked at actually used the “two elevator problem” for technical interviews. Fun animations! Archive

C declarations are expressions #

Once I really assimilated this fact, the maze cycle stopped being an issue. Archive

C type definitions are a maze #

I instinctively do something like this, but the diagrams really show how bad this is… Archive

“THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”” #

Without guarantees of any kind. Archive

“But you have to do it, it’s inevitable” #

Exactly my feelings for every time someone has told me a trend is inevitable. Archive

MACRO #

A fun apocryphal story. Looking online it seems like it actually comes from “macro-instruction” which makes more sense, but is less fun. Archive

Hiding your site from crawlers #

Very cool adversarial techniques for protecting yourself from those who don’t respect the web-crawling social contract. Archive

AI is not conscious #

Ted Chiang is a wonderful writer, and the analogies to space exploration and AlphaFold never having been considered sentient were novel and striking to me. Archive

Memory out of bounds issues #

See also… I’m learning C (and having fun with it) these days, but these issues bother me. Can we achieve C ubiquity with bounds checking? Archive

On how tech is political #

This specific post is about Linux’s (and Linus’s) recent decisions on using AI tools for the kernel. The excuse of “we use the best tool, we’re not political” is just a cop out. Archive

Why make an app when you can make a webpage? #

Cory Doctorow has a great point about the DMCA act and why companies make apps. Here is how it should be instead. Archive

Q-Q plots explained #

Q-Q plots are great tools, and I learned new tests of distribution similarity. Archive

SIMD examples in Zig #

A nice simple example of some SIMD instructions in Zig. Archive

Having a wide variety of languages is good, actually #

Languages with different focuses make you think about different aspects of your software. Archive

Is software engineering “real” engineering? #

Against Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer is actually YES! A great three-part series. Achive

Accessibility is also security #

I wonder how to advertise such features? Archive

If statements and branch predictions for optimisation #

Sometimes the compilers are smarter, but also sometimes we’re smarter. Archive

CARDiac, computing by hand #

Learned about this from Cory Doctorow’s blog. Very cool! Archive

A great guide to using valgrind #

Learning how to debug C code has been just as hard as learning to write it in the first place. As they say, I did the first 90% of the work, now onto the second 90% of the work. Archive

The Jqwik saga, from the author #

I find it very interesting to hear what prolific OSS authors think in terms of LLM/GenAI policy. Archive

More old GUIs #

More oldie goodness!! Archive

Virtual OS museum #

A blast from the past! Archive

Github is badly made software #

An interesting and opinionated take on what makes good software. It’s always a surprise to me that billion dollar corporations can’t seem to make good software. Archive

It turns out Claude Mythos might not be that big of a deal #

I know fairly little about cybersecurity, but this deep dive into what Mythos is doing was super interesting. Archive

Lines of code measures complexity and liability #

The more we do with the less code, the better off we’ll be. Archive

LLMs make individual coders faster, but the rest of the funnel is still slow #

A very interesting look at how individual pieces of work combine into a finished product. As usual, the mythical man month remains as such. Archive

CLIPS #

I had never heard of CLIPS, but have played in some games with creating order systems for controllable characters. I didn’t realize how deep it went! Archive

Hot reloading in C #

Every day I learn something new about C! Archive

Conventional commits, and a better alternative #

I remember learning about conventional commits with semantic releases and thinking something was wrong with them. This is a nice formalisation. Archive

Cory Doctorow on centaurs, reverse-centaurs, and class struggle #

I didn’t know of this article when I wrote my own, but I’m glad to see someone with such a large platform share these ideas. Archive