My "production stuff" is listed at https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/README.md#other-usable-projects-of-mine
I thought 32gb on my desktop was excessive. Today I tried to use DuckDB in a way that required compiling it. With 32gb, my computer keeps killing Firefox to free RAM so that the compilation can finish.
(I think in general compiling DuckDB is not necessary, but I'm weird.)
GitHub lacks support for repositories using sha256 instead of the classic sha1. Problem or opportunity?
@datarama @david_chisnall but your story adds to my belief that good translators are worth their weight in gold (edit: and horribly undervalued in the real world).
@david_chisnall @datarama I was unlucky; my writing was translated to my mother language, but a) I think they picked a cheap translation provider b) it was translated to an "averaged American Spanish", which feels foreign to me (as a mainland Spain speaker who avoids reading Spanish technical writing).
I think we had some translation process were authors participated, but I was never invited. I think I would not have been useful anyway.
@david_chisnall @datarama I concur with David, although in my four short years doing technical writing, my editors were not technical at all, but they caught quite a few factual errors by... purely linguistic deduction! I always thought that was really awesome.
One of the coolest things I’ve seen recently is the platform that the University of Kent uses to teach programming. It’s a little circuit board that looks like a gameboy, complete with LCD and buttons, powered by a microcontroller.
They start people off with MicroPython and can teach core programming concepts as well as things like 2D graphics, different algorithmic performance, and so on with the platform. Some of the students write moderately complex games.
We’re hoping to do a version with them using our CHERIoT chips so that they can teach sandboxing and other security concepts on the same device.
I was a bit nervous about the performance (including the overhead of a Python interpreter that is optimised for memory usage and not performance) until I saw this post. Our chips runs at 250 MHz and has DMA that can push pixels to the LCD, as well as a couple of orders of magnitude more code and data memory than the original. I think it will be fine.
(And, yes, one of our customers has already ported Doom to run on the FPGA development platform, which has less memory)
@pid_eins hmmm, Hetzner has some auction Xeon with E3-1275v5 that support SGX and trusted execution for <70€/month. EPYC auction servers start at 215€/month and I'm not sure that has the proper extensions but... it's not so far for a small group of users.
I'm mostly curious, but I think there are some interesting use cases around self hosting. (E.g. shared hosting with friends allowing confidential tasks.) But this is mostly "curiosity".
@pid_eins how close is this to being able to provide people a way to run VMs on a box I have root on with some verifiable trust that I wouldn't be able to pull secrets from?
(I've been toying for a while with the idea to provide a tilde were people could run sensitive processes such as email fetching/forwarding or instant messaging. My last information is that this is quite far away yet for regular people.)
Cloudflare just had to buy one of the few slogans I like so I would dislike them more.
@david_chisnall @MaddieM4 @cyberquixote Then I shall share my own evergreen Conway's Law corollary:
There must be software designs we have never conceived because we do not have the social forms of organization that would be able to do so.
@coder (yes, I use compilers and I don't check the compiled output of my programs. Compilers are sufficiently deterministic and predictable in most cases. People following an architect's design tend not to be as deterministic and predictable.)
@coder the article is more about thinking too much about abstractions and not enough about what software is supposed to do for the user than about what I usually think about architecture astronauts, that the farther you are from doing the actual low-level work, the less qualified you are to talk about it.
Guess why I was thinking about architecture astronauts a few minutes ago. I searched and apparently I had missed this article from Joel where he apparently coined the term:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you/
I think it's a bit ironic considering what Joel seems to be doing these days, and it is not entirely what I think about architecture astronauts, but it's still worth reading in my opinion.
"Don't take the black pill" is indeed a good talk. Hadn't seen in yet.
Due to $REASONS, this morning I've been exploring Python monorepo setup options. I focused on Hatch as it seemed to tick many of my boxes.
I found some stuff odd. For example, by default it does not generate lock files!
However, I found it reasonable and it allowed me to integrate a Django project reasonably according to my tastes.
@leah I read much less than I used to, so I've been mulling having a book on me at all times to read on public transport and that kind of thing instead of using the Internet.
My main issue is that stuff I'd like to read is not pocketable and that sourcing books for electronic paper devices legally sounds troublesome.
Perhaps I should just focus first on reading public domain books first.
@datarama hmm, I wouldn't be so sure. And if they requested to be removed, I would say they should be removed. But I'm not sure they wouldn't shrug it off, own what they said, or even be proud of being listed there. Many sources in the list are primary!
It makes me uncomfortable too, though. I wouldn't publish that myself. Also I don't like using links from the Wayback Archive- people have a right to change their views (although I doubt that's the case there).
Nice, "nano --modernbindings" uses shortcuts more similar to common editors on Windows and macOS. Even Debian stable has a nano with support for this option!
@datarama maybe the difference lies in whether the person wants to be taken off the list?
https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
Shocking. I always said "DNS is not so bad, I'm not aware of ICANN doing crazy shit."
If I understand correctly, ICANN in fact now has done insanely crazy shit in a way that breaks my trust significantly.
Luckily the only two "important" domains that I use personally are both .net, and they are much bigger than .name so I doubt they're going to pull something like that, but it's annoying to have to watch your back for ICANN.
Perchance anyone with personal experiences with external USB enclosures for 4-5 drives? My Proliant Microserver might be edging closer to a much needed retirement after perhaps 10 years of service.
But in today's day and age, it seems difficult to get reliable information on noise and heat from those enclosures.
@david_chisnall I have to say that there's always a convenient excuse to jack prices up. This has happened with many natural disasters- maybe some caused supply chain issues, but I'm... suspicious.
@david_chisnall yep, I have 2x4Tb drives in my "NAS" and one of them started giving out NAS errors.
One of the 4tb drives costed me 123€ in 2013. I've spent 223€ in the replacement.
HECK, a 2.5" external USB 4Tb drive in 2019 cost me 112€!
This is insane. I got lucky with RAM and bought a 32gb desktop *and* expanded my other desktop to 32gb before prices started going up, but my NAS situation is pretty dire...
@david_chisnall my pet peeve is name pronunciations. I have a recording that I enter on all systems that allow it. Not because I needed to hear my name correctly (lost cause) but because I want to try to pronounce well others'
For the diet, would stating "I follow a Halal diet" skirt regulations? There's a strong correlation with religion, but AFAIK Muslims would not have an issue with others eating Halal?
This seems (contradictorily) good general advice, but I just added it to my list of basic links:
https://earthly.dev/blog/thought-leaders/
"Don't Feed the Thought Leaders" explains that contingent advice (that depends on the situation) is in general better than generic advice. In my experience, one of the most difficult parts is knowning when you have to deviate from common practices.