Notes | Brutkey

Can you resist voting in this poll?

If I write something and people misunderstand it, is it that I expressed myself badly or that people are just stupid and should realize I am brilliant and say nothing until they agree with me?

That's a leading question

Of course it's neither. Both sides in communication have to try their best to understand the other. Either side can be at fault and often both are.

But as a rule of thumb for writers, the writer is at fault until proven otherwise. This rule helps me develop as a communicator.

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

When I was a lot younger I wrote C string handling libraries that I used for my own projects or for work projects. I have Opinions™ about this. But it's no longer a battle I care to engage in. There is no way to win, without leaving C behind.

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

C strings are a sequence of bytes ending in a zero byte. It's awkward, cumbersome, error prone & stupid in many ways, but in the early 1970s, having strings with a length field was expensive. When your biggest computer has about 9 KiB of RAM, spending two or four bytes to express the length of a string was hideously expensive. A one byte terminator was the cheapest option in terms of memory use.

There's more resources available today, but entrenched fundamentals are quite difficult to change.

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

When I was a lot younger I wrote C string handling libraries that I used for my own projects or for work projects. I have Opinions™ about this. But it's no longer a battle I care to engage in. There is no way to win, without leaving C behind.

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

Hey Google, the only way you're allowed to celebrate my birthday is to gift me at least a billion euros. I don't want you to spam me with birthday wishes. They're not welcome from a bot. Especially not a bot run by a faceless, inhumane corporation.

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

I rewrote a one-line shell script of mine as a Rust program. This is silly, of course. The shell script is part of a bunch of small scripts of mine that I've packaged as a deb package. I want to get rid of that.

OTOH, with Rust, clap, and serde, it was easy to add optional JSON output. So there's that. I also don't like shell.

The script wasn't even one line, there was some scaffolding around

find "$dir" -printf x | wc -c

https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/radicle.liw.fi/rad%3AzFTqZ3gCdUBCYwjsQ4vAeUNCNMTM

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

Is the problem that teens use social media or that they use social media that's highly optimized to enrage and addict?

I'm not a parent and haven't followed research on this. But all the news stories I've seen equate social media with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and X. I don't know snapchat, but F and I are run by people who help genocide happen and the last one by an actual nazi. Those can't be good for anyone, never mind children.

Has anyone studied how the fediverse affects its users?

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

Ruritania might be worth a visit in the near future.

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

Like SMTP before it, S3 lies about being simple.

#snark

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

I am starting to think that maybe, possibly, there is a hint of a chance that I may, perhaps, not be entirely an evening person anymore. It's before 06:00 where I am and I've just woken up and I'm sipping tea and writing code.