Brutkey

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi
Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

You can't trust someone who lies frequently. You can't trust large companies or rich people to keep their promises, when the situation changes and keeping the promises might reduce profit a little.

#wakingUpThought

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

I have produced ten thousand lines of working source code today. I started late. Tomorrow I'll run the script to produce code to initialize an array with ten million elements. That will be my most productive day ever!

(This may be a sarcastic subtoot about the ongoing large language model craze.)

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

Given my involvement in Radicle, I don't want to create a page for it on Wikipedia, but maybe someone else would like to start one? Probably add it to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source-code-hosting_facilities as well.

#Wikipedia #Radicle

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

On this day in 2001 Wikipedia was first edited. That was 25 years ago. A cause for celebration.

Have you made an edit to Wikipedia? If not, today would be a good day to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Day

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

I should write an essay on why I dislike, even despise, awards. I mean awards like "best song" or "best book". It'd be therapeutic, I'm sure, but it'd take too much time.

The gist of it is that I've seen them almost always go to those who are already popular, ignoring and dismissing those who diligently do good work out of the limelight.

This is a subtoot. I will not be answering questions.

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

I distilled my four hour Rust training course for FOSS developer into a web page. I hope it's useful to people.

This is the first full draft. It's probably going to need updates and fixes. Please reply to this message if you spot anything wrong. But feel free to boost and share if you want.

https://liw.fi/distilled-rust/

#Rust #RustLang

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

Tell those who build the open source software you use that you use it, and why you appreciate it.

I don't accept donations, but I really appreciate positive feedback for any of my little projects. From talking to friends in the open source software development community, I know I'm not the only one.

This is especially important for the lesser known software.

https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2025/donations/

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

Can you resist voting in this poll?

Lars Wirzenius
@liw@toot.liw.fi

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

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.