rob pike

Long career as a dilettante at Bell Labs Research and Google, mostly building weird stuff no one uses, but occasionally getting it right, such as with UTF-8 and Go.

Also: tootfinder

Public Key

npub16s49cyez927vm69a3vrfckav2pmulculhrzz95cgl82p8r4hd8eq2mpvtz

NIP-05 Address

robpike_at_hachyderm.io@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsdg2juzv3z40xdaz7ckp5utwk9qa70uw0m33pz6vy0n4qn36mknuspz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0wd68ytnsw43qfnhtl5

Publishing to

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub16s49cyez927vm69a3vrfckav2pmulculhrzz95cgl82p8r4hd8eq2mpvtz

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Last Notes

2024-09-06 20:27:44

Ed is the standard text editor.
https://merveilles.town/@prahou/113090745115878995

2024-08-12 08:43:34

Since twitter is gone, I mean really gone (RIP), is it acceptable to use the word "tweet" again? Or would that be unwise? Too soon? An awful idea? I understand it might upset some, but I like to think it honors the old service before it became.... something else.
I miss the logo and the terminology, I really do, even if I don't exactly miss twitter. I had stopped posting there long before certain events happened.

2024-08-11 11:00:22

Attention app designers: If I have disabled notifications, my intent is that the set of notifications that are disabled includes notifications that I have disabled notifications every time I interact with your app. Please give it a rest.

2024-08-10 09:14:26

This is just awful news. Susan Wojcicki was one of the good ones.
Gift link.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/10/business/susan-wojcicki-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.B04.hxx3.VDgW7pbXJsyi&smid=url-share

2024-08-04 08:59:13

USB-C is a fantastic "standard" if you are a cable manufacturer. My latest dance required trying three different cables, all unlabeled with anything other than manufacturer name, before my devices would talk to each other.
I remember people were so excited that USB-C was going to make the vagaries of USB a thing of the past, but in my experience - today was not much of an outlier - it has only accentuated them while introducing new puzzles.

2024-08-02 02:24:44

You'd think by now they would have identified all the images with motorcycles. I feel no need to continue to process them for our digital overlords.

2024-07-30 10:45:21

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@npub1sys…ckr3 Good idea. Or maybe the sound of a slide carousel going to the next image.

2024-07-30 10:30:41

Nowadays the definition of the term "video" seems to be "robotic voice narrating a few still images fading in and out".

2024-07-19 08:05:33

Automated bisection of code to find bugs. A nice packaging of an old but underused idea.
https://research.swtch.com/bisect

2024-07-17 09:31:02

There are three hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and getting your video game character onto a ladder.

2024-07-16 04:41:21

Wow, Chudnovsky's algorithm converges fast! I put it into ivy (code in the alt text) and the first term alone is good to 10 digits. Each term adds 30+ bits to the precision. Here the argument to chudpi is how many terms to sum.
)get 'chudpi.ivy'
chudpi 0
3.1415926535897342076684535915782983407622
log pi - chudpi 0
-30.4607171517456828366955039144850114298603
log pi - chudpi 10
-357.9935248416118262945083838384929862494035
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/794/329/318/234/450/original/e90536eaced004b8.png

2024-07-15 07:34:37

Sometimes you can make something from the result despite the catastrophic print failure.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/789/348/317/185/329/original/83902095300b8f36.jpg

2024-06-23 23:40:04

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@npub1sys…ckr3 In other news, I spent the morning getting some rust spots off the printer roller.

2024-06-17 21:39:31

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@npub178r…qekt But have they tried turning flickr off and on again?

2024-06-17 21:38:36

I mentioned this on a Unix mail list, and Doug McIlroy replied.
https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/112615649865163136
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/634/122/268/206/104/original/1fe03c3d4306ad8d.png

2024-06-17 03:19:41

Yes, it's the mandatory part that makes the difference. It's not enough to have formatters - Gofmt was not even early in that race - but enforcing its use is critical. And so is not providing options to control the format.
https://masto.social/@aiuto/112629683923661744

2024-06-16 22:51:13

Laurent Le Brun has written up a nice summary of the time Russ Cox and I (mostly Russ) edited about 200,000 files to install a code formatter for every BUILD file at Google.
https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/the-story-of-reformatting-100k-files-at-google-in-2011
Then the Hacker News followup, with more details.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40693264

2024-06-12 07:02:06

I was lucky enough to work in Ed Stone's cosmic ray lab when I was a graduate student. He was one of the greatest leaders I've ever known, while remaining so calm and solid and just plain deep. Principal scientist on Voyager, later head of the JPL, then the TMT and much more. An amazing, inspirational man. So sad to see him go but he had a truly great and influential life. There are few like him.
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/edward-stone-1936-2024

2024-06-07 02:06:50

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@npub178r…qekt We will sell (actually rent) you this hammer; in return we get to live rent-free in any house you build with it.

2024-05-26 22:09:01

Also, today's good code is likely tomorrow's bad code.
https://mastodon.social/@dabeaz/112507379669620422

2024-05-26 02:24:17

I don't understand what the fuss is all about. It said NON-TOXIC glue. Lighten up, people.
But also don't eat rocks, OK?

2024-05-22 04:21:59

My occasional reminder that I once used a ROM burner that, upon power-up, announced on its bright red LED display: "RELF-TEST PASSED".

2024-05-21 21:12:25

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@npub1scr…teus It's the weird thing about carbon capture. If you actually do the math, it's utterly pointless.
If the problem is too much technology, the solution is not more technology.

2024-05-14 20:28:02

It is a fascinating field of study for me. Why some staggeringly complex tasks can be done at 120fps but it still takes me 30 seconds to render the login page at my bank.
https://mastodon.social/@ZevEisenberg/112435500743889014