tef

former main character. they/them is fine

Public Key

npub1ntnhyxw9s3jcu8qdeq4y92uytg26rdp5fxl2u5ymxfnc38pqlr4q622mle

NIP-05 Address

tef@mastodon-social.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsf4emjr8zcgevwrsxus2jz4wz959dpks6yn04w2zdnyeugnss036spz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsnvdvup

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1ntnhyxw9s3jcu8qdeq4y92uytg26rdp5fxl2u5ymxfnc38pqlr4q622mle

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Last Notes

2026-04-08 13:44:15 UTC

finding myself repeating "fuzzers are stochastic, with enough cpu time you will always find a bug, results are a usually demonstration of resources not algorithms"
like, hacking, along with spam and fraud are the sorts of activities where things only need to work 0.1% of the time to be successful
it isn't a demonstration of clever code or tooling but the uncompromising effectiveness of sheer brute force heh

2026-04-05 03:48:32 UTC

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@nprofile…h0ll the answer is "you get arrested for posting them" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-war-uae-tourists-expats-influencers-detained-social-media-posts/

2026-03-08 17:49:33 UTC

genuinely wasn't sure what ot make of the barefoot polka dot experimental rock band from quebec, but eventually gave in and clicked on the video last night
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi-9wS1so
it's like someone left the rhythm section alone, unsupervised, and when you come back they're giggling, they have papier mache heads on and there's eight tape loops drifting in and out of sync. it's incredible
like some sort of brubeck surf rock or ratatat tabarnak

2025-12-28 23:32:17 UTC

i would simply not have null productions in my grammar

2025-12-27 19:01:36 UTC

realising i need to rewrite almost everything i've done, huge day

2025-12-03 03:58:18 UTC

the stephen's sausage roll of data structures continues to vex me

2025-11-23 20:57:36 UTC

hearing america has outsourced the manufacturing consent industry to overseas workers

2025-10-19 13:47:10 UTC

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convergent crab evolution but it's how all modern software turns into three column app

2025-10-19 13:41:34 UTC

is vscode just eclipse for zoomers

2025-10-13 13:48:18 UTC

if anyone is hiring for staff or senior backend remote, let me know
my cv is over at https://tef.computer

2025-10-05 17:01:29 UTC

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@nprofile…us66 yep, and it's yeah, a rolling block hash to set chunk size, and a merkle binary tree atop

2025-10-02 23:05:25 UTC

https://gist.github.com/tef/a690e9fd8d4ef3f5575e10456ae8bc43
writing some notes to self on copy on write ish datastructures for content addressable stores
if you're not reimplementing git this is probably boring as shit
also this is a draft so i haven't got around to adding "a log of actions" but i will soon

2025-10-02 17:33:52 UTC

imagine for a moment that you're reimplementing git or hg, and you're looking at how to store a snapshot of a directory, recursively
git has a merkle tree like deal, and iirc hg just uses a big list of names and shas, but i'm wondering if there's any other designs worth considering
in particular, neither handles "a really big directory filled with files" that well, although it's easy to fix: you can just split up the file or tree by prefix

2025-08-21 19:19:27 UTC

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@nprofile…36ma i think it was assumed that someone had read the manual

2025-08-17 21:58:05 UTC

i should probably mention i am still on the search for a job, staff engineer or senior, remote or uk hybrid
https://tef.computer

2025-08-09 13:26:11 UTC

yeah github is the ai powered... hold up the page isn't loading ... yeah so github is ... yeah i'm just going to open this in a new tab, there we go yeah so github is the world's leading ai powered platform for collaboration, and yeah i think the page has almost loaded now, one sec

2025-08-07 02:24:20 UTC

in what can only be the most telegraphed heel turn: those who waxed lyrical about return to office, are now extolling the beautiful automated future of talking to chatbots in a call centre

2025-08-07 00:49:49 UTC

i see github has finally matured into a cost centre after being a loss leader all these years
soon, the product will be as regarded and as well liked as a salesforce app, or maybe even jira

2025-07-25 16:06:37 UTC

working on an alternative list of names for vibe coding/vibe coders
- loot box coding
- gatcha pull requests
- prod paypig
- milkshake duck programming (as opposed to rubber duck programming)

2025-07-11 00:54:53 UTC

aside it is kinda tragicomic watching github destroy whatever good will is left
be it the rotting of the product with hamfisted copilot integrations or the way in which the web ui reguarly breaks and needs refreshing
the gradual change from a freemium startup with a toxic work environment to a corporate unit with mass layoffs has been quite the ride but i honestly did not expect it to end with in app purchases to play a boilerplate slot machine

2025-07-07 23:57:21 UTC

it's sgdq, so it's time for my annual sgdq post. ahem:
who called it médecins sans frontières and not doctors noclip

2025-07-05 15:06:17 UTC

great news everyone, i've managed to combine the technologies behind "excel thinks it's a date" and "my phone keeps saying duck" to produce an office memo generator
it can also draw sentient anime breasts, as well as generating occasionally correct stack overflow replies
here's how: first we harvest every website, and use it to train a spam filter
we run the spam filter backwards on a massively parallel system to generate the desired output
then we try to filter out racism and csam. ish

2025-06-26 14:21:52 UTC

i think a bunch about how edsger dijkstra didn't set written exams for his students, the final was an oral exam, he'd sit and ask them questions
written exams aren't used because they're better at evaluating students, but because they're way easier to scale up, marking and grading can be pushed onto other students
with things like chatgpt destroying most of academica it's nice to think that dijkstra would be "have you tried actually examining the students" heh

2025-06-26 01:01:05 UTC

did an interview, opened it as always by saying "i have adhd, i will go off topic, if you give me an agenda and times we can stick to it"
got told not to worry about it as it was just a casual conversation, and then got told i failed the interview because "i talk too much, and go off topic"
it's a knife in the back to spend hours proving my technical chops, only to fall by something you can learn about me in approximately 90 seconds
and it's a twist to hear it's adhd kicking my ass as ever

2025-06-17 01:32:56 UTC

in case you missed it, someone has been porting mario64 to the gameboy advance
in what i can only describe as incredible hackery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kueoO3b4B-M
technically speaking, it isn't the first 3d game on the gba, there's games like "asterix and obelix xxl"
technically speaking though, porting an n64 game to the gba is even more ridiculous

2025-06-11 15:22:46 UTC

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@nprofile…6m2n the old book "the unix programming environment" likely cemented that view

2025-06-10 01:02:17 UTC

all things said and done, the funniest interview answer i've given was for that old classic:
"how do you find a loop in a linked list"
the answer is simple: free every item in the list, and if there's a segfault, there's a loop

2025-05-31 04:22:43 UTC

fun facts:
mbas don't increase profit or returns, they just cut wages [1]
in fact, ceos tend to be more self serving than other people [2], and risk taking ceos correlates to childhood exposure to pollution [3]
'superfund ceos' tend to get promoted [4], even though unionised places perform better in stock market [5]
sources:
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w29874.pdf
[2] https://hbr.org/2016/12/mbas-are-more-self-serving-than-other-ceos
[3] https://www.iimb.ac.in/sites/default/files/inline-files/hazed-confused-prenatal-ceo-risk-taking.pdf
[4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5270031
[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0929119921001127

2025-05-30 16:02:54 UTC

i'm looking for work as of today!
if you need a staff level backend/database person, i could very well be that person: https://tef.computer
if you know your company is hiring, drop me a link to the careers page.
nb: due to having a sleep cycle resembling a melatonin free jazz solo, i usually work in Eastern Time, remotely.
as a result i generally work for east/west coast firms in the us, or very flexible employers in the uk

2025-05-30 05:10:26 UTC

here is a modest proposal for git workflows: what if we rebased, then merged
https://gist.github.com/tef/618bbdaf17927885dbabc5fec3041826

2025-05-28 11:22:53 UTC

big day

2025-05-27 21:00:38 UTC

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@nprofile…jqvx fwiw there's literal studies showing the exact same thing
"This paper provides evidence from the US and Denmark that managers with an [MBA] reduce their employees' wages. [...] These business managers show no greater ability to increase sales or profits."
via: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w29874.pdf
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/581/800/313/591/873/original/c5b4da43969a8c81.png

2025-05-27 14:06:16 UTC

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@nprofile…htaz to be fair the us hasn't woken up yet

2025-05-23 16:11:41 UTC

it looks like my role is about to be made redundant, so i might be looking for a new role, staff developer, remote uk/us
my resume/cv is here: https://tef.computer
i am pretty good at the whole "fixing distributed systems" stuff but i'm also pretty good at the "levelling up a team" stuff too

2025-05-10 03:57:35 UTC

idle question, does anyone know why the german passports use 'D' and not 'DEU' or some other three letter code, like _everyone else_
no, really, everyone else has a three letter code
and yes, i have seen that travel stack exchange post you're going to find in the first page of results

2025-05-06 03:40:34 UTC

if anyone wants to see the hacked up "let's convert seven repos into one repo, all branches included" thing i did,
https://github.com/tef/ratking
it takes the main branches, interweaves the first-parent commits into a single linear timeline, and then propagates those changes back out to every subsequent commit
including ones in feature branches, so yeah, you can migrate over pull requests from the upstream to the new merged repo

2025-03-29 12:34:11 UTC

maybe it's social media, maybe it's being kicked in the head by a horse, but i feel the need to prefix every blog post with
"This post contains advice. Advice given here is given for beginners, not experts, i.e. choosing operational simplicity over performance. Edge cases and outliers will exist, and this advice may not be the best choice in all circumstances. If you know better, you can ignore it. That's how advice works."

2025-03-20 23:15:06 UTC

accidentally blocking a mastodon instance instead of the reply guy and breaking things for at least one mutual: the mastodon experience

2025-03-13 00:05:01 UTC

got to give my one (1) sure fire piece of advice again today
wash your hands with cooking oil, then later soap, then water, if you want to clean your hands after cutting chillis

2025-03-12 18:10:13 UTC

reading up on the ntsb report on the dca heli collision, and they've put a jaw dropping graph inside
it shows how narrow the safety margin is between the helicopter route and landing path
the last time i saw such a striking "don't do that" graphic in an incident report was the northern and city line incident, where someone tried to drill through an active subway line
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/150/786/669/888/841/original/a56ca04f5e8f4218.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/150/789/509/096/835/original/88b6d8e9f1cbc52d.png

2025-03-12 02:47:29 UTC

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@nprofile…wkxy the key is keeping your wrists straight i guess but also, ow

2025-03-11 21:26:35 UTC

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@nprofile…wkxy i've always been tempted by bass, but well, i did try a piano for a bit and i am reluctant to admit that i have already fucked my wrists successfully
i think my best bet may be drumming because my feet still work ok

2025-03-11 21:05:11 UTC

anyway guess i gotta find a new side project to stave off the intrusive thoughts huh

2025-03-11 18:13:44 UTC

to be clear, when a recruiter, manager, or ceo says someone is a "genius programmer" or "10x" or similar
they mean "someone who works 80 hour weeks and we only pay them for 40"
every time

2025-03-09 19:45:40 UTC

icymi: there's a c64 remix of the skype ringtone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYbvjoXx2EU
by yes, that jeroen tel

2025-03-08 06:41:46 UTC

i learned a cool trick to make a concurrent hash map: use a linked list of all entries, and a jump table into them
... and i tried playing with buckets instead of lists, and different ways of organizing the jump table
but ended up going back to something very close to the original design, but without cool bithacking tricks, or pointer tagging
which honestly feels a little anticlimactic

2025-03-07 03:59:27 UTC

realising i can say "the king is a big fan of the goons" now

2025-02-22 18:12:06 UTC

the local supermarket has "30 years of clubcard" posters up, ones that skip over the absolutely bizarre origin story of the loyalty scheme
the tesco clubcard was launched in order to pay ransom money, as a former soldier was threatening to contaminate food products with hiv+ blood
seriously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco_Clubcard#Incidents

2025-02-16 00:47:43 UTC

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@nprofile…6m2n somewhat aside, a lot of old unix tools would balk at "cmd file -opt" but gnu tools had no issue handling options coming after arguments
i had a friend who used to complain of "gnu bloatware" until he was forced to use (fairly old) solaris at work and he installed the gnu userland tools within minutes of trying to get the older tools to behave in ways he was used to

2025-02-14 13:30:10 UTC

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@nprofile…vyme bad news about all the neurodiverse people who have dissociated through most of the trauma and have no real long term memories then i guess, not really neurodivergent heh

2025-02-14 13:21:55 UTC

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@nprofile…vyme this doesn't sound right tbh
memory is a weird and vague thing for many people across the spectrum
trauma isn't something that dumps gps coordinates into long term memory
odds are you're taking the question too literally

2025-01-17 17:06:40 UTC

btw if you're planning on protesting a talk, the easiest way is to pull the fire alarm
and if you're at fosdem, you can say "i just saw a vape cloud i guess" if anyone asks why

2024-12-27 21:09:29 UTC

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@nprofile…gffv like i said, i can't fault you for it but it doesn't mean i won't try to tempt you a little

2024-12-27 20:22:19 UTC

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@nprofile…gffv the low intelligence stat run is particularly fun

2024-12-27 20:21:39 UTC

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@nprofile…gffv i can't tell you to enjoy it as something to savor later, that's like being against having a book on the shelf or a bottle in the cellar
i'm just not sure it'll age as well as you'd hope, and besides, it is the sort of game you end up replaying to try different faction endings and builds, so

2024-10-17 14:51:03 UTC

am reminded that your average tech conference ticket is basically the same price as an apple laptop

2024-10-15 23:55:59 UTC

to be clear, stallman has repeatedly shown that he's not a capable steward of software projects (everything that happened to hurd and gcc), and even less capable as a leader of an organization
even before you get into his toenail eating: he is very bad at his job
if free software is to mean more than a cult of personality, he should be replaced at the fsf, no question
i do not think he is capable or responsible enough to perform the job he gave himself

2024-10-07 00:24:26 UTC

if you tell a programmer "we store the code in the repo as a directory of patches, raw,so if you want to know what the code is now, read the patch files one by one" they'd look at you weirdly
but for some reason this also how all database schemas are stored, and if you suggest "what if we had one file with the latest code" they think you're insane for suggesting it
even before you get to the "migrations get run basically once in their lifetime" bit

2023-08-23 23:09:14 UTC

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@npub1pfe…e2dm @npub1ua7…rrg3 i burned my tongue with 2.2 and the libc upgrade so i haven't tasted anything since

2023-08-23 22:58:40 UTC

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@npub1ua7…rrg3 it tastes like metal but it smells like burned toast

2023-08-20 02:41:46 UTC

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@npub1pfe…e2dm in all honesty i feel like i'll be writing in typescript, java, C#, or similar in a few years and i won't be able to tell the difference

2023-08-20 02:37:16 UTC

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@npub1pfe…e2dm the impact java has on first time python programmers cannot be underestimated

2023-08-20 02:29:03 UTC

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@npub1pfe…e2dm either way, i think the issue is more deeply rooted, programmers learn abstractions to pass exams, and so they invent things they don’t need, to show they can
or the way in which many beginner python questions are “yes but how do i do it in one line”, or the “it’s reusable!” thing where people generalise before having an example
i guess when you write enough of it, it’s way easier to be detached and sloppy where necessary

2023-08-20 02:23:42 UTC

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@npub1pfe…e2dm prolog has a saying, “elegance is not optional” and it boils down to “if it’s ugly, it’s hard to debug, or inefficient” but that’s kinda about going with the grain of the language
which i do agree on

2023-08-05 22:34:10 UTC

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@npub1pfe…e2dm yeeeeep https://go.dev/play/p/HFrHlaWpONm
although python's worst feature in my mind is "default args at define time"

2023-08-05 22:18:50 UTC

tripped up on the “go loop variables aren’t inside the loop block” closure bug and i am very “you had _one_ job, rob pike”

2023-07-20 21:08:27 UTC

:3
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/748/448/733/250/104/original/b8985ffd3661c4bb.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/748/449/220/724/920/original/3dca19cfcccc719e.png