Brian Swetland

Writes the codes. Recovering OS Engineer (BeOS, HiptopOS, Android, LK, Fuchsia). Embedded systems hacker. Hobbyist Digital Designer. Player of video games. Etc.

github: https://github.com/swetland/
frotz.net: http://frotz.net/
bsky / @swetland.frotz.net: https://bsky.app/profile/swetland.frotz.net
location: Palo Alto, CA

Public Key

npub1pcxszqyeekhg5uy4qrjx4jk65sq223xukk3azt8h4lhg724e7n3qg5rjk8

NIP-05 Address

swetland_at_chaos.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqurgpqzvumt52wz2sper2etd2gq99gnwttg739nm6lm5092ulfcspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dstmn7p8

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1pcxszqyeekhg5uy4qrjx4jk65sq223xukk3azt8h4lhg724e7n3qg5rjk8

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Last Notes

2026-04-09 23:10:55 UTC

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As a lifelong 1TBS adherent, I'll fight you on this one.
Open braces go on the end of the line of the function decl, if/for/switch/while statement, etc. Close braces go on lines by themselves, aligned with the indentation of the line the open brace is on.
Exception 1: An else is preceded by a close brace, indented to match the associated if/else and followed by an open brace on the same line.
Exception 2: case labels are indented the same as the enclosing switch statement.

2026-04-09 22:39:23 UTC

Okay, more C (or just generally curly-braces-style-languages) discourse: I am a strong believer in aggressively using braces everywhere.
Very occasionally I will emit them on single-line if/for/while statements, but even that makes me feel uncomfortable.
I've seen far too many bugs resulting from not being aggressive about block delimiter usage over the years.
Bonus is it tends to mean diffs adding/removing single lines of code are cleaner.
Toy systems language choice: braces are *required*.

2026-04-09 11:01:21 UTC

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I've been programming in C for nearly 40 years and I long ago shifted to very defensively parenthesizing instead of memorizing the 17 levels of precedence. I feel like it's both easier to write and read code that minimizes dependence on human cleverness.

2026-03-07 20:40:51 UTC

A reminder that you can still just sit down and write software. Or stand up and write software if you prefer.
The key point is that *you* can *write software* and you don't have to let other software write software for you.

2026-02-15 22:52:36 UTC

Is that controversial? The USB mini b connector is crazy cursed.

2026-02-13 23:07:43 UTC

Recently I saw someone remark that they find "AI" useful for generating commit messages.
Just now I was writing a commit message. Out of long habit, I do that while reviewing a diff of the change I'm about to commit. This is very useful for catching errors (ranging from actual incorrect code to accidentally checking in some debug prints or a including a whole file not meant for *this* commit).
And I thought "wow, I'd bet anything my code quality would go down if I outsourced that to 'AI'".

2025-11-30 14:26:21 UTC

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That checks out.
(For reference, it is a close-up shot of Doctor Julius Strangepork, at his station on the bridge of the Swinetrek, Pigs in Space, the Muppet Show).

2025-11-30 14:20:15 UTC

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I'm curious what mine reads as. I've always thought it's very obvious, but that probably assumes a familiarity with a certain late-70s US/UK television program...

2025-11-11 01:46:31 UTC

Wanted: some kind of corporate vehicle (maybe some sort of co-op thing?) that enables me to get functional health insurance, maybe share other resources like a bit of office/work space, etc, but without signing up to do any work other than my own personal projects. Surely doable somehow, no?
I mean yeah I might occasionally want to do a bit of consulting or accidentally create some software or hardware I want to sell. Just don't want to be obligated to deal with somebody else's bullshit. ^^

2025-09-29 22:06:56 UTC

Discussion about "how much is a lot of memory" has me once again reflecting on the fact that my current desktop machine for gaming has 50% more on-chip cache (30MB) than my first machine with a hard drive had total disk storage (20MB).
(It was a 12MHz 80286 with 2MB ram and a 720x348x1bpp hercules monographics display)

2025-08-26 15:52:04 UTC

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My main question is "does that software have to talk to a cloud service to 'authenticate'" or not.

2025-08-26 15:33:04 UTC

Okay, what's the latest on Bambu Lab 3d printers and the ability to use them without Internet connectivity or their cloud service? Local LAN access, I mean, not swapping sdcards by hand like a caveman.
#BambuLab #3dPrinting #Questions

2025-08-25 20:44:56 UTC

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I suspect that it's primarily driven by malware complaints (and ensuing customer service costs) rather than government demands (though it certainly makes those much easier to fulfill).
It's still horrible overreach and combined with the killing off of AOSP build support for Pixel devices it's a bad sign for the health of the Android platform and ecosystem.
We (early Android team) fought hard for open app installation and replaceable OS images. Sad to see that finally dying.

2025-07-23 22:53:22 UTC

zfs on linux tip: use serialno based device names *not* /dev/sd# labels that are dynamically assigned (like say due to slightly different disk spin-up rates at boot).
If you fail to do that, zfs unmount POOL, zpool export POOL, zpool import -d /dev/disk/by-id/ POOL can get you fixed up.
#zfs #linux #oops

2025-07-04 01:51:53 UTC

Ahaha, people bemoaning the "enshittification" of "AI" as these companies all desperately try to charge people for this craptacular snake oil is hilarious to me. Is it really "enshittification" if the product was garbage from the start?

2025-06-12 22:46:30 UTC

One of the key things I fought for on Android was that AOSP (the open source release) could be built for and installed on the flagship Android devices. (Nexus, Pixel, etc). Sounds like that's no longer the case as of Android 16. Very sad.
https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114669765268140206

2025-06-11 06:39:34 UTC

I'm kind of fascinated by the "oh no, new languages / tools / systems are doomed because there's no huge corpus for 'AI' to be trained on" blather recently. Sounds a lot more like "oh no, people who are utterly dependent on these 'AI' tools are doomed" to me.

2025-05-30 08:17:39 UTC

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The second task and the ensuing studio segment were delightful. And as a bonus, I learned the adorable British-ism for "crossing guard."

2025-05-30 08:07:59 UTC

The studio banter is just fantastic this season.
"There's no twist."
#Taskmaster (S19E05)
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/114/595/753/497/443/111/original/ed28476c7bc402f5.mp4

2025-05-28 17:25:52 UTC

So roughly once a week nowadays, Firefox on Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS just stops responding to all keyboard input. I haven't found anything I can do at this point besides killing it and restarting it. I haven't observed any obvious commonality to the failures.
Any suggestions on how to fix (or just debug) this? Would jumping through the hoops to migrate from snap to the deb packages that Mozilla releases possibly fix this or make it easier to debug?
#Firefox #Ubuntu #Help

2025-02-16 16:52:50 UTC

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Can we do the same for Perl at the same time?

2025-01-24 21:14:04 UTC

Am I imagining things or didn't there used to be a way to attach spoiler-protected images to posts without putting the entire post behind a CW?
#Mastodon #Questions

2025-01-18 07:24:59 UTC

Here's a question... is there a solid/proven little 2D toolkit/engine out there in the style of #love2d (or maybe just a bit fancier) that uses #javascript instead of #lua ?
I love the Lua's VM design, simple embedding API, compact 0-deps codebase, and reasonable performance, but writing Lua just does not bring me joy.
Javascript has its own warts, but the general feel of a "braces" language with 0-indexing, etc, is something I just find more comfortable to work with.
#gamedev #questions

2025-01-13 06:07:13 UTC

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Not only that, I still am weirded out by people who feel comfortable just always using the latest compiler version with absolute faith that there can't possibly be any risk in upgrading.
I mean, yeah you probably should upgrade periodically, but changing compilers right before a release? For any reason besides a critical compiler bugfix? Wild!

2024-12-31 18:52:17 UTC

Between the web being absolutely flooded with "AI"-generated slop and search engines self-inflicting even more "AI" slop on their results, I wonder if hand-curated indices/portals/etc might become popular again at some point.

2024-12-24 18:11:17 UTC

Just rewatched Lower Decks season one, episode one. It does feel a little try-hard in the humor, and Mariner is more out of control than T'Lyn even, but it just makes me smile to see the introduction to these delightful nerds again, even in their earliest forms. Going to enjoy rewatching the series.
#LowerDecks #StarTrek #TV
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/709/142/840/811/355/original/8d28c8dcbe402525.jpg

2024-12-19 13:47:20 UTC

I have not been this completely absorbed by a classic roguelike since I was deep into NetHack in high school.
#CavesOfQud #Gaming

2024-12-05 22:38:32 UTC

Happy Caves of Qud 1.0 Launch Day:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/333640/Caves_of_Qud/
Enjoy a modern roguelike in the style of the classic tiled, turn based games, with nicer UI/UX, in a far-future science-fantasy setting more in the spirit of Dune or Book of the New Sun than the typical D&D fare.
#Gaming #CavesOfQud

2024-11-18 05:35:46 UTC

Oh interesting, apparently it is possible to import back-dated posts into Bluesky. Some folks are migrating their Twitter history over. (Not something I want or need there, but the capability is useful).
Would love to see post import support in Mastodon to allow for full-account migration, including one's content.
https://bsky.app/profile/scott.hanselman.com/post/3laxjqfz7sc2a

2024-11-04 01:25:48 UTC

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Does GOSUB count or are you talking about some fancy stuff involving arguments and return values?

2024-10-16 02:47:20 UTC

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Interesting. This seems to imply that Blobs end up getting streamed out of the IDB (via FileReader API), which definitely seems like a big win for larger data.

2024-10-16 01:46:12 UTC

If I'm going to store #JavaScript objects in #IndexedDB, is there any significant size or performance difference between storing them as Objects (letting IndexedDB serialize them), strings (post-JSON.stringify), ArrayBuffers (post-TextEncoder.encode), or Blobs (wrapping the ArrayBuffer)?
My assumption is the space difference is minimal or none, and that there may be some performance gain for not doing the JSON -> UTF8 -> bytearray conversion in discrete steps in Javascript.
#WebDev #Questions

2024-10-15 04:12:03 UTC

This evening I watched One Cut of the Dead at the recommendation of a friend and it was amaaaazing. A Japanese indie zombie film from 2017. $25,000 budget. Entirely too much fun.
I strongly recommend going in cold. There's blood and violence and mayhem, but it's low-budget-indie-film-style, not hyper-realistic gore, if that's a concern.
Here's a trailer, if you must, but be warned it absolutely spoils some of the fun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wBImbHqhFk
#Movies #Horror #Comedy #Zombies #October
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/309/460/418/498/011/original/f4d365939271a801.jpg

2024-09-15 03:19:29 UTC

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Doubled the coal power plant, bringing total power on the grid to 1050MW and experimenting with some different plumbing that's a bit of a mess, still.
#Satisfactory #Gaming
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/139/399/836/478/543/original/b9f788dda4da39a0.jpg
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/139/400/618/464/885/original/529d82a2fcbef9be.jpg

2024-09-13 00:17:08 UTC

Satisfactory 1.0 is out and it is still fantastic (and now with a bunch of new QoL improvements, etc).
Started a new game in 1.0 and now have coal power online (525MW) and just rebuilt and expanded the copper and iron production lines on the new second floor of the main factory.
#Gaming #Satisfactory
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/127/349/772/653/627/original/801ff394b773cfb4.jpg
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/127/350/143/836/927/original/8be4f108e07ae24e.jpg
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/127/350/522/237/485/original/098a7a7b74965b64.jpg
https://assets.chaos.social/media_attachments/files/113/127/350/909/591/277/original/43b681ec6df77a23.jpg

2024-08-13 18:43:56 UTC

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If there are sufficient resources (IO and fabric), taking advantage of the wider address bus of the C265 to provide a more direct interface to VRAM, etc would seem like a big win.

2024-08-11 06:55:37 UTC

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They do, but in 10 years of owning a 1661A, I never disconnected the cables from the back of the device. Just folded them up over or under it when not in use. (Mine had the pouch on top to hold all the goodies).

2024-08-11 02:13:48 UTC

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This is one reason I tend to use male 0.1" headers on the main board side of projects.
Also you can just use the trick of plugging in a male header with long leads and then plugging your LA, scope, etc into those.

2024-08-11 02:03:27 UTC

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If you've got the signals you need on 0.1" headers you can skip the grabbers and just plug in directly.
I loved my 1661A. Ended up giving it away a few years back when it needed some refurb TLC and my need for very wide (>16 bit) captures had pretty much vanished.

2024-08-09 02:12:44 UTC

Oh this is a very nice feature of the RP2350's (Q)SPI memory interface:
"The QMI can map addresses with its built-in address translation hardware: each chip select is partitioned into 4 × 4 MB windows, whose physical base address and aperture size are configured in units of 4 kB (one flash sector). This enables the runtime addresses of flash programs to be independent of where they are stored."
Massively simplifies a lot of things, including A/B firmware images.
#Pico2 #RP2350

2024-08-08 20:16:51 UTC

Lots of fun new goodies in the RP2350.
New QMI memory controller supports two SPI/QSPI memory devices, and RAM as well as ROM/flash.
OTP area allows for USB VID/PID/string customization from bootloader onward, and user-provided second stage bootloader if desired.
Various PIO improvements and a 3rd PIO unit.
All USB errata from RP2040 fixed.
A new high-speed serial output block (HSTX) that can drive 8 outputs at 150MHz (optionally DDR). Interesting!
#Pico2 #RP2350

2024-08-08 19:51:36 UTC

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The RP235xB variants are QFN-80s with 48 GPIOs and 8 analog inputs, which is pretty decent.

2024-08-08 15:27:41 UTC

This looks like a bunch of fun. Twice the memory. Choice of Cortex M33 or RISC-V RV32I cores at boot time. Real atomic ops. Stacked SPI flash option. Hopefully the USB peripheral is a bit less wonky.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/rp2350/
#Pico2 #RP2350

2024-08-05 20:48:40 UTC

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Customized ASICs for CPU/PPU/glue is not too out there for an early-90's console design in my mind. The ability to (if you really got fancy) support a couple different "app" cpus (6502/65816/Z80/etc) would be fun too and I feel like keeping the programming model and ISA "realistic" is plenty. Having everything be DIPs or whatnot or run at 5V is certainly not essential at least to my way of thinking, but obviously opinions vary.

2024-08-05 20:43:56 UTC

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Really, if you're going to drop an ECP5 in, I'd ditch the 65C265 entirely -- you can easily fit a pipelined and cached RV32I or a 68000 in there -- a 65C816 should not be a problem. You could probably fit *two* -- run the OS on one and apps/games/etc on the other. Abandon the clunky peripherals on the C265 for nicer ones, do a VERA++ video engine, and build your dream early 90s console/computer. Prototype it out on a ULX3S or similar.

2024-08-05 20:24:09 UTC

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I expect it's all workable but you're going to need a new design to accommodate the latencies involved with external memory compared with doing all the compositing out of on-board BRAM/SRAM blocks. Definitely doable (and the ECP5, even a small one, has a lot more resources and is much faster), but likely requiring a significant rebuild of the VERA core design.

2024-08-05 20:18:37 UTC

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Outboard memory would be the way to go. Not sure if you'd be able to guarantee the same exact timing/limits as the original VERA design. You'd certainly be able to have a lot more video/tile/sprite RAM to play with thought. It'd be a big change to the VERA design.

2024-08-05 20:12:35 UTC

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How much block ram is available? I think the only possibly issue might be that the VERA design uses 128KBytes of on-board memory in the ICE40UP5K for sprite/tile/etc ram, and I forget if the ECP5's are as generous with BRAM.

2024-08-05 02:29:24 UTC

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That falls pretty squarely in "I'd worry that even if not malicious, this could introduce who knows what subtle bugs into the boot/install process" for me. I haaaate debugging crap during installation, so ye olde iso dd'd to a usb stick it will remain for me!

2024-08-05 02:16:21 UTC

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Being suspicious of things that people are inexplicably aggressive about feels reasonable to me. I've heard of ventoy (or something similar) and it sounds possibly useful (though I'm pretty content with just dd'ing images to devices as needed), but people being weird about it makes me think maybe I'm fine as is.

2024-08-04 23:53:53 UTC

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Yeah, it always seemed a bit dodgy to me, but fixing it to have an actual synchronous external bus interface feels like it'd be tricky (for me at least) without building up a full simulation environment, which is a fair bit of work. Someone with more extensive digital design experience and/or less rusty could probably get it sorted more expediently, I suspect.

2024-08-04 23:38:08 UTC

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My read on it is that VERA was designed to handle a 1MHz 6502 bus interface by mostly leveraging the fact that it runs at 25MHz internally rather than doing more extensive CDC handling. I suspect as the external bus clock gets faster, things just generally get iffier.

2024-08-02 03:57:37 UTC

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I don't see contiguous RAM being necessary -- and it's pretty rare on actual 80s/90s machines, either because of ROM, peripherals, etc getting in the way on 64K address space machines or there naturally being gaps in larger address space machines.

2024-07-01 01:22:58 UTC

I know there's a big contingent of folks that believe Quote Toots are the root of all evil, but they are absolutely the most lacking feature of Mastodon for me -- not being able to share a post and introduce it or comment on it at the same time just remains incredibly clunky. It's pretty much the only major feature I miss from other systems here.

2024-07-01 01:04:15 UTC

Hey, #ActivityPub folks.
I'm curious -- has there been thought given to making some kind of simple HeyFollowMe button on web pages that could work as smoothly as RSS buttons did for RSS using folks back in the day?
Ideally not requiring one to copy and paste a URL into a #Mastodon search box or type your home server address into a Follow dialog box on another site's page.
I'm assuming there's some reason such a thing isn't already out there.
#Question

2024-05-17 03:56:39 UTC

Is it just because I'm weird (or old?) that I find callbacks much easier to understand and reason about than all the async/await/Promise stuff? (looking at some modern-ish javascript example code)
The stuff that supposedly "simplifies" things just seems to make control flow much less obvious to me.

2024-05-14 19:41:07 UTC

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Something that consistently enraged me when I worked at Google... being told "you are not the target user" or "we're building for the 90% use case" when I ran into some frustrating limitation of a product.
Sure, you can't always cover every edge case, but at "Google scale" 10% is a *lot* of people you're leaving hanging.

2024-04-28 17:27:38 UTC

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TT provides 8 out, 8 in, and 8 bidir IOs plus rst and clk. For TT07, this design is running the Z80 core at 1/4 the project clock (so 12.5Mhz for the max 50MHz clock) and alternating between control, A0-A7, control, and A8-A15 on the out pins, D0-7 on the bidir pins, control inputs on the in pins:
https://github.com/rejunity/z80-open-silicon/blob/68438f00192e7b2388163e198b330567e6133cb7/src/tt_um_rejunity_z80.v#L24
The README implies that after prototyping on TT07 the plan is ChipIgnite runs for QFN44 and DIP40 packages (presumably classic Z80 pin-compatible).

2024-04-22 06:38:12 UTC

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The other thing that I see WASM increasingly being used for is: take a huge pile of software needed to do for a task -- say an FPGA/MCU toolchain -- convert it all to a platform neutral format that can run on any modern desktop at a performance level that's Good Enough, but also in a reasonable sandbox environment, without the need to wrangle the build for every potential target OS.
Kinda horrible but sure beats rewriting it all from scratch to be safe and clean and portable.

2024-04-22 06:25:14 UTC

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Sure.
However, for good or ill, the modern web and browser have evolved into a platform-ish thing (and trust me, as an OS engineer I have been involved in extensive arguments with browser folks about how a Browser is NOT an Operating System).
And while I despair of the absurdities of the modern "web tech stack", a mechanism for delivering content other than hypertext documents that works much better than Javascript, yet remains platform neutral is, to my mind, a good thing.

2024-04-22 06:16:45 UTC

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Also, WebAssembly is like ActiveX or Java Applets (yes, I know, eww!) but better! (really!).
I have my grumbles with Rust and with WASM, but the combined power of these two much-maligned technologies have managed to resurrect a long-thought-vanquished maligned technology of days past (shockwave flash) and the result is I can once again watch classic StrongBad Emails in their full Vector Animated Glory instead of as sad, artifact-y copies on Youtube.
https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/58-dragon

2024-04-22 05:51:14 UTC

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See, this is a perfect example of objection-to-evangelism getting in the way of potentially-useful-technology!
Because it's increasingly used in many places (far beyond just browsers) as a modern intermediate form that can be very efficiently AOT'd/JIT'd/etc.
Some people also have an instant negative reaction to it being a 32bit environment, but that decision allows for some extremely efficient implementation of runtimes on modern 64bit archs.
There's some good stuff there.

2024-04-22 05:44:27 UTC

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For your amusement, past-me grumbling about the WASM spec...
https://chaos.social/@swetland/111271568378452789

2024-04-22 05:38:44 UTC

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Yup, it's definitely not a novel approach.
I got interested in WebAssembly as a "portable" intermediate target after seeing how Zim had made use of it for their bootstrapping process.
WASM is another one of those "there's a lot of hype" and "there are some questionable design decisions" things (and ye gods I haaaate how the spec is written, don't get me started) that also has a LOT of good ideas (and has increasingly wide adoption, which is handy too, worse-is-better, etc.)

2024-04-22 05:30:50 UTC

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That's actually how my stage-0 compiler works. I had started writing everything in a minimal dialect of C thinking I'd, at some point, machine-translate it to the target language. It wasn't horrible for the lexer, parser, etc, but data structure wrangling, code gen, etc got increasingly ugly. So I hit the reset button and bolted a super-minimal transpiler-to-C on the lexer+parser. Then I can use that to compile the stage-1 compiler written in (a subset of) itself.

2024-04-22 04:58:29 UTC

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My big takeaway from some of this recent chatter is I should clearly be spending more of my time on my long running, slow moving, hobby language project.
My goal: a small systems language that tries to combine the joy that C has brought me over the past 3 decades with some of the syntactic and safety innovations that Go, Rust, etc have introduced, while trying to avoid the horror of modern "big compiler" UB landmines.
Because, of course, my solution is "yet another language!"

2024-04-22 04:51:58 UTC

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Are there people who seriously think "we'll never have to change again"? One of my takeaways from some of the big security oopses of the last decade or two is "we don't know what we don't know."
There's value in learning from past mistakes and trying to make the next thing a bit more resistant to breaking in the same ways that previous things broke. But that doesn't mean there won't be exciting new ways for things to break discovered in the future!
Sound like job security!

2024-04-22 04:18:26 UTC

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Yeah, teen characters to be relatable to a teen target demographic seems to be pretty typical for a lot of anime.
It's always fun to get a show with a somewhat older cast with different problems than the typical middle-school/high-school ones.
Shirobako is fun that way. Much more of a workplace comedy with the (large) main cast being variously in their mid-20s through mid-40s.

2024-04-22 01:35:19 UTC

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I've actually been surprised at how many fun shows have turned up (I had pretty low expectations).
Dungeon Meshi continues to be awesome, Hibike Euphonium is (finally) back for a 3rd season, and we get more silly camping slice-of-life in YuruCamp S3.
Meanwhile Girls Band Cry, Jellyfish Can't Swim In The Night, and Whisper Me A Love Song are all doing fun girls-in-bands slice-of-life/drama stuff.
First two episodes of Shuumatsu Train were a solid weird post-apocalyptic start, too!

2024-04-13 22:40:12 UTC

This keynote speech by [@marthawells](https://wandering.shop/@marthawells) about writing non-human intelligences and Murderbot is fantastic.
https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/649804.html
"There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy. But humans have always been really good at ignoring things we don't want to pay attention to. Which is also a theme in the Murderbot series."
#books #murderbot