Tony Finch

from my link log — BLUF: make your writing more powerful with the bottom line up front. https://www.animalz.co/blog/bottom-line-up-front/ saved 2019-09-13 https://dotat.at/:/RAR32.html

from my link log — The bubble sort curve. https://linesthatconnect.github.io/blog/a-rigorous-derivation-of-the-bubble-sort-curve/ saved 2024-04-23 https://dotat.at/:/5F0BK.html

from my link log — A 40-year-old bug in BSD unix domain socket inode allocation discovered on the DEFCON 34 main stage. https://yuvalino.com/how-can-you-not-be-romantic-about-unix-domain-sockets saved 2026-09-14 https://dotat.at/:/A1LTF.html

from my link log — RISC-V: they should have known better. https://dmitry.gr/?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=12.%20RV saved 2026-08-14 https://dotat.at/:/OEC83.html

oh lovely, french wiktionary has an appendix on swearing in québécois https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Annexe:Sacres_qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois (i love the tutorial on swearing in the movie “bon cop bad cop” which was (if anything) made harder to understand by the subtitles)

from my link log — Verona: a research programming language for concurrent ownership. https://github.com/microsoft/verona saved 2020-10-28 https://dotat.at/:/6KY3K.html

@slava@mathstodon.xyz and the macromedia flash authoring tools

“do we even have a registration number?!” several hours of searching later “uh, will 1571 c. 29 13 Eliz 1 do?” https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Eliz1/13/29

anyone know which station this is? a youtuber used it as a thumbnail on a video about cambridge

from my link log — Rust for Morello ARM CHERI: always-on memory safety, even in unsafe code. https://drops.dagstuhl.de/storage/00lipics/lipics-vol263-ecoop2023/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.39/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.39.pdf saved 2026-07-21 https://dotat.at/:/9MIM0.html

@sash « I stumbled into the first vulnerability while debugging the reverse DNS zone for my IPv6 range in RIPEstat, RIPE NCC’s network information tool. A blue marquee started scrolling across the page, from an XSS payload I had put in my DNS server months earlier. » actual irl lol, excellent work

from my link log — Learning a regular language by inferring a DFA with the TTT algorithm. https://rahul.gopinath.org/post/2026/06/09/ttt-grammar-inference/ saved 2026-06-11 https://dotat.at/:/4I4X2.html

from my link log — Debootstrapping without archeology: stacked implementations in Camlboot. https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.09231 saved 2026-06-10 https://dotat.at/:/LKPL6.html

from my link log — Documentation and analysis of the Linux random number generator. https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Publications/Studies/LinuxRNG/LinuxRNG_EN_V5_9.html saved 2026-07-28 https://dotat.at/:/3YJ5L.html

from my link log — A floating point bit twiddling toy. http://evanw.github.io/float-toy/ saved 2020-01-23 https://dotat.at/:/G639G.html

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems i enjoy technologyconnections’ rants about how feeble they are :-)

from my link log — Fully in-place functional programming with Koka. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3607840 saved 2026-07-06 https://dotat.at/:/PGVVV.html

@henryk@chaos.social heh yeah the statute of elizabeth is similarly postdated for oxford and cambridge, by nearly 400 years after their founding dates :-)

@dwmalone@mastodon.ie it would be amusing if the eu applies clear product labelling regulations to usb cables :-)

@al45tair@pleroma.al45tair.net @joe@f.duriansoftware.com @aburka@hachyderm.io different thing! i think you’re thinking of the relatively new thing where an unnamed struct or union inside a struct roughly speaking inlines the members of the nested object so you don’t need multiple levels of . . . a shitty version of it was standardized in c20ish (i forget which version) with irritating limitations that make me think, oh this might be useful? actually no, wtf the 1970s c struct namespacing thing was much weirder basically you could use x->member for any x, whether it was a pointer or an integer there was a single namespace for all struct members: the type of x did nothing to narrow down what ->member meant which is why the oldskool unix api structs have prefixes for the member names like struct stat st_mode st_ino etc to avoid accidental name collisions

@joe@f.duriansoftware.com @aburka@hachyderm.io it isn’t so common in v7 but in v6 you have things like https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/sys/param.h so kernel code can write PS->integ which nowadays we would write *(int*)PS cast syntax (type)val was relatively late, after v6, shortly before k&r, so i think the bourne shell shows signs of casts not yet being a thing

@joe@f.duriansoftware.com @aburka@hachyderm.io yep

@dotstdy@mastodon.social the context in the “fixes” link makes it look to me like it was caused by deleting the () by mistake when cleaning up some code duplication https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/sys/kern/?id=f373437a01a3

@pozorvlak@mathstodon.xyz i grew up with john ireland’s “gentle art of making guinness” hung in series along a staircase lovely illustrations which i think were painted for a calendar in about 1980

@typeswitch heh :-) have you seen simon tatham’s article on custom control structures? https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/mp/

@tubbydammer@mastodonapp.uk huh, that makes me if even normal councils have corporate registration documents, or if (say) cambridge city council would have to refer to its 1207 charter

@joe@f.duriansoftware.com @zwarich@hachyderm.io aren’t rust async / c++ coroutines based on knowing transitive frame sizes?

what ios mastodon clients are good? i’m annoyed by ivory’s crappy ui for filters, which spams the server requesting userpics that i don’t want to see, and pegs the rate limiter i’ve reported it as a bug but they don’t seem to be making improvements to ivory so i should probably look elsewhere

from my link log — The UX of Lego interface panels. https://www.designedbycave.co.uk/2020/LEGO-Interface-UX/ saved 2020-08-03 https://dotat.at/:/QJ8ZR.html

@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me @kaye@cathode.church heh, yeah :-) https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/

@aburka@hachyderm.io @joe@f.duriansoftware.com totally obvious to pdp11 kernel hackers! (i am not a pdp11 kernel hacker)

from my link log — antcc: a little C compiler. https://codeberg.org/lsof/antcc saved 2026-05-25 https://dotat.at/:/C9DRG.html

from my link log — An introduction to canvas in Emacs. https://monadicsheep.org/blog/an-introduction-to-canvas-in-emacs.html saved 2026-08-23 https://dotat.at/:/79WDD.html

i guess i could have thought of the old unix crdelay feature which only went up to 3, which suggests how much slower cr was than bs (but i still wonder how much the speed was determined by serial baud rate and how much by mechanical limits) https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=stty&apropos=0&sektion=1&manpath=Unix+Seventh+Edition&format=html

from my link log — What exactly was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]? https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/blog/?p=1035 saved 2021-04-12 https://dotat.at/:/KWNJ4.html

pondering how to advise someone who wrote “I want to play devil’s advocate and argue …” that it comes across as “I want to be an argumentative asshole” … but without turning the advice into a vicious flame

i’m enjoying alastair reid’s thoughts on designing a language for readability so that nonspecialist programmers can understand intel’s instruction set architecture specification https://intellabs.github.io/isa-tools/

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange you might find https://github.com/Latias94/merman is easier (i would be interested to hear how well it works if you try it)

from my link log — A new online era of The Far Side is coming! https://www.thefarside.com/ saved 2019-10-01 https://dotat.at/:/W823N.html

from my link log — The tech of ‘Terminator 2’: an oral history. https://vfxblog.com/2017/08/23/the-tech-of-terminator-2-an-oral-history/ saved 2026-07-12 https://dotat.at/:/FF40O.html