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stevekemp

10,717 karma · joined October 30, 2012

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stevekemp··on Replit rebuilt its sandbox engine with microVMs
I do hope nobody reading this copies any of Replit's design decisions or architecture, lest they get threatened.

I avoided reading the piece, just in case.

stevekemp··on US FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control by 2028
Linux 7.4 got fixes for floppy disk handling, as recently as yesterday!

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

stevekemp··on MS Paint Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
Email may be text-based, but parsing MIME is a pain in the ass (speaking as somebody who wrote a console-based email client.)

You can go back to mutt's parsing, and CVE-1999-0940 for an old example. But I'm sure that's only one of many.

stevekemp··on North Korean fake job interview led to $6.3B Binance heist
I've worked at a few companies where they'd offer to sell, for a nominal amount, the work-laptops to ex-staff.

I know the last time I left my job I was given the opportunity to buy an M1 mac with 16Gb of RAM for €100, so of course I did.

(Though I also paid €500 to keep the phone they'd bought for me, which was perhaps not such a good deal, it was convienent and I do like the phone, but I'd have been happy to have a random cheap android phone, I have no specific requirements beyond "small enough to fit inside a sporran"!)

stevekemp··on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
As somebody born with the name Steven I'm curious about the relative popularity of "Steven" vs. "Stephen".

I feel like when I was a child more people were present with a PH, but nowadas virtually nobody. Most of the Stephens I know are "old", and I think "Steve" won.

But no doubt it varies on country, and who you know.

(I legally changed my name from Steven to Steve, a couple of years ago, because it was the only name I'd ever used and it got too tiresome dealing with my official passport, and ID saying one name when I signed/wrote another name on all my official paperwork. To the extent that employers would book flights in one name but my passport was in the other name, cue much hilarity at boarding time..)

stevekemp··on US boy names that became girl names and vice versa
Finland has some naming rules, but they don't necessarily apply to everyone in the country because they're rules for naming people born here, rather than those who later moved here.

There is a public index of forenames and surnames which I learned about when I was with my pregnant wife, and back then I was obsessively searching for my/our surname to see it increase by one when our newborn was registered and became "official".

Apparently within the whole of Finland there 22 men with the same surname as me, and 25 women. 21 of these people are in Finland and 26 are abroad but known.

Interestingly if I go to the forename search and look for people named "Steve" there are < 5 women with that name (i.e. non-zero, but the number masked for privacy reasons):

https://nimipalvelu.dvv.fi/en/forename-search?name=Steve

I'm curious about the origin there, though of course I've seen Steve -> Steffan -> Stephany, and similar translations in the past.

stevekemp··on Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4
Clicking on either of the feeds takes me to a page that just returns an error.

e.g. https://jepsen.io/blog.rss returns a text/plain respond containing only "Nothing to see here; move along.".

stevekemp··on Casio Watches of the 1980s
I really loved your comment, it's something that we take for granted these days with it being easy to buy these things.

For me I've been collecting (mechanical) watches for 20ish years. Half my collection is high-end Swiss watches, and the other half is more ecclectic but I have a real soft spot for the former Soviet designs.

They were not expensive, and even now you get a great watch for €50 because they made so many of them.

Although the focus of the USSR watches wasn't that level of quality you see in the Japanese pieces they're so rugged and simple that most of them will outlive me.

I regularly buy 50+ year old watches that have never been serviced and still run properly. Obviously there's some element of survivorship bias at play, but the engineering there is top-notch.

stevekemp··on Casio Watches of the 1980s
I collect watches and the only digital watch I've owned for the past 20ish years is the ubiquitous F91W.

I've been strongly tempted by the g-shocks over the years, but never quite pulled the trigger. There are so many to choose from, with various features. But seeing this post I figured why not just pick one that looks fun, so I ordered the GMA-P2100-4AER (which is pink).

stevekemp··on I didn't know I was lacking in Vitamin D until I collapsed at work
Because being surrounded by people who use English as a second/third language, they often encourage us to report "mistakes" and "weirdness" in their language, as a way of improving and learning.
stevekemp··on Assembly Nights (2021)
"set disassembly-flavor intel" was one of the first customizations I made to gdb when I started using it in anger.
stevekemp··on Assembly Nights (2021)
I've been writing a lot of assembly over recent months (the runtime routines for a lisp compiler, and of course debugging the generated assembly my compiler emits itself).

Mostly all I do is run a backtrace from the segfaults, and otherwise single-step through the code to verify my assumptions.

GDB has sufficed pretty well, though I admit I spent a long time writing the stop&copy garbage collector, and tracing through it trying to understand why I was getting segfaults.

I'm sure there are better tools, but for simple debugging it was sufficient.

stevekemp··on Solar power is becoming bigger than nuclear
I have a cabin in the woods, an hour from my house, my choices are either install a couple of solar panels on the roof, or have no electricity.

I'm looking forward to installing a couple of panels on the roof next year. Having power to charge my phone, or laptop, won't take much capacity, I'm not going to use much power other than that, maybe some music but nothing like cooking/heating, or similar heavyweight usage. (I have a wood stove for heating, and gas/alcohol stoves for cooking, along with on-site water.)

stevekemp··on One of the Greatest Inventions in the History of Human Transport
I live in Helsinki, where there is a good tram and bus network. Every now and again a major road will be dug up, in the city center, and trams often get rerouted for a few months to work around that.

I've noticed that there are some diversions which are definitely beneficial to me. There are busses from my house to the city center, as well as a tram. If the tram diverts to a different destination that essentially doubles my available "travel destinations" in a way that's really useful.

So no doubt, for me personally, there are changes that could be useful. But perhaps they would be less useful for others.

stevekemp··on Google illegally cut down 250K trees in Finland for data center
> (a parking ticket level occurnace)

Remember Finland is the country where we scale fines based on income, as the famous article says "Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket."

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

Not appropriate for this specific issue, but for "traffic ticket" it's worth remembering.

stevekemp··on Reforming English Spelling
Welcome to Finnish where there are both "a" and "ä" to get different sounds, in a consistent fashion.
stevekemp··on Remove pgrust: the entry is cheating (per-query kernels and result caching)
Some projects do, for example the Lua programming language does their work in private, between releases.

Other projects do it less successfully, making grandiose claims and later releasing things in a partially working state, for example the V-programming language.

It's not super-common, but just those two examples off the top of my head show it's not entirely unheard of.

stevekemp··on Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier
I've been buying used DVDs from local charity shops (here in Finland) for the past couple of years.

I've noticed that there are fewer new releases, but apparently people are increasingly buying physical media (that statistic might be squewed by counting vinyl releases).

But that said most of the films/TV I watch is old stuff anyway, and every time I visit a large store I walk away with 5+ disks.

Just yesterday I bought a physical copy of Fight Club for €1, alongside Trainspotting, Blade, and a boxed set of black and white St Trinian's movies. Definitely enough media to keep me entertained for the next week or two.

stevekemp··on The reverts will continue until morale improves
Copyright law; you can't copyright a recipe.

The "life story" is a means to it easier to issue takedown notices, and report rehosters for copyright infringement.

Google isn't involved.

stevekemp··on Show HN: Death Plan Switch, a self-hosted dead man's switch for solo devs
I notice that your github README says that you don't accept pull-requests, that's fine, but you've still got them enabled upon the project. Perhaps you should go to your repository settings, and disable them?
stevekemp··on Ousted Savannah police officer gave ICE agent husband access to Flock system
I suspect it's human nature, earlier today I was reading about how some hospital staff had been fired [in the UK] for looking up details of patients they shouldn't have been involved with.

They should have known better, but despite constant training people just seem unable to help themselves.

stevekemp··on Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
I guess we can argue technicalities, but since the processor is different, and the 6502 handles the zero-page specially the end result is that you have to rebuild/recompile your binaries to run them under cpm65.

In that sense I'd regard it as a remake, rather than a port. But it's impressive it is possible at all, and it does look like a fun project. (I remember watching some of the porting/building videos when I was working on my own understanding of CP/M for emulation purposes.)

stevekemp··on Constructors Shouldn't Throw
In go there are the "init" functions, but those do not return a possible error result.

I guess you're thinking more of package constructor methods, such as NewFoo, which tend to return the new object and an error value.

stevekemp··on Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
I'd compare to a z80 with 64k of memory, which would be enough to run CP/M. That wouldn't allow TLS, or music playback, but it would allow wordperfect, turbo pascal, a bunch of old C-compilers, and a spreadsheet or two.

I don't think anybody would use such a machine full-time, but with a radio and a cabin it would suffice for offline work.

Of course there's no native CP/M for the 6502, but remakes have been made..

stevekemp··on I Became a Citizen of Japan
Some westerners are, maybe they like manga and other aspects of the exported media.

Some westerners are obsessed with Finland, the happiest country in the world.

Some westerners are obsessed with the idea of being an artist and musician in Berlin.

In short the internet makes these niches and obsessions seem larger than they are, because people with such a shared interest can find others to talk to. But I'd wager that most westerners aren't specifically obsessed with any specific country, or region.

stevekemp··on A Princeton PhD applied to 2,300 jobs and still can't get one
archive.is blocks the whole of Finland, which is annoying.
stevekemp··on Domain Health
I've used mail-tester.com as a simple test in the past, it reports on the obvious SPF/DKIM/reverse-DNS things that are often significant.
stevekemp··on New York City’s horse-drawn carriages expected to take their last trot
I'm kinda curious what other horses you'd have in the streets, there?

I've lived in the UK, and now Finland, and generally the only time I see horses are when ridden by the police.

(In Scotland it was common-place to see mounted police outside Rugby and Football matches, apparently the increased height gave them good visibilty. I'm sure they trained and selected for even-tempered horses, but I always imagined the combination of thousands of shouting pedestrians and horses was a bad one. If a horse got spooked things would end pretty badly, and quickly.)

stevekemp··on The Double Headed Stack Allocator
You're probably right, in practice it would be just fine.

That said if you look at a lot of the basic GC approaches you end up either moving all the allocated and live objects, or running through a mark & sweep dance which gives you holes in your allocation region - and causes problems with fragmentation.

Choosing the right kind of GC, knowing your constraints, could probably sidestep these problems, but there seems to be nothing obvious with the simple two-headed bump-allocator decribed in the post, so long as the lifecycles don't change over time - ruining the simplicity of the arena-based approach.

stevekemp··on QGIS bans AI assisted contributions
I just started archiving my repositories; I still run the code, I still tinker in the background, but no more slop reports.

Users can continue to fork my code, if they wish, and it is still available, but I'm done fighting submissions.

Although recently I've started getting more spam by email from scrapers which are obviously AI based. Just yesterday:

"We reviewed your "Added generated syscall identifiers" in skx/slisp and selected it for the hub. It is a substantial piece of work: 3 files and about 390 lines across packages." Some bollocks AI coding hub, where apparently people will be able to see my code when they have 100% identical problems. Meh.

I'm almost reaching the point where I want to make repositories private, and maybe it will come, but for the moment things remain.

I just leave one-three repositories "open", and archive the rest. Then when my interest shift, or I need to go back to something old I rotate them.

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