Dave Anderson

Software developer by day (Tailscale), other kinds of nerd the rest of the time. ADHD says current hobbies are 3D printers, building CNC machines, tinkering with NixOS, and general shitposting on whatever grabs my interest.

Nazis, TERFs, other terrible people: please go away, there's nothing for you here.

Public Key

npub16272q2qvgcswvunpmmr7lelwcjcu5vhdxlyyjkxkca44w5npxtzs9wje7e

NIP-05 Address

danderson_at_hachyderm.io@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsd909q9qxyvg8xwfsaa3l0ulhvfvw2xtkn0jzftrtvw66h2fsn93gdgkm7j

Author Public Key

npub16272q2qvgcswvunpmmr7lelwcjcu5vhdxlyyjkxkca44w5npxtzs9wje7e

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Last Notes

2024-08-16 07:44:17

"Electronics isn't magic"
"Also, here is the protective sigil to cast when working with DRAM"
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/970/575/318/817/868/original/70e000e28fe4879c.png

2024-08-03 22:19:19

I found it, the true source. 1992 programmer's reference for VGA and XGA on IBM PS/2.
VGA is 0 to 0.7V, regardless of what messy reality did
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/900/402/687/383/065/original/2147647365b877aa.png

2024-08-03 18:23:34

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@npub1ane…7zqz do you honor the Little Big exemption? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUwTnJ8yFXY

2024-07-28 18:30:35

TIL the British Columbia wildfire fighting service has "parattack" crews, firefighters who parachute into inaccessible areas to fight a wildfire. 48h of food and water, resupplied by airdrops, and they have to either walk back to civilization or to some place a helicopter can pick them up.
You know, just in case FIGHTING WILDFIRES isn't quite metal enough for you, why not jump out of a plane into the wilderness first.

2024-07-24 23:20:46

It's funny how github's API vomits out _so much_ information about pull requests, but nowhere in that pile of data can you find the PR's merge base.
If you're about to go "akshually the response contains base.sha", I hope you didn't write any CI code based on that assumption, because it's wrong: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39880 . base.sha references _some_ commit on the target branch, which could be before/on/after the desired merge base.

2024-07-23 23:33:40

New rule for software design discussions: if your argument for a design includes the words "the unix philosophy", your design is automatically rejected, with no appeal available.
If you mean a specific design goal, say what you mean. "The unix philosophy" has half a dozen definitions, unix never followed any of them religiously at all times, and has become shorthand for "I like this and don't feel like unpacking why".

2024-07-21 06:55:23

It's quite funny that in the midst of the crowdstrike thing yesterday, someone tweeted - afaict as a shitpost - that Southwest Airlines were unaffected due to running windows 3.1. Then digitaltrends published that claim using the tweet as a source, and are now being quoted themselves as a source.
AFAICT, it's entirely bollocks. Same with the claim they still run Windows 95, that's from the same lazy digitaltrends article, misquoting another misquote from 2 years ago.

2024-07-19 08:56:28

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Also, quick note for crowdstrike execs: everyone can see you looking over at that bus, considering your options, limbering up your throwing arm... Just a note that the people you probably want to hire are watching reeeally closely how you're going to handle this, and are taking notes. The shareholders may be into human sacrifices, but the people you need to run your business aren't. Choose wisely.

2024-07-19 08:53:53

Okay so you know, bunch of shitposting and all that, but a serious interlude:
Someone pushed the button to start this rollout. They are probably having a _really_ bad time right now.
If someone at Crowdstrike knows who that is, please go and check on them, give them a hug, tell them it's not their fault, that it's going to be okay. No matter what the company line is on blameless culture whatever, the lizard brain is in charge right now and needs reassurance.

2024-07-19 08:39:33

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Windows is in fact Crowdstrike/Windows, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, Crowdstrike plus Windows. Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully non-functioning Crowdstrike system, made useful by the .SYS files, automated updates and blue screens comprising a full outage as defined by the news.

2024-07-19 08:04:16

Happy Friday, hugops to Crowdstrike, Azure, Microsoft, and uh every fortune 1000 it would seem.
Big skynet vibes tbh, I'm kinda surprised that _more_ stuff isn't on fire. Not yet, at least.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/812/106/190/002/373/original/bd7514125ebb5f0b.png

2024-07-19 03:36:20

If you're mad about Google killing short links all over the Internet, and are saying things like "let's scrape it all before it goes down", I suggest checking out https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior. Some chaotic good people are well ahead of you in terms of planning, and have a VM image you can run to lend some compute and bandwidth to the effort. It's like SETI of old, but for praxis against internet vandals like Google.

2024-07-12 06:16:28

Arright well the combination of CAD stuff and trying a bit of Julia dataviz is the last straw for NixOS on desktop for me. Entire ecosystems I wish to partake of simply will not work, because they're not interested in the whole derivation bondage scene, and I'm tired of having to spend precious hours on trying to make it work out.
Now to decide... Debian (first love), Ubuntu (dislike, but universal build target), Arch (like, but tweaking a million configs without declarativeness...)

2024-07-07 19:37:24

Looks like congratulations are in order to le wokisme, for winning the war on le wokisme

2024-07-03 02:57:45

Damnit ZFS stop storing my /dev/zero dumps efficiently, I need to run the pool down to 0B free to test a thing...
/dev/one when

2024-07-01 20:14:16

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@npub10sm…hjqm Never mind, I'm an idiot. I was connected as root to check the post-upgrade state, and my usual bouncer runs as the non-root user 🤦‍♂️

2024-07-01 20:10:46

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@npub10sm…hjqm I dunno man, I upgraded my bouncer machine, started weechat, it printed a million messages about migrating configs... and then didn't connect to any servers, and there are no server configs any more.

2024-07-01 20:08:28

oh cool weechat yeah just silently erase all servers from my IRC config because you got yourself a new release that changes the config format and fuck trying to forward-port configs right

2024-06-29 19:33:58

I maked a thing in CAD, and did not forget the most important parametric configuration.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/701/565/466/461/591/original/89519b12438b76be.png

2024-06-14 03:08:45

Something I wish existed but if it does I can't find it: a general "learning prerequisites and pointers" database. Given a concept/topic, tell me what the topic is called in academia, point me to the standard textbooks/opencourseware, and give me a dependency graph of "other stuff you should know first".
Right now I'm having to do this by stumbling upon the right course at some university, and working backwards from the course prerequisites.

2024-06-07 20:18:09

Finally, I have defeated my own website and successfully posted something.
For your amusement, I humbly present: what the hell is PID 0?
https://blog.dave.tf/post/linux-pid0/

2024-06-05 06:16:27

ISO standards continue to be hilarious. Take for example ISO 10303, which defines the STEP file format for CAD things.
It consists of 103 separate parts. You have to buy each one separately.
Part 1 is the introduction. Just the intro mind you, the bit that tells you what's in the rest of the parts. It is flagged as outdated since 1994, missing a large part of what modern CAD does with STEP, and costs $157.

2024-06-02 06:09:02

Extremely niche peeve: when a functional DSL calls something `let`, but it turns out to be `let*`.

2024-05-18 18:11:08

darn, pretty blue LEDs have an annoyingly high Vf. So either I have to find some driver IC that does non-resistive current limiting, or run a 5V rail just to get enough margin for the LEDs. Or I guess use comforting traditional red/amber/green LEDs instead of this newfangled InGaN stuff.

2024-05-18 02:40:57

How to tell your OSS is ridiculously popular: people aren't 100% sure they _didn't_ embed it, and tack on the software equivalent of "packaged in a facility where peanuts were also present" to the license list.
This watch contains software, so statistically probably contains at least traces of curl.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/459/762/292/917/909/original/4889231ae4731a64.jpg

2024-05-17 03:19:36

I found all the people who made the unhinged ultradense unusably elaborate winamp skins back in the day! They're now making watch faces in the Garmin app store.

2024-05-14 19:57:32

Hi. Quick break from the posting for a serious PSA.
Please have a bottle of aspirin in your home. Make sure the tablets can be chewed as well as just swallowed. Make sure you remove any fiddly foil seal and such. Don't use this aspirin for regular pain relief, just keep it around and know where it is.
Hopefully, you'll never need it and will just feel silly for having it. But if a bad time comes for you someday, being able to chew aspirin when emergency services tells you may save your life.

2024-05-01 22:20:01

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@npub1ane…7zqz hmm yeah I'm not sure what all goes into the signed tailnet lock state offhand, but that does make it more annoying.
HAProxy also seems fine fwiw, just offering ways of keeping the current thing alive :)

2024-05-01 02:58:29

The unmoderated nixos reddit is extremely mad at the woke mind virus conquering nix.
I'm going to take this as a very hopeful sign indeed.

2024-04-30 22:38:03

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@npub1ane…7zqz How are you liking it? It's on my list, though my machines are all hyperconverged NAS boxes so I'm nervous about an extremely opinionated appliance OS...

2024-04-23 17:22:57

"Did the sentient spacecraft evolved from Voyager 6, which featured in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, have twink mode?" is not how I expected to start the day.
Not complaining mind you, not at all.
(the answer is yes btw, assuming the existence of Voyager 6 implies politicians who aren't unimaginative money-grubbing shits, and thus funded a version of the Grand Tour program even more ambitious than the original, in which Voyager 6 would be the proposed TOPS spacecraft design)

2024-04-05 02:16:47

Yesterday I ended up taking a random walk through "the rust memory model is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules".
Today I took a wrong turn and ended up on the LKML, in which I learned that the kernel has its own unique memory model, but also now contains rust code which follows the rust memory model (whatever that turns out to be), and also it's necessary to be able to exchange data back and forth between memory models.
Some days, I'm just amazed that computers sometimes work.

2024-04-01 16:39:27

Reminder/warning that it's 1 April, and assholes are doing pranks.
Also reminder that almost all "pranks" are cruel and make you an asshole, not a sparkling wit, for doing them. This goes triple this year in software, because read the fucking room, it's been a rough couple days, people are on edge, and you're not helping.
Anyway, back to happy rust posting now. Well, happy for me, my incompetence may make you cringe, but I promise that's not a prank, I am actually incompetent at rust.

2024-03-30 20:45:55

As the xz thinkpieces start showing up about What Should Be Done, a couple of questions I'd encourage you to keep in mind while reading them:
- Is this advocating security nihilism and giving up because stopping 100% of badness is impossible?
- Is this pushing a random hobby horse like "sign your commits" that wouldn't have helped this incident in any way?
- Is this equating employment/nationality/notoriety with trustworthiness?
- Is this pushing a technical solution to a social problem?

2024-03-30 17:10:34

The poor original maintainer of xz is on it now, and has already found another "fun" thing: https://git.tukaani.org/?p=xz.git;a=commitdiff;h=f9cf4c05edd14dedfe63833f8ccbe41b55823b00 . The configure check for enabling the Landlock sandboxing facility was subtly broken, so that Landlock support would never get enabled. The original malicious commit landed around the same timeframe as the main backdoor, also at an abnormal time of day compared to the new maintainer's historical activity pattern.

2024-03-28 23:16:29

Oh look it turns out vultr wasn't planning to steal shit off customer hard drives after all, and it's just this year's instance of Reddit, Reddit and Reddit Law Associates whipping up a mob for no reason. I'm shocked. Shocked, I say.

2024-03-14 07:20:33

I went down a Voyager rabbit hole again. And I came up with a factoid that entertains me.
The original Grand Tour program was canceled in late 1971, due to congressional pressure over cost. Voyager was the cheaper mission to just Jupiter and Saturn.
Voyager and its team are incredible, and they managed to pull off the entire grand tour anyway, and then 34 years and counting more science after that.
There's a good chance Voyager might outlive the entire congress that killed the grand tour.

2024-02-17 18:44:49

An interesting tidbit from a podcast of TV producers, about why the big streaming services are starting to get into live sport: you cannot fast-forward through ads on live sports, so they are a much higher value asset.

2024-01-23 03:49:53

catching up to the discourse about a bunch of youtubers packing up or scaling back at the same time, and all the analysis of trying to figure it out, and...
They're not in their 20s any more. That's it, that's the reason. They've grown up, and the unsustainable pace of when you're young and feel invincible caught up to them, hard.

2024-01-07 18:20:18

In my quest to do a web development, I'm now learning about htmx and man... Talk about a paradigm shift from where I came from, but also this might be delightful?
Also it embraces HATEOAS, which (a) is a very strange acronym, (b) I do know a lot about HATE when it comes to software, so I just need to pick up a bit of OAS and I should be set.
Also it's apparently pronounced "hatee-us", like a Greek god of web applications?

2024-01-05 00:56:16

Another day, another large group of Very Good Programmers who are mad at a programming language chiefly because it's more successful than they believe it should be, according to their aesthetic preference.
Computers were a mistake, sure. But so were programmers, to a great extent.

2023-12-31 06:35:54

I've had one or more cats in my lap in shifts all day as I learn about emacs, tree-sitter and writing major modes. And while it's definitely slowed me down on the hacking part, it has also made the experience much more pleasant.

2023-12-28 00:13:03

The ACM website is janky and slow and a bunch of its links 403 because they link to old domains. This is a poor impression of the industry the ACM represents, and also a very accurate impression of the industry the ACM represents.

2023-12-16 02:14:03

"I'll try this piece of CAD software, everyone seems to rave about it"
*a few moments later*
"Wow, everyone seems to have _really_ low standards for software"

2023-10-09 03:14:32

Watching the Foundation series made me wonder about a "reverse 4X" kind of game, a strategy game where you start with a galaxy-spanning empire and have to manage the fall. Feels like it could be an interesting twist. Surely this has been explored already... But I don't know what games might have done this.

2023-09-23 22:51:29

I just had this moment of deep nostalgia.
Remember Beagle? The "Spotlight for linux" desktop search engine? Remember when you owned data and needed to search through it? And you could do that, with format awareness, without asking google and getting back fifteen "tutorial" SEO spam networks?
I've realized that I kinda want local search back. Sure the web is nice and sometimes useful, but... how much could I simply not with great local search where I can add things I care about?

2023-09-05 15:58:26

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@npub1ane…7zqz well morning news... Apparently anduril has been dropped as a sponsor, although communication about it is not published yet... So.

2023-09-05 09:00:38

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@npub1ane…7zqz in theory the nonguix community repo fills the gnu gap, but... Yeah nowhere near the coverage of nixpkgs. And I deeply dislike some bizarre choices guide makes like rolling their own pid1 and banning even discussion of non libre software. I just feels a bit too cultish tbh.

2023-09-05 08:38:07

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@npub1ane…7zqz tell me about it, my infra is all, 100% on nixos. And guix last I looked is incompatible with what I want in several dimensions. Hahaha fuck fuckfuck, why did they have to do this.

2023-09-05 08:26:25

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@npub1ane…7zqz oh ffs. Could there be one day, just one, in which a large open source project doesn't shoot itself in the foot with 101 level shit. Fucksake.
Thanks for the heads up ☹️

2023-08-27 18:12:43

Going down a rabbithole of reading about the US's ground ICBM arsenal, and ended up in a (old, declassified) document of safety rules for ICBMs. It contains the amazing line:
> Do not use nuclear weapons to troubleshoot equipment faults.
I'm glad that these procedures spell out the obvious, but also: lol. lmao

2023-08-11 02:14:33

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@npub1j4v…p4ys Hashicorp relicensed all its code to a non-OSS license today.

2023-08-11 00:57:52

Turns out, hashicorp was a zero interest rate phenomenon. Now that the chips are down, it immediately just folded and turned into traditional enterprise software, unable to compete on the merits of its offering.

2023-07-16 01:09:31

I have just discovered that a popular brand of washer/dryer has a diagnostic function that is literally you hold your phone up to the washer and the machine screams AFSK tones down the phone to the support person, and I'm sorely tempted to buy one just to support the chaotic design choice of shipping an acoustic coupler in consumer hardware in 2023.

2023-07-07 02:34:20

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And a bunch of other things I glossed over. It's just a really nice combination of significant new investment in stuff like UKIs and secure boot, and lots of little polish and "oh awesome the little thing I've wished for is just there now". Love it.

2023-07-07 02:33:24

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And even more little quality of life things.
systemd-firstboot has a command now to reset all the stuff that gets created at first boot, so AMI preparation should be able to replace a bunch of hacks with `systemd-firstboot --reset`.
Hibernation uses EFI non-volatile storage where possible to save restore info, to make the resume more robust.
An optional component can check for very low battery during boot, and shut back down gracefully rather than plow on and run out of power.

2023-07-07 02:28:00

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Hot damn, systemd-resolved has a new debug command to dump the contents of the local resolver cache for inspection! Also an option to retain cache entries beyond their nominal TTL, but done right! The prolonged cache entries are only used if DNS upstreams are unreachable, not as broken unconditional TTL clamping.

2023-07-07 02:24:45

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Huh TIL there's an RFC now for transmitting captive portal information in DHCP packets, so your computer can obtain an IP and at the same time find out what they need to do in order to get full internet access.
Anyway, systemd-networkd supports that now apparently

2023-07-07 02:22:21

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Similar to the UKI stuff, disk images that follow the Discoverable Disk Images (DDI) specification get a whole bunch of nice tooling now to inspect those images, mount them, dissect them, construct them, ...
Again the theme of just handing downstream distros a complete toolkit for these thorny problems, so that all these nice things like can happen like "oh just by looking at this disk image I can figure out how the system is put together without a curated /etc/fstab"

2023-07-07 02:18:34

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This could be pretty cool to build into stuff like the Go runtime too: if your Go program runs under systemd, the Go runtime could seamlessly hook into the kernel's memory pressure notifications and trigger GC or other forms of memory release when requested. Mostly invisible to the end user, but all these system components just talk among themselves and cooperate a bit better to keep the system alive <3

2023-07-07 02:17:08

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Further nice "invisible" changes: fairly seamless integration into the kernel PSI memory pressure subsystem, so you can request that systemd notifies your process when the kernel needs to reduce memory pressure, and implement load-shedding accordingly. Or for C stuff you can just haz a default reaction provided by systemd that returns idle malloc'd pages to the kernel when receiving a pressure signal.

2023-07-07 02:14:15

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And of course a whole slew of new nice things for systemd-repart and UKI support, so downstream distros just get a pretty fucking complete "here's all the crap you need to do secure boot, dm-verity partitions, TPM-tied credentials, ..." You can really feel the vision Lennart laid out in https://0pointer.net/blog/brave-new-trusted-boot-world.html coming to life here.

2023-07-07 02:09:05

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!!! `systemctl soft-reboot` has landed! It's a userspace-only reboot: systemd shuts down as normal, but then instead of triggering a CPU reset or kexec, it pivots to a new rootfs and chainloads to systemd in that new root.
This could be kinda great for A/B immutable systems, especially because soft-reboot also supports services that persist _across_ the soft-reboot, or passing resources like server file descriptors across the reboot to minimize impact! So cool.

2023-07-07 02:06:31

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Ooh and when did Upholds= happen? Continuous enforcement of "should be running if other thing is also running", as opposed to the one-shot nature of Wants=
Whenever it was added, it's getting better in the next release with more support for creating upholds at install time!

2023-07-07 02:03:21

ooooh the next systemd release supports exponential backoff for crashloop restarts!
Every systemd release note is a little bit of joy as I get to read about all the things that are getting a little bit better than before.

2023-06-18 23:00:42

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@npub1ane…7zqz One of us! One of us! My primary NAS is exactly this, "hyperconverged" compute and storage. The two backup NASes also run NixOS, although in a more pure storage config.

2023-06-16 20:22:09

Google just emailed me to let me know that "Album Archive" is going away and my data will be deleted in a month.
Album Archive is apparently the dumping ground for images that were in _other_ products Google has already killed, such as Google+ and Hangouts.
They're killing the place where images from killed products went. It's just beyond parody, incredible.

2023-06-12 04:14:44

I slept on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds because I'd been burned on ENT, DIS and PIC. But fuck me, they got it right, a proper Star Trek at last! I hope they get to keep making this.

2023-05-03 07:09:17

Nordic Semiconductor: hey that nRF24L01 transceiver you liked is Not Recommended For New Designs :(
Me: :(
NordicSemi: but, hear me out, what about a $7 SoC with a Cortex-M4 CPU, that same 2.4GHz transceiver on board, also Bluetooth Low Energy, and a dozen other peripherals?
... wat