/ is on Nostr

Chaotic good artificer/ranger, sending you drive-by bugfix pull requests while sitting in a tree in the middle of nowhere.

Follow me for: hopefully useful articles on Rust, embedded systems, and software correctness; bad puns; occasional photos of the desert; and stuff.

Making reliable things from unreliable parts, currently at Oxide Computer. Reverse engineer. Blinky light artist. Putting Rust in machines while removing rust from machines.

he/him - geriatric millennial - Berkeley, CA

Public Key

npub19znrep7u2jrsfvqs5aa3s352l4ppfnxyun8pt28yulnkd7k9x08q9spj90

NIP-05 Address

cliffle_at_hachyderm.io@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsz3f3uslw9fpcykqg2w7ccg6906ss5enzwfns44rjw0emxltzn8ns4dn7th

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npub19znrep7u2jrsfvqs5aa3s352l4ppfnxyun8pt28yulnkd7k9x08q9spj90

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Last Notes

2024-08-17 23:12:27

My tote bag is attracting a lot of questions that I was pretty sure were answered by my tote bag.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/979/887/680/118/978/original/94714bb76ade20fa.jpg

2024-08-06 01:17:17

Plums are ripening really fast right now, and I can only eat a few a day before people start to look at me funny. So preserves it is!
#cooking
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/912/411/623/184/764/original/b0a72be3bc916652.jpg
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/912/412/644/597/603/original/e581975ca6ba5d2b.jpg

2024-07-26 16:50:33

Thinking about how many C programs I've written, read, and maintained, that contained a subtly broken, buggy, partially implemented, and difficult-to-read implementation of Vec::retain.
#rustlang

2024-07-09 22:08:56

Unexpectedly nice use case for the Roost laptop stand: elevating my computer off the bench so I can see it over the patient.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/758/810/371/428/856/original/2b3d6c2180ca247a.jpg

2024-07-09 04:02:44

Oh hey, more evidence that air pollution increases the risk of unsuccessful pregnancy.
Wouldn't it be great if this turned the "pro-life" crowd into a bunch of environmentalists?
Sigh.
https://www.eshre.eu/ESHRE2024/Media/2024-Press-releases/Leathersich

2024-06-21 14:09:50

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@npub1c9m…9xjd have you tried singing to it?

2024-05-13 01:06:08

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@npub1c9m…9xjd Not sure how configurable your browser is, but I've definitely got "close tabs to left" in Firefox.

2024-05-09 06:49:01

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@npub1vr4…92wq That's interesting, I was just looking at small Schemes. That particular implementation doesn't look like it's thought about no_std at all, but it also seems simple enough that that might be easy to fix.

2024-04-23 03:23:38

After 5 years of development, 7 art projects, one commercial product, and at least a dozen subtle soundness bugs, I've decided lilos is ready for big ol' version 1.0.0.
As of this release, lilos is 100% strict-cancel-safe, which afaik is a first.
This release is notable for having no fewer than five contributors other than me! Thanks to one of those contributors, we've even got tests on QEMU now.
C'mon in! We have docs!
https://github.com/cbiffle/lilos/
#rustlang #embedded

2024-04-06 02:32:14

Fellow infosec folks:
If I wanted to incentivize people to try and exploit Hubris, what should I do? What would you want to see?
While open source, the system is mostly used by Oxide, a for-profit company, so I would expect "am I doing this for free" to come up. Explicit threat model is also good. What else?
We've hired firms for this but with mixed results (they mostly know C). I wanna open it to everyone else. I would be _delighted_ to give guidance.
Boost away.
#infosec #rustlang

2024-03-25 06:14:46

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@npub1vr4…92wq ...and now the computer's hostname has revealed itself to me.
This computer is named Theseus.

2024-03-25 06:13:29

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@npub1vr4…92wq I guess an alternative, equally valid way of looking at it might be:
I'm returning it one part at a time! 😆

2024-03-24 21:46:57

One down-side of calling the operating system "Hubris" is that, being in the US, I can't realistically title a talk "Four Years Of Hubris" without it sounding like a commentary on one presidential administration or another.

2024-03-24 20:31:33

Continuing to methodically check out my #FrameworkLaptop 16 since their QC seems iffy. Noticed my ambient light sensor didn't work.
Under the microscope, it was pretty clear why: it's missing.
Not "missing" as in not installed -- "missing" as in "has been physically torn from the circuit board, destroying pads in the process." At some point in assembly _before_ its protective cover was glued on.
Zoomed-out comparison photo attached.
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/152/558/108/239/466/original/858d50f76d798334.jpg

2024-03-19 16:20:55

Because I2C has been a thorn in my side for my entire embedded career, I'm working on the I2C analyzer I've always wanted to buy but never could.
Here's a nice trick for writing complex test fixtures in Rust: define a simple character-driven language for expressing them, and embed a string. This test ASCII-arts the (D)ata and (C)lock waves of an I2C transaction and labels moments in time with the (E)vents that should be decoded.
I think it's way more legible than a big array of structs. #rust
https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/112/123/251/186/843/189/original/ea79326532476a57.png

2024-03-15 17:01:14

Elsevier, everyone's favorite copyright maximalist closed-access publisher, argues that their high costs are necessary because they're the arbiter of quality.
The arbiter of quality keeps publishing LLM-written papers. Thanks for making my argument for me, Elsevier! They didn't even read it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1930043324001298
"In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I'm very sorry, but I don't have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model."

2024-03-12 05:43:13

If you're excited about systems programming in Rust, whether it's down on the bare metal where I work, or up at the cluster management software layer and customer API endpoints -- we're hiring at Oxide!
https://oxide.computer/careers/software-engineer
We try to write really thorough job descriptions. Also, the salary is right on that page (top and bottom) and is independent of your location, because we respect you and don't want to bullshit you.

2024-03-06 21:31:58

I would have a lot more sympathy for Apple's DMA complaint that it may have less ability to shield users from "objectionable or harmful content" if their definition of "objectionable or harmful content" they've been shielding their users from hadn't included
- telling users that things were cheaper outside the app store
- pointing out that you could subscribe to a service through a web browser
- noting the existence of jailbreaking and the ability to turn off parts of Apple's code

2024-02-11 01:24:14

I've seen a few people linking to the new open-source search engine stract.com today.
For my purposes, these articles are burying the lede: Stract appears to be entirely in Rust. :hamster_dance:
It includes user-defined ranking and filtering, which is an amazing pro-user feature that I'm excited about. Google wouldn't do this because it "wouldn't scale."
Here's the thing: genuinely federated or open source things _don't have to scale._ Not like a single-company program does.

2023-10-26 19:23:03

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@npub1psd…9sr7 I appreciate the alliteration, looking forward to this becoming available. :-)

2023-10-15 17:20:23

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@npub1cda…ud3k @npub1psd…9sr7 wait... Robert Heinlein? I thought you had died‽