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** Of fairies, compost, and computers **
Lately I’ve buried myself in reading fiction. Stand outs from among the crowd are, of course, Middlemarch but also a lot of sort of scholarly fairy fiction; works that follow the scholastic adventures of studious professorial types in vaugely magical settings. Namely Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries’, Heather Fawcett and The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow.

I’ve also been working on a handful of personal utility programs. I … ⌘ Read more

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** My measurer **
My dad is an electrical engineer and physicist. Measuring things is a core part of his professional life, and something he seems to spend a lot of time doing around the house. This is all to say my dad is relatively expert in the ways of measuring things so I think it’s hilarious that he calls absolutely anything he is using to measure anything else“my measurer.” Measuring tape, oscilloscope, scale, volt meter, bubble level, table spoons, whatever. They’re all“my measurer.” ⌘ Read more

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** growing good **

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

George Eliot, Middlemarch ⌘ Read more

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OpenBSD has the wonderful pledge() and unveil() syscalls:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXO6nelFt-E

Not only are they super useful (the program itself can drop privileges – like, it can initialize itself, read some files, whatever, and then tell the kernel that it will never do anything like that again; if it does, e.g. by being exploited through a bug, it gets killed by the kernel), but they are also extremely easy to use.

Imagine a server program with a connected socket in file descriptor 0. Before reading any data from the client, the program can do this:

unveil("/var/www/whatever", "r");
unveil(NULL, NULL);
pledge("stdio rpath", NULL);

Done. It’s now limited to reading files from that directory, communicating with the existing socket, stuff like that. But it cannot ever read any other files or exec() into something else.

I can’t wait for the day when we have something like this on Linux. There have been some attempts, but it’s not that easy. And it’s certainly not mainstream, yet.

I need to have a closer look at Linux’s Landlock soon (“soon”), but this is considerably more complicated than pledge()/unveil():

https://landlock.io/

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In-reply-to » Gopher server is back online and I’ll be phasing out Mastodon.

@bender@twtxt.net Both Gopher and Mastodon are a way for me to “babble”. 😅 I basically shut down Gopher in favor of Mastodon/Fedi last year. But the Fediverse doesn’t really work for me. It’s too focused on people (I prefer topics) and I dislike the addictive nature of likes and boosts (I’m not disciplined enough to ignore them). Self-hosting some Fedi thing is also out of the question (the minimalistic daemons don’t really support following hashtags, which is a must-have for me).

I’ll probably keep reading Fedi stuff, I just won’t post that much, I think.

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In-reply-to » I wanted to port this to Rust as an excercise, but they still have no random number generator in the core library: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/130703

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s difficult, you often don’t get what you’d expect. They also make heavy use of 3rd party libraries. IIUC, for random numbers, they refer to this library. I’ve read many times that the Rust stdlib is intentionally minimalistic (to make it easier to maintain and port and all that).

I’m struggling with this, using 3rd party libs for so many things isn’t really my cup of tea. I’ll probably make my own tiny little “standard library”. It’s silly, but I don’t see any other options. 🤷

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My Journey to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024: A Story of Volunteering and Growth
My name is Oscar Ayra and I am from Lima, Peru. In 2024, I had the privilege of being part of the volunteer team at Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) Lima. It was an enriching experience where… ⌘ Read more

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Newbie No More: Lessons from My First KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as a Speaker
Introduction April in London has never felt so electric. From the first footstep in the ExCeL halls to the hallway conversations, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 was a whirlwind of new ideas, familiar faces, and those… ⌘ Read more

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Passing of Jean-Raymond Abrial
Jean-Raymond Abrial, father (in particular!) of the Z notation, but also of the B method, and then Event-B, passed away on May 26. I was surprised to see that this piece of news, which may be of some interest to formal method folks, doesn’t seem to be very well known (there’s not much material on the web).

Here are some links (on LinkedIn, sorry):
[by Bertrand Meyer](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bertrandmeyer_i-am-saddened-to-report-from-todays-print-activity-7335684948974034944-SJf1? … ⌘ Read more

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MacOS 26 is the final Intel version, sucks to be a 2023 Intel Mac Pro owner
macOS Tahoe is the final software update that Intel-based Macs will get, as Apple works to phase them out following its transition to Apple silicon. During its Platforms State of the Union event, Apple said that Intel Macs won’t get macOS 27, coming next year, though there could still be updates that add security fixes. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors Not particularly surprising, but def … ⌘ Read more

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Windowing, menu bar, and background processes come to iPadOS
For years now – it feels more like decades, honestly – Apple has been trying a variety of approaches to make the iPad more friendly to power users, most notably by introducing, and subsequently abandoning, various multitasking models. After its most recent attempts – Stage Manager – fell on deaf ears, the company has thrown its hands up in the air and just implemented what we all wanted on the iPad anyway: a norm … ⌘ Read more

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FreeBSD 14.3 released
FreeBSD 14.3 has been released, an important point release for those of us using the FreeBSD 14.x branch. This release brings 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) support to many modern laptop wireless chips, OCI container images are now available in Docker and GitHub repositories, and a number of cornerstone packages have been updated to their latest versions. ⌘ Read more

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‘Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google’
If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be an engineer at Google during the early to late 2000s, here you go. Now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of its revenue is advertising; the proportion was even higher back then), we Engineers were kept carefully away from that reality, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don’t think about it, jus … ⌘ Read more

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New oil and gas fields incompatible with Paris climate goals
Opening any new North Sea oil and gas fields is incompatible with achieving the Paris Climate Agreement goals of limiting warming to 1.5°C or holding warming to “well below 2°C” relative to preindustrial levels, finds a new report published by UCL academics. ⌘ Read more

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