Ian @im@mastodon.sdf.org

i got a student review that shunned me for "using the same slides as the other instructors" and, i mean, why would we all make 4 unique slide decks?? and then I remembered how we explicitly never let students collaborate.

I was thinking about the word "cavalier" earlier today, and how it's clearly related to French "chevalier" and Spanish "caballero", and those are from "cheval" and "caballo" respectively, but then I got stuck. They're Romance languages, but the Latin for "horse" is "equus", isn't it?

Turns out Latin borrowed "caballus", meaning "draft horse, workhorse" from an unknown language, but it was originally only poetic; it doesn't appear in prose until Vulgar Latin, where it replaced "equus".

Huh.

literally every C tool i publish has an extensive and carefully-designed error reporting mechanism, and C makes this a terrific pain in the ass. in a language that has a real exception system? you have absolutely no goddamn excuse

Me: I don't have anybody to talk to
Friend: Talk to me!
Me: Okay. I have x issue
Friend: :/

Basically my hobby these days is going into Twitch coding streams with 0 viewers, and complimenting the person working so hard on their projects. I really do love pretty much everyone talking quietly to themselves while they hack.

(Here's who I'm watching right now: https://www.twitch.tv/czarified -- they are building a load model of the the SpaceX Starship, just for kicks)

I wrote a blog about how Safe Browsing works and how Apple switching to Tencent might affect users. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/10/13/dear-apple-safe-browsing-might-not-be-that-safe/

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1183442600394661888

Hannity gets me. He really gets me.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/10/12/its-like-hes-reading-my-mind/

I think Wine (and emulators in general) are going to be key for keeping control of our computers from being wrestled away from us. Personal Computing (not just PCs but computing in general) is being subsumed by cloud providers and subscription models and I for one am not about to give up the idea of Personal Computing.

If there's anything that I've learned from 30+ years in computing is that corporate interests are never in the users long-term interests. Ever.

Time Hackers!

"What the author fails to consider is <thing the author considered in detail throughout the piece>."

tbh the main attraction of *nix systems is that they make composability available to the end user, not just the developer.

isn't it fucked up when we teach programmers to write composable and modular code, and then make them use those techniques to write closed source monoliths that only compete, and rarely cooperate?

there's some #programming food for thought....