Regarding the Danfoss fridge thing doing the rounds in the media - there’s several thousand of them that are directly internet facing.
The username is admin and the password changes every day automatically to.. the current date.
Every single one is like this. You can just log in and change the temperature. Anybody can do it, easily scriptable.
I read some post about how Mastodon consists primarily of German-speaking creatures talking in English. I'm gonna do a poll, need to test that. Boosts highy appreciated!
So, do you speak German?
"The people holding up the internet"
A good-looking but somewhat depressing exposé about the people holding up current digital infrastructure as a hobby.
Thank the gods Jira's AI tool has this excellent option to make the ticket longer. Just what I was looking for! /s
The video for my talk "Using Types to Save Your Code's Future" from @cppunderthesea 2025 is now out on YouTube.
Wow. Visual Studio's Github Copilot Chat is an ugly piece of work. The editing tool often fails, so half the chats are the agent checking whether editing actually persisted, and falling back to tricks like generating edits via powershell.
What a waste of tokens.
Busy compressing my talk for #meetingcpp so it comfortably fits the time slot: Cutting out fluff where it doesn't add value while keeping a pace the audience can easily follow. Retaining enough repitition of core points without wasting time.
Reminds me a lot of trade-offs when writing code.
https://meetingcpp.com/mcpp/schedule/talkview.php?th=acec5ef2d08be3f2b70a17cf1d2c92003dac2ac3
We have released a new C++Now 2026 Conference Video!
Lasting Quality – Michael Caisse – C++Now 2026
We seem to own a Houdini hamster who, to all appearances, escaped a locked cage.
Can't blame her trying, but amazed at the success.
Found her before she could get to my networking hub behind the shelves.
To all politicians who don't consider child care "work", I highly recommended spending a week alone with two kids, one of whom catches a stomach bug halfway through.
#github copilot integration in #visualstudio is driving me nuts.
Agents open a new shell to build stuff. But that shell doesn't inherit the correct environment. Agents will then happily spend minutes hunting ghost build errors.
Any advice, anyone? Except use a different IDE (it's on my list)
In which I am cranky:
When I want to imagine what it feels like to dock a space craft to a space station, I think about convergence between requirement and code. Tricky business.
Meeting C++ 2026 featured talk of the day: Hana Dusíková - Where does constexpr start and where it ends
https://meetingcpp.com/mcpp/schedule/talkview.php?th=ef3ff31a8deed852830164b5fe33205450a6ee52
#meetingcpp
#cpp
#cplusplus
Deep down, all graphics programmers have one burning question that they want to ask…
“Where the fuck did my triangle go?”
It went to visit their NaN
Right now, life feels like a todo list where I have to check the boxes faster than they appear - or at least as fast.
People learn to work around quirky systems. LLMs are not yet great at that. They like to dive into rabbit holes if you let them.
True, you can document all the edge cases in agents.md or similar, but
1) They'll often forget to read it
2) How much context do I want to waste for that?
Finally, I have convincing rationale to fix the quirks. This is an opportunity.
My time at Unity is coming to a premature end, with our consulting team being dismantled.
That means that ✨Sparkling Code✨ is available again for all your #cpp, performance, graphics and #gamedev needs, now with premium #unity expertise too!
(I can also do #unrealEngine and bespoke tech)
Feel free to get in touch!
For people who still believe the GPL influences corporations in a meaningful way:
When I was at Microsoft, I worked on a product that used Linux. The product was cancelled for largely unrelated reasons before it shipped, so the exact details are irrelevant but anything that links Linux needs to loop in lawyers, so I spent a lot of time talking to them.
Maybe 10% of the total time was spent with the technicalities of the GPL. The fact that the GPL is ambiguous and poorly written and the Linux syscall exemption is even worse made me expect long discussions about the legalese. But instead the conclusion of the GPL-focused discussions was basically:
No one really knows what the GPL can actually enforce and half of the stuff that's done with Linux is technically in violation. Microsoft ships Linux images for Azure that come with a click-through license that prohibits running them on any other cloud and no one cares. We can make a convincing argument that this is okay. Only a handful of companies can afford a protracted legal battle with Microsoft and none of them are sufficiently motivated to take us to court over this, so it's unlikely to come up.
The remaining 90% of the discussions were around how the product would be perceived by Linux maintainers, the wider Linux community, and the broader F/OSS ecosystem. Microsoft had put a lot of effort into the 'Microsoft <3 Linux' marketing things. The Ballmer-era alienation of the most active developer communities had cost the company a lot of ecosystem market share. The risk of pushing developers away from Microsoft products and platforms was something that the lawyers regarded as a huge risk. If two of the senior Linux maintainers had said 'we think this is not an acceptable use of Linux' then that would have torpedoed the project instantly.
The moral of this story is that, if positive engagement with your community is perceived as valuable, you have an enormous amount of leverage over big companies. At the time, Microsoft was (by market cap) the largest company in the world. The legal text, in contrast, isn't worth the paper it's written on when your adversary can afford to outspend you in court by six orders of magnitude. When they happen to be aligned, the legal text may look as if it's working, but that's a coincidence.
Communication works best if nothing needs to be talked about.