Results ultimately not too surprising! Always fun to see a number of people who learned in the 70s, 80s, and 90s before C89 was widespread. And glad for the people who get to learn with the latest and greatest available. C may not be a language I recommend for new projects anymore, but there will be existing projects written in C for a long time to come, and it's going to remain the Standard Interoperation ABI for a while as well, so it's still useful to learn it. Thanks for responding, everyone!

@mwichary Reminded of a historical difference in the Mac side: when writing out shortcuts using names, the order used to be "Command-Shift-Option-Control-X". But when using symbols, the order is the reverse, ⌃⌥⇧⌘X, presumably to have all the ⌘ line up in menus. Apple seems to have moved over to being consistent with the symbols about ten years ago, i.e. the correct order in new texts is "Control-Option-Shift-Command-X", but you can still catch the previous order in older material (and I still have that order as my default when speaking aloud!).

"We have const generic string arguments at home." #RustLang

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2024&gist=1a8a4038630fb5b38e42310cec930395

@ireneista “If you *don't* have RSI, ergonomics are for you”: https://boredzo.org/blog/archives/2023-09-29/if-you-dont-have-rsi-ergonomics-are-for-you

C programmer demographic survey: when you first learned to program in C, what standard did your compiler support? (If you don't know, assume it takes about three years to get widespread support for a standard.)

"Hey, I thought this was a guided tour!"
"Ah, I see the confusion now. This is a GUIDed tour. Every tour is unique!"

...If anybody's looking for a person who basically does everything from compiler {backend,frontend} development, GPU driver development, to hardware/firmware security research, let me know. #getfedihired

US only.

Are "sewing" (🪡) and "sowing" (🫘) homophones in your accent/dialect of English? If not, mind posting an audio clip of you pronouncing them both in a sentence to satisfy my curiosity? (They have the same pronunciation in mine, per the audio clip below.)

Six years at Signal! (at least three of them were 2020)

Happy Stanislav Petrov day!

Today marks 43 years since Petrov decided to wait for confirmation before escalating a missile alert up the chain of command in the Soviet Air Defense, preventing nuclear war.

A hero for not trusting automated systems fully.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident?wprov=sfti1

The tech oligarchs are rallying around Elon Musk to block a filmmaker from advertising a deeply reported documentary that lays bare what a slimy -- and dangerous -- person Musk is. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/elon-musk-documentary-trailer-rejected-tiktok-youtube-1236710259/

(Meanwhile, Corporate Journalism continues to support him. Of course.)

Sometimes I run uuidgen just to feel something

Really rather annoyed that the #RustLang Allocator trait is getting stabilized with a grow that doesn't guarantee "in-place if successful". Way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

(I realize I'm complaining about it here rather than anywhere productive, but I'm sure I don't have anything to add that hasn't been said before. It's just…what caller can safely use this besides Vec?)

Today a coworker and I made use of the fact that these two bits of #RustLang code have different behavior:

trait Derived: Base where Self::BaseAssoc: Clone {}

trait Derived: Base<BaseAssoc: Clone> {}

The difference is at the use site: with the second, T: Derived is enough to use the trait, but the first forces you to write T::BaseAssoc: Clone as well (in some form).

This kind of subtle difference does not make me happy. I suspect there are compatibility shenanigans going on though (if I remember correctly the second syntax was added later).

[rant] Two posts that demonstrate the age of custom UI:

• https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260922-00/?p=112719/
• https://inessential.com/2026/09/22/that-about-wraps-it-up-for.html

Once upon a time this was the thing Mac OS did well and Windows kinda did and Linux barely attempted (in the name of developer freedom). Now macOS is making it not worth it, Windows isn't consistent with itself, and Linux desktop environments are doing as best they can based on those past decisions. I miss cross-app consistency.

overheard a fun C history question i don't know the answer to: why is it `FILE *`, as opposed to `struct file`, `file_t`, or any of the other UNIX/C standard library conventions

Explanation: https://youtu.be/F3V3tLfSVKg?t=320

(I never even had this game, but the soundtrack and Mitsuyoshi's enthusiasm in this re-recording are infectious.)

Bonus inspiration, and why a certain horse isn't already on this list: https://youtu.be/ejxyt5zYdps

"Hey, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi of Sega, what's your favorite JRPG series?"
"PERSONAAAAAAA!"

"What's your favorite car brand?"
"TOYOTAAAAAAA!"

"Favorite drawing implement?"
"CRAYOLAAAAAA!"

"Religious building?"
"PAGODAAAAA!"

"Cough drop?"
"RICOLAAAAAA!"

"Magical girl series?"
"MADOKAAAAA!"

"Final Fantasy villain?"
"JENOVAAAA!"

"Mexican-American fast food chain?"
"Q-DOBAAAAA!"

"send tweet" is a joke format that arose in the 2010s when phones were first getting voice control integration; the implication is that the poster had a thought and used the voice control to post their thought to Twitter without even unlocking the phone (and also without noticing it had included the command at the end of the utterance as part of the content). For me, the fact that I'm not even posting on Twitter only makes this funnier.

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. CBOR is a binary format somewhat based on JSON. It actually stands for Concise Binary Object Representation, and I would have used "Concise" instead of "Compact" in the original joke if I had looked it up before posting instead of after.