I remain very happy with my move from #neovim to #gram, a nice little Zed hard fork: https://gram-editor.com/

Just in case anyone is looking for something to switch to.

#GramEditor

I need to split up the day into 4 equal time ranges. In 24 hour time, this is easy: 00-06, 06-12, 12-18, 18-00. I need to add support for 12 hour time.

The obvious solution is 12AM-6AM, 6AM-12PM, 12PM-6PM, 6PM-12AM. But I don't have enough space for all those AMs and PMs.

Which alternative reads best? I need feedback from someone who's native in 12 hour time. I have my own guess but it's like having a guess about what flows the best in a foreign language

#languages #localization #i18n #usa

Okay I just tried to use #matrix again and every app I've used #element on is telling me to "start verification on the other device". There is no other device!

What a shit show. I wish new projects too just used IRC. IRC works. Matrix doesn't.

#foss

I just re-read my old blog post about bytecode VMs from 2023 and found it to be an interesting read. It's so long since I wrote it that I didn't remember all the things I covered. Would recommend:

https://mort.coffee/home/fast-interpreters/

#blogpost #pldev #programming #blog #virtualmachine #plt

I guess I should've added blogging related tags too, do people do that on here?

https://mort.coffee/home/sqlite-editions/

#blog #blogpost #blogging

I wrote a blog post about various annoyances I have with SQLite's defaults, and a suggestion about how it could be fixed: SQLite should have editions:

https://mort.coffee/home/sqlite-editions/

#sqlite #databases #rdbms #embedded

I haven't done enough programming language dev lately, but I just added a new syntax feature to a language I made a while ago (Gilia, https://github.com/mortie/gilia). I can finally do 'a += b' instead of 'a = a + b'

Now += isn't its own operator, instead '+' is an identifier, and "identifier with an equal afterwards" is a special kind of token. (Yes + is just a function)

This stuff is so satisfying to work on. Especially the bytecode gen part

Diff: https://github.com/mortie/gilia/compare/baa25ec9b7739c99baa063a77cf8bddcea5857bc..1fa300e34200e1a6f0cae3714056b56954737e08

#pldev #programming

But I think this can be solved perfectly well on a fairly shallow syntax/type level: tag a function as "throws" if it can throw, have special syntax to call "throws" functions. Maybe you have to put a question mark after the function call expression for example. I don't think you gain *that* much from other error handling mechanisms if you do this

2/2

The only part of thrown errors I dislike is that they are implicit control flow. There are times when I'm in the middle of some code which needs to complete in its entirety or clean up something (a mutex, some sequence of file system changes, meddling with a linked list, whatever) and it's nice to know whether a function call will implicitly return from my function or not.

1/2

Maybe util-linux could gain a little standalone resize program? #utillinux

There's an awesome little program called "resize". It outputs and reads escape sequences to query the terminal for its size, then it reconfigures the TTY to use the size reported by the terminal. Super useful for cases where resizing isn't communicated out-of-band, such as serial consoles. Every embedded Linux system should have this.

BUT IT'S PART OF THE XTERM PACKAGE! MOST EMBEDDED SYSTEMS HAVE NO NEED FOR XTERM OR EVEN X! AAAA

#linux #xterm #x11 #unix #embedded #embeddedlinux

Is there a way to find *why* someone's profile is "hidden by the moderators" of my instance? This happens sometimes, where I see someone boosting a post which looks interesting, I click their profile, and see the "profile has been hidden" page. Every time this has happened that I can recall, the profile has seemed fine. Either there's something bad about the profiles I should know about or there's an incongruity between my values and floss.social's that I should know about #mastodon #flosssocial

Yes I am right now searching for a full-size B connector for the one thing in my life which uses it and am lamenting how every old cable I find everywhere has the micro-B connector, THE WORST CONNECTOR IN THE HISTORY OF HUMAN KIND, because some absolute buffoons found the type B and mini-B connectors to be in need of replacement

Yes they have somewhat remedied their folly with USB-C, a pretty good connector. But why foist those decades of micro-B hell upon us, why stray from the righteous path of full-size B and mini-B

Something that annoys me a lot: full size USB type B (aka the "printer connector") is a truly excellent connector. And the mini-B connector is a pretty good connector was a really good connector for situations which call for a tiny connector. YET THEY STRAYED FROM THIS EXCELLENT STATUS QUO AND INVENTED THE MICRO-B CONNECTOR, THE WORST CONNECTOR KNOWN TO MAN

And then this micro-B connector, the worst connector known to man, BECAME THE STANDARD CONNECTOR FOR EVERYTHING

WHY

#usb #computers

You may ask, "why not just use Busybox?", and yeah that's a fair question. I like how it's just a single program which can live by itself in /sbin/init, it doesn't need symlinks all over the place; it doesn't depend on $PATH, it doesn't depend on having a real filesystem layout, it can be the literal only file in your initrd

Plus I know how to compile something that's just a single C file, busybox would probably have me mess with autotools idk

#linux #programming #embedded #embeddedlinux

I'm working on early boot/initrd-style stuff again so I had another chance to bring out my tiny shell, xxsh 😊 https://github.com/mortie/xxsh

I really like this silly little shell

#linux #programming #embedded #embeddedlinux

It feels like it would be *SO* easy for the cryptography community to define some basic file format spec containing a header with magic bytes, an IV and an HMAC, probably using aes_gcm or something, and then declare that as the standard general-purpose encrypted file format. But nooo, they can't make specifications, they *have to* tell you to use their shitty C implementation in OpenSSL or command line tool

#security people will tell you to never invent your own crypto but then fail to create standard simple cryptosy stems for e.g file encryption

Their answer is "link against this or that C library" or "shell out to this or that command line tool". No I want a solution native to languages (plural!) I'm writing in

Time to roll my own crypto based on AES again I guess, every language has easy access to an AES primitive so I can throw together something in 20 LoC per language #cybersecurity

A couple years ago, I was discussing #Google and their tendency to discontinue products with someone. I remember expressing that: I strongly doubt Google will sunset search or email any time soon, but I would be worried about relying on their less popular products.

Well. They've now discontinued search. I'm speechless.

What are people moving to? DDG? (Or will DDG follow in Google's footsteps, like they followed in replacing the info box at the top with a chat bot?)

#search #duckduckgo #ddg