Tools and Workflows I Use For Blogging With Low Vision - Veroniiiica Lewis:
https://veroniiiica.com/blogging-with-low-vision/

I love to keep my devices for a very long time.

It's cheaper, it's better for the environment, I don't need nor want all these new flashy things, and I'm too busy and lazy to take the time to shop and migrate to new devices every two years.

The things that always end up forcing me to upgrade is either the software that becomes incompatible or the battery that dies and I cannot change. This is exhausting, and shouldn't happen.

This is not inevitable. We could build devices and software more resistant to time (some already are, but aren't always accessible in many contexts sadly).

I am well aware this is part of the planned-obsolescence capitalist scheme. But I'm still going to share my frustration about it and push against it every way I can.

We could have nice things.

#PlannedObsolescence #Capitalism

The more I read about it, the obvious it becomes that the big news story regarding Nvidia is corruption and financial shenanigans, not the affairs or honestly even the spy rumours. The scale and potential consequences of the former far outweighs that of the latter.

been reading "how complex systems fail" by richard cook, 18 short points from a doctor who studied why things break in hospitals. it was written in the late 90s and it reads like a postmortem of every outage i've ever been part of.

the one that hit me: there's no such thing as a root cause. catastrophe needs several small failures lining up, each harmless on its own. "root cause" is mostly our social need to point at someone. yesterday the us grounded every flight for hours and the official answer was "old equipment." sure. and also everything else that quietly had to go wrong at the same time.

my other favorite: complex systems always run in degraded mode. everything is a little broken all the time, and it works because people keep patching it on the fly. that's not a bug report, that's my homelab's biography.

the uncomfortable takeaway is that safety isn't a part you buy. it's something people create every day, and the "fix" after an accident usually just adds more complexity for the next one.

https://how.complexsystems.fail/

#complexsystems #sre #safety #systemsthinking

#merephone news: I've now got my firmware reading scancodes for my novel keyboard! That was easy, once I had the hardware together! A simple state machine.

So tomorrow: I'll highlight the selected key & start converting it to text!

I'm almost there to seeing whether my approach has legs!

Studying how Linux boots up its radix trees...

After some validation it allocates a kmem-cache & hands off to another helper via wrappers altering the type-signature & grabbing locks.
After some additional validation & locks this other helper calls to possibly-update some state while storing some callbacks, propagates any errors or invalid states, & iterates over each CPU core.

For each CPU core it retrieves a per-core pointer & the state within, ...

1/2!

Something worth remembering about unit-tests: They test themselves!

On the one hand this means you don't need to worry about unit-testing your unit-tests, creating an infinite amount of work for yourself.

On the otherhand when a unittest fails & you're struggling to figure out why, try double checking that you're testing what you think you are!

... skips if its less than the caller-given state (in this case DEAD), invokes a helper to retrieve the next "step" for the state if any & call it via the appropriate wrapper, & upon failure triggers (via a helper) appropriate cleanup callbacks.

1.2/1.2 Fin for today! I need to be getting going...
Tomorrow: Housekeeping initialization, & maybe more!

If you were wondering what the collapse of an empire looks like from the inside, just look at the past few days. Empires don't collapse overnight, they collapse gradually, with systems steadily degrading and failing over decades. It's not a spectacular, singular event, it's watching shit that worked fine in the past just stop working and never getting fixed.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

#HitchhikersGuide #DouglasAdams #quotes #quote #bot

#Alonzo news: I've got a plan in place for integrating that typechecking code I've spent the last week getting right...

Should only take me a couple days to implement this integration!

Studying more of the eXpat XML parser as vendored into Papyrix...

The primary parser state might transition to a CData state. It invokes a helper propagating any errors before deciding whether to switch to the external-entity state or that primary state. Normalizes its input, iterates over the lexed XML tokens possibly invoking another helper to help clean up, & branches over results to clean up. Primarily its looks for cdata-sect-close tokens, converting others to text.

1/?

If the DTD build flag's set it there's a whole suite of states for parsing that DTD prologue. I won't discuss further, since I've got enough already!

There's a wrapper around callbacks for handling text encodings. There's a wrapper around one of 2 XML declaration lexers which additionally copies data into memory that's not about to be freed, while handling those text encodings.
There's another wrapper around the callbacks for unknown encodings.

These are used in the starting parser state.

2/?

The 2nd state invokes a custom lexer & (via a helper with its lookuptables) normalizes its input & repeatedly branches over tokens with validation. Usually it practically ignores the tokens though it might hand off to the DTD parser. Afterwords it branches over the final token to determine which state to carefully hand off to next. This branch is *very* extensive!

Once the last tag's closed the primary state hands off to an epilog parser.

3/?

This epilog parser handles remaining tokens invoking callbacks for comments & processing instructions.

There's an entity processing util dispatching to the appropriate state. Including a state for carefully looking up internal entitites.

There's an error state which merely returns an error code.

There's helpers for gathering arrays of attributes. There's helpers for gathering entities to lookup. There's a line normalization helper. There's helpers wrapping the callbacks.

4/5!

There's helpers for managing a "context" hashmap. There's more normalization helpers. There's helpers for managing a "pool" of strings, arena-allocated. Helpers to manage some "scaffolding" datastructures.

There's accessors & string utils. And there's profiling counters with debug output.

4.5/4.5 Fin for today! Tomorrow: XML roles & tokenizing!

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https://wordwrap.lol/neatnik/2026-11-14_204653

if the FSF and GNU movements were still relevant they'd be at the forefront of discussion in tech right now...

But they're not relevant, because they're not grounded in helping improve the rights of real people working on real projects anymore. Their obsession with abstract rights and principles has blinded them from the obvious reality that everyone in tech is facing right now (that being LLMs, their laundering of free software, and the associated social decay).

Instead of people feeling represented and the FSF/GNU projects spearheading industry and social change, they cower in their own spaces looking out at the wider tech world and waiting to see what happens, while developers increasingly feel alienated from their work. It's pitiful when you know what the movement used to be tbh.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/117616100920220358

My friend @oration is fond of pointing out something that an awful lot of people who own several very nice suits really do not like to hear: any postmortem incident analysis that does not trace cause back to one or more management decisions is incomplete.

This will cause a huge amount of capital that was poured into the tech sector to shift elsewhere and this is a good thing. Climate change is weighing down on us and on our future as a species, all the resources we have should be concentrated in fighting it, not chasing a technological fad inflated by a bunch of scammers and mega-rich buffoons having mid-life crises on commercial social media. 18/