After reading through the HTTP explosion due to a shared C library and the brotli shit, and seeing that it is ABI-compatibly mitigated by Rust.....

..... Mmmmmmmmmm.

I have a vested interest in the continued use of C/C++ because if it stops I can't idle farm ad revenue off of that series

#meme #humour

@thephd posts like this is why i lament the fact that programmers builders coders didn’t unionize and form guilds.

"Well, at least the PHP vulns could be the end the of--"

• High-level CVE in the most widely-deployed DNS software in existence
• CVE in Acrobat Reader
• CVE in Node

well. okay. sure, why not.

But also:

wow, what a time for me to join the C Committee, buahahahah!!

idk it sucks to see analysis like "yeah of course backporting 12kloc patches is hard which is why it's useful to think of other solutions that don't involve 12kloc patches" written off as moral purity testing

"I am concerned this huge patch is a symptom of a lack of design coherence and will just hide further bugs" is not morality policing

"a security patch that is impractical to review is a category error" is not "feeling icky"

As I keep reading over the PHP patches I keep seeing the devastation not of people who don't know how to write secure software, but decades of people with very little resources tasked with writing the most widely used internet-facing software on earth in the programming language I am a participant in shaping. I see that the slow pace of adoption of things that we were told would help people 20, 30 years ago by security experts has not been adopted, and some of the world's most complex codebases using things as fragile as setjmp/longjmp and abort for error handling.

I see, simply, that we are failing our software engineers by not having better in-language tools to mitigate and manage this level of complexity. That the pride in hacks we wore as a symbol of the power of C were in fact cries for help from a userbase that did not understand the long tail of consequences.

Good luck and God Bless to the system administrators today and tomorrow and for the rest of this month. I'll do my best to make it so C isn't like this, anymore.

"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

https://xeiaso.net/shitposts/no-way-to-prevent-this/memory-safety/CVE-2026-93479/?utm_campaign=mi_irl&utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon

also it's prime, which is aesthetically pleasing

me: "I think my opsec could be better, i'm probably below average"

the industrial accident of a certificate authority: "our private key is 4"

this is the Sun Sylveon. boost now or she steals your SPARCstation

A new one I kind of just dumped out. Hopefully for C2y, we'll see.

https://thephd.dev/_vendor/future_cxx/papers/C%20-%20Unicode%20Printing.html

AI agents make creating and abandoning projects so much faster

RE: https://pony.social/@thephd/117407936187136608

Thank you to everyone that came to PLSS to hear this, and thank you to everyone who met up with me after! I missed a good few of you, but don't worry. There WILL be another time!

Are Claude tokens called “SI units” now?

#DeepThoughts

I can't travel internationally yet still because of (* gestures outside *) but I can at least give talks as long as it's in the country, I think!!

> My feed is supposed to be SFW
> Joke (maybe half) about R18
> Someone actually comms something cute
> Can't share because SFW
> I've got the freaking editor of the C Programming Language standard liking my tweets about this

My brain is melting what is this timeline aaaaaaaaaaa

Talk and panel done!!! I think I did good and held my own after falling off for 4 years.

Slides are uploaded. Not sure if they will provide the talk or anything publicly, I forgot to hit record on my end because some technical issues derailed me, haha.

https://thephd.dev/_presentations/standards/C/2026%20October/PLSS/The%20Power%20of%20Paper%20-%20The%20C%20Standard%20in%202026.html