Happy to announce that I am now a Trusted Contributor in the @postmarketOS project! It has been around 3.5 years since I found out about it and started contributing (mostly with ports and mainline linux support for various Samsung devices). It really feels great to be part of a joint effort to give devices a second life, and decrease the amount of #eWaste in the world!

I managed to embed a programming language interpreter inside DWARF debug information on Linux.

I'll be giving a very cursed talk about how it works at Pure Virtual C++ at the end of the month:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/pure-virtual-cpp-2024-sessions-announced/

I guess the takeaway from the xz backdoor situation is:

If you’re an open-source project maintainer, and somebody starts getting on your case for not doing enough free work for them, you reply “big Jia Tan energy there” and then block them forever.

Paying maintainers who accept monetary donations is a good start, but the real critical thing people need to do is stop abusing maintainers. Stop abusing random people on the internet in general. Seriously.

I know we've all got capitalism brain worms, but sometimes the only thing that is accomplished by throwing money at a project is creating a customer entitlement dynamic that pointlessly increases the stress placed on volunteers.

Ask maintainers what kind of support they need.

Hello you fine Internet folks

Today's article is on a Mainframe. A system that has seemingly dethroned the king of the mainframe, IBM.
Today, we are looking at Control Data Corporation's CDC 6600, the fastest mainframe available today!

Hope y'all enjoy!

https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/04/01/inside-control-data-corporations-cdc-6600/

"Scotland's new hate crime law has come into force, with JK Rowling and Elon Musk among its critics."

First line of the article and I'm already a big fan of the new law.

"In 2022, cars killed 7,508 pedestrians, the equivalent of 18 fully-loaded Boeing 747s crashing with zero survivors. That means a pedestrian died roughly every 70 minutes, with no breaks in the tide of fatalities for weekends or holidays."

https://www.motor1.com/features/713936/pedestrian-deaths-emergency/

La la la. No this doesn't sound sketch.

Telegram is offering a new way to earn a premium subscription free of charge: all you have to do is volunteer your phone number to relay one-time passwords (OTP) to other users. This, in fact, sounds like an awful idea — particularly for a messaging service based around privacy.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24111818/telegram-peer-to-peer-login-otp-two-factor-volunteer

knowing where you are in git

https://wizardzines.com/comics/knowing-where-you-are-in-git/

We got an email from the Serbian Registry of Internet Domain Names (RNIDS), the organisation that is responsible for the `.rs` top-level domain.

Looks like they are a big fan of Rust. 😊

Ever played factorio and thought "I wish my factory had a risc-v core"?

Introducing Factorio Yosys!

This is a project of a friend of mine not on mastodon, so all credit to him. He built a full @yosyshq backend for #factorio that can now compile a #riscv core.

The core runs at 1.82 Hz at 60 FPS, and much faster with uncapped framerate.

Source code here https://git.sr.ht/~acqrel/factorio-yosys

I had a great time visiting Tenstorrent's Santa Clara office this week. @olofj surprised us with the unexpected delight of Semla! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semla

Surely someone who's worked on Chromecasts at some point follows me, so why am I getting this:

curl 'http://192.168.87.229:8008/setup/eureka_info?params=setup.setup_state' | jq

{
"setup": {
"setup_state": 52
}
}

which does not appear to be an expected value, and attempting to trigger a stream results in it immediately closing the connection help I don't know what I'm doing

My story about how telematics data from people's cars unexpectedly raised their insurance rates is on the front page today...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html?unlocked_article_code=1.b00.DzhQ.GXkvg-kgWebx&smid=url-share

... and this is where it started: me lurking on car forums and seeing comments like this.

If this story doesn't convince lawmakers we need a strong federal privacy law, I'm not sure what will.

The next Linux Kernel Debugging Tools monthly meeting is tomorrow, Wednesday, February 28th at 11:30 AM Pacific time. See the linux-debuggers mailing list for the agenda: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-debuggers/Zd5FF1aTvhHWcHhY@telecaster/ and let me know if you'd like an invite.

So, this is fun, but it really chews through your ChatGPT credits. :`)

I'm working on b4 "code review" mode (grab a series, apply it to your tree, review every patch, send all your acked-by's, reviewed-by's, and individual comments as a one lump batch at the end of your review). The reason I'm playing with this is to see if we can plug in some AI pre-analysis and discussion summaries before the reviewer starts their work.

We had a lot of #linaro hackers wondering around at #fosdem this year it seems: https://www.linaro.org/blog/linaro-fosdem-2024/

The #Linux Security Summit, April 18 & 19, in Seattle, has published the schedule:
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/linux-security-summit-north-america/program/schedule/
Come join us!