At the time of writing, I haven't blogged since the 10th. I'll probably go back and fill in what I remember (especially if I have links or emails or my old mastodon posts telling me what day something happened), but I really haven't been using my laptop much. Yesterday's email pretty much explains why. I'm poking at "hello world" kernels to add to mkroot, and as usual my attempts to program have…
I wrote a draft reply to a message about initrd removal, which I decided not to send because it wouldn't help. Cut and pasted it here instead: > So, this patchset will not impact these people. So, I think it is okay > to remove linuxrc now. We can revert this patchset if needed. I'm not exactly thrilled about it either, I just haven't got much useful to say. A consequence of the "no stable API"…
Thinking it would be really nice to have a tiny LUA implementation that runs on bare metal, _as_ the operating system. I looked at Lua Embedded long ago and just the executable wouldn't fit in 256k sram, let alone runtime stack/heap and an app big enough to actually do anything. Over the years I've written a bunch of smaller versions of existing utilities, usually able to get it less than 1/2 the…
Somebody (alas, I forgot who/where) pointed me at Armbian's orange pi 3b page, which does NOT live on Huaweicloud! Which means I should get off my ass and set up a little server. They have a full/desktop Debian 12 release and a "minimal/IOT" Debian 13 release. I suspect I want the 13 version. (Um, I'm running Devuan Daedalus which devuan.org says derives from Debian Bookworm, and debian.org says…
I'm so burned out on Linux I'm looking at writing a lua vm for bare metal. (Dunno if that'll turn into anything: so far, it looks like a lot of work.) The linux-kernel community is disappearing up its own ass. You want corporate meddling? Hardware going out of patent must have support removed before generic implementations come to market. No really .
Los Vegas died the same way Sears did: they sold the land out from under themselves, became renters where they once owned, and the slumlords drained the business dry. Once again, the problem is unguillotined billionaire parasites.
Not all heroes wear capes. Some are 53 year old women at the largest protest in US history tackled by alabama police for wearing Spirit Halloween's inflatable penis costume .
We're still fighting the civil war because John Brown was hung for treason and Robert E. Lee was not. Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forest was allowed to live and became the first head of the Klu Klux Klan. Both sides needed follow through cleaning up: McClelland's butler George Armstrong Custer, last in his class at West Point, sucked up to the guy who dragged out the war an extra 2 years…
Capitalism is a religion where abundance and surplus are considered problems. "Excess" inventory, too much labor is "unemployment", etc. It needs to be "consumed" like burnt offerings in fire. Since WWII the USA has provided the main international source of demand. We ran a huge trade deficit to buy everyone's stuff, they got rich by exporting to us. The USA is currently hurting because China…
The IMF and the Bank of England have issued warnings about the AI bubble. Last week bloomberg said the "AI bubble" was "nearing its peak". Hard to get much more mainstream than that. Meanwhile, fire marshalls are preparing for "the triangle shirtwaist fire of datacenters" and quietly rewriting fire codes in conversation with the insurance companies.
Got a toybox release out. Not going to Plumber's. According to Jeff I have been explicitly disinvited, and he was told there is a narrative he will not be allowed to diverge from. (A subset of the linux kernel community has decided that they will be abandoning the embedded market, removing 32 bit support, removing nommu, all the world's a vax, here's a nickel kid buy yourself a real computer,…
This week I learned about the " Nelson complexity " of oil refineries. I wonder how that relates to the institutional memory article (which was about a refinery), or the US refinery closures . Or Ukraine's ongoing destruction of russian refining capacity (like Russia's airline industry and train car bearings, they're running down a stockpile of imported spare parts they can't easily replace...)…
Arguing with codeberg. Created an empty repo, generated a new 4096 bit rss key for ssh, pasted the .pub into the server... cannot push: pubkey denied. Half an hour of reading docs and staring at stuff. Tried their "verification" thing, which failed. Sigh. Dowanna do another toybox release to github, but don't want to hold up the release either...? Given a choice I'm GOING to use the algorithm from…
Methane has a half life of 7 years in earth's atmosphere before oxidizing to CO2 and water. Adding fossil carbon to the air remains a problem for thousands of years, but cows eating grass are just recycling existing carbon. The side trip into methane adds less time to the round trip than tanning leather does. Carbon "capture" that delays fossil carbon's release for ~10 years is equally irrelevant…
Yesterday I met with the Money Concierge (to print out the bank records showing we PAID those taxes: between the St Paul ransomware attack and doge gutting IRS staffing it's PROBABLY just paperwork being slow to process, but still), and while I was there had him sell enough stock to pay the taxes on the traditional->roth IRA rollover earlier this year. I'd hoped to work a contract to save that up,…
The spammers are taking advantage of the maga prudery->spyware doom loop, with light spearfishing: "Complete your Know Your Customer form to keep your Dreamhost account". From an email in korea, with a URL going to "sharktech.net". ("Light" spearfishing because you can tell my website's on dreamhost from the mx record, in a trivially scriptable manner.) Except that particular exploit chain isn't…
I should tweak my release procedure to have the news entry link to the tag name, not the tag hash. Otherwise the news.html entry has to be committed AFTER the tagged version because if the news mentions the version hash it can't be part of that version, can it? (This means I can't check the links before they go up, but... eh? It's ALL circular dependencies...) I keep wanting to do more. I didn't…
Darn it, trying to update design.html to explain how to run the hermetic build on macos without homebrew and there's STILL a circular dependency. In a clean tree, cc scripts/kconfig.c && KCONFIG_ALLCONFIG=kconfig/macos_miniconfig ./a.out -n > .config fails because generated/Config.in doesn't exist. Which scripts/genconfig.sh creates BUT that requires #!/bin/bash and uses sed and so on that the…
Email du jour about initrd removal. Sadness. Built all the targets with linux-6.17 and there were no obvious regressions using the 2.16 patches, so I should cut a release based on that. Caught up making release notes from the git log. Realized I hadn't pushed in half a month. I really need to set up my codeberg account and upload projects there, and change all the github links to codeberg. Sigh. I…
Got an email from patreon that texas passed some law to take sales taxes out of donations, and... I should really really thingy. But I'm still out of "can". More leapfrogging: electric vehicles are selling where gasoline has never been. EVs don't need a regularly passable road into a community to deliver gasoline, just local roads to drive on. No mechanics needed to change oil or filters, and a…
The AI " infinite money glitch " is called a wash trade. Molly White did a good podcast about how FTX and Alameda sent the same money back and forth, booking it as revenue each time. If you hand your friend a $20 bill and they hand it back to you, and you repeat the process 1000 times, each of you technically received $20,000 dollars today. This is the logic behind a "wash trade", loaning YOURSELF…
US farmers just did to grain exports what confederate farmers did to the cotton industry 150 years ago. When you become an unreliable supplier to the point where your foreign customers bootstrap alternative suppliers in another country, those customers do not ever come back. Europe still buys egyptian cotton today. China built ports and railroads on brazil and argentina's west coasts to buy grain…
Turns out toxic masculinity is most toxic for men , not that this is news. I read an article titled " Men must be needed because they can't imagine being wanted " in 2007. (Somebody linked to it on livejournal.) The greatest sociological advance to society would be a way to track and contain externalities. The current administration is a circular firing squad, there's nowhere safe to stand but…
I blathered about history again. But before I posted that, I wrote an entire separate rant, and deleted it as off topic: That was Paul Allen, who left in 1983. (CP/M had File Control Blocks and QDOS was a 16 bit reimplementation of CP/M otherwise trying to be a bug-for-bug clone (a bit like linux was to unix). Paul Allen added File Descriptors and subdirectories in DOS 2.0 because he was trying to…
I really need to submit talk proposals to the plumbers' embedded track in tokyo. I've had the tab open for something like 3 days now. I've written down almost a dozen potential talk topics (half for me, half for jeff). I just... don't care what a white guy has to say about C programming anymore? (And consider "rust" in someone's mastodon profile an instant turn-off from following them.) If I…
Tried to check out a Lua book from the library, since I have a shiny new library card. (The ransomware attack on St. Paul's municipal systems has finally been cleaned up! The library's printers work again and everything.) Alas their "computer" section is a grand total of 7 books, 5 of which are on microsoft office, one is web page authoring (not technical, more one of those "how to write a resume…
Sigh, lkml is imploding. I wanted to link somebody to a message I posted in the recent initrd removal thread (ala "I already explained this, look here") but... it's not in the archives. REPLIES to it are, such as this one , but when I asked for the thread it only has one message from me. (In that case copied to multiple different lists. I wound up there because I looked at the list and went "this…
Cut and pasted from a reply to the initrd thread, because saying this sort of thing on lkml just makes them shake their canes and smack their gums. Renaming stuff doesn't help, you just confuse more people because all the old documentation DOESN'T GO AWAY, and the coworker in the next cubicle who learned this 5 years ago will tell you the old thing when you ask. If the old thing BROKE and won't…
Here's what I sent privately to Elliott last week in reply to his reply to my rant about Google. Since a week later I don't know if he even read it (no response, a longstanding pet peeve of mine), I might as well put it here for posterity. > and before you say it... > https://groups.google.com/g/android-ndk/c/4h_SAr0Cr68/m/mPbvwVGSDwAJ 1) If they have a laptop, why would they need a phone to learn…
I have not been blogging for a while, because the world's on fire. While I don't exactly want it to burn, I DO kind of want to check back in when the last Boomer is dead and the american dollar has lost its position as the global reserve currency and no longer gets used to colonially impose victorian prudishness on the entire world, and both christianity and its successor religion capitalism go on…
Noticed the "basenc" command and considered adding it, but "echo hello | basenc" says I have to specify an encoding type (no default) and it only offers --longopts not short options, which made me lose interest. (Too gnu/dumb to live. That's not unix.)
Posted publicly about how disgusted I am with Google .
Ok, find -depth and -xdev are already acting global, and the -mindepth/-maxdepth "global" behavior is crazy: $ find toys -name x -o -mindepth 2 2>/dev/null | wc -l 277 $ find toys -name x -a -mindepth 2 2>/dev/null | wc -l 0 And find . \! -maxdepth 2 is also always-fail. The "global" argument is acting as an always-true NOP with a second (unrelated!) test done at the start.
Bug report in find, the OTHER side of the "warning: you have specified a global option" spam gnu/stallman/ftaghn emits. I'm already parsing the command line in two passes, so the first pass needs to set flags for this and then implement the behavior at the start of the loop. The find man page says the global options are -d/depth, -maxdepth, -mindepth, -mount/-xdev. (And several others like -noleaf…
Spent the day over at my sister's going through Mt. Boxmore. Got one and a half boxes emptied, burning quite a lot of it (did EVERYTHING printed in 1998 have your social security number on it?) and took two boxes and one packed suitcase back to sort at the apartment. Plus I abducted three pots of her dirt for our new porch. I'm hping to grow my own tomatage instead of paying over $1.50/pound for…
Did a full build of all targets, I think I have the patches to make 6.16 work. I should cut a release with what I've got.
I am NOT posting a snarky reply , I am instead blogging it. (And yes finding that was a pain, I can't ctrl-f for my name in lore.kernel.org's backscroll, I have to "view source" on the specific message and cut and paste the message ID out of the headers, which is not "msgid" as I keep thinking, but spelled out.) > I'm not sure what issue you're gesturing to exactly, but if you have the >…
I updated scripts/recreate-prereq.sh to work with the new kconfig plumbing, but hit a missing bit in the new kconfig plumbing (allnoconfig wasn't honoring KCONFIG_ALLCONFIG overrides). Took a while to figure out what exactly was wrong...
Huh, lkml.iu.edu is down. I'm assuming it has something to do with the mass resignations and general unreliability of US-hosted infrastructure.
And my laptop rebooted. The reason was I did a "git checkout v2.6.0" in my one-big-git tree (because I couldn't remember Andre Hedrick's name), and told thunderbird to download email at the same time, and the two of them threw Linux so deep into swap that ctrl-alt-f1 couldn't give me a text console (to kill git) for 30 minutes, at which point I held down the power button. (Jeff is convinced that…
Ooh, a 0BSD reimplementation of Lua in Zig . Tried to install zig (wouldn't mind an excuse to learn) to try it out, but... zig is not in the debian repository? Hmmm... Zig's web page (sadly on ratelimithub ) says the project's not at 1.0 yet and lists a bunch of distros you can get it out of the repository of... alpine, arch, fedora, freebsd, gentoo, SuSE, openbsd, mac homebroew, manjaro,…
I was looking at 0BSD licensed repositories and Microsoft Github rate limited me. And 15 minutes later the rate limit was still in place, because I hadn't logged in to the website. (Which I can't do without 2FA, which ain't happening.) Sites that stop being anonymously world browseable deserve to stop getting new users, and then go the way of faceboot with an aging userbase circling the…
The toybox "readahead" command is subtly borked in a way I _actively_ don't want to have to care about, AND YET. The problem is that passing a 64 bit value on 32 bit platforms with syscall() has some hiccups calling older syscalls on some 32 bit architectures, and this one is used as the _example_ in the the "Architecture-specific requirements" section of "man 2 syscall". Some 32-bit processors…
It's mildly ironic that the day of the youtube boycott my phone's unable to charge and almost out of battery. It's been funky about charging since Monday, hallucinating an "unsupported audio device" in the slot which is apparently a symptom of either a bent pin or fluff shorting out a contact. It went from being unable to fast charge (not a big loss) to being unable to regular charge (slow charge…
Editing a zillion old blog entries before youtube goes away and I can't verify that the link to the video I saved actually goes where I think it does. There's apparently a boycott tomorrow. I'm thinking of just uninstalling the youtube app on my phone. I could theoretically still watch some youtube videos on my laptop (after the boycott day, anyway) but I've never logged in to youtube on my laptop…
Ok, hopefully we've FINALLY gotten the tax lady all the info we needed. The reason the library was closed was "staff shortage". Which I believe means somebody called out sick and they're running on a skeleton crew. One of the few third places left, and it's hanging on by a thread. Wheee. And the cyberattack on St Paul (the State Capital of Minnesota) is now confirmed to be ransomware . The FBI is,…
Curled up in a ball pretty much all week over stress from the ongoing censorship stupidity. (Owned platforms are not public spaces, they are preemptively complying with stupid laws that haven't even passed yet. At least Wikipedia is out there fighting the good fight.) I'm aware it's clearly going to go like prohibition (and the comstock act, and McCarthyism) and self-destruct bigly, but all those…
The library was closed today. No warning, just a construction paper sign on the door. I should ask them why on Monday. Since I went to all the trouble of getting a mastodon archive to html converter working, I put the result up on my website. I should probably link it from the top level nav bar, but I haven't touched my top level web page in YEARS. (I should completely redo it, I know. So many…
Of course youtube is going to extend the UK's mass doxxing to the USA starting on the 13th . (No, don't say "always welcome" you assholes. Do not preemptively salute. Youtube is not a substitute for parents. No for-profit corporation is EVER going to be a substitute for parents. I read The Ship Who Sang and The White Dragon in 4th grade.) And of course the people doing the censorship are lying…
And the UK is censoring the internet, pushing it all over its borders. Adult creators there have been eloquently warning this was a problem, but Starmer declared Palestine Action a terrorist group and is arresing grandmothers for holding up a two sentence plackard, so clearly they can be trusted doxxing everyone everywhere.