today's leftovers

• reversing an openbsd kernel syspatch

  OpenBSD has provided binary patches for a select few architectures for a while now, to save users from the daunting task of running make on their own. Alas, this means you might now apply a patch without first reviewing it. In the olden times, you had a source patch, so obviously you meticulously studied every line before application, just like you advised new users on IRC to do. But now, who will believe you do this when the binary syspatch is right there, so easy, so tempting.

• [GSoC 2022] Ham: A Jam Replacement

  Haiku currently uses a fork of Perforce Jam as its build system. While Jam is a great build system, its legacy codebase makes it difficult to fix bugs or introduce new features.

  Ham is a complete Jam rewrite that was started by Ingo Weinhold, but wasn’t completed. This project starts where Ingo left off to bring Ham to where it can be used as Haiku’s official build system. The new repository can be found here.

• Daily logging on al-Toril

  What I’m gonna add in is a cheapo A5 notebook. The notebook is a daily log (and by daily, I mean days on al-Toril in the year 1494) that’s strictly for post-hoc. Keeping track of torches & shoes, but also take note of what happens (gonna make writing session reports a li’l easier). A symbol to capture extra-diegetical (real-life) todo-items for me (a square box probably), for example “remember to make a new crafting table for potions” or whatever (sort of like a bujo), and another symbol (maybe just underline) for references to the A7 & A4 loose sheets. So that non-post-hoc, actual prep prep can live there. Things that are actual stuff, forward references, will become cards instead.

  This is also great because I can use shorthand in the daily log (I need to use longhand for prep so that the players can verify stuff, but logs aren’t prep).

Compile GNOME Shell and Apps From Source [Beginner's Guide]

A tutorial on how to compile GNOME from its source, including the shell, mutter and some native apps.

Free Software Leftovers

• 8 reasons to ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox

  One such option is Firefox. It’s a rare browser not based on Chromium, the project that powers Chrome, unlike other rivals like Edge or Opera. It’s also backed by a team with a long, storied history in browser development and a deep interest in online privacy. As a result, using Firefox can boost your PC’s performance, better protect you on the web, and also make life more convenient, too. You’ll find it offers built-in features that don’t exist in Chrome or otherwise require third-party add-ons.

  Just like we’ve recently done with Vivaldi, the enthusiast’s browser, we’ve highlighted the top 8 reasons to quit Chrome and make the switch to Firefox. Let’s dig in.

• OpenPGP Email Summit

  During the trip I suddenly remembered that Swiss was not part of the EU, so the roaming rules that apply to all EU countries and that allow EU citizens to use mobile internet and telephony abroad while not having to worry about astronomical bills from their provider would not count. I quickly did some research on how bad it would be. 7cts/10KB. What. The. Fuck. I quickly disabled roaming and mobile internet. Guess I’ll be dependent on the availability of Wifi for the next days. [...] After quickly refreshing, I took the bus to the other end of Geneva to the offices of Proton (formerly Protonmail). They hosted the 6. OpenPGP Email Summit which I was going to attend. When I got to the building, I had to call the office upstairs and one member of the Proton team came down to fetch me. On Thursday we only had an informal meeting of participants that already arrived. The real discussions would take place on Friday and Saturday, although when I entered the office room people already had discussions going. After the meeting we went to a small bar to get some drinks and a small dinner. This being my first OpenPGP meetup (apart from the Sequoia meeting I was invited to some time ago), it was nice getting to know many of the people I already knew from the internet in person.

• Using Homebrew on M1 Mac

  If you’re coming to M1 Mac fresh, without any old projects or profiles, you probably won’t notice; Homebrew will work as it always has. But if you’re trying to migrate from an Intel Mac you won’t be able to just move packages that were once in /usr/local over to /opt/homebrew. No need to worry though, reinstalling everything on M1 is easy, it just may take a bit of time.

• Prematurely labelling RSS feeds as inactive

  Please don’t let this be another hang up if you’ve considered writing but are worried about how often you could post. A well written post about a project every other year is already hugely valuable.

• LinTO: An open-source end-to-end platform for voice-operated solutions

  LinTO a great and efficient assistant, very interesting and intelligent product with many features that have no other any product. It has much grate privacy and security features for businesses meeting and also calling to grow the business. [...] LinTO is released under the GNU Affero General Public Licence V3.

Programming Leftovers

• A backup is only as good as ...

  Today, while looking at previously-logged data in preparation for consumption of future similar data, I discovered to my horror, that tinylog(8) truncates lines at what I first assumed was 1024 but actually is 1000 bytes.

• Multiple level filters in jq

  Here's another note-to-self on using jq to shape JSON representations of OData to match what's returned using system query options. Thsi time it's all filtering at two levels.

  In the Back to basics: OData - the Open Data Protocol - Part 3 - System query options live stream last Friday we looked at OData's system query options.

  There was a question at the end about whether it was possible to use the $filter system query option at multiple levels, in an $expand context. I wrote up the question, and a detailed answer (summary: yes) with an example here: Can $filter be applied at multiple levels in an expand?.

• 0024: HYTRADBOI postmortem, HYTWACFI?, preimp, emergent ventures, data and reality, merkle search trees, readyset, julia compilation times

  Now that all that HYTRADBOI craziness is over I'm focusing on preimp. The goal is to work towards the programming experience that I envisioned for imp, but hack it together in clojure to avoid getting bottlenecked forever on language design.

  So far I have a simple clojure notebook with coarse-grained incremental maintenance. There are data cells that can be mutated by other code, with the changes being persisted back into the cell. The notebook is backed by a simple crdt, so once I finish hooking it up to the server it will allow collaborative editing of code and data. Next step after that is rendering the output values as interactive widgets, and then adding bidirectional editing so that interacting with the widgets for derived views can push changes to upstream data.

• Parsing JSON faster with Intel AVX-512

  A few years ago, we released a really fast C++ JSON parser called simdjson. It is somewhat unique as a parser in the fact that it relies critically on SIMD instructions. On several metrics, it was and still is the fastest JSON parser though other interesting competitors have emerged.

  Initially, I had written a quick and dirty AVX-512 kernel for simdjson. We never merged it and after a time, I just deleted it. I then forgot about it.

• "GameShell" interactive game for learning Linux shell commands

  A new project has been released which seeks to teach people how to use a UNIX style shell… via a game-like experience.

• Best Books on Data Science with Python

  Best Books on Data Science with Python, In the subject of data science, Python is one of the most extensively used programming languages.

  Pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, Matplotlib, and SciPy are just a few of the Python packages and libraries that are specifically suited for specific functions.

• AI Attempts Converting Python Code To C++

  [Alexander] created codex_py2cpp as a way of experimenting with Codex, an AI intended to translate natural language into code. [Alexander] had slightly different ideas, however, and created codex_py2cpp as a way to play with the idea of automagically converting Python into C++. It’s not really intended to create robust code conversions, but as far as experiments go, it’s pretty neat.