ori

https://hj.9fs.net/ori

We have a word for things that try to grow at any cost. That word is cancer.

Made of meat.

9front, Recurse Center, systems and data.

Site: https://orib.dev

Public Key

npub1485zn7htrffa6x3g6wkf2y329uc3x5a0q3p8en84eucgd5c4z00q0m8vcz

NIP-05 Address

ori_at_hj.9fs.net@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs2n6pflt43557arg5d8ty4zg4z7vgn2whsgsnuen6u7vyx6v238hspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dssw4x8z

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1485zn7htrffa6x3g6wkf2y329uc3x5a0q3p8en84eucgd5c4z00q0m8vcz

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Last Notes

2026-10-26 15:15:51 UTC

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Hurling punks into the sun.

2026-09-09 10:04:42 UTC

Made it to EuroBSD.

2026-08-06 23:11:46 UTC

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Also, I'd strongly suggest setting it up as a non-graphical CPU server, and using drawterm to access it. Sharing files with the host machine, getting copy-paste integration, and all of the other nice stuff drawterm does for you is worthwhile.
CC: @npub1anh…av85

2026-08-06 22:49:41 UTC

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You probably want to add 3 lines to /n/9fat/plan9.ini:
9fs 9fat
echo 'monitor=ask' >> /n/9fat/plan9.ini
echo 'vgasize=ask' >> /n/9fat/plan9.ini
echo 'service=terminal' >> /n/9fat/plan9.ini
Arguably, we should probably generate it with this by default. I'll look at changing it.
CC: @npub1anh…av85

2026-08-04 19:33:09 UTC

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'misprompting'?
CC: [@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange](https://infosec.exchange/users/david_chisnall )

2026-08-04 02:18:18 UTC

I'm playing with 9front's locks. Our spinlock, as far as I can tell, should be laughably bad, but rough microbenchmarks are actually giving me reasonable results, partly because the locks are hilariously unfair.
Does anyone know of any good, representative benchmark suites I should be stealing ideas from, or even better, porting?

2026-07-26 22:32:38 UTC

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The problem is that people forget to ask "work well for who, exactly?"
CC: @npub1ksf…r6s6

2026-07-26 20:31:35 UTC

Made it to Boston for Systems Distributed 2026.

2026-07-26 04:05:19 UTC

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Yes. Moody @npub1juz…eyat) did the initial port, and humm (of unknown fediverse handle) has done more on making it usable.
CC: @npub194w…fhpv

2026-07-25 14:45:24 UTC

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> 15.9 TB
Huh -- if that's all of github, it's surprising to me that it fits on one large-ish consumer hard drive.
CC: @npub1szn…y7qx

2026-07-23 20:40:36 UTC

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I would still be much more comfortable if the spec was updated to remove support. Hypothetical bad behavior by companies has an unpleasant tendency to become actual, especially if there's a way to use it for additional lock-in.
I don't think it's worth prioritizing holding on to a dead feature over removing things that make adopters uncomfortable.
CC: @npub14k2…ch60 @npub1jzt…jnwm

2026-07-22 03:01:24 UTC

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It's public key cryptography, not a simple password. The private data is not sent over the wire, so it can't be stolem. I would like to have public key cryptography in use for authentication, though I have one major and one minor reservation with passkeys.
The major reservation is remote attestation: the party that I'm authenticating with should have no idea what device I'm using, as long as it follows protocol. I don't feel comfortable using a protocol with provisions for this; large tech companies have shown that they're not to be trusted, especially where there's an opportunity for lock-in.
The minor reservation is the difficulty of backup and recovery. (If the major reservation is resolved, I can run a non-standard passkey agent that backs up the way I want, so this is only an issue if someone has protocol support for constraining the devices I can use)
CC: @npub1jzt…jnwm @npub14k2…ch60

2026-07-18 00:52:14 UTC

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Yes. My grandmother and her sister survived Auschwitz. Their ten other siblings did not. I know more than I'd like about those places. The gas used to exterminate them was initially designed to increase crop yields, and reduce loss to pests. The label "pest" got reapplied by society, while the technology remained unchanged. The process to produce the gas was evolved from processes designed by the (Jewish) Fritz Haber, well before the Nazi party rose to power. Did he encode his values into his work? What about the synthetic fertilizers that are still in use today?
There's engineering at the fringes when optimizing a tool for a specific purpose, but at that point, there's usually some repurposable technology already ready to generalize to other uses. Because the generality of technology, it's genuinely difficult to encode "good" values into it unambiguously.
CC: @npub1k3n…vqd0

2026-07-18 00:30:52 UTC

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But my point is that it's *not* embedded with our values. You can keep the technology, change the context, and the values "embedded" in it change. And that makes it more dangerous -- if you believe it was embedded with the creator's values, then it would be a great deal safer; it would be harder for someone adversarial to pick it up and run with it, and use it to harm people.
Because it's neutral, you can't just consider *our* values, but the values of every possible person that could pick it up and run with it.
CC: @npub1k3n…vqd0

2026-07-18 00:24:41 UTC

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Yes. My point is that you can't assign a moral value to the technology; the technology and the society need to be co-designed. It all comes down the to people. The people in charge are one of the most important components defining the moral value of a technology. The technology itself can't be evaluated morally without the context it exists in.
CC: @npub1k3n…vqd0

2026-07-18 00:19:18 UTC

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I disagree with the example -- the atom bomb is just an overly excited source of cheap, clean energy. If you have nuclear energy you have the H-bomb. You take the helpful technology that leads to abundance for humanity, and remove a few safeguards. Now you have a weapon of incredible destructive power.
For me, the question is what the social (and, technical) safeguards could look like. It's a genuinely hard question. I don't have a good answer.
CC: @npub1k3n…vqd0

2026-07-18 00:13:27 UTC

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For me, the essence of the neutrality is the wide range in how it can be used by society. To oversimpify, "if you're not careful, it can be used for anything, including harming the very things you were trying to protect. It doesn't have any care for the things you love built in -- that's the job of the people around it."
CC: @npub1k3n…vqd0

2026-07-18 00:04:17 UTC

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I've (in the distant past) taken multiple courses on the ethics of technology, so I've definitely been exposed to this viewpoint. I disagree with it.
I admit, I haven't read the specific book you pointed at, but I would imagine that it mirrors Ursula Franklin, and to a lesser extent, Neil Postman.
Rejecting the idea that technology has inherent ethical value isn't the same as absolving it of harm. Remove the people, and technology is just a very intricate pile of rocks and metal. Deciding that technology has inherent moral value outside of how people chose to use it makes it too easy to avoid reckoning with the social context of technology. Rejecting that forces you to reckon with the full interaction of technology and humanity. The harms and benefits technology cause are intricately intertwined with social structure, ideology, politics and human behavior.
Accepting technology's neutrality, though, means that you need to reckon with the complexity of social interaction. You need to defend not just against the things you label as "bad", but also the things you label as "good". Moral neutrality is not the same as having no social impacts. And while some, er, ballistic impact, translates pretty directly to social impact, a huge amount of indirect impact is far more ambiguous. Even if we can use it for huge good, we need to be careful to defend against downsides.
Trying to label technology outside of social structures is too dangerous for me to accept.
CC: @npub1sl7…lnx3 @npub1k3n…vqd0

2026-07-17 17:36:40 UTC

I just started to re-read Brave New World. I,atypically, read the foreword too, and this sentence caught my attention:
> If I were to rewrite the book, I would offer the savage a third alternative. Between the utopian and primitive horns of his dillema would lie the possibility of sanity.
The whole foreword is worth reading.

2026-07-17 12:25:48 UTC

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It's worse than that. Technology is neutral, people are adversarial.
CC: @npub1sl7…lnx3 @npub1k3n…vqd0

2026-07-17 03:21:30 UTC

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That works so much better than I expected it would.
CC: @npub1ljm…w8tm

2026-07-17 03:19:55 UTC

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FWIW, I reject the term 'core developer'. I have developed zero cores. In fact, I usually throw out the core after I eat the rest of the apple. I have commit access, that's all.
CC: @npub1gah…uu3c [@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt](https://tech.lgbt/users/nina_kali_nina ) @npub1ayp…79nj

2026-07-16 14:42:08 UTC

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The entire goal of the AI project is to replace thought -- it naturally follows that if you've bought in, 5 minutes of thought is too much.
CC: @npub1sl7…lnx3 @npub1gcf…svwy

2026-07-16 02:53:57 UTC

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Ah, well, shit, I owe someone else an apology then.
CC: @npub10wd…nwww

2026-07-16 02:13:25 UTC

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At this point, if you're on Linux you're swimming in slop: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/CAHk-=wi4zC+Ze8e+p3tMv8TtG_80KzsZ1syL9anBtmEh5Z40vg@mail.gmail.com/

2026-07-16 02:03:53 UTC

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Right. I saw that email, and I think I just forgot to respond.
Anyways, yes -- it's going, but between paying bills, debugging issues that people using it on 9front run into, and just understanding what I'm doing in the VFS, it's slow.
Maybe it's time to put up an onlyfans.
CC: @npub10wd…nwww

2026-07-15 20:06:24 UTC

Looks like my talk was accepted.
https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2026/talk/NVMSCJ/

2026-07-15 19:48:48 UTC

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Polished announcements and slick marketing have been anti-signals for about as long as I can remember.
CC: @npub1hnh…d29u

2026-07-04 21:12:09 UTC

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Several years back:
https://myrlang.org/summer-of-cod
CC: @npub1zfy…8xdp

2026-06-25 17:01:05 UTC

The well known hotbed of Debian-like distros, Lower Manhattan. Thanks, Google, for your helpfully localized search results.
https://hj.9fs.net/ori/s/post-f9b2d0fd9bec255a867f68907e0a9a5f.png

2026-06-19 13:46:11 UTC

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The PDF link seems broken.

2026-06-19 03:07:38 UTC

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the current iteration: https://shithub.us/ori/shithub/HEAD/gate.c

2026-06-17 21:54:43 UTC

Can you tell when I enabled the bot scraping protection on https://shithub.us?
https://hj.9fs.net/ori/s/post-d4a29faacd70222dae7b6c11f69f2684.png

2026-06-06 16:44:23 UTC

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LLMs can be useful, but we are literally building gas pipelines directly to data centers to power them. The project is intentionally dehumanizing, and devalues the things I like most about people.
For me, my distaste isn't about how well they work, but about the surrounding effects they have.
Roasted marshmallows are pretty great! Who doesn't want roasted marshmallows? But would you burn down your neighbor's house to roast marshmallows?

2026-06-04 22:29:18 UTC

considering becoming a dis-content creator.

2026-06-02 02:03:55 UTC

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The hebrew name for "cotton candy" is "Grandma's hair". Appetizing.

2026-05-21 01:06:48 UTC

I wrote some words:
https://orib.dev/nexus.html

2026-05-10 15:59:11 UTC

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But what music?
CC: @npub1z8r…mrq6

2026-05-10 15:54:33 UTC

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Yes.
However, You didn't ask what they should do when they're clicked.
CC: @npub1z8r…mrq6

2026-04-20 18:27:27 UTC

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Those are metric inches. Obviously.

2026-04-01 03:59:09 UTC

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Please tell me that if I get the PDF version, I can copy and paste out the original text.
CC: @npub1qhk…u7aa

2026-03-31 13:12:44 UTC

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Does it? The attacker needs to be able to control the contents of your .git directory, which is *not* copied by git clone. Git cloning a repository *will not* leave you vulnerable, this is why the PoC gets the reproducer with wget. Today, git repositories can execute arbitrary code, but they don't carry that code along if you clone them.
In other news, if someone is sitting in your living room, they can unlock your front door from the inside, so your locks must be defective!

2026-03-29 12:22:05 UTC

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Remember that 'none of the above' is still a perfectly valid option, and is rather conservative: it's the status quo.
The privacy maximalist option is 'if you attempt to collect this information about your users, we will see you in court'. I would like to keep the status quo, which probably means that someone will have to start lobbying for stronger protections for users.

2026-03-28 13:35:49 UTC

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That's with G as in GIF, right?
CC: @npub1j8e…ncgu

2026-03-28 01:08:11 UTC

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Fwiw, https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/vim-classic/ and https://codeberg.org/NerdNextDoor/evi
CC: @npub1l5h…tl0m

2026-03-22 13:49:38 UTC

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Stuff.

2026-03-16 03:07:19 UTC

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we fixed it in 9front with the great hammer of rm -rf. Thanks.

2026-03-02 03:44:41 UTC

A French person once told me: "You shouldn't found a bakery, it's just going to be a source of pain".

2026-02-15 07:29:23 UTC

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Setting aside non-technical considerations: I wouldn't be able to put together a good spec if I hadn't translated it to code and worked out all the details for this. English is a sufficiently poor notation for thinking through a spec.
So, if LLMs write the code, my understanding of a problem would be poor enough that they would also be better at writing the specs, docs, and models.
Writing the code is homomorphic to studying the problem space in enough detail that I know I understood things.
CC: @npub1er4…x9ky @npub1ylv…mdmf

2026-02-14 07:06:30 UTC

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Lobsters has also gotten sloppy. It may be necessary to start over.
CC: @npub1sl7…lnx3 @npub16y8…d455

2026-02-08 09:41:56 UTC

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I think it's the documented way to pass a timeout:
> Several _umtx_op() operations allow the blocking time to be limited, failing the request if it cannot be satisfied in the specified time period. The timeout is specified by passing either the address of struct timespec, or its extended variant, struct _umtx_time, as the uaddr2 argument of _umtx_op(). They are distinguished by the uaddr value, which must be equal to the size of the structure pointed to by uaddr2, casted to uintptr_t.
Kinda gross, and iirc inherited from Linux futex apis.
CC: @npub1fq6…wmwe

2026-02-07 22:54:38 UTC

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I would be very surprised if I posted a followers
-only note that a no -follower could see.

2026-02-07 22:16:53 UTC

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Well, you asked what expectations were, and I told you. They're not what you seem to be proposing. Not sure what else to say.

2026-02-07 22:00:09 UTC

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Yes. That's equivalent to Alice setting their post followers only, and Bob setting their post public, but less confusing to the user.

2026-02-07 21:55:25 UTC

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Yes. Either you do that or you ignore someone's privacy settings.

2026-02-07 21:33:33 UTC

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The intersection of Alice and Bob's followers.

2026-02-05 11:19:31 UTC

Did you know that there's a small town in Italy called Cologne? I sure didn't when I booked my train tickets from Cologne to Rome.
Sigh.
Alternative travel plans arranged.

2026-02-04 17:11:38 UTC

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Most breakers are electromagnetic, not resistive.
CC: @npub19av…rp6r

2026-01-28 23:55:19 UTC

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You can see what happens if you tell it to not search the Internet, for vanity.
For me, it doesn't always work. It will also sometimes say things like "I have no idea who Ori Bernstein is, but here's code written in the style of a low level systems programmer with a focus on performance".

2026-01-28 23:30:44 UTC

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> "Admitting you don't know the answer looks weak"
One of my favorite bits of feedback I got on a talk was "I love how confidently you said you didn't know things".
There's a lot I don't know. I consider it basic courtesy to clearly flag the boundaries of my knowledge. It's rude to pass around falsehoods.
"Strength", whatever the hell that means in this context, comes from being able to think about how to get the missing information, or being able to think about what the parts of a system you do understand constrain the parts you don't know about. There's real skill demonstrated if someone is able to say "I don't know, but if you flip the third rock from the left, the answer will be right there."

2026-01-28 23:11:48 UTC

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The best is that I can (unreliably) ask an LLM to write in the style of 'Ori Bernstein' and it will. Once it even decided to do it in a language I wrote.
The irony: I hate using LLMs to write code, so this is only really useful as a party trick for impressing ai-brained people.

2026-01-25 14:56:08 UTC

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Would the insurance cover it?
CC: @npub1fc6…2khj

2026-01-13 13:41:43 UTC

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Maybe https://aosabook.org/en/ ?

2026-01-11 15:14:10 UTC

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When I was in high school, the introductory programming class didn't let us use a computer for about a month. Instead, we would get programs on paper, and would be asked to trace out what they did.
When I taught friends how to code, I was less strict, but writing out the steps on paper was still a big part of it. I also wouldn't let people make changes to their code without first telling me what they thought was broken, and predicting/explaining what the change would do.
I think it's a very effective approach.

2026-01-09 05:09:49 UTC

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The new Plan 9 file system I've been working on for a while (GEFS) is getting very close to stable, and my port of it to OpenBSD has read its first directory listing.

2025-12-22 18:05:32 UTC

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Look at affinewarp. It's a new feature, added last summer.
CC: @npub1trl…vm7z

2025-12-20 15:11:09 UTC

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bitsy/keyboard
CC: @npub1jt2…s5v4

2025-11-26 05:02:06 UTC

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From early Unix: sbrk and the stack.
It's a good idea.
CC: @npub1ll6…jjcy

2025-10-21 21:44:14 UTC

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Counter culture is a culture where you add as many counters as possible, so you can track user activity. Right?

2025-09-18 03:05:43 UTC

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Gridchat. It's still pretty active -- this is the script I use to connect: https://orib.dev/gchat
CC: [@sigrid@ftrv.se](https://nein.ftrv.se/users/sigrid )

2025-09-16 12:09:33 UTC

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Why specifically one that's be hard to turn down? I would have thought volume control would be important.

2025-09-12 03:32:50 UTC

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Heck, we've got most of it. What if we had a virtual PCI bus to enumerate and identify the built-in stuff, and picked a short list of supported stuff to put on htere?
This obsoletes devicetree, parts of acpi, and the other things everyone hates.

2025-09-12 03:20:08 UTC

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The PC isn't a great platform, but it is a platform.
There's a lot of hardware bugs and stupidity to deal with, but at least it's pretending that it's interoperable. I haven't had to worry about which interrupt controller the motherboard I bought had for a while.

2025-09-11 18:29:33 UTC

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"hey, let's quickly hack in a global flag". And this is why I still use [rc](https://shithub.us/cinap_lenrek/rc/HEAD/info.html ), even on unix.
CC: @npub187a…5xdw

2025-09-10 18:43:27 UTC

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It's never about the instruction set, but about the peripherals.

2025-08-19 04:16:48 UTC

Well. New job, let's see how it goes.
Back to poking at databasey things at ParadeDB.

2025-08-13 06:48:52 UTC

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I don't have an openbsd at hand, but it's reportedly supported by mandoc: https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20181002175838

2025-08-11 09:34:11 UTC

The problem with a good hackathon: By the end, I have more projects than I started with.

2025-06-06 15:23:13 UTC

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Not sure it matters. Between ordering and delivering it's going to change anyways. 1%? 10000%? Who the fuck knows.
You could probably probably make a few bucks with a challenge coin slot machine: Guess the difference in tariffs between order placed and order delivered, and you win!

2025-06-04 23:31:08 UTC

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Scaling for hi dpi robs me of the pixels I wanted to use for more text.
CC: @npub1cp3…39ww

2025-04-28 14:41:42 UTC

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If a baker is someone who bakes, a badger must be someone who attaches badges to attendees.
CC: [@bsdcan@bsd.network](https://bsd.network/users/bsdcan )

2025-04-23 01:59:31 UTC

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https://antithesis.com/ ?

2025-04-22 16:03:53 UTC

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Where's the alliteration?
Perverse Presents.

2025-04-06 19:20:00 UTC

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I like technology. I don't like the technology industry.

2025-02-14 17:58:41 UTC

Walking by a tour group: "New York City is the most expensive rat habitat in the world"
They're not wrong.

2025-02-09 04:40:22 UTC

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> until they experience consequences.
Well, aren't we optimistic.
CC: @npub1rz2…xaz3

2025-01-30 17:55:52 UTC

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Skimming the replies, I'm surprised to see so few mentions of books.
There's the classic TUPE book, which is a great introduction: https://github.com/tcd/tupe/blob/master/the-unix-programming-environment-kernighan-pike.pdf
There's lots of others, including more modern ones. That's a big part of how I learned, and then I fit new knowledge into the framework set up by the books.