leastfixedpoint.com

It is 2026 and I cannot get a link (URL) to an email message that I have received.

Re: ult boost. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. 1200/75 modems. Active FTP. Hopping shell to shell across SUNET VAX/VMS machines. Tears in rain etc., time to die

(me grading) I Can't Believe It's Not ✨AI✨

"LLMs produce a Borgesian library of superficially plausible alternates"
https://social.coop/@adamgreenfield/115771986742330648

I don’t know, apathetic bloody species, I’ve no sympathy at all.

Bookmarklets are still so valuable. I hope they never go away. Today's exemplar:

javascript:(document.location = ('' + document.location).replace(/(zoom\.us\/)j\/([^/?]+)/, '$1wc/$2/join')), (void 0)

which converts the URL of a Zoom meeting that, inexplicably 🙄, no longer has a link to join the meeting in your browser, directly to a joined meeting in your browser.

Omg til 255 is divisible by 3!
https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/115686136924120708

€7.50 at the charity store gets some pretty amazing retro word processing kit.

My university, Maastricht University, is hiring an Assistant Professor in Computer Systems and Security: https://vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastricht-Assistant-professor-in-Computer-Systems/1333270757/

Maastricht is a great place to live! Feel free to get in touch if you want to talk about the position or the city or moving to Europe or anything!

There must be some mythic character from antiquity whose role is to rail against the pathetic ambition of the human species. I mean we've collectively decided that PowerPoint is about as much as we can hope for, may as well just give up here.

I take back everything nice I've said about Java. Its ByteArrayOutputStream.toString("UTF-8") silently "corrects" errors with the replacement character. No thrown exceptions. 🤮

TIL about the "git pickaxe" (git log -S textfragment) which can search for specific commits that introduce or remove a fragment of text (exact match or regex!) to/from the codebase: https://www.philandstuff.com/2014/02/09/git-pickaxe.html . Very useful.

The UX of MacOS special character input panel is so much worse than even Emacs C-x 8 RET is. A low bar to clear, you'd think? Focus is in the wrong place when you open the panel; have to use the mouse; no decent history; awful.

Sometimes, mail deliverability problems are receiving-end problems. But not for me, not today: today, it turns out to be the fault of some bonkers overzealous "security filter" on the sending side (not run by me) that gets so scared of the outside world it fails to deliver email for no particular reason.

daemontools is great except stopping a supervisor doesn't properly stop children recursively. Unless I'm holding it wrong...?

This is an absolutely brutal/amazing/intense album: Emptyset, "Borders" (2017) https://album.link/i/1168072029 . Start on track 2 ("Border") if you want to get a taste.

Tried to figure out a streamlined way for my students to get access to "free tier" cloud VMs. ... Utter failure. First: credit cards required. Showstopper right there. Second: completely user-hostile experience working with both Google and Oracle. Didn't even bother with AWS or Azure. Might have to tell them the "free tier" is a lie.

I was reminded of FoxNet (mid-90s CMU project; Biagioni et al.; my mirror) the other week because I'm teaching Computer Networks and so thinking about layering and the intricacies of network protocol design again; I've implemented TCP/IP myself before and it's always interesting to revisit alternative implementation techniques. This one is especially interesting for its use of SML's functor system and for the way "layering" 🙄 is expressed in terms of, essentially, bounded quantification.

@krismicinski When you have student projects go into a large-ish test suite in an autograder or similar, do you let the students know the details of the test cases, so that they can think about and repair any failure? Or do you keep the details secret? Or something in between: perhaps let them know a one-line description but not the full exact details? And do you retain some test cases as "secret" tests used only in grading and not available for the students to see or try out as they work?

Livid at the behaviour of AI scraper bots (and by extension AI companies). Just wasted several hours getting Anubis installed in front of forgejo.