my haiku summary of @pluralistic’s enshittification: everything is shit in ways you can’t imagine we must regulate

While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #unix v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973 Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum #retrocomputing

There are no dead languages! A spooky tale about the modern world. In scientific, legal and medical fields, Latin is often used for naming, because unlike a "living" language, the meaning and nuance of its words will not "drift" over time. But the idea that any language is "dead" is itself […]

new post: Vibe coding in the 90's https://ssg.dev/vibe-coding-in-the-90s/

just finished the first chapter. it’s refreshing to see all that we’ve been experiencing every day from 10,000 feet. it makes the solutions approachable. thanks @pluralistic !

is the feature called "passkeys"? is it considered singular when we talk about the feature, like "passkeys is great", and plural when we talk about individual passkey items, like "15 passkeys have been processed"?

Joshua Rogers sent us a *massive* list of potential issues in #curl that he found using his set of AI assisted tools. Code analyzer style nits all over. Mostly smaller bugs, but still bugs and there could be one or two actual security flaws in there. Actually truly awesome findings. I have […]

NASA is facing backlash after reportedly being ordered to destroy a fully operational satellite that plays a crucial role in monitoring the Earth’s atmosphere. Imagine a perfectly good, high-tech spacecraft gathering invaluable data on carbon dioxide – a key player in climate change – only to […]

new blog post: Safe zero-copy operations in C# https://ssg.dev/safe-zero-copy-operations-in-c/

Millionaire trophy hunter gored to death by 1.3 tonne bull on African safari https://metro.co.uk/2025/08/06/millionaire-trophy-hunter-gored-death-1-3-tonne-bull-african-safari-23845140/

**CP/M Creator Gary Kildall’s Memoirs Released as Free Download **https://spectrum.ieee.org/cpm-creator-gary-kildalls-memoirs-released-as-free-download

Somehow I watched the completely unwatchable Reagan biopic. My god it was bad. Not even so bad it’s good. More like, even in communist USSR they wouldn’t make such horrendous propaganda biopic as this. Main difference of course is that in communist USSR horrendous propaganda biopic finds *you* […]

The shape of Gorbachev’s birthmark was the only historically accurate detail in the whole film.

"wap.sourtimes.org" was the URL of ekşi sözlük for WAP browsers, and i remember that @ssg showed me its old screenshots on X a few years ago. recently a friend on discord taught me how to run its WML file i found from @internetarchive's wayback machine, by using openwave sdk, and voila! 🥳

The way technology advances is that someone builds a hack of some kind, let’s call this “a banana” — and then others build further bananas on this banana until the entire banana tower collapses into a mushy layer of decaying banana matter. Fresh banana towers are built on this until they too […]

is a Utf8String coming to .NET? or do we stick to Span<byte> and alike for it?

why wouldn't visual studio debugger JIT optimize the member accesses here when debugging. it's in Release mode and "suppress JIT" isn't checked. compiler explorer produces optimizes code. visual studio doesn't.

What on earth, SoundCloud?? "In the absence of a separate agreement that states otherwise, You explicitly agree that your Content may be used to inform, train, develop or serve as input to artificial intelligence or machine intelligence technologies or services as part of and for providing the […]

Ok, I might stop after this one: The new Pope has a degree in mathematics from Villanova University. This guy doesn’t just understand sin. He understands cos.

does it make any sense to target netstandard2.1 anymore in #dotnet libraries? (not netstandard2.0) or, would it be sufficient to support the earliest supported .NET like net8.0 currently?

#mastodon releases annual reports, but they only show how many reports they processed. they don't include a transparency report such as with government takedown requests. compare that to bluesky's 2024 moderation report. why is it so @Gargron ? […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

#mastodon releases annual reports, but they only show how many reports they processed. they don't include a transparency report such as with government takedown requests. compare that to bluesky's 2024 moderation report. why is it so @Gargron ? […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

Fighting words from @molly0xfff's opening talk at the Fediverse House at SXSW 2025: “We're facing an existential threat. We need a web that serves people not profit, a web built on protocols, not platforms…It's being built right now by people like you in communities like this one.” Thank you […]

Okay this is really interesting. The NLRB whistleblower Daniel Berulis told me that he found the DOGE accounts had downloaded three different code libraries from GitHub that none of their IT people or contractors used or knew about. One of them, Berulis said, had in its "README" file a […]

My Garmin watch did not sync activities with the Garmin Connect iOS app upon returning home from a week of travels. It did sync my steps from the day I landed, my sleep that night, and steps the following day. It just failed to pick up my running, hiking, and other activities logged when I was […]

Finally had time over the holidays to realize a long-standing dream of mine: a hex editor that knows about the PE file and .NET metadata format. You can click any byte and it will show you which data structure it is in the tree. Every byte is covered. The […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

@matthew_d_green are you also on bluesky by any chance? i couldn’t find you on search.

“it’s impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows” —epictetus

doesn't allowing password login pretty much kill the purpose of passkeys (resistance to phishing)?

lenovo bios comic sans

**Touchscreens Are Out, and Tactile Controls Are Back** Rachel Plotnick's "re-buttonization" expertise is in demand https://spectrum.ieee.org/touchscreens

Federal Trade Commission Announces Final Rule Banning Fake Reviews and Testimonials https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/federal-trade-commission-announces-final-rule-banning-fake-reviews-testimonials

BIOS setup and boot menu keys should be standardized. even if a vendor supports other shortcut keys for reasons, all PCs should support the standard ones. (i know it’s better if BIOS had gone away, but until then)

turkish language has a gossip tense. if you haven't witnessed an event yourself, you use gossip tense to emphasize that what you say may not be accurate, that it's hearsay. there's a cultural element too: if you use any other tense, people would judge you for misleading them.

*record scratch* *freeze frame* hi! this is me. you might be wondering how i ended up in this situation. well it all started when i tried to mount an ext4 SD card on WSL... (also, it's quite fascinating that this UI hasn't changed in the last 30 years!)

achievement unlocked: after days of googling and experimentation, i can now setup full disk encryption + auto TPM unlock on a systemd-based linux. something windows could do without even asking. 🤷‍♂️

so, there is a bluesky-mastodon bridge! @bsky.brid.gy