A book club. Where we sit in a circle and read out loud, chapter by chapter, the C Programming Language, 2nd Edition. And at the end of each session we stand up and call out names of Open Source and Free Software written in C without which our modern society wouldn't run. Dress code: 1970s.
After the reading session we gather for food and drinks in a room full of whiteboards (no computers!) where we discuss what we heard. With real code printed out from the projects we named.
1/6
You can join at any time. You can go at any time. You can stay just for the reading (which will be without interruptions, no discussions, no questions). Guest speakers that wrote the code on the whiteboards and printouts. Birds of a feather, lightning talk style. No fundamental discussions. Just celebrating the language and the code in an open and inviting way. It could actually work :)
2/6
The first rule is: You have to bring your own copy of the book. That's the entrance badge. No book, no problem, though. You can still join. But when you return for more than one time, you should get a copy. We will help with that. (Just kidding, but I really do love the book)
The second rule is: No computers. Paper and whiteboard only. People that interact. That's the goal.
3/6
The meetings are always on the 3rd of the month. (C is the third letter in the alphabet). And having it on the third and not something like every 2nd Wednesday means that it will be on different days of the week, giving more people that chance to join. Some people just never can go on a Wednesday.
4/6
And if we get this concept up and running at various places all over the world, you can join a C Reading when you travel and meet new people :) Wherever you are on the third, there might be a C Reading you can join!
5/6
No sponsoring. No money involved. The readings can and should be in living rooms. Guests can bring food. And drinks. Everyone is welcome. We could even split it up in C Major for the Elder of The C and C Minor for the younger folks. You get the idea. Let's just do it. I will open my living room on the 3rd of October and hope others will too :). So. #Munich. 3rd of October. I can host around 10-15 people max.
6/6
@jwildeboer After which you retire to a bar and argue about how to interpret the standards and whose code is compliant.
It would be like a religious meeting - read from the old, apocrypha, or new testament, followed by a long missing the point and futile argument about semantics.
The Ratfor book was cool.
@jwildeboer Yeahbut where do you get the fanfold paper for the printouts these days?
(Boggle. I just did a search - you *can* indeed still buy the stuff.)
That book is probably one of the most influential programming books I have ever studied. It is a great example of how to write a programming language book. My current copy of it is an eBook. I live in a camper and space is limited. I do have a ton of dead tree books though and I will no doubt eventually get another paperback copy of 'The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan & Dennis M. Ritchie'. Though that is not a priority at the moment.
I would not consider discussing any programming books without development systems at the ready. Replace the whiteboards with a room full of development computers and I am in. You do not learn programming by theorizing on whiteboards. You learn programming by programming. Here are a few more books in my library we can add to the list for discussion. I have plenty more when those are completed!
@jwildeboer If you're looking for cultural significance, I have to ask - why not the first edition?
#weeklyreview 38/2025
AI wrestling
Got a task that sounded like it could be solved with the help of an LLM : provide a summary of the changes between two versions of a given Confluence page.
First investigation was delegated to Perplexity to find me the most suitable Model Context Protocol Server (MCP) for this purpose. They are readymade to connect to Atlassian Confluence and Jira to access the content. Quickly fiddled with the network to make the MCP server available to my local LLM tool. I tried LM Studio this time as it has direct MCP support over OpenWeb UI.
Asked the gpt-oss model (free version of an earlier ChatGPT model from OpenAI) to provide said summary and it happily spit out something that looked like the report I was looking for. Probed it a little bit for other version and it also provided output.
But of course the summarized report was incorrect. Asked why, the model responded that it doesnāt have access to previous versions of the confluence page and thus made up a report that would look like the real thing. So all previous summaries were actually made up. I turned back to Perplexity to have it verify that the MCP it recommended can actually fetch previous versions of a page. It confirmed that this is possible.
I tried a few other prompts, but non of them would find me previous versions. Eventually I looked into the source code of the MCP Server and figured that this feature wasnāt implemented yet. While the API supports that in general, the MCP server hasnāt implemented it yet.
So I fired up Claude Code and had it adding that feature. New round of tests. Now the model could fetch previous versions of a page if explicitly instructed. So far so good. Doing the main test again. Made up results again ā¦
Asked why it would make up content instead of using the provided tool, the model responded that it considered it too slow to do multiple API calls and favoured made up content instead.
This is absolutely hilarious and a huge waste of time. Itās like discussing with an overconfident junior that makes up stuff to look good but is too lazy to do the actual work. Testing the waters how far he can push it.
ScreenshotTrying out LM Studio
This week I was trying out LM Studio to work with LLM models locally. Thats a GUI application for macOS that can download and handle popular open source models. It has native MCP support unlike OpenWeb UI.
So far it looks good to me. Easy to manage. Subjectively the models responded slower than with Ollama. But I havenāt done any actual measures. I might be mistaken here.
TIL pbpaste
Discovered some cool command line tools that I didnāt know about so far. The pbpaste and pbcopy tools on macOS will spit out the content of the Clipboard to STDOUT or ready STDIN into the Clipboard. So you can copy and paste in/from the Terminal. Pretty. neat.
Apple Container Updates
I was playing with Apple Container. Just recently figured that I have to manually uninstall and then reinstall from their GitRepo. There is not yet an automatic update.
iOS 26 Update
Speaking of updates ā¦ the Update to iOS 26 (yes, new versioning scheme representing the year it should be most prevalent in) came out this week and I updated my devices that were compatible (iPhone, iPad) to iOS 26. As expected ā¦ the new liquid glass UI leaves mixed feelings. It looks playful and fancy for sure. But I donāt see a value in that beyond the initial visual effect. A bunch of UI elements seem less usable now. The infamous illegible glass distortion on busy backgrounds, the overlapping menu items, the missing scroll indicators for overlay menus ā¦. hard to imagine that Steve Jobs would have approved this.
ScreenshotC book club
Inspired by @[email protected] post about the C book club Iāve ordered my copy of the ANSI C book. Ordered a pre-owned copy and it arrived this week. Might eventually join one the club gatherings of there are any nearby.
ā¬social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/115175692238414645
village stuff
some picture from the weekend. Gathering of our little village society where people show with the old tractors. And right behind the venue some delicious porcini.
#AI #container #enEN #iOS #mushrooms #programming #Uckermark #weekly #weeklyreview
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