I am Director of System Architecture at SCI Semiconductor and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. I remain actively involved in the #CHERI project, where I led the early language / compiler strand of the research, and am the maintainer of the #CHERIoT Platform.
I was on the FreeBSD Core Team for two terms, have been an LLVM developer since 2008, am the author of the GNUstep Objective-C runtime (libobjc2 and associated clang support), and am responsible for libcxxrt and the BSD-licensed device tree compiler.
Opinions expressed by me are not necessarily opinions. In all probability they are random ramblings and should be ignored. Failure to ignore may result in severe boredom and / or confusion. Shake well before opening. Keep refrigerated.
Warning: May contain greater than the recommended daily allowance of sarcasm.
No license, implied or explicit, is granted to use any of my posts for training AI models.
So the UK Met Office is inviting people to suggest up to 5 names for storms. And apparently lots of people have been suggesting "Storm Bigoil", along with BP, Equinor, Exxon & Shell... This is obviously appalling & definitely not to be emulated via this link:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/forms/name-our-storms-call-for-names
@jmc It's kind of impressive in its glorious insanity.
I just re-read Don's "X Windows" chapter of the Unix Haters Handbook for the first time since probably nineteen diggity-aught -- http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/disaster.html
....and like 80% of it still tracks if you s/X/Wayland/
The Iran-Contra jokes in there kinda hit different today, and yet also don't, at all.
Time is a flat circle.
The wealth of the world’s 3,000 billionaires has surged by $6.5tn (£4.8tn) in real terms over the past decade, according to Oxfam, equivalent to 14.6% of global output.
In total the richest 1% of the global population has gained at least $33.9tn in real terms, which the charity said was “enough to end annual global poverty 22 times over”.
https://www.dumptheguardian.com/news/2025/jun/26/billionaires-wealth-oxfam-report
I bet my fiancée that this picture of our cats could get 10 billion boosts on Mastodon.
She said she doesn't believe me. She said there's only 13 million accounts on Mastodon. She said there aren't even 10 billion people on Earth. She said it concerns her that I struggle so hard to comprehend large numbers.
Let's prove her wrong everyone. Boost away and show her just how awesome the Mastodon community is.
Holy #surveillance hell, Batman.
Let me get this straight:
First, they feed your video, which is already stored in their cloud, into an #AI transformer to write descriptions.
Then they feed your descriptions into a pattern learning system (ML, maybe?) to figure out your patterns and habits.
All of this is stored in the cloud. So they not only have your video, but a narrative about your habits, ready to be exfiltrated, monetized, and shared with law enforcement.
#ai #enshittification #RingCamera
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/25/amazons_ring_ai_video_description/
With the switch fixed, everything worked. At least until next time...
I worked on this with @CuriousMarc, @tubetime, Wren, Shmuel, and others.
I'll leave you with this documentation of the relevant circuitry with inscrutable IBM symbols.
end/N
@kenshirriff @CuriousMarc @tubetime
A classic case of turn it on, and then turn it on again.
@kenshirriff That wasn't a START button, that was a START MISBEHAVING button. In those days, dedicated hardware was needed to make the computer misbehave as software developers were too highly trained to do it purely in software.
These days we have that in software, especially if it's shipped from Redmond, Washington with the help of a large language model. ;-)
@TimWardCam@c.im It turns out that the debouncing is more complicated than that. The switch is double-pole double-throw, with one contact turning it on and the other turning it off. So you're guaranteed not to bounce. Except if one contact is shorted.
@kenshirriff If you by toggle switches mean switches with two physical positions, then that was the switches on most DECs.
But this was push buttons with lamps, so you could actually load a word onto the buttons, only flip the individual bits you wanted changed, and then store it back to either the same or another location.
My PiDP-10 replica, powered by a Raspberry Pi 5. All the switches work. It comes with ITS, TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 operating systems running on top of Linux. Very cool.
Gould SEL, late 70s, had similar.
Classic case of "You're holding it wrong"
As a kid I rolled around on the floor and napped by these. I definately wanted a stack of hole punch cards but was thwarted at all turns.
I was not ready to be smacked with nostalgia in this manner.
@kenshirriff “it wouldn't halt.”
Hustle culture is everywhere!
Natasha Jay
jwz
Paco Hope #resist
DocAtCDI
Ben
Low Quality Facts
Dave Rahardja
Tyke the Dog
CryptGoat
BastilleBSD 
Ken Shirriff
Mathzy
john spurling
Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE
Kermode
penguin42
Confusion as a Service
printf of persia 🇺🇦🇨🇿✌️🌻
Magnus Ahltorp
Ainsley Lowbeer
Howard Chu @ Symas
bytebro
Jeff n1kdo
SpaceLifeForm
Hervé Nicol
�
Magnus
Ken McLeod
Ratanasec