Mastodawn

David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!)

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange

2.6K Followers

83 Following

6.6K Posts

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.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)12m ago

trashHeap

13h ago

Any #FreeBSD folks, gaming via #Bhyve w/ GPU pass through ? Does that work well ?

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)1h ago

Milcom Miasma 1d ago

Somebody on the internet is very good at subtle humor.

#StarTrekTNG
#Humor

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)1h ago

dch

2h ago

#FreeBSD I just upgraded my systems using #pkgbase and I can tell you it’s fscking awesome. I have been running CURRENT for years, building from source, and this is a game changer.

pkgbase is actually already available in 14.3 but … erm … we haven’t quite got the documentation sorted yet. Working on it!

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)16h ago

Geoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿17h ago

I can't believe we're still having to say this in 2025, but would people *please* scroll back to the top of a website when they're finished reading, so it's ready for the next person. We've even got buttons at the bottom to do it all in one go, it's not 1994 any more.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)17h ago

I always hated being told to show my working as a child, but it took me until recently to understand why it annoyed me so much.

Some thing in a sequence of reasoning steps are obvious. A small number of them are obvious to everyone. Some are obvious to me. A (probably overlapping) set are obvious to you but, typically, they are not the same set.

Over the last few years, I've had a lot of conversations with really smart people where they got stuck on something I consider to be so obvious it doesn't need explaining, and then they skip over the next three reasoning steps that I thought needed very careful explanation because they consider those to be obvious.

A huge part of effective communication (especially in teams with diverse expertise) revolves around understanding which steps in your working you need to show. Showing all of them will just bore your reader. Showing the ones that you think need to be shown will work only if your reader has the same background as you.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)18h ago

Thomas 1d ago

If you're wondering why you are separating the lids from yoghurt cups to recycle them properly, while in a parallel universe nearly 100 private jets arrive for the Bezos wedding, here's why:

Because you are better person than each and every one of these massive cunts.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)19h ago

Hannes Hauswedell 20h ago

Go home, Clang, you are drunk!

#LLVM #Clang #cplusplus

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)19h ago

Hats off to IBM for their sterling efforts to convince people that the solution to European digital sovereignty is to buy from IBM instead of Microsoft.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)21h ago

Exciting, the FreeBSD platform extensions to the OCI spec PR was approved! Looking forward to seeing FreeBSD an officially supported platform for OCI containers!

Add FreeBSD as a platform by dfr · Pull Request #1286 · opencontainers/runtime-spec

This uses FreeBSD jails to implement container isolation.

GitHub

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)21h ago

Neil Brown 23h ago

# Statement on Online Safety fees and penalties

I have not get read Ofcom's latest #OnlineSafetyAct document in full, but, for people running small online services, there's some good news:

> Subject to the Secretary of State’s approval, for fees-related duties, we have decided to exempt providers of regulated services whose UK referable revenue is less than £10 million.

No notification nor payment.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/consultations/category-1-10-weeks/consultation-online-safety---fees-and-penalties/main-documents/statement-on-online-safety-fees-and-penalties.pdf?v=399290