"THE FEDIVERSE IS FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. IT DOES NOT SUPPORT YOUR DESIRED ENGAGEMENT MODALITIES AND IS UNABLE TO PROVIDE ANY REASONABLE MONETIZATION OPTIONS POSSIBLY CONTRARY TO YOUR EXPECTATIONS. DON'T RELY ON THE FEDIVERSE AS YOUR SOLE SOURCE FOR FAKE FAME, MINDLESS FOLLOWERS, OR INFLATED INCOME. POST TO THE FEDIVERSE AT YOUR OWN RISK FOR HORRIBLE LIFE-LONG NEVER-ENDING WHEATON-SHATNER-PIONEERED EMBARRASSMENT ETERNAL. OH AND ... SUCK A BAG OF DICKS."

#fediverse #TermsOfUse

I don't care one bit if "official" accounts exist in the Fediverse. I don't care if this or that newspaper, this or that city, this or that state, this or that ministry/department of some state, this or that professional organization, this or that famous person, this or that ... whatever are here. Indeed I often block those things anyway, even entire "official" instances. I like accounts of normal people best. To me, that's what the Fediverse is for. YMMV.

(Proudly self-plagiarized from a 2025 post from my previous account.)

During a discussion of how only power matters between states, not laws (whether international or not, whether long-established or not), I was reminded of Alan Watts' saying "There really is no other problem for human beings than ... [death]" [1] and how that encompasses ALL of the various struggles humanity has been through whether it's against slavery or for the eight hour day or whatever you look at. The threat is always, ultimately, "comply or we will kill you" whether from a state, a corporation, an individual, doesn't matter. And so it is between states themselves as well to a degree. Sadly.

[1] See for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioFG999aOCs&t=125s but if you have the time, just watch the whole thing. 🤷

(Proudly self-plagiarized from a January 2026 post from my previous account.)

#AlanWatts #Philosophy #AlanMayBeWrongForYou

In today's episode of "How to C" we learn (or re-learn) that "unsigned" should be the exception, not the rule.

Yes you may think a millisecond timestamp (from boot) should be uint64_t but that's not right. It should be int64_t so you don't need special stunts just to subtract timestamps sanely.

Then of course there's size_t: what a mess! For functions you can use wrappers to range-check and cast appropriately, but for sizeof ... well, luckily that usually only appears in fairly idiomatic contexts. What I mean is that sizeof does not usually produce a value that only fits in uint64_t. Indeed, it will almost always fit into something much smaller. How often do you deal with objects (in the C sense) that are >2GB in size? Never seems to happen to me, that's for sure; but maybe I write wimpy C code? 🤷 So for sizeof you could use a macro to range-check and cast appropriately, maybe to ptrdiff_t? (Or just cast to int anyway; come on, you know you want to; what could go wrong? 😉)

Which gets us to when "unsigned" is actually the right way to go. Well, it is useful if you're doing arithmetic that should "wrap around" as it were, for example in hash functions. It is useful if you're doing bit manipulation in general: shifting stuff and masking things off. Or for interfacing with hardware that's actually using "unsigned" representations. I used a uint16_t the other day to grab a weird Linear11 value from a power supply over I2C.

So "unsigned" does happen. But a lot less often than you'd think.

(Proudly self-plagiarized off of some 2024 posts from my previous account.)

You're begging some "random text extrusion god" you think you believe in to please PLEASE do what you want it to do? You're begging it REPEATEDLY so MAYBE it will have mercy and actually follow your instructions? Are you really THAT stupid? So 10 prayers are not enough but 144 might be and in any case the more prayers the better? Because WHO KNOWS what "god" REALLY wants before fulfilling your wishes?

Scientists and engineers had left all that stupidity behind and now you're bringing it back and you're calling it progress. IF YOU WERE WRITING THE CODE YOURSELF YOU COULD JUST WRITE IT THIS WAY OR THAT AND BE SURE! This is progress in the same way that US politics rushing back into the dark ages is. What's worse? An idiot prompt fondler or a right-wing nutbag politician? At least the politician is only TELLING OTHERS to pray, knowing full-well that it's useless. But you actually pray. To a slot machine.

Amen.