So I made a Vimeo account and uploaded a video (a lightly edited version of the first one-take tutorial video on downloading and using a toybox static binary), tried to make a video post on patreon, and... it says I can't do this with a "Vimeo basic" account, I need one of the pay accounts.

I logged into archive.org with my google account (well, one of them) and uploaded the video there, and then tried to post THAT to patreon as a video post and instead of embedding the video the summary box is a notice about archive.org having an outage for scheduled maintenance, and then when you click through it goes to the download page where there are inexplicably five files (I only uploaded one). Although archive.org has a nice video player (that goes to 3x when youtube's maxes out at 2x), you have to click "parent directory" to get to it for some reason.

I'm not sure if this is actual incompetence on patreon's part, or strategic incompetence promoting specific partners in a plausibly deniable fashion?

Meanwhile, the Google guys suggested I make an account on something called "Open Source Collective", so I can go through an approved vendor and thus bypass the lawyers boggling endlessly at the concept of an individual human being existing as standalone entitity rather than part of a corporation. (Doesn't EVERYONE have a corporate shell? Are you truly real without a corporation wrapped around you?)

This collective of course takes a 10% tithe, and I asked if just sponsoring my Patreon was doable (I have the old-style account there that takes less than that), and apparently the tax people doing a bunch of head-scratching about that. (So giving 10% of the money to some organization I've never heard of is doable, but going through the one that many open source developers actually use is not currently an option. This reminds me of IBM's lawyers spending the whole of 1998 frowning at GPLv2.)

Yet another study shows that lead poisoning cost Boomers several IQ points.

Capitalism intentionally creates scarcity, and some of that scarcity is permanent.

Here's a good thread on how deregulation under capitalism screwed up rock music in 1996. (With bonus misogyny.) And here's a good writeup on how Boomer Capitalism isolated everyone and destroyed our social skills.

And here's a 20 year old article explaining how Russia was already a plutocracy, I.E. capitalism is to blame for Putin. "Oligarch" is just a billionaire with political power.

Cultural misogyny is often internalized, although other times it's explicit (and incompetent, and implausibly deniable).

Defund the police.

Fuzzy was up all night barfing again, right after I was sick/tired/anxious again. This is definitely acting like that long-covid sine wave thing, which sucks. (And would imply we got Omicron late last year. Wheee.)

So I'm out at the table trying to edit another video I recorded, and I've hit a snag.

For years I've left the house to work, which might be an unmedicated ADHD thing? I'm more productive OUT somewhere, at a coffee shop or fast food booth or the picnic table on the UT Geology Building's porch. The hotel rooms in Japan were marvelously productive, but the apartment I had there stopped being so after the first week. Same 4 walls does not productivity make, for some reason. Not exactly writer's block, just really hard to get into the zone and WAY easy to get distracted.

But recording video at the table has the problem that it isn't QUIET. Right now there's cicadas, and even when there isn't there's some sort of climate control hum from across the street. (Most likely a multi-story building installation of heat pumps.) I'm assured that the hum is tolerable in the recordings (the true/false videos were recorded here), but my problem right now is I recorded several minutes of footage on the "tty" command (usage and implementation) back at home where it actually IS quiet-ish, and took it here to edit, but now I want to supplement the usage part because during editing I realized I never really explained what a TTY _is_. That's easy enough, I've worked out a brief script pointing at man 4 tty and basically saying it's a pipe with extra side channel info such as screen width and height, cursor position, and also process membership for signal delivery so the shell can batch signal ever process associated with that TTY so ctrl-C kills everything in a pipeline and ctrl-Z suspends the whole pipeline (and then bg or fg can resume it all). (On the implementation side I should probably mention you can go look at the man pages for tcgetpgrp()( and tcgetsid() if you want to know how that's implemented but it's out of scope for now.)

The problem is, if I splice together footage taken at the table with footage NOT taken at the table, the background air conditioner hum cutting in and out probably gets a lot more noticeable. (The cicadas certainly would.) So I need to edit as much as I can here and then go somewhere quieter to record supplementary footage.

Re-recording turns out to be harder than I thought, because on later takes of the same thing I wind up tongue tied and... tired? Dunno. It's strangely exhausting to explain things into a microphone, I don't quite know why.

This is WAY harder than just standing in front of people and talking to them. When I can actually SEE my audience I don't care so much if I repeat myself a little or explain stuff out of order and then backfill. Live talks are never GOING to be perfect, so they don't have to be. I can TELL if the audience is confused or bored or following it. Even giving talks over zoom, there's still people listening live. This is like trying to do stand up comedy without anybody laughing. Maybe it's because I'm new at it and have been speaking to groups of people FOREVER. (I taught community college courses back during the dot-com boom in front of rooms full of people at a time. That part's old hat. One on one I can do, one to many I can do, one to NONE I lose traction somehow...)

A right wing loon added an amendment to ban postal banking to the current post office repair bill, which would include the $21 billion of money orders the post office sold last year. It's another part of the "war on cash", the US Dollar has been privatized and may now only be spent through the monopsony of Visa, Mastercard, and Chexsystems who will ban you for life if you do anything they consider "immoral" such as visit a nudist resort. (Of course spray-painting moral judgements over everything is how they prevented AIDS research in the 1980s.)

Hertz is actively hurting its customers for no obvious reason by reporting its properly rented cars stolen and having the renter arrested. They interviewed one man who wound up homeless, another who spent 6 months in jail. It apparently does this over 3000 times per year and knowingly refuses to provide accurate information to the police because if it did the police wouldn't accept its theft reports. (Leto's Law has been covering this story for a while.) The moral of the story: corporate personhood allows people to do this sort of thing and escape punishment because the PEOPLE who did it aren't liable, the ablative corporate shell is.

The GOP remains funded by russia even today. Of course capitalism in general has that problem, but right now right wing loons are actively blocking US military operations near Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Defund, Guillotine, as usual.

I need to figure out where to host the videos I'm making, but youtube's copyright claims are just so amazingly stupid that I really don't want to get it on me, but there isn't an obvious second choice yet? They're like AOL, Myspace, or Livejournal: totally unassailably dominant. An american institution like Sears. (Although in this case it's mostly that Patreon has good youtube integration, and hasn't bothered to implement that for most other places, including raw URLs.)

So there's a bug report about toybox md5sum treating directories as empty files, and this is a more general problem that should be fixed in lib/ somewhere. If I put an fstat() into notstdio()... it doesn't have a good way to report back that it failed. Hmmm. Maybe just in loopfiles()? Grrr. Trying to retrofit a design constraint.

Happy International Sex Worker's Rights day. (That thread is from a bookstore, highlighting a lot of books about the racism and sexism behind the attacks on the industry.) Speaking of, here's an old video showing that 80% of american men admitted to watching porn and pornhub had literally BILLIONS of visits per day, and yet the Boomer prudes think that prohibition's going to somehow improve matters here.

The USA defeated Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's Red China by converting them from communism to plutocracy, which turned out to be an even bigger problem in the long run. Late Stage Capitalism is now the toxic problem threatening to destroy the world, with global warming and nazis and countries invading each other (China's plutocrats eyeing Taiwan).

The plutocrats' playbook is to take over public services and then destroy them, both to convince people that government is unworkable (with tories in charge) and to make people desperate enough to beg for crumbs from oligarchs. (Bill Gates does not hire Warren Buffett to wash his car, they need piles of starving peasants to boss around or being a zillionaire means nothing. If they can embezzle the funds along the way, that's a bonus. As is writing laws to prevent themselves from being prosecuted, such as needing to prove intent. Sure you can show what I _did_ but without reading my mind you can never know what I MEANT by it...)

The most recent scummy replublican thing is to outlaw postal banking, including the $21 billion annual business selling money orders the post office currently does. (It's part of the War on Cash, all financial transactions must go through one of three private companies that can track and veto each purchase. This is why we need to guillotine the billionaires, as soon as the last boomer dies.)

Here in the USA we have the return of slumlords. Still trying to buy up every residence in the country and corner the market on housing.

Russia bombing a nuclear reactor is alarming but not as bad as it could be, because nobody outside of Russia is stupid enough to still run RBMK reactors. (Meanwhile, Russia still has ten of them on its territory, each of which could still go full Chernobyl. Luckily, Russia's post-soviet turn to capitalism gave it massive embezzlement and fraud which has hollowed out its army.)

This laptop has bluetooth built in (my previous one didn't but the Dell Latitude E6230 does, I was reminded when rewriting lsusb recently). It's on an internal USB bus and has EXACTLY the same problem that the external USB bluetooth dongles did: the GPL Linux bluetooth stack is incompetent. (Android's got a working one, they threw out the GPL version and wrote an Apache licensed version from scratch. But nobody's ported that back to Debian.) The xfce GUI dropdown menu for bluetooth sees my headphones just fine (iJoy Logo), but when I click "select" it can't identify them (the options are "serial port", "audio sync", or "handsfree"), and when I select any of those it thinks for a few seconds and then goes "Device added successfully, but failed to connect". This has been the case with the Linux Bluetooth stack for at least 7 years now, completely unchanged. Linux on the desktop is not just dead but embalmed.

I need to do a video on the toybox build infrastructure, but first I want to split header generation out of scripts/make.sh just so it's easier to explain.

There's already a NOBUILD=1 that tells it to return early (just regenerate the headers, don't compile code), but that still leaves this script being hundreds of lines long and doing all SORTS of stuff before actually compiling *.c into *.o. And the basic technique for "make -j" in shell script seems like it would be of use to other projects. (You really don't NEED ninja and so on, 90% of the problem here is that "gcc *.c -o blah" won't use multiple processors because compilers are still stuck in the 20th century which has been over for two full decades now.)

The problem with splitting up scripts/make.sh is that it cheats: the file generated/build.sh is both a standalone script you can run to rebuild the toybox binary from this source and generated/*.h with a simple "gcc *.c -o blah" invocation (sadly currently broken again because I don't regression test it enough), but it's ALSO used by the plumbing to see if we need to re-run the library probes. (The compiler can eliminate used libraries via --as-needed, but if you tell it to link against a library it can't FIND that's a hard error, so we need to probe for what libraries are available and only include those.) And the "figuring out what to build" logic that theoretically only goes in the build-not-headers part gets used to create generated/build.sh. Hmmm, I suppose I can have it generate the start of the script as a separate file and then "cat file; make_more >> file". Bit of an intrusive change...

There was apparently exactly one airplane that could move the largest pumps and cranes and such around the world, and Russia destroyed it attacking the airport in Ukraine. I should apparently add the book "Kleptopia" to the to-read pile because it annoys the right people. New research shows that the glass ceiling is held in place by insecure, poorly performing men.

The GOP is reviving its family separation policy, this time taking native american children away from their families so they can be raised by white people (or sent to catholic boarding schools to be quietly murdered).

Walking around hancock center in a circle watching the blender video tutorial series on my phone. Everybody keeps taking "I have one video I want to cut chunks out of and stitch together" as too trivial a case to ACTUALLY SHOW AN EXAMPLE OF. (I'm not trying to overlay picture in picture. I'm not trying to do transitions. I just want to edit my one long take down to something that sounds more intentional.)

Speaking of the USA being uniquely prudish... (Because we were colonized by the Quakers and Puritans, people who fled pre-Victorian England for being too licentious. The mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, between this portrait of english court fashion in 1616, and this in 1625. The thanksgiving images of buckled hats don't just look stupid by MODERN standards, they were silly cult stuff at the time, without even taking into account how much colder England's climate was back before the industrial revolution and coal burning steam locomotives and such kicked off global warming.)

Found a situation where bash is leaking internal state, I think? Running this in my home directory (and WITHOUT the usual prompt trimming I do for these shell examples):

landley@driftwood:~$ mkdir one
landley@driftwood:~$ cd one
landley@driftwood:~/one$ rmdir ../one
landley@driftwood:~/one$ cd .
cd: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory
landley@driftwood:~/one/.$ declare -p | grep one
declare -x OLDPWD="/home/landley/one"
declare -x PWD="/home/landley/one/."
landley@driftwood:~/one/.$ unset PWD OLDPWD
landley@driftwood:.$ cd .
cd: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory
landley@driftwood:~/one/./.$

How did it get "one" back at the end there? The directory no longer exists and I zapped the environment variables that contained that string.

I don't think I want to emulate this one in toysh?

Apparrently Apple's "security" is entirely performative. Youtube has a new feature to make sure the next video of police misconduct posted on a brand new youtube account can't go viral on their platform. The united states remains uniquely prudish and easily scammable via sex panics.

Fascists are murdering protestors on US soil again. It's only ever the GOP doing this, with the police equally blaming the victims. (The protests were against the police, the police say the protesters deserved to be shot, pointing out the large number of witnesses contradicting their story makes the situation "very complicated". This is AFTER portland police were documented attacking protestors 6000 times and got censured by the Department of Justice.)

Another day, another leak of secret billionaire bank account info. Who owns $80 billion of swiss bank accounts and what did they spend it on.

Of course the scandal isn't that "they still bank here": adding individuals to "the unbanked" is bad whoever they are. The scandal is the tax evasion and that billionaires anywhere remain unguillotined. "Punching up" is good, "punching down" is bad, even though both actions are punching. Basic income (plus a National Health Service and rent control) fixes most of this: let people afford to do what they want to do. And stop criminalizing sex work: we don't criminalize chocolate harvesting despite modern corporations enslaving children to do that. The triangle shirtwaist fire was about textile workers locked in and unable to leave when a fire broke out. Sex is NOT THE PROBLEM here.

The above article about the most recent billionaire banking leak also details the path by which Visa/Mastercard/Chexsystems achieved a proprietary stranglehold on the US dollar so it can unbank "immoral" customers like marijuana dispensaries and camgirls and escalate into the "war on cash" to eliminate all untracked transactions. I'm hoping that The Great Retirement (followed by The Great Die-off) will take the wind out of their sails, but really the problem of cornering the market and creating oligarchs is inherent in capitalism, going back to the Guilded Age with railroad robber barons in the 1800s, who were only displaced by the spanish flu pandemic, World War I, the 1929 stock market crash leading to a decade long Great Depression, World War II, and finally Sputnik and the "atomic bomb delivered by ICBM that no amount of radar and fighter jets can defend against so we will REORDER SOCIETY because of it". The period from New Deal through Cold War beat back the oligarchs for most of a century, but that century is up. AOC's Green New Deal was not NEARLY aggressive enough, capitalism needs to END, along with corporate personhood and civil forfeiture and the existence of billionaires. (Both as a category and as individuals. Guillotines are designed to divid. Proper tool for the proper job. Until then, Billionaires continue to literally kill people.)

Among the many MANY failures of IPV6 is the way it defeats half the purpose of ssh: every time I connect to a server via an ipv6 address it's a DIFFERENT address, and it goes "Warning: permanently added host key for address BLAH to known hosts" which provides ZERO protection from man in the middle attacks. (I know the "Earn It" act is poised to outlaw encryption in the USA entirely in the name of locking up all the Boomers who took naked baby pictures of their kids and are thus guilty of child porn by insane modern standards, while also denying that one House episode was actually describing a real thing because THESE days nobody does that under the age of 30. But it's still annoying for the infrastructure to get this stupidly wrong in the meantime.)

Grinding away merging lspci and lsusb, so they can share the .ids file loading/parsing/searching infrastructure, and while we're at it the parser for the uevent keyword=value stuff is pretty much the same too. (The lspci DISPLAY logic is nuts, but that's because it's got a half-dozen different output formats. -m, -n, -nm, -nn, -nnm, plus -e and -k modifiers for all that. And -nn puts the data in a DIFFERENT ORDER than all the others, the vendor:device data gets collated. Everything else is string [numeric] with fields optionally dropping out, but that one emits string string [numeric:numeric] unlike anything else. Hysterical raisins.)

This tweet reminds me I miss the non-STEM parts of college. I got an english minor, and had a bunch of courses in sociology and psychology and cultural anthropology and comparative religion and so on, and those were the actually useful ones. (Open source is an example of a potlatch culture!) The computer science I taught myself starting in 5th grade, and only wound up taking classes in it to pull my GPA up after the disastrous foreign language requirements. (The only F I ever got in high school was the second year of German: I remembered nothing from the first year. The only D I got in college was French: my french teacher taught french entirely in french. I tried to explain that if I knew french I wouldn't need to be there, but it didn't work because he wanted me to explain it to him in french. I WORKED for that D. Don't remember a darn thing from it, I eventually traversed the foreign language requirement with two back-to-back summer courses in spanish where the compressed schedule plus grading on a curve meant 50% was a C+.)

Oligarchs try to divert all funding to STEM and away from humanities because STEM isn't a political threat to oligarchy, and humanities are. Silicon valley techbros are politically fungible.

We still need to defund the police. Each misdemeanor arrest costs NYC $1750, so buying and giving away diapers and food would be signifcantly cheaper than policing petty thefts of essentials. And here's police teaming up with fossil fuel interests to stage an attack on themselves as an excuse to evade an eviction order by the native american tribes who legally own the land. They don't have to fool anyone, they just need a paper-thin excuse to "yeah but" silence protests at a casual glance: "Isn't that horrible?" answered with "Oh no, she was asking for it..."

Law enforcement is always protecting the powerful against the powerless. and the silver-spoon crowd are unused to being on the wrong side of that, so every time they meet a bigger fish or swim out of their little pond they cry like babies over the injustice of this thing that has never happened to anyone else before.

The war on cash continues. All purchases must be trackable back to an individual in realtime, and the recipient of the money potentially culled from the financial system. Switching everything digital is a bad idea. Once upon a time you could do the NYT crossword without having your data harvested, but of course Wordle is full of trackers under NYT ownership.

If the Earn-It Act punches a big hole in Section 230, Google's ad business could wind up with an awful lot of legal liability, and they'll still somehow manage to avoid going after the real problems (which existing laws apply to just fine). Meanwhile creeping prudishness continues to have knock-on effects, and the GOP is openly attacking contraception already. They consider taking away abortion a given at this point because of the supreme court packing, they're on to the next misogny. And as always, Boomer Biden fixes nothing.

Scammy right wing loons never stop fighting to chip off the most vulnerable 10% of everyone else.

Hmmm, got a bug report that sha1sum and friends treat directories as empty files, when they should treat them as -EISDIR and skip them with error_msg().

This is actually a library code problem: an awful lot of stuff should refuse to accept a directory in place of a file. There doesn't seem to be an faccess() variant that works on a file, just fstat(), so the check is doable but a bit more heavyweight than I like. (Eh, the overhead of copying a bunch of dentry data into a struct is probably swamped by the system call entry/exit code.) The two obvious places to put this are in loopfiles_rw() or in notstdio(), and although the second is the more thorough fix, adding a stat() to basicaly every open() call makes me wince, and auditing all the calls for correctness (69 xopen and 23 xcreate under toys/ according to a quick grep, plus more in lib/ and possibly main.c) seems uncomfortable. And those are just the DIRECT calls, not through something else.

Speaking of which, there are 48 loopfiles calls under toys/*/*.c (each of which goes through xopen), and just auditing those if that's where I put this fix is... annoying. But that's probably the first place to fix it.

I checked in bash and "echo hello < dirname" is not an error. (No, I'm not poking the maintainer. "The implementation is the specification" is hard enough to cope with, and then he keeps FIXING things I point out to him when I just want to understand why it's doing that.)

Boomers solve nothing. Boomers can never resist letting Russia spend money at them, which is why they're so easily hired to push Russian agitprop. Sedition is just another commercial endorsement deal to them, like hawking shoes or burgers. They keep letting the same clowns cause trouble over and over, without learning anything ever. (Speaking of which, Canadian truck loons are still in the news.) Everything the Boomers did was ultimately self-defeating, and the lead poisoning combined with senility has made them really stupid.

Oligarchy uses racism as a shield and a distraction. (Keri Leigh Merritt wrote a whole book about this in 2017.) Meanwhile actual racists are stupid and spend their time manufactuing victimhood and being profoundly hypocritical.

Quartz' translation of the spotify apologia is weapons grade snark. And here's a a long 4 part thread of actual analysis of the podcasts triggering the backlash. But the rot at spotify goes far beyond Joe Rogan.

Amazon needs to be broken up: turns out Audible's shafting creators too. Abolish ICE. Remove cars. Slumlords are a problem. An excellent analysis of why all blockchains suck. Uber is a scam. Facebook is also a scam. Youtube continues to suck. The great resignation is happening for many reasons. Religious parables are often kind of horrifying if you understand what they made a story about. Defund the police, then defund the police some more. Funds meant for other things keep getting diverted to police.

Don't forget how bad the guy behind the Comstock Act was. historical censorship has always been insanely stupid, but the right wing loves endless creeping censorship, intimidation, voter suppression, and conspiracy.

The earn it act continues to be horrific. First they came for trans people, then they came for sex workers, then they came for gay teens (and teachers), then they came for abortion rights... How any of the "freeze peach" advocates support the end of anonymity and banning encryption in the name of being shriveled up old prudes is beyond me. (Sex workers look out for each other, the reason there's so much trafficing is they're prevented fromm doing so, and the ones who are preventing them from helping each other are the ones victimizing them: the same rich white men who are openly persecuting them are paying for the trafficing. It's the old "homophobe turns out to be gay" issue. No catholic priest gets to weigh in on this issue.)

No it's NOT the stimulus payments: inflation is happening because the cost of shipping things from china went from $3k/container to $30k/container with a month long wait to unload in the port of los angeles, and it goes back down when we finish onshoring/reshoring the manufacturing within NAFTA. Playing with the demand side (via money) only has an impact when supply can't keep up, it's SUPPLY constraints that cause inflation, not demand. The classic example is rare comic books where there's only a few dozen bidders for that issue in the WORLD and if you found a box of 1000 of Batman's first appearance in an attic somewhere the price of all of them combined would plummet to less than what ONE costs now. "Act now supplies running out" is a classic sales line trying to induce demand via the illusion of scarcity. Cornering the market raises the price, it's how Late Stage Capitalism works: when everyone is adequately supplied, the thing being produced is cheap. Only when there isn't enough to go around do prices get bid up. It doesn't matter what the DEMAND is, air is still free and clean water coming out of the tap is cheap enough to shower in the stuff without a timer. Inflation is happening because of disrupted SUPPLY chains, not a change in demand.

The reason I keep coming back to twitter isn't what twitter thinks it is. Unfortunately last year twitter was purchased by a right wing loon, just like the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek were. "Conservatives" are all about censorship. They want everything they say to be mandatory viewing (clockwork orange style when at all possible), but to be the only ones allowed to speak and immune from criticism.

Elon Musk, "incompetent narcissist". He should have it on his business cards. Guillotine the billionaires.

The reason for fiddling with struct string_list yesterday is I wanted to add struct dev_list next to it, because lsusb and lspci are reading basically the same file format for their device ID databases. There's a third layer to pci.ids, but toybox's lspci isn't using it (because it doesn't implement -v, which turns out to be kinda fraught).

But I've sort of changed my mind and decided that merging lspci and lsusb into the same file probably makes more sense? Because I don't see a third caller showing up any time soon, and neither of them is particularly big (each a little over 100 lines).

Meanwhile, I REALLY need to break up ps.c and move the shared code to lib/ps.c, and that's... a can of worms. But triaging commands to do a new round of documention on them (videos) is resulting in various cleanups. As documentation always does. It's easier to fix it than explain it. (Which can be read as BOTH avoidance productivity and filing off corner cases that are too much backstory to digress into during the writeup.)

Reading the C99 specification is no fun. I forget what I was trying to look up but along the way I convinced myself it did NOT require unmentioned structure members to be zero initialized when you did &(struct boing){.potato=37;} (I mean, it WORKS, and you can see the explicit initialization via objdump -d, but I wasn't sure it was RELIABLE because {1,2,3} and {.a=1,.b=2,.c=3} seemed to be treated different by the c99-draft? The confusing part is that section 6.7.8.9 says "Unnamed members of structure objects have indeterminate value even after initialization", but apparently section 6.7.8.21 is the part that says to zero initialize them, and "elements or members" clarifies it applies to both styles of initialization. (According to grep '[)]{ *[.]' main.c lib/*.c toys/*/*.c the only command using member initialization in compound literals is host.c, which I rewrote NOT to do that and then didn't check in because... no, it's fine as is. I think.)

I then tried to look up what "unnamed members" _ARE_ but it seems to be 1) a bitfield thing (might have seen that but I can never trust bitfield endianness and the compilers traditionally generate HORRIBLE code for bitfield access, so I always shift and mask myself) and 2) a way to add padding to a struct? (Never used it, never encountered it. Lots of stuff adds padding to structs but they always call it stuff like char __unused1[2];)

Ah right, I was trying to look up whether the variable length array element at the end of a struct should have [0] or just [] and it's section 6.7.2.1.15 that says it's char blah[]; with nothing in it. (It of course adds some nonsense about access being "undefined" and then immediately subverts it via the examples in 16-18, and I refuse to be baited twice by the same standard in the same session. This one I KNOW, I'm just making sure that removing the 0 from struct string_list in lib/lib.h is the correct thing to do. They're equivalent with or without the 0, but static checkers throw a wobbly and people keep trying to use them...)

Heh, I apparently need a current writeup of my whole "Linux uncontaminated by gnu" plan to make a system you CANNOT call "gnu-slash-linux" because it isn't even built with gcc. I've mentioned this multiple times over the years, I think it was in my 2013 "rise and fall of copyleft" talk at ohio linuxfest for example, and probably on the old aboriginal linux mailing list long before that. Heck, it was probably in my old livejournal back in the busybox days, and a quick google finds people referencing me talking about it back in 2007. And, of course, my original sin that interested me in undoing the damage from the toxic waste spill I'd initially triggered in the first place...

Yay, I figured out how to switch the keyboard backlight in this laptop on and off. (Despite poking the geology building's management at UT a couple months back, they have yet to fix the timer that turns the lights on at midnight, so if I get there at 10pm I'm in the dark for a couple hours, and the keyboard backlight is very convenient.) It's function right-arrow. While fiddling with that, I toggled something with a moon symbol, and something that's three squares fit together. (I was thinking it MIGHT be a keyboard but it's probably supposed to look like the mousepad and the left and right click buttons under it?) I hope selecting whatever it is an even number of times turns it back off so I don't notice some weird new symptom I forget how I triggered days from now. Ah, it turns out there is a webpage explaining that stuff, and most of it doesn't work on Linux anyway. Oh good.

I'm going through lots of little toybox commands that might make good short intro videos I can both get out easily and use to learn video editing. (This is resulting in lots of little cleanups to commands I haven't looked at in a while.) There's a lot of "I need to explain everything before I explain everything else" circular dependency stuff in this, but there's pretty clearly gonna have to be playlists: how to use commands, how commands are implemented, common infrastructure, building bootable Linux systems...

I want to do videos with GROUPS of small commands, because true, false, clear, reset, sync... they're all basically one function call. Another genre is "open a file and call an ioctl on it", maybe with or without a loopfiles(), which covers freeramdisk, fsfreeze, partprobe... (Huh, I have a "detach.c" in my tree that isn't checked in, I should look into that...) It seems a bit silly to have a "how to use unlink" video, and then an "unlink.c implementation walkthrough" when each is under a minute: the implementation is "if (unlink(*toys.optargs)) error_exit("message");" plus the usual command boilerplate and help text.

But at the same time if each command has its usage video and it's implementation video, it's easier to do a table of them. A few commands (ps, sed, sh...) will probably need multiple implementation videos though. I REALLY need to do the breakup work on ps.c to make the 5 commands in it have their own files and move the rest to lib/ps.c before doing an explainer video on that. (The shell and sed are just big, I expect awk and vi to be too. I see tar.c has crept over 1000 lines too, that one's not CONCEPTUALLY hard to explain but somewhat voluminous.)

Everything else (that's completed and not in pending) probably fits reasonably well into a single implementation walkthrough video that isn't exhausting to watch. But even the "how to use" video for sed or sh is gonna be a bit of a marathon viewing if it's all one go...

To avoid burying the lead: people are organizing against the latest monstrosity, and here's Stephen Fry on Graham Norton decades ago explaining the fundamental problem.

So the anti-sex evangelical loons have a new bill to make showing ankle on the internet illegal: the Earn It Act. (Of course the main people stopping sex trafficing are sex workers, but victim-blaming is fundamental to christianity. Eve listened to the snake that God made and let into the garden, so God held a grudge for thousands of years and had to arrange a human sacrifice to give himself permission to (conditionally) forgive their descendants. That is literally the core story of christanity, so if the church admits Eden is a "metaphor" then original sin needing to be "forgiven" by this benevolent god is...?)

Wikipedia blacked out to stop SOPA and PIPA, and white guys spoke out against it, but not FOSTA and SESTA because that was "icky speech". Germany's nazi party started out by treating trans people as non-human, and expanded it to concentration camps for millions of people. Of COURSE the misogynist evangelicals going after camgirls won't stop there, they want to rigidly censor the internet and bring back the Comstock Act.

But the real driver is to force everyone participating in the great resignation back into the crappy jobs they left making plutocrats money. And yes, they're still using other tools like civil forfeiture (except that example was Amazon convincing a friendly judge to steal the money straight from bank accounts), and of course both of the news stories linked from that gofundme are behind paywalls.

The evangelical clowns burning a zillion books are never addressing actual problems. The actual fixes are all undoing damage the GOP intentionally caused in the first place (or at least pushing back against it). There are zero bright lines with prudery, just one big long gradient smoothly shading through every possible grey. The censors will never have enough, and will keep grasping until the Boomers die and we end capitalism.

Speaking of capitalism, Faceboot's cover-up of its role in Cambridge Analytica just blew up in its face. The billionaire whose seed money was inheriting blood emeralds from apartheid south africa might be a giant racist (who could have seen that coming) and he continues to be arrogantly incompetent.

It warmed up a bit, and I went to the table and actually stayed for a while and got work done. (Also, HEB restocked on my lovely checkerboard tea.) Enjoyable evening, on the whole.

It's fascinating, I can never remember the name of the hackermonthly PDF (let alone the URL for the original slightly wrong explanation I posted to the busybox mailing list off the top of my head a dozen years ago) so I googled for "landley usr bin" to find it and...

No, Ken and Dennis did not have floppies, the PDP-7 used a ramdisk loaded from paper tape. (And /usr wasn't "renamed", it was the user directories with a three letter name like bin, etc, lib, and dev because the pdp-7 had 1024 18-bit words with half running the OS and half being used as a ramdisk so yes the extra letter counted and they kept the name when they moved to the pdp-11.)

No, dynamic linking did not solve any problems with static linking, it made things WORSE so that the proposed "mount this, then that" approach wouldn't work reliably. (And yes, the a.out executable format had shared libraries back before ELF.)

Obviously I can't really throw stones when my own first stab at the explanation got the disk sizes wrong. (I remembered the TOTAL size but not how it was partitioned, nor how MUCH faster the tiny system disk was than the external disk packs. In modern terms they filled up their SSD so leaked the system onto the external USB disk holding user files, and then got a second USB disk later to move the user files to so the system could have all the first one.) That's why I went back and corrected it when a magazine asked to republish it, and gave links to primary sources at the end.

I have filled out the "Embark" online paperwork. I already know one thing I got wrong, but that's normal for me filling out paperwork: back in middle school I expected about an 85% on tests where I knew the material cold, just because it was paperwork so I would of course fill some of it out wrong, miss the back of one of the sheets (of the instructions if not the test), and then hand it in to the wrong place. (Programming is all about iteratively fixing the thinkos when the machine points out where you got it wrong, sometimes backing up and frogging entire sections when something's misaligned.)

To relax, I'm trying to get toysh to match bash's behavior for moved and deleted current working directories. I already added a test:

mkdir -p one/two/three
testing 'cd in renamed dir' \
  'cd one/two/three && mv ../../../{one,four} && cd .. && echo ${PWD: -9:9}' \
  '/four/two\n' '' ''
rm -rf one

Which the host passes but toysh doesn't, and the logic is sadly a bit tangled. But then bash is a bit confused too. When launched in a deleted current working directory, bash goes:

$ env -i bash --norc --noprofile --noediting

shell-init: error retrieving current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: No such file or directory

bash-5.0$

Except I ran it under strace and piped the output to less so I could search it (even with --noediting bash and less are trying to read from the same tty and getting alternating letters until you hit control-C which kills the bash instance but not the less instance for some reason; probably gotta make my less implementation do that too eventually) there was only ONE call to getcwd() (with a fixed size 4k buffer instead of an automatic allocation), so I have no idea what it's talking about "parent directories" plural?

I added support for "cd -" while I was there (and already emailed Chet back on January 20 to add it to "help cd" in bash because seriously, it's in posix: 'cd -' is 'cd "$OLDPWD"' the same way 'cd ~' is 'cd "$HOME"').

It was already exporting $PWD and $OLDPWD only on the first cd, because that's what bash does (and yes I should add a test):

~$ cd sub
~/sub$ cd ..
~$ unset OLDPWD
~$ cd sub
$ declare -p OLDPWD
declare -- OLDPWD="/home/landley"
~/sub$ declare -p PWD
declare -x PWD="/home/landley/sub"
~/sub$ unset PWD
~/sub$ cd ..
~$ declare -p PWD
declare -- PWD="/home/landley"
~$ env -i bash --norc --noprofile -c -- 'cd sub && env'
PWD=/home/landley/sub
SHLVL=0
OLDPWD=/home/landley
_=/usr/bin/env

It SETS them both each time you cd, but only _exports_ them the first time, and just does a local assignment the rest of the time. And I do mean "local":

$ x() { local PWD; cd .; }
$ unset PWD
$ x
$ echo $PWD

So I think my code was already getting that right (I need to add more tests) but before it was wasting an entire int for this in the TT globals block and I switched it to using the high bit of TT.options, and collated the export statements under the same test.

When I say I'm not just writing a shell but specifically a BASH replacement, I'm SERIOUS about that. My spec is not posix, or even the bash man page. It's WHAT BASH DOES. Tied to the comfy chair, poked with the soft cushions, and added to the regression test suite. I'm reluctant to communicate with Chet about stuff because he keeps FIXING THINGS I POINT OUT and thus changing the behavior. Which probably breaks somebody's script somewhere...

Still not sleeping well, because anxiety. I did not used to have anxiety. It comes and goes, but having it lurking is INCREDIBLY ANNOYING.

Corporations are not your friend, and regulatory capture is a thing.

Intellectual property law destroys intellectual property. Ten years ago the netflix DVD library had 100,000 titles in it, but the online streaming version they transitioned to keeps losing content and these days has 15,000 and shrinking. All the services are like that: Youtube just showed me a clip from something called "Sakura Trick" which Google says came out in 2014 and was on Crunchyroll, but of course it's not on Crunchyroll anymore. It's about two high schoolers dating; if they were heterosexual it would be "cute" but if they're gay cue the pearl clutching about corrupting the youth. Me, I'm thinking it might be better "I want to learn japanese" background noise to put on without subtitles than Hulu's run of the original Sailor Moon, because watching Usagi murder people and be lauded for it "because protagonist" gets old. Each week she kills somebody who was passing as human just fine at the start of the episode, and I have yet to see any of her opponents actually permanently harm anyone? As I said, watching without subtitles so I couldn't tell you much about the plot. It's hard to find things that aren't so bad they're unwatchable but aren't good enough I turn on the subtitles to follow them after a few minutes.

Of course the Boomer extinction burst of evangelical prudishness is cover for late stage capitalism misoginistically shoving self-employed young women back into retail jobs, and the war on cash (no untracked purchases for-profit corporations can't individually veto and PUNISH you for trying!) has literally escalated to police seizing armored cars. (And no, crypto solves nothing.)

I'm confused by Mark Cuban. He's a billionaire, and he's maybe possibly doing a good thing? Most likely because he wants to run for president (which should DEFINITELY NOT HAPPEN), so it's really for his own personal gain, but... I wouldn't want to STOP him from subsidizing affordable medications, if it is true? It's not Mackenzie Scott's get-out-of-guillotine free pass (checkboxes: did not voluntarily become a billionaire, is convincingly and consistently attempting to STOP being a billionaire, has embraced Uncle Ben's Spider-Mantra in doing so). Mark Cuban isn't absolving himself of the slumlord guilt of having taken a billion dollars from poor people and hoarding it (starting by giving it BACK), he's doing the "little people" a favor by pushing back against a specific societal problem that plutocrats have been consistently exacerbating since 1970 (here's a lovely writeup on that). But that IS one heck of a favor... Maybe it means he goes to the back of the line leading up to the guillotine? Hmmm... (Obviously it's not my call, but I'm trying to figure out what to lobby for. In a just society, hoarding a billion dollars while anybody is homeless would be a capital offense.)

This is an unusual exercise because most billionaires constantly broadcast how bad they are, and even PR-minded twerps like Elon Musk are much clearer: sure Muskrat's cheerleading the advance of cool tech, but none of it's happening because of him. He bought Tesla, he bought Solar City, he bought Maxwell. All the advances in electric cars and solar panels and batteries were already happening and he literally purchased credit for other people's ongoing work. ("Oh but they might not have been sufficiently funded otherwise" that's only because for a hundred years the USA massively funded basic research but we STOPPED when Reagan lowered the anti-billionaire tax shield until plutocrats could hijack the government and iteratively "drown it in a bathtub". The Boomers have been eating the seed corn since they took over.) Musk's assets have been mortgaged to the hilt for decades, all of Tesla's money (like Uber's) comes from friendly financiers willing to hand him tiny slices of the $21 trillion the USA printed after the 2008 mortgage crisis and gave to the BANKS rather than using it to bail out any homeowners or students with loans or the piles of predatory credit card debt... That man is a scam artist. Adam Something and Common Sense Skeptic have multiple video take downs of his endless dumb ideas. Ford's F150 Lightning is still restricted by the dealership model, even though they're inching away from that model they're hamstrung by stupid protectionist laws from years ago, and nothing Musk did to punch holes in that for Tesla fixed the dealership problem for anyone else, because he's not ABOUT fixing anything for anyone else. He's about getting a spotlight shone on him as a savior because he inherited african blood emeralds during Apartheid which gave him seed money to hang out with finance bros during the 1990s dot-com boom.

But even without the threshold being "net positive", it's rare to see a billionaire where guillotining them immediately would have ANY discernable downside. Encountering a second brings us from "Spiders Georg" territory into... black swan event maybe?

Walked out to the table for the first time all week. It's been below freezing each night, and the UT Carrilon plays "I've been working on the railroad" (no really!) twice through very slowly starting at 9pm, but in between there's a few hours were it's quiet but not TOO cold yet.

Didn't really get anything done, but oh wow I needed the exercise. Couple hours of walking. Listened to podcasts in the wifi headphones. Good times.

Various links from my talk went up on the golug website. Basically stuff I'd pasted into the chat channel. There's no archive of the video that I can find, and the page itself doesn't seem to be set up to have a persistent link to any of the entries. Presumably archive.org will snapshot it at some point? Still, I'm glad there was interest, and I need to make my own videos on this.

Some good political news: multiple federal courts have struck down republican gerrymanders in upwards of 5 states. (Doesn't stop the voter suppression, propaganda networks, replacing the people doing the counting with partisan hacks... But still, step in the right direction.)

So it looks like logging into Google Embark (their contractor payment thingy) with my main email address has a hiccup, namely that I break everything.

I've had the google account my email is spam filtered through for many years, through multiple upgrades of Google's systems, and it's... kinda borked. For example, to this day I have to log OUT of google to use maps.google.com because otherwise it's not an "authorized service".

Elliott recently pointed me at a bug in issuetracker.google.com (that's what those /b/ links translate to for the rest of us) and I should probably log in to comment on it, but I used my "work account" (at coresemi.io) to view it. The gmail account my personal email goes through is some sort of "google domain" organizational thingy set up in 2008-ish by a friend who has since undergone a religious conversion and moved to Europe. Once upon a time gmail wouldn't accept mail for other domains unless without special setup, and if I ever had the domain-side login to that it would be a half-dozen laptops ago.

Both the organization account and my previous individual Google account had the login "landley" (yes, at the same time: initially different namespaces), and when Google collapsed them together it had a name collision and got itself VERY confused (meaning I couldn't use Google Plus for the first two years of its existence), and Google periodically sends me emails like this one from Thursday:

We are writing to let you know that your G Suite legacy free edition will no longer be available starting July 1, 2022. To maintain your services and accounts, you need to upgrade to Google Workspace.

Which I have historically ignored and they auto-migrated whatever they had to and email still worked so I left it alone, but I do not consider an account with a pending Windows Scheduled Shutdown timeout to be load bearing, and if it STOPS passing email I move the DNS record to dreamhost's mail servers and update the pop3 and smtp server addresses in my client.

I've been thinking of preemptively pointing my domain's MX record at dreamhost's servers anyway to cut the gordian knot, but to be honest have been reluctant to touch it. And now I need a Google account to use Google vendor stuff and should probably interact with android's bug system directly and...

The thing is, Google's "Embark" draws a bright line between "gmail" and "non-gmail" addresses for some reason, and moving the MX record in dreamhost's nameservers (where the domain is registered) doesn't clean out the account association on Google's side: it still thinks "landley.net" goes with the 15 year old fused pair of gmail accounts that have undergone multiple system migrations. The tutorial video warns that if I try to tell Embark my email is an external address when it smells gmail, it will throw an "email mismatch error".

I could use my phone's gmail account, but my phone has NEVER had authorization to spend money, except for one fixed-size gift card I fed it back in Milwaukee. (The problem with programmer paranoia is it tends to be justified, not that intel is any better. It's not that the phone is inherently less secure, it's that the always-on orwellian tracking device with the whole-room microphone, camera pointed at the user's face, and second-by-second GPS tracking is a much higher profile target, and reusing google accounts between phone and payroll smells WAY too much like reusing passwords.)

Besides, until recently I just created a new gmail account for each phone. I kept it for the most recent phone because I remembered the login/password and because I wanted my youtube music playlist, but youtube has lost that capability and no longer lets you listen to two consecutive songs without 60 seconds of advertising in between. Youtube has taken away the POINT of having a persistent account for phones, and I'll probably just create another one once the Pixel 3a stops being supported (or allowing battery replacements).

I asked Elliott if there was somebody at Google I could talk to who could maybe apply cleansing flame to the situation, and he's never even MET anybody who works with gmail, and doesn't believe there are any at the Googleplex. (My own theory is it's entirely automated.)

Anyway, if you're wondering why I compulsively document and make everything be a self-contained reproduction sequence script with minimal external dependencies and regression tests... (And also why I use a vanilla unmodified distro on my laptop with a fresh reinstall each version upgrade and a written checklist of setup changes, and why I leave my phone running the stock Android version with nothing sideloaded.) Bit-rot is sadly real: the context shifts out from under you, the space something lived in stops being maintained, migration copies symlinks but not what they point to (at a dozen different levels of abstraction), they back up the data but not the reader/parser...

I got innoculated aginast this early, by the time I'd moved from a C64 to Amiga to DOS to OS/2 to Linux I was ALREADY expecting "this too shall pass" and becoming a digital pack-rat. But it's hard to be paranoid ENOUGH...

February 3, 2022

Austin is paralyzed by an ice storm. HEB is open but understaffed, which is ok because there's almost nobody here. (And then they closed at 5pm.) This is nothing like last year's blizzard, though, this is just our version of a snow day, we had a worse ice storm than this the first year I moved here. (That was over an inch of ice on everything, this is like, a third of an inch tops. Makes the trees pretty, but they'll live.)

February 2, 2022

HEB was positively SLAMMED today because there's an ice storm coming, so the line to use the self-service checkout machines ran all the way around the deli and into produce aisles. They apologized for being understaffed (despite offering $17.50/hr to start according to the signs), but it's panic buying. Last year we went down under 10 degrees celsius and STAYED there, all the pipes froze including the gas pipes leading to the turbines generating electricity: it comes straight up out of holes they drilled into the pipes with no processing, which means they didn't bother to remove the steam and such mixed into it, which means if it's cold enough ice plates inside the pipes until they close up.

Meanwhile solar panels are self-de-icing if you install them at a slight angle, because the parts that aren't lit up act as resistors and heat up when current from the lit bits tries to flow through them, so the snow on them melts at the bottom until it slides off, and the newly revealed bits collect more electricity to heat up the remaining parts faster until it's all clear and dry. (This is why casting a shadow over part of a solar panel disproportionately reduces the amount generated, and they use microinverters to wire them up individually instead of in series when they can, so the shaded ones merely don't generate instead of consuming the power produced by the other panels).

But that was a hard freeze lasting days. This is just getting down into the 20s overnight (below freezing but not by that much) with rain putting a thin layer of ice over everything, and then going back up above freezing during the day and then down into the 20s again the following night (repeat for most of a week). That's not even climate change, Austin was doing that when I moved here in 1996. (We have six weeks of winter every year, they're just not consecutive. Last year we got in trouble because two of them WERE consecutive: the destruction of the Polar Vortex means nothing's keeping the the arctic winds up where they belong anymore. So the ice up there doesn't get built up and maintained, and all the cold leaks down here where it's just gonna melt again immediately. Leaving the freezer door open does not mean your frozen peas are going to last longer just because it feels so cold in the kitchen. It's a BAD sign, not a good one. The cold should not be down here, it should be up there: it went walkabout because the oil companies screwed up the weather.

February 1, 2022

Turned 50 today. Forgot until well after I woke up, and then wound up taking the day off and (let's be honest) moping.

Fade ordered me a fresh set of headphones. Yay. (I do break them every 6 months or so; they have planned obsolescence plastic hinges that are always the first thing to go. If those were metal I'd probably still be on my original pair. Capitalism again.)

January 31, 2022

The plan for today was to file new LLC paperwork at the Secretary of State's office when they opened at 8:30 am, but it was pouring out when I woke up. I tried to wait it out (the #10 bus picks up across the street but I still have to walk several blocks downtown and then I'd planned to walk to UT from there to work with my laptop), but by around 2pm it was clear there wasn't going to be a good gap so I went anyway.

Talked to the LLC specialist in the little booth for half an hour, and came away with a stack of paperwork to fill out and return. They say that with covid it could take up to 40 days to process, although I can bribe them an extra $25 to cut that in half, so that's nice.

I have to do name clearance searches for a new name because my old LLC from 2008 (Impact Linux) was apparently never properly shut down and still sort of zombie-exists but not in a useful way. (It went "inactive" in 2011 due to unpaid annual continuing-to-exist fees. The person who handled that at the time was born again into one of those religions where you get a new name, dress differently, and move away from everyone who knew the old you.) At this point properly killing the old LLC off means fully resurrecting it first, which is MORE paperwork and fees than just starting over with name clearance searches for a new name, which is like finding an unused domain or twitter login, only worse and probably requiring trademark searches too (which the initial state search doesn't do). Decisions, decisions...

Got caught in the rain on the way back, dried off at the Wendy's in Jester Center. Which is open 10am to 5pm, and for once I was there during daylight hours. Bought a new frosty keychain and everything, although sadly I didn't have those coupons with me. And then trying to walk home from UT during what SEEMED to be a break in the rain, it started pouring enough I gave up and asked Fade to order me a Lyft while huddling in a parking garage. (I haven't got the app on my phone; nothing on there is authorized to spend money. Yeah, I should have just taken the bus home, but it LOOKED like a gap in the rain. Tricksy weather.)

At the table, but... really tired. I am not load bearing when it comes to ANY additional stress right now, not even GOOD stress. I am highly pleased to be starting work on Google's toybox hermetic build todo list, but tomorrow I have to fill out paperwork with the state of texas (can I reuse the name Impact Linux from 2008, or do I need to find another one that passes a conflict search), and then do I need a federal EIN or not? I finally got the tax envelope from Triple Crown (now that the box of stuff has returned to Stenograph; packed it as well as I could with those air baggies from amazon and wads of paper, but that thinkpad never had a case, I hope it made it there ok) and need to file taxes for 2021 soon, I hope Juanita can tell me how to do the "passthrough ignore" thing for a single person corporation.

I want to get work done. I need to get a lot of todo items cleared. I wrote a bunch of things I need to remember to do on the back of an envelope this morning, and of course left it at home.

I did a little programming doodle yesterday, which was great stress relief. That's the kind of programming I do for fun. I was going to do a quick ldd and posted about it on the list in hopes somebody had a trick to make dlopen() work from a statically linked context (ideally to portably poke a shared library loader to tell me about foreign libraries in a chroot context; I want the load address and maybe whether all the symbols resolve, but I don't need to USE the result), and Elliott reacted like I'd tried to poison his cat. (We've been in a long thread about it all month.)

My working style has always spun off todo items faster than I can close them, and the really satisfying work sessions are the ones where I can close tabs, finish stuff, document it, and ship it. I'm trying to clear my plate before diving into a new chunk of todo, and... I'm having the programmer vesion of weak noodle-arm can't lift anything. I'm TIRED.

I'm about to sign up to serve two masters, because Jeff's doing the J-Core ASIC that I REALLY WANT TO SEE SHIP, and Google's finally ready to get serious about toybox in a way I REALLY WANT TO SEE FINISH. And first I have to work out the division of my time between them (both want me full time; I would LOVE to do both full time) and do a bunch of paperwork.

I need to do more toybox videos, those should probably be weekly. And I signed up for a lightning talk at golug on wednesday (the topic is an intro to mkroot), and Jeff and I are speaking about making an open ASIC at Japan Technical Jamboree #78. Both online via different streaming clients, of course.

Still haven't decided if I should submit an ELC talk. My "not sure I really want to go" talk strategy has been to submit ONE proposal instead of the usual four or five for the committee to chose from, but then I feel rejected when they don't select it. I'm aware that makes no sense, and yet I know my failure modes. And coping strategies. I have decades of experience representing a project rather than myself, and met my wife when she was working the SJGames table at various conventions I was pitching Linucon at. I could be poised and confident pitching the convention to potential vendors because it was a great convention and other people not seeing that was their loss. I was just coincidentally creating it, the work stands on its own. But "would you like me to talk" can't avoid being at least a little about me, it's not a context in which I can easily intellectualize emperical metrics to moot a subjective judgement, and I can't dismiss it with "this person's opinion doesn't matter" when I'm the one who asked to be judged.

(Oddly, if I submit 4 topics and they choose none of them, it's easy to dismiss the conference because clearly our interests do not overlap. It's less of a personal rejection. I didn't ask them to trust my judgement about what would make a good talk but offered them a menu, and they didn't want anything on that menu because they don't get why any of that is important. Ok then.)

Sigh, I need to vent but I'm too tired. Fuzzy and I tried to walk through the Wendy's drive-through today (corporate is still mailing out coupons) but they were too understaffed to serve food. (When we knocked on the little window, the guy behind the register ran away, and the woman who (eventually) answered said come back in half an hour.)

Here's a good story about how the last wave of american prudish censorship got beaten back in the 1980s (between panics about dungeons and dragons being witchcraft and AIDS being a judgement from some god or other). When television ruled the culture they got a strangehold on broadcast television and vetoed every image and word spoken. Now that late stage capitalism has its tentacles everywhere they're making moral judgements about every dollar spent and rendering those they deem insufficiently pure "unbanked", and the gerontocracy's promises about properly funding the IRS to get billionaires and corporations to actually pay taxes turn into monitoring the poor to make sure the have-nots pay every penny of tax on every tip and side hustle. (Of course the increase in the IRS's budget is all about punching down, not up.) Here's a good link about how plutocracy is a problem from my wife's tumblr, and Dr. Sarah Taber pointing out that the war on camgirls is part of plutocracy pushing back against the great resignation: how dare anyone pay their bills WITHOUT flipping burgers for a large corporation.

A clear explanation of how modern christianity turned into a toxic death cult of doomsday preppers, and thus why church attendance is plummeting.

David Graeber talked about "direct action", which takes lot of forms.

YES! Google has approved funding to sponsor toybox work! (Specifically to advance the "hermetic build" work I've been poking at for many years.)

At the start of this (a full 6 months ago) Elliott didn't think I'd need to resurrect my old LLC, but now that we're actually doing it... yeah, down to the Secretary of State's office monday morning to fill out paperwork.

And I'm still hip deep in the J-core ASIC work and don't want to leave Jeff in the lurch, so I'm presumably doing each half-time for a bit? No idea how long that's going to take, but I want to see both these things FINISH.

Speaking of which, back to explaining how hardware toolchains work:

The toolchain we're currently trying to make our ASIC mask with is qflow, which is a set of build wrappers around four other tools (greywolf, netgen, qrouter, magic), plus then you need to feed it the fab's #include file with the standard cells for the process you're actually trying to build a mask for.

I mentioned last time how insanely proprietary most fabs are: their SDK (except it's a PDK here, Physical Development Kit) is TOP SECRET. Various NDA material has leaked over the years (especially for the older fabs that have been passing this info around for decades), but if you present a self-made mask to such a fab without a good explanation of how you got it, they will be EXTREMELY unhappy with you. The fab WANTS to get your netlist and make their own mask, because that's a service they can charge you for, and sprinkle in lots of per-chip royalties for their libraries, and it means your design is completely unportable so if you ever want to fab it through a competitor you basically start over from the netlist and pay all over again.

BUT: back at the start of the pandemic Google paid one fab (Skylake) to publicly release their PDK data without an NDA, for a complicated but powerful 130 nanometer fab process with its physical facility up in minnesota somewhere. This includes (quite a large) standard cell library, and corresponding process data such as how thick the P in a P/N junction has to be and how close two wires can be together before they interfere. (There's hundreds of weird little corner cases worked out by scientists in lab coats when they were designing the fab process, which are usually part of the NDA data without which your placer can't place and your router can't route. Sky130 is extra weird because the layers are different sizes: five volts up top, 3 volts in the middle one volt down at the bottom, so it can do a lot of flexible signal processing stuff and is frankly a bit odd to make a CPU with.)

Before this, the other main option was the OSU standard cells, which a university made years ago using extremely conservative estimates for a very old process, and would PROBABLY work... if spaced widely and clocked very slowly. And original targeting 350 nanometers, I think? It's a terrible option, but at least does not involve an NDA, and was used to develop a lot of these open tools back in the day. And I've talked about Graham Petley's work before, but it's more a generator than a ready to use PDK package, and the guy who did it apparently retired to paint watercolors. Jeff was involved in that project back in the day and could pick it up again, but there's a lot of heavy lifting to actualy use it in a real modern process and we'd like to establish a working baseline first. But the advantage there is you could (in theory) assemble an PDK for any process from maybe 25 nanometers on up. Below that it gets weird and quantum, and they cheat by turning the cells on their side to pack them more tightly together...

The standard modern file format for this stuff is LEF (Library Exchange Format) and DEF (Design Exchange Format). The PDK is generally LEF and DEF files, and the final mask file is a big DEF file. The netlist could be supplied as a DEF file instead of as verilog but usually isn't for historical reasons, and qflow isn't JUST a pile of glue scripts but also has a half-dozen little C programs to do file format conversions.

So, back to qflow: Greywolf is the placer, qrouter is the router, netgen does multiple things (most notably collating the list of labeled pins into a list of networks), and magic is the design rule checker (and it's a GUI visualizer, and format converter, and it actually calls back to netgen to perform some of those design rule checks).

The input to qflow is a netlist describing the circuit (which can be a bunch of formats but verilog is popular). This is still literally just a list of components with pins, and a corresponding list of "nets" which are just groups of pins to wire together. (I was calling them "pin pairs" until Jeff corrected me that there can be 3 or more pins in a net, all of which get wired together so current flows between them all. So networks, not just wires.)

The output is a "routed netlist", a bit like a PDF or photoshop file (except in DEF format) with a bunch of layers each containing a bunch of rectangles. Each component from the input netlist has been assigned to a physical location (layer, x, y, and orientation: greywolf places cells in a grid but can rotate or flip each one to make the routing work better) and broken into the series of rectangles of each type of material that implement that component. Each net from the input netlist has also been filled out with the set of rectangles (on metal layers, plus the vertical bridges connecting layers) needed to route the connections (I.E. the output of place and route).

The rectangles on each layer are all filled with the same thing, like "metal" or "insulator" or "dopant" (the chemicals that turn silicon positive or negative) or vertical connectors between layers punching little squares in the insulator layers. These layers are defined in the fab's PDK, and the PDK also has rules for each layer describing how thin the rectangles can be and the minimum gap needed between them, and the design rule checker's job is to verify that none of the PDK's rules are violated by a given DEF file generated by the toolchain: it checks the output for errors after you've generated a mask candidate.

The components don't just connect to each other, they connect to power and ground and clock. On the outside of your chip is a "pad ring" with special cells that talk to the outside world; there's generally a separate pad ring generator that produces all that, and then your place and route fills in the space inside the ring and links up the relevant nets to the ring's connections to satisfy all the references to the outside world.

The hardware version of QEMU is called spice. It's a physics simulator package that can actually "run" a circuit in a mask definition file. (Very slowly and unreliably, and it hasn't benefitted from 30 years of Moore's Law the way the other tools have, although there are ongoing attempts to rewrite it. But if the stars align and you chop your chip into tiny enough pieces, it can show you little pieces of your circuit working before you spend $$$ to fab it.)

So that's what we're TRYING to get the ASIC toolchain to do: combine a verilog netlist (produced by GHDL from the ICE40 J1 repo) with the sky130 PDK to run it through the qflow tools to place and route a mask file. We also need some libraries, most notably an SRAM generator (what's wrong with openram is its own whole writeup, but the tl;dr is it SHOULD have a few bits of SRAM available as a macrocell we can stick in the PDK and place and route instances of like any other component, and instead it tries to takes over a chunk of silicon wafer space and produce raw rectangles, routing its own power lines and everything (badly). In software terms, we want some C functions and it gives us a .o file with a giant binary blob in it that isn't even -fpic).

One persistent bug in qflow is that verilog uses an insane escape sequence for names with punctuation in them: it sticks a backslash on the front and a space at the end (which either gets stripped so the symbol no longer matches, or causes a syntax error, in any other format the symbol name is copied into). The proper thing to do when converting from verilog to any other format is to strip this escaping, and re-escape any characters that need it in the new file's format. (So far, we haven't hit a case where anything WOULD need to be escaped anywhere else, it's mostly that verilog hasn't got a lot of concepts VHDL does so things need to be made very explicit for it, which involves creating compound symbol names to represent components of VHDL objects, and GHDL uses an "illegal" character (period) to glue those together to avoid potential in-band signaling conflicts. Period is a valid name component requiring no escaping in all the other file formats EXCEPT verilog...)

What qflow decided to do instead (which is nuts) was keep the leading backslash and turn the trailing space into another backslash. And it didn't do it CONSISTENTLY, lots of names leak through unconverted. Sometimes this broke the reader of the new format, and other times it meant bits of the design didn't match up (mostly broken nets because it couldn't match up pins when the converted and unconverted names didn't match at each end). The other problem is, while LEF and DEF don't seem to escape anything and just treat backslash as a normal character... json doesn't. And yes, one of the conversions is into and out of json, because that's what some tool wanted. So the json parser threw a syntax error trying to read the file, which we hadn't noticed before because it didn't get far enough to HIT that failure mode before we fixed several of the other conversions. (The name mismatches were showing up as design rule check failures, now they're showing up as a build break, and this is PROGRESS. Sigh.)

So the PROPER fix is to go back and strip out ALL the escaping: when the vhdl reader library encounteres an escaped name, it should use the escaping to parse the name, then strip it. Unfortunately, this both means digging through qflow's vhdl code to figure out WHERE to strip the escaping (it needs it to figure out where symbols end during some of the parsing), AND it means ripping out all the wrong conversions later turning the "\name [123]" format into "\name\[123]". (Whether or not the [123] should be part of the resulting symbol is one of those things I need to dig further into, but... probably? Work out "what would this do if the name didn't need to be escaped" and make it do that.)

It would have been easier if the earlier code had been at all consistent or systematic, but there's a lot of whack-a-mole fixes that happened here over the years, which need to be ripped out again.

Qflow was apparently trying to preserve the escapes because one of the big Design Rule Checks at the end makes sure the input and output files contain all the same components (nothing got dropped), so it wanted a conversion that was trivially reversible. But the question "how do you know when to put the escaping BACK so it looks like the original" was THE WRONG QUESTION to ask. You don't, you consistently strip escapes EVERY time you load data from verilog: you now know the length of the symbol because it's in a C string, and you don't CARE what punctuation is in a null terminated C string. Teach the design rule checker to strip the escapes when it loads verilog, so it doesn't HAVE to escape the data it loads from the DEF file.

And if you DO need to write the data out into a new verilog file, you know to escape that symbol name BECAUSE IT HAS PUNCTUATION IN IT. Same way the escape wound up there in the first place when the original tool wrote out the first verilog file. You don't have to preserve a decision an earlier tool automatically made, you just have to competently make the same decision again as needed.

So yeah: qflow is a set of build wrappers around four other tools (greywolf, netgen, qrouter, magic), and then spice (or Xyce) is a physics simulator package that can actually "run" a mask (badly), and it doesn't quite work right with verliog that was generated from VHDL, and it doesn't quite work right with the sky130 PDK. We're working on it.

Poking at toysh. Combining command history with continuations is horrible. Both of these multiline input patterns:

$ for i in a b c
> do echo $i
> done
a
b
c
$ for i
> in a b c
> do echo $i
> done
a
b
c

Produce the same for i in a b c; do echo $i; done history entry when you cursor up. The newline between "for i" and "in" does NOT take a semicolon, and the code stitching the multiple lines together into a single long line knows that. This means we have TWO line continuation types: ends current command and does not end current command. No wait:

$ echo $(
> echo potato)
potato
$ echo "
abc"
abc

When you cursor up, the history entry PRESERVES the newline in both those cases. So three states so far. And you can cursor left and right past the line break just fine, which is why I wanted the code I'm writing to be the basis of my text editor implementation.

Sigh, what does busybox ash do... keeps everything entered as separate lines in the history and does no stitching together. Makes sense, but a lot less useful for rerunning things.

Alas, that's all the time I have for this today. Jeff needs me to fix vlog2Spice and vlog2Def the way I fixed vlog2Cel yesterday, and then look at the other project he found that's also trying to use VHDL with qflow to build a chip, and see if we can collaborate at least on toolchain fixes...

Working on the qflow stuff (toolchain for making our own ASIC). Trying to debug various design rule verification failures, and work out what magic's display output is trying to say when there are a bunch of layers... Ok, back up: I should do videos about this stuff too.

We've had a fully open source "VHDL to bitstream" toolchain for a while, which compiles human readable VHDL source code into a "netlist" file describing the circuit, and then the toolchain links that netlist into a bitstream which you can load into an FPGA to run your circuit.

The fully open source toolchain uses GHDL to parse the VHDL source code, and yosys to produce the netlist, then feeds the netlist to icestorm to turn it into a bitstream for Lattice's ice40 or ecp5 FPGAs.

We've recently updated this bitstream toolchain: the previous version was using a package called ghdlsynth-beta that's since been merged into one of the other packages. Unfortunately the new one reads a vital component via dlopen() and thus can't be distributed as a statically linked binary, which isn't exactly an improvement. But anyway, open source FPGA bitstream generation toolchain (for lattice): solved-ish problem.

An FPGA is primarily made up of LUTs and switching fabric. Switching fabric is a bunch of wires connecting all the inputs and outputs of every other circuit in the cell, which run together into junction boxes full of programmable switches that control which lines gets plugged together or kept apart.

LUT is short for Lookup Table, which is a tiny amount of SRAM with a set of input pins and one output pin, so each possible set of inputs can produce a known output (and thus act as any combination of and/or/nand/nor/not gates turning a set of binary inputs into binary output) just by using the input pins as address lines to look up that bit in the SRAM.

Historically there were 3 big FPGA vendors: Xilinx, Lattice, and Altera, but Altera was bought by Intel in 2015 and isn't available to individuals or small business. The J-core stuff builds for Xilinx and Lattice FPGAs.

Lattice uses 4-input LUTs (each indexing 16 bits of SRAM), and Xilinx uses 6-input LUTs (64 bits of SRAM). Neither's really better, it's just the granularity with which you can program the circuits, but it does mean that 1000 Lattice LUTs is potentially less circuitry than 1000 Xilinx LUTs so you can't compare them directly. (Although it also depends on how efficiently the toolchain's optimizer uses those extra inputs and how many are left unconnected, so it's not a strict ratio either. It's ballpark estimates then "try it and see".)

Xilinx was a higher-end FPGA vendor than Lattice, but Lattice has been creeping upmarket. The ice40 line maxes out at 7680 (4-bit) LUTs, while Xilinx's "LX9, LX25, LX45" were how many thousands of (6-bit) LUTs each contained. But Lattice's ecp5 line scales up into tens of thousands of LUTs, albeit at a slower clock speed than the high-end (much more expensive) Xilinx chips. J-core runs around 66mhz on cheap (Spartan 6) Xilinx and 100 mhz on more expensive (Kintex) Xilinx chips. It runs between 12mhz and 20mhz on various ICE40 chips, and isn't expected to be much faster on ecp5 (although we can do the full J2 SMP on there). This also makes things like 100baseT ethernet, GPS correlators, and USB2 noticeably harder to implement on Lattice.

One reason Lattice is hobbyist-friendly is price: an ICE40 is $3.5-$5 even with the chip shortage. An LX45 Spartan 6 is $35-$50 depending on speed, and a similarly sized Kintex is easily twice that. (And that's just the bare chip, bought in volume. Then you need boards to put them in, and Xilinx needs more expensive boards.)

But the real advantage of Lattice is the community has reverse engineered how to program it. Xilinx spent a LOT more on lawyers to sue anybody trying to understand its IP, so you can program Lattice with open source tools quite well (we've completely discarded Lattice's proprietary FPGA toolchain), but the Xilinx equivalents are buggy and incomplete and only furtively developed when Xilinx isn't looking.

So you compile VHDL to a netlist and link it into a bitstream that loads into the FPGA to program the LUTs and switching fabric (and initialize any other SRAM blocks). Great. What's a netlist?

A netlist is actually two lists: a list of hardware components (such as "and gate"), and a list of the named I/O pins sticking out of each component. The linking-ish phase of the hardware build is called "Place and route". The "placer" assigns each component of the circuit into one of the FPGA's programmable cells (including all those LUTs). The "router" programs the FPGA's switching fabric to connect up the various inputs and outputs of each LUT (by matching up the pin labels in the netlist and wiring together everything with the same name).

Conceptually, a hardware toolchain is a bit like a software toolchain. A C compiler produces a bunch of instructions bundled into functions and variables bundled into structures, and then the linker glues them together using a bunch of annotations where thing X needs to connect to thing Y. (In static linking this is all done at compile time, in dynamic linking another program does some of it at load/runtime.)

In a hardware toolchain, the compiler produces components (called "cells") instead of ALU instructions, and instead of jump/branch instructions it has I/O pins to wire together (called "nets", short for wiring networks, because when you connect together 3 or more pins that need to share a signal, or power, or ground, or clock, those wires have to be able to branch.) The toolchain backend reads the netlist so it can place the cells and route the nets.

The main limiting factors on how fast you can clock a circuit are 1) how long are the wires the signal has to travel down, 2) how much electricity does the component at the end need to fill it up? Physically smaller circuitry has shorter wires and less capacitance, so clocks faster. But layout also matters: if a wire "trace" is too long, the signal trying to go down it won't have done its job by the time the clock advances, so your circuit doesn't "meet timing". You can annotate signals with minimum required timing (if this 100baseT transciever is passing 4 bits at 25mhz, the circuitry at the far end has 40 microseconds handle it), and place and route iteratively try to get the best timing and tell you if anything failed to meet its minimums. (You can "floorplan" by manually grouping chunks of circuitry together with more annotation to basically give the placer hints, but that's a more advanced optimization technique usually only done when automatic place and route just can't figure it out.)

The big differences between different targets is what components are available: the VHDL or Verilog parser produces an Abstract Syntax Tree and runs the usual optimizations on it, then generates a component list and net list from that. Each Lattice FPGA family has one set of components, each Xilinx family has a very different list, and each hardware fab has its own list of available components for making photolithography masks from. A given process's list of available components is called its "standard cells", and the last "generic" step in a hardware build is the AST, because you need to #include the target process's standard cell file to generate a netlist.

The reason we still have to use the Xilinx Web ISE package to produce bitstreams for Spartan 6 (the bigger and faster FPGA in the turtle board) is icestorm doesn't know how to place and route for xilinx, and packages like Symbiflow that try to target xilinx aren't as mature because Xilinx is proprietary and litigous and has ways of encrypting its bitstreams. We have an ok list of standard cells for xilinx, so we can use GHDL to create a netlist (and thus use a more modern version of VHDL than Web ISE supports), but then we have to place and route that netlist using Web ISE to make a bitstream. Unfortunately, Web ISE is a binary only package last updated halfway through the Obama administration, which won't run without a registration key: it's basically the Flash plugin of bitstream toolchains, if Flash had required individual registration keys for each install with a working email address and needing a physical street address (ostensibly for export control reasons). They can probably remotely disable it too, I haven't checked. (Xilinx is REALLY trying to push everyone to its new Vivado toolchain, which only supports the newer more expensive FPGA families. Think Microsoft trying desperately to pull a reluctant userbase off of Windows XP without the new releases being interesting enough to move them on their own. But Vivado is no less proprietary or tightly controlled, and can't make a Turtle bitstream anyway because they dropped support for the older cheaper FPGAs.)

The standard cells of an FPGA aren't just LUTs, there are also macrocell "libraries" including clock inputs, phase locked loops, SRAM blocks, integer multipliers, and in extreme cases entire DRAM controllers. It's a bit like pulling functions out of libc that would either be a lot of work to reimplment or which you can't really implement yourself in a portable manner (because they need OS-specific system calls). Clocks need crystals, phase locked loops need capacitors, etc. The gotcha here is that each library component you pull in has a finite number of instances available on that FPGA, which live in a specific place on the chip you have to wire the rest of your circuitry up to, a constraint which makes meeting timing harder.

Compiling for ASIC (I.E. making a hardware mask) is slightly different: we take the AST produced by ghdl+yosys and run it through a different backend to produce a netlist using that fab's standard cells. In ASIC there's no limit to how many of each component it can create, the limit is how much space it has to draw cells in. The ASIC placer puts your standard cells in a big grid, initially randomly distributed (modulo any floorplanning) and then performing a kind of sort, swapping them with each other to collectively minimize the distance between pins needing to be connected to each other. The ASIC placer also tries to leave enough space for the ASIC router to add the necessary wires in the next pass, using various heuristics (fancy word for an automated way to guess). The result is more or less a giant photoshop file full of many layers of colored rectangles, with metadata so you can trace back to where those rectangles came from if you need to debug stuff.

A hardware toolchain still produces components ("cells") instead of processor instructions, but instead of libraries it has the option to bundle them together into "macrocells" (which is just cells containing other cells recursively, but with the routing locally within them already worked out). Each macrocell can be treated like a tiny little chip that has I/O pins, each with a long complicated name saying which OTHER pin on some OTHER cell it needs to connect to.

The whole ASIC has a "pad ring" around it (thing crt0.o and friends), and sucks in "standard cells" (think libc, except this defines things like "how to make a transistor in this fab process".). The pad ring is what connects to the externally facing pins the chip will have connected up to it when it gets cut out of the wafer and packaged into a ceramic case. This has special I/O pad cells (GIANT capacitor-ish thingies to try to protect the chip from static damage, or generate an enormous output current visible from space from outside the chip), and GPIO blocks that let the chip remap which pins do what (so the same ASIC can be packaged into different form factors without making different masks; sometimes there's a runtime-programmable register that lets you swap stuff in and out, and sometimes it's fuses blown during manufacturing).

Fabs treat their standard cell libraries as crown jewels: you sometimes have to sign a contract with them just to get enough to make a netlist with, and then the fab wants your netlist and will do everything else itself. If you want just OUTLINE versions of the standard cells (reserve this much opaque space you can't route through on this many adjacent layers, with I/O pins connecting at these spots) to do your own place and route, that's generally serious NDA territory. And you will NEVER get the full version that allows you to make a complete mask, in software terms you can only make a .o file that THEY link into an executable.

Standard cell libraries aren't just transistors and nor gates, they also include big macrocells like the FPGA libraries do, but fabs charge per-chip royalties for them. Using a fab's SRAM or their DDR3 controller adds extra costs, which you pay again every time you run another wafer from that mask.

Back in 2006 I was invited (by David Mandala and Tim Bird) to speak at the Consumer Electronic Linux Forum, which I've attended semi-regularly since. This year it's being held in Austin, and I'm tempted to submit a talk proposal... except I should really be doing Youtube videos directly instead of having someone else record and post them. Maybe it makes sense to do a talk there to advertise my youtube channel? Which would involve me actually starting a youtube channel; so far I have one video and the scripts for several more I haven't recorded yet because I need to learn video editing.

Ok, technically CELF isn't in Austin this year, ELC is. (That's the new name the Linux Foundation peed over it to make it smell like them.) Except ever since the Linux Foundation grabbed it they've been trying to glue it to other random events in hopes its success will rub off on whatever random nonsense emerged from their bureaucratic focus group du jour. This year the Linux Foundation is calling the collected mess the "Open Source Summit" (since O'Reilly is no longer using the name: the Linux Foundation is nothing if not opportunistic, derivative. ostentatious... Is immitation still flattery if they're not sincere?)

The latest katamari they've assembled inclues all SORTS of random padding to look bigger. Linuxcon has always made me sigh a bit at the name, but that one's at least happened before, and I think CloudOpen also previously existed, but ContainerCon isn't realy a name, OSPOCon (Open Source Projects Office) is meta-bureaucracy, SupplyChainSecurityCon was CLEARLY just made up to cash in on current headlines, and then you've got Critical Software Summit, Community Leadership Conference, Emerging OS Forum, Embedded IoT (as opposed to all the non-embedded IoT going on), Diversity Empowerment Summit (really!), Open AI & Data Forum (not even trying anymore), and Open Source On-Ramp. (Because none of the rest has an educational component?)

So yeah, they're holding CELF in Austin this year and trying to pretend it's got 14 other events bolted onto it (not tracks, EVENTS), at least half of which they just made up. Ten years ago the event's T-shirt already had more sponsor logos than your average Nascar jacket and I'm trying to figure out if I should bother with it.

Oil producers are treating their entire infrastructure as stranded assets. No matter how high oil prices go, they're not investing in more drilling because the transition to renewables could shrink demand and make the price go negative again at any time. While the USA can scale up production, it's mostly chosing not to (except for finishing about half of the backlog of drilled-but-uncompleted wells it already found oil under but never installed pumps and hooked up to the output pipes, which got shelved and auctioned off when the price went negative and the drillers went through bankruptcy.) Other countries like Russia that have nothing else going for them are already pumping at capacity and can't increase further.

For a clue why the finance guys refuse to invest in drilling, look at the oil tanker market. The "contango" issues from last year where oil tankers were used as extra storage have all worked through, and there's now an increasing surplus, and I quote: "Crude tanker owners have been bleeding cash for over a year, and the market will have to absorb more new tonnage in 2022 than in 2021." Container shipping rates are at historic highs, but coal, oil, and LNG tanker rates are down 70-90% from last year, with one tanker that costs $26,000/day to run is able to charge $800/day now.

Shipping oil from the middle east to china has even gone negative again. When prices went up they invested and increased capacity in a shrinking market, but there was no depth to the demand, less need each year than the previous year. The money guys don't want to play musical chairs and get left holding the bag. (Rare comic books sell for huge prices BECAUSE they're rare: if you discovered a hundred issues of Superman #1 in an attic and sold them all at once, the price would plummet. It's even possible that ALL of them would collectively fetch less than ONE does today.)

That said, LNG tankers are doing way better than oil, because there's demand to take extra gas from the USA to Europe, to reduce the amount they buy from Russia, and it's in the USA's strategic interest to scale that up as much as possible (replacing Russia entirely if they invade Ukraine and trigger sanctions strong enough to personally starve Vladimir Putin to death).

As for oil, the USA became a net oil exporter in November 2019, and our oil exports are booming as the rest of the world pays through the nose for the stuff. These days the USA only imports oil to refine it, but we're converting our refineries to consume fracking output which is chemically much less complex than conventional oil because it just came out of the rocks that produced it and hasn't had time to soak through other stuff and dissolve a lot of contaminants, and converting the refineries means they can't consume imported "heavy" crude anymore. The demand slump during the covid pandemic has been the perfect time to convert idled refineries.

US refinery capacity also fell almost 5% last year, as gasoline demand fell 13% (not just lockdowns but electric cars, telecommuting, the Great Resignation...) Some surplus refineries are being turned into storage, others are becoming biofuel plants (which is stupid, but happening), and more are just plain closing.

As for the increasingly lucrative container shipping side of the Force, The profitability isn't because the industry is HEALTHY, but seems to be because it's been sabotaged by the Biden administration to drive reshoring and weaning supply chains off china. As one of the above articles mentions:

Deutsche Bank analyst Amit Mehrotra... noted that the retail sales-to-inventory ratio is now three standard deviations below its 10-year historical average...

If we assume a reversion to pre-pandemic sales-to-inventory and use current demand, retailers would need $821 billion in inventory. Taking the fastest inventory has grown — which was November 2021, up $12 billion — it would take retailers 17 months to restock.

This drives up the price of goods from china (those record shipping profits are subtracted from manufacturer's and retailer's profits), and adds delay and uncertainty to supply. And it's clearly an intentional strategy because the container ship backlog at US ports isn't decreasing, it's increasing.

This seems to be an intentional (but pluasibly deniable) strategy on the Biden administration's part to respond to China's "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy: US/Mexican manufacturing is faster and cheaper once we stop subsidizing international shipping. (Which is half of what the US defense budget's been doing since the Berlin Wall fell over 30 years ago.)

I continue to object to the privatization of government functions. Mastercard's war on porn (with the enthusiastic collusuion of visa) is bad and they need to be driven out of business (via postal banking or something; the phrase "being debanked" should not ever apply to US citizens). It's providing cover for the IRS requiring third party facial recognition to access your own tax data. Late stage capitalism is contracting into a black hole.

This is the same kind of BS that youtube vs verizon was trying to pull back in 2007: everybody uploading anything must preemptively dox themselves and provide legally binding signatures stating that they own all rights to sounds playing on the radio in the background so the corporations can easily financially harvest the little guys at will. Verizon didn't get it then, but they're using pearl-clutching about sex and children to get it now. (Nevermind the self-employed models and camgirls and cartoonists they're putting out of work, or that the real problems have nothing to do with sex: M&M Mars and Nestle are facing a literal child slavery lawsuit right now, and of course their response is to try to distract from it by desexualizing their advertising. Because the antidote to accusations of slavery is performative prudery, just ask the Catholic Church. Even when neither the slavery nor child abuse were sexual in nature, being loudly anti-sex makes you immune to any other attack on moral grounds.)

Right wing loons have been using "family values" to advance fascism for generations: Reagan did it, Nixon did it, and "The Fatherland" of nazi germany was literally named after their family values campaign. The first big nazi book burning was the library of the institute for sexology. Fascists LOVE chastity belts and the Prince Albert for the same reason they love fasting, hairshirts, and mortifiation of the flesh. The less healthy your emotional life is, the more you need the cult leader to channel all your frustrations through.

But regulatory capture so you can't spend american dollars without passing "family values" judgements imposed by private for-profit corporations? That's DISTURBING. It's a pity the Boomercrats aren't even aware what the actualy issues _are_. Upstanding german citizens wouldn't stand up to stop the 1933 nazi book burning because some of those books were about gay people and trans people and the founder of the institute was jewish. First they came for...

I get emails:

On 1/22/22 9:51 AM, XXXX wrote:
> Hi sorry to bother you,
>
> I'm a it enthusiast and recently I came across your name associated with some
> mirai sample.
>
> Can we talk about it?

My old https://landley.net/aboriginal prebuilt binary toolchains got used to build rather a lot of weird code over the years, including some old rootkit stuff, and those old versions of gcc leak the build path of the toolchain/libraries into the output. (The were uClibc based and glibc is incompetent at static linking, so the cross compilers you could fish out of debian with the qemu-debootstrap stuff were way less useful for making portable binaries.)

My toolchain got stale because I stayed on the last GPLv2 release of each package that went GPLv3, and I wound up fighting the linux kernel devs to revert stupid stuff (see the sources/patches directory on https://github.com/landley/aboriginal). I switched to musl-cross-make years ago but never posted binaries of those because I don't trust GPLv3 not to turn into a lawsuit without a large corporate legal department standing between me and the loonier parts of the FSF ecosystem.

(I keep meaning to try to convince github to build the toolchains and host the binaries for me as part of the build commit hook stuff, but I'm told NFT clowns abused that infrastructure for coin mining and it caps the CPU usage or something now? It's on the todo list to poke at it...)

Rob

Of course now that I've actually looked at microsoft github's workflow docs, it looks like they delete the retained output files after 90 days. So not a place to put stable links to release binaries. Oh well.

January 21, 2022

January 20, 2022

January 19, 2022

January 18, 2022

On Fade's advice (she's been dealing with anxiety for decades and I'm new to it; I had about 15 years of depression but usually not anxiety) I took an ibuprofen and melatonin last night, and did manage to get some sleep. Still under the weather. The second time Jeff got Covid in japan (South Africa variant at the time, now renamed "megatron" because mentioning geography is racist) he had several days where he was anxious and couldn't sleep, so I'm wondering if this is Omicron manifesting through two rounds of J&J and two previous infections? (Annual flu vaccine doesn't stop you from getting the flu, it just makes it suck less when you do. Fade pointed out you can order 4 of Biden's covid tests now, for delivery "eventually". If I had one I'd probably take it.)

January 17, 2022

Did not sleep at all last night. Lay awake in bed stressed. Took advantage of the holiday to stay in bed until almost 1, but it didn't result in any more sleep.

Not a hugely productive work day with no sleep and "don't think about a purple elephant" anxiety avoidance strategies. (Plutocracy has cornered the market on spending money, not just collecting a fee every time but passing value judgements about what you are and aren't allowed to spend money on, starting with the nominally indefensible and spreading out from there the way the first nazi bookburning in germany was the library of a gender studies institute supporting trans people 100 years ago, hindsight about which is what inspired the "first they came for" poem. Since the dollar is the global reserve currency, we're exporting this "table legs need stockings covering them because otherwise it's indecent" lunacy to other countries. And we can't even focus on this with late stage capitalism pricing everyone out of their homes, a school-to-for-profit-prison pipeline bypassing the 14th amendment, student loans immune to bankruptcy with loan forgiveness being the new pie-in-the-sky dangled in front of people but never delivered by the octagenarian president, the retirement age endlessly increasing as lifespans decrease... Right, don't think about any of that until I can be ANGRY again rather than scared about living in the christian version of saudi arabia.)

January 16, 2022

Stomach bug today, which makes me wonder how much of yesterday's stress was "my intestines are clenched up" reading as stress. (I'm still pissed about all those issues, but I usually get on with things better.)

Looking at a todo list dated December 2020 and going "eh, only a month old" is a "still writing wrong year on my checks" variant. It's "twenty twenty also" already, the whole year "twenty twenty defeated us" was in between...

January 15, 2022

January 14, 2022

January 13, 2022

January 12, 2022

Ok, I need to get off of gmail NOW. The net-nanny software has made it unusable.

I was trying to send co-workers a tar.gz of an old right click -> save as snapshot of an internal wiki page about GPS timings over a homemade hardware bus, now that database has gone the way of all databases. (Seriously, we knew about the archival format skew problem thirty years ago; even when you THINK you have backups, new programs can't read old nontrivial formats. Nothing stored in a database is going to be usably retreivable ten years later unless somebody's dumped the output to a real static self-contained storage format, and even then half the time your PDF is a cover page with no contents or an index into a backup system that no longer exists.)

But gmail is doing a net-nanny thing: "oh no, I don't like the contents of that tarball, it's got css files and javascript in it, you're not ALLOWED to send that tarball". I didn't ask it to, and can't STOP it.

This is not a receive spam filter, this is a SEND spam filter. I am not allowed to SEND that email because gmail won't let me. It doesn't properly understand the contents but THINKS it MIGHT be dangerous, and insists it knows better than I do what's in my interest to be allowed to send. It had to decompress the file and untar the file (not a format widely used on windows) in order to scoff at the contents of the file. And note how there's no "here's how to override it", the linked page is "Here is an explanation of why you shouldn't have tried to do that in the first place you naughty child you.".

This is not a service I consider usable anymore. This is not a relationship I want to have with a service provider. Dreamhost provides mail servers as part of its service package, I just hate moving my email because my preferred recovery mechanism for stuff IS email. Grrr... Dowanna, but... really need to.

January 11, 2022

January 10, 2022