evilstevie @evilstevie@mastod1.ddns.net

What people don't understand is it never used to be this bad. Even the tunnels under the Internet used to be well-kept by their inhabitants. Radscorpions were trained by diligent owners and didn't need leashes. There was a sense of community.

I miss when people actually gave a fuck about reliability

#SilentSunday #Iceland #Travel #BirthdayTrip

#silentSunday #Scotland #waterfall

In case you're looking for Canadian right now, we're not available.

#HNOM #Olympics #GoCanadaGo

Coin operated vending machines dispensing kibble for streetcats are my favourite shared infrastructure discovery this week.

Sunday

my absolute rock bottom expectation in this moment is some basic fuckin solidarity with pro-worker causes

if you're here to make claims like "yes this anti labor tech is bad but here's why it's ok for me" - ya blocked

"being anti labor tech absolutists is some kind of privilige" - again, ya blocked, son

@ploum @cstross
I am reminded of a line from a William Gibson novel
"And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human."

The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.

Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.

LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.

Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.

Acronym of the year, from the New Jersey Legislature.

@glennseto you were right

Defer available in gcc and clang

About a year ago I posted about defer and that it would be available for everyone using gcc and/or clang soon. So it is probably time for an update.

Two things have happened in the mean time:

A technical specification (TS 25755) edited by JeanHeyd Meneide is now complete and moves through ISO’s complicated publication procedures.
Both gcc and clang communities have worked on integrating this feature into their C implementations.

I have not yet got my hands on the gcc implementation (but this is also less urgent, see below), but I have been able to use clang’s which is available starting with clang-22.

I think that with this in mind everybody developing in C could and should now seriously consider switching to defer for their cleanup handling:

no more resource leakage or blocked mutexes on rarely used code paths,
no more spaghetti code just to cover all possibilities for preliminary exits from functions.

I am not sure if the compiler people are also planning back ports of these features, but with some simple work around and slightly reduced grammar for the defer feature this works for me from gcc-9 onward and for clang-22 onward:

#if __has_include(<stddefer.h>) # include <stddefer.h> # if defined(__clang__) # if __is_identifier(_Defer) # error "clang may need the option -fdefer-ts for the _Defer feature" # endif # endif #elif __GNUC__ > 8 # define defer _Defer # define _Defer _Defer_A(__COUNTER__) # define _Defer_A(N) _Defer_B(N) # define _Defer_B(N) _Defer_C(_Defer_func_ ## N, _Defer_var_ ## N) # define _Defer_C(F, V) \ auto void F(int*); \ __attribute__((__cleanup__(F), __deprecated__, __unused__)) \ int V; \ __attribute__((__always_inline__, __deprecated__, __unused__)) \ inline auto void F(__attribute__((__unused__)) int*V) #else # error "The _Defer feature seems not available" #endif

So this is already a large panel of compilers. Obviously it depends on your admissible compile platforms whether or not these are sufficient for you. In any case, with these you may compile for a very wide set of installs since defer does not need any specific software infrastructure or library once the code is compiled.

As already discussed many times, the gcc fallback uses the so-called “nested function” feature which is always subject of intense debate and even flame wars. Don’t worry, the implementation as presented here, even when compiled with no optimization at all, does not produce any hidden function in the executable, and in particular there is no “trampoline” or whatever that would put your execution at risk of a stack exploit.

You may also notice that there is no fallback for older clang version. This is because their so-called “blocks” extension cannot easily be used as a drop-in to replace nested function: their semantics to access variables from the surrounding scope are different and not compatible with the defer feature as defined by TS 25755.

So for example if you are scared of using big VLA on the stack, you may use the above code in headers and something like

double* BigArray = malloc(sizeof(double[aLot])); if (!BigArray { exit(EXIT_FALURE); } defer { free(BigArray); }

to have an implementation of a big array with a failure mode for the allocation.

Or if you want to be sure that all your mutexes are unlocked when you leave a critical section, use and idiom as here

{ if (mtx_lock(&mtx) != thrd_success) { exit(EXIT_FAILURE); } defer { mtx_unlock(&mtx); } ... do something complicated ... if (rareCondition) { return 42; } ... do something even more complicated ... }

Just notice, that you’d always have to use the defer feature with curly braces to ensure that the gcc fallback works smoothly.

Once you realize it’s not “age verification”, but actually “identity verification”, then it’s easy to understand that the real goal is “papers, please” for the entire internet.

And now for my favorite dark programming j/k

What is the difference between a light bulb and a programmer?

The light bulb stops working when it burns out.

🥁

455) Pibot. Knows all the decimal places of the mathematical constant pi. Will continue reeling them off until the heat death of the universe if you let it. #SmallRobotsRemastered