comex

Just deleted my Mastodon->Twitter crossposter, which had been off since I rebooted my server last month without me noticing. It's not worth it if I have no way to see or interact with replies. Goodbye for now, Twitter. Find me at @comex" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex.

Via HN, an ad for Google’s new Bard AI inadvertently shows it returning false information: twitter.com/IsabelNAngelo/…

＊checks Twitter profile＊ My Mastodon-Twitter crossposter bot is still running, but if news reports are accurate, it will stop working in 4 days when Twitter removes free API access. Probably a good thing. At this point, with Tweetbot down, I… @comex/109813194678586258" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1098131…

Well, it’s still likely months at least before I even leave my job, and who knows how long after that until my Fancy Indie Project is in a releasable state (a project which I have fantasized about in detail but, for legal reasons, haven’t written a… @comex/109813161330413318" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1098131…

Recently learned about Sigsum, an alternative to Sigstore/Rekor for software release transparency (like Certificate Transparency but for executables), developed by a sister company to Mullvad VPN. Looks neat, but AFAICT, neither project has a… @comex/109813103725077205" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1098131…

Today I tried to get that HDMI lag detector circuit to work again. It seems like the problem is that everything is just… too dark? With 3.3V -> phototransistor -> 1MΩ -> ground, voltage across the resistor is 350mV ‘bright’, 20mV… @comex/109808687066206105" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1098086…

Ooh, Ivory (Mastodon client for iOS) is out! Still missing major features and in ‘Early Access’, but now on the App Store rather than being a TestFlight beta. Toot!, you were pretty good, but I know where my loyalties lie.

This is the best YouTube video I’ve watched in a long time. What If Mario Characters looked Like Their Original Sprites? youtu.be/ZtafO1bRFYw

Update: I built it on a breadboard and it still didn’t work. My working theory is that I broke one or more components while experimenting and need to replace them. I’m bad at this, but I guess there’s only one way to get better.

Today I wrote my first FPGA program. It blinked an LED. Then I wrote my second FPGA program, which just set the LED on or off based on an input pin, and discovered that the very simple circuit I copied from somewhere on the Internet didn’t… @comex/109770357504408360" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1097703…

Or maybe learn nushell.

Why doesn’t my shell have parallel `for` loops built in. I know there’s xargs and GNU parallel, but they both involve awkwardly representing the loop body as a string and dealing with escaping issues. It’s much simpler to use a shell… @comex/109779455760791750" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1097794…

Caveat: A large chunk of compilation time is spent in optimizations/codegen, and that design space is actually well-explored by the many JIT compilers. Or at least part of that space. I think there may be room to explore in the subspace of… @comex/109762238289010826" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1097622…

If you take a modern C++ or Rust compiler and think about optimizing it… There’s lots of “low-hanging fruit” in the form of incrementality and parallelism. Not truly “low-hanging” as in easy to implement; it’s actually extremely… @comex/109762209016321862" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1097622…

＊peeks head out in 2023＊ Still no HDMI 2.1 capture cards. But they’re coming, according to gamerevolution.com/guides/931266-… (written last month).

Pretty high-effort Smash Ultimate mod: youtube.com/watch?v=e1Kwp_…

How do reverse-engineering tools fare at recovering symbols from ObjC runtime metadata? Ghidra does it by default. Binary Ninja does it if you choose Plugins -> Objective-C -> Analyze Structures. Confusing, since this isn't about… @comex/109696347969005749" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1096963…

Okay, get this. llvm-nm, the default nm on Darwin, which I always knew as 'the tool that dumps nlist entries', can synthesize symbols from ObjC runtime metadata. But only Apple's private version, not LLVM upstream or even swift-llvm! And it's also… @comex/109696319501078098" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1096963…

TIL that reverse engineering system libs on macOS is even more of a shitshow than it used to be. dyld is harder to compile, and its shared cache extractor is unable to locate local symbols, even though they do seem to still be there (unlike on iOS where… @comex/109695949431021397" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mas.to/@comex/1096959…

I have a half-formed plan to go independent. If and when that happens (eep, I'm scared to even mention it), writing a working cache extractor (again) will be one of the first orders of business.