Definitely does NOT work for me.

My recipe, such as it is:

1. Be gentle with myself every morning. I may wake vaguely human, but consciousness and acuity require coffee, word games, ablutions, and point 2.

2. Dog walking, aka DW, aka Diagnostic Wandering, allows me to breathe fresh air, let my mind wander or perhaps let it focus. Most of the best code I've written in the last 4 years has been DW code. All of the weird bug discoveries have been DW discoveries. Most - and almost all - of my discoveries about how ND I am and how I really work have been DW discoveries.

3. Recognize which brain I have today, and select issues/workload based on that...

4. ...unless I really, really must, MUST, work on something specific, in which case force it, knowing there is a cost.

5. Recover from such costs as quickly as possible, but as gently as possible (cf #1, #2).

6. When off-roading with my very good friend the CTO, do NOT talk about work...

7. ...unless we both agree something needs 30-90s, after which resume #6.

8. Watch football all day Saturday, if possible, preferably Liverpool, but not necessarily. Detach. (If Saturday is impossible, e.g., family obligations, substitute Sunday.)

9. Read in bed every night before turning off the light, regardless of how tired I am. Subject is irrelevant (current bedside stack: LotR (again), two books of category theory, Ulysses). One sentence, one paragraph, one page, or as many as need be, until I start to drift off. If my GF has to collect the book from chest and turn off the light, so much the better! :-> (She's a night owl, there is no cost and there is much joy to her in this.)

10. Endeavour to start the bedtime process between 2300 and 2330 as often as possible - but see #1 re gentleness. DO teeth. EVERY night. REGARDLESS.

11. Nap occasionally. Ah, my 60s.

12. Recognize when #11 is a MUST, not just a SHOULD.

Let the brain cook and stew and bubble and backburn whilst doing other things. As effective as DWs for things that are more "R" than "d".

Triple the price of 1Gbps fibre to the home and we might get a bit more upset.

nan isn't anything. It's an early attempt at None when no/few (common) languages had that concept.

That python allows nan as an index is just so many kinds of buggy.

Sometime ago I wrote a library for a customer that did exactly that: Open a number of resources, e.g., stdin, stdout, stderr, a pipe or two, a socket or two, make the seccomp calls necessary to restrict the use of read/write/etc. to the associated file descriptors, then lock out all other system calls - which includes seccomp-related calls.

Basically, the library took a very Capsicum-like approach of whitelisting specific actions then sealing itself against further changes.

This is a LOT of work, of course, and the available APIs don't make it particularly easy or elegant, but it is definitely doable. I chose this approach because the docker whitelist approach was far too open ended and "uncurated", if you will, for the use-case we were targeting.

In this particular case, I was aided by the fact the library was written to support the very specific use-case of filters running in containers using FIFOs for IPC, logging, and reporting: Every filter saw exactly the same interfaces to the world, so it was relatively easier to lock things down.

Having said that, I wish Linux had a Capsicum-equivalent call, or, even better for the approach I took, a friendlier way to whitelist specific calls.

This has me puzzled to the point of being dumbfounded: If libxml2-ee has fixed many security and other flaws in libxml2, then what's the point of directing people back to a project that is relatively flawed?

Licencing it as AGPL is also interesting, since the original was MIT, though I'm not sure they've worked out all of the kinks, given this example from one of the M4 files:

  # LICENSE
  #
  #   Copyright (c) 2011 Maarten Bosmans 
  #
  #   Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are
  #   permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice
  #   and this notice are preserved.  This file is offered as-is, without any
  #   warranty.

Define "here", please! Perhaps your "here" and mine differ, but the view from my here is that while all three plurals are generally acceptable, formulae is the correcter double plus good spelling for this context.

Once these bugs were fixed, things became deterministic, but to say that all software is deterministic is to assert some level of programming, build, and operational consistency that is often achievable with great effort.

Re gcc hacks: nope. No gcc'isms anywhere in the code, all warnings enabled, no warnings produced, just one case where a field is not updated in one very specific set of circumstances. Thanks for the suggestion, but that was one of the first things we thought of. There is a slight chance that it is actually a clang/llvm call stack depth bug, but the effort to reproduce that outweighs the impact of the bug, what with one thing and another not relevant here.

UB -> occasional non-determinism.

> Software used to be deterministic

Ah, someone fortunate enough to have never coded a heisenbug or trip over UB of various causes.

I've written plenty of well structured, well thought out mostly-deterministic software, then spent hours or days figuring what oversight summoned the gremlins.

(There is one low priority bug I've occasionally returned to over the last two-three years in case experience and back-burner musing may result in insight. Nope. Use gcc, no bug, use clang, bug, always, regardless of O level, debug level, etc. Everything else, all of it far more complex, works 100% reliably, it's just that one display update that fails.)

(It occurs to me that that is a bad example, because it IS deterministic, but none of us can pinpoint the "determiner".)

I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programming and consider error and edge cases, the rest don't.

Will the AIs get good enough so they/we won't have to? Or will people realize they are programming and discipline up?

It meant that the user received meaningful short updates as things progressed, with detailed information in system logs.

This made it much easier for testers and users to report bugs and for developers to understand what to look for in logs.

A great many words surround what seem to me to be red herring arguments and arbitrary definitions and groupings, with the word cult appearing in the article precisely 8 times without any justification for the statement in the headline. Moreover, the sentence "We can pop an epistemic bubble simply by exposing its members to the information and arguments that they’ve missed" seems woefully naive: By the definition included in the article, traditional views re the roles of women or blacks in society would be epistemic bubbles and not echo chambers, and women's right were not advanced and slavery not eliminated through the bringing of facts, but through long, arduous moral struggles to convince at least a majority that women and blacks merited the same rights as men and whites.

But it liked my comment on UBI and potential cost reductions through elimination of fraud detection and mitigation, so obviously it does things well. 1/2 /s? :->

Having said that....

If one is willing to build one's own HTTP server with integrated MAC, etc., and is able to demonstrate mitigations against known vulnerabilities, one may be able to get the certifying bodies on board. Time will tell.

Yes, this is very niche, but TUIs are in general niche.

What did it for me was thinking through how mutable==exclusive, non-mutable==shared, and getting my head around Send and Sync (not quite there yet).

AI helps me with boiler plate, but not with understanding, and if I don't understand I cannot validate what AI produces.

Rust is worth the effort.

Actual theme: LARGE tech companies suck.

Declared subject: you have to know how tech companies work

Actually subject: you have to know how large-and-or-disfunctional-and-or-sales-or-finance-bro-led-companies work.

Tagging @dang re title.

It ISN'T Venice you need to make me care about, it's YOU! Why should I spend any of my time on you?

A good first sentence should make me care about your perspective, at least for non-fiction about subjects well-studied.

Fiction, obvs, differs. Scalzi's Old Man's War had such a great first sentence I devoured the series.