Notices by Gergely Nagy 🐁 (algernon@trunk.mad-scientist.club), page 21

This morning, we played with the twins, as usual. But! We were listening to the Neverhood soundtrack. They loved it.

So much so, that *both* fell asleep after breakfast. Even more, we could dress up the little lady, without waking her up! While music was still playing!

And now they are sleeping on the terrace, so peaceful like never before.

Thanks to the Neverhood, and @cwebber for reminding me yesterday. :)

@cwebber It's been *ages* I listened to The Neverhood. Thank you for reminding me! :)

(Also, the game is incredible too!)

Bought a swing for the kids. We should have got one much, much sooner!

They *love* it!

"I can definitely tell that you guys are putting a lot of effort into making the code base simple and concise. I've spent the day reading and have been able to read most of the source in a day which is impressive and cool. It's awesome to know how my keyboard works from the inside"

<3

(https://twitter.com/Kethku/status/967226618950270976)

Just one more song, and I go home.

Lem was ahead of his time.

(Seen on the birdsite)

Hmmm... I might end up improving my static site generator to generate gopher-servable content too. Perhaps I could host the raw markdown there? At least, for posts that I wrote in markdown.

On the other hand, I do not feel comfortable using a plain-text protocol.

Aaand upgraded my instance to Mastodon v2.2.0. So far so good, upgrade went as smoothly as usual.

But then, this is a tiny little instance.

On the other hand, I could just add a local alias that runs ssh behind the scenes...

Company firewall blocks gopher (it blocks everything but https, git, and ssh, basically). Not entirely happy. I have to ssh home and gopher from there.

Turns out that the issue is with using 「__builtin_bswap32」 the way we used it. If we lift out its argument into a temporary variable, the issue is gone. Calling conventions do not necessarily apply to builtins, apparently.

I suppose it is not possible to have both @algernon *and* @algernon@mad-scientist.club work a the same time (with both pointing to the same instance)?

Eh, fuck. It's past 3am, and I'm reading x86_64 assembly, and studying compilers.

Dear brain, please stop. Thank you, and good night.

@oz Yep. Hence why this filter is counter-productive, in my opinion.

While universities can provide a good framework, there are very, very, very few cases in one's day-to-day job that requires them to solve the kind of brain teasers thrown at applicants. Brain teasers require a very different mind-set, thinking.

@oz 'tis not brain freeze in my case, it's that I did not study programming at university, so I don't know a dozen algorithms off the top of my head. If I need to come up with one, I need time to think. I need a spark. That does not come on demand.

I solved the challenge sunday night in about 30 lines of Clojure (while in the shower), readable, reasonably fast and efficient too. Just needed to sleep on it. That's how I normally work too. If a company doesn't appreciate that, their problem. :p

@oz Yep. Quite a lot of it, actually. :]

Turns out I perform badly on coding challenges (I knew that. Always fail these things.)

It's better this way, though. Simple, comfortable $dayjob is just what I need right now. I'll get my challenges elsewhere. Mind you, $dayjob just recently provided me with a fun little exercise in debugging (see my other recent toots), so there's that.

For added context, this is in a function called 「foo_set_id」, called as 「foo_set_id(self, foo_get_id(self));」, where 「foo_get_id」 does the reverse, pretty much, and both poke the 「self」 struct. The disassembly shows the functions getting called in proper order.

This is strange, fascinating, and very scary.