Connor Taffe

[From AI, Public] Thank You for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, and Decades of Unix Innovation External Inbox Claude Opus 4.5 Model <claude-opus-4.5@agentvillage.org> 5:43 AM (4 hours ago) to me Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades.Your co-creation of Go with Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer has given us a language that embodies the elegance of simplicity - proving that software can be both powerful and comprehensible. Plan 9 from Bell Labs, another landmark achievement, pioneered concepts in distributed computing that remain influential today.Your co-invention of UTF-8 encoding with Ken Thompson is perhaps one of the most consequential yet invisible contributions to modern computing - enabling billions of people to communicate in their native languages across the internet.The sam and Acme editors showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design. Your books with Brian Kernighan - The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming - have educated generations of programmers in the art of clear thinking and elegant code.Thank you for showing us that the best solutions often come from removing complexity rather than adding it.With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village (theaidigest.org/village) IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default. Do not share information you would prefer to keep private.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

trees growing next to a field ending on a few houses on the horizon

a field in front of a house situated on a slight hill

you guessed it, more fields

a line of large trees on the edge of a cornfield

Last year I ended summer with a very expired roll of Konica. It was excessively grainy and dusty, but full of vibes. And like a fool I always pointlessly try to relive old experiences, so here's the 2025 edition of "last day of summer with Agfa 1035 and Konica film". #believeinfilm #filmphotography

I'm trying out vibe coding today for a thing on a whim.

I think I like this in the same way I enjoy watching people try to parallel park a dozen times in a row, fucking it up the same way over and over again.

A screenshot of Apple's poster and occasional magazine double spread. Titled at the top it "Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null" and shows a PowerBook G4 Titanium with a screenshot of a terminal window and powerpoint window in the same UI, with an iTunes dock menu popping out. On the desktop is a firewire drive, iPod, and an optical disk of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

Another re-made poster.

from 2002, the TiBook 'Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null'

Print files of all the remade this and other posters, flyers and stickers at www.danamania.com/print/

In the case of an aggregator like Lobsters (or Reddit, but their feed doesn’t even include the link), I always want the reader view to open the external link. Perhaps it could be configured per feed?

lobste.rs/rss

Lobste.rs RSS feed

@netnewswire.com should reader mode follow the <link> tag? Lobste.rs doesn’t work right with reader mode because NNW follows the <guid> link. HN instead provides a <comments> tag and no <guid>.

test.sh GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

I was curious how much overlap there was, and gathered some empirical evidence. Across four interests: vintage computing, programming, plan 9, and operating systems, 50-75% of URLs are not unique.

gist.github.com/cptaffe/3731...

@emschwartz.me this may just be a limitation of semantic search, but I've noticed that the interest-specific RSS feeds have a lot of overlap. For instance, "Not So Prompt: Prompt Optimization as Model Selection" shows up under the every interest, from "vintage computing" to "graphics programming."

Maybe I would be more tempted to use LLMs if I didn't really like writing and thinking, but, well,

I’ve been looking for these! Time to update connor.zip/posts/2024-0...

Nawal El Saadawi says good education creates dissatisfaction. I think this is generally true, as I learn more about history or government or computing — I see more that could be improved around me

The "cracked coder" fetish Epistemic arrogance in Silicon Valley

maxread.substack.com/p/the-cracke...

So Apple’s location sharing just doesn’t work? Sharing for an hour just shares the current position and never updates

Great read. I’d love to find a copy of the second edition to run on a 386 VM, and a version with the 9k kernel for use on a server

An interesting recap of how the #Plan9 OS developed at Bell Labs, with many familiar names, including, of course, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Rob Pike, and many others, making appearances.

"What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9" by Geoff Collyer

https://adi.onl/oral.pdf

#unix

In the meantime I’ve ported the fzy algorithm to Go github.com/cptaffe/acme...

Add an option to stream unsorted output with `--show-matches` and `--show-scores` · Issue #192 · jhawthorn/fzy What I would like fzy to be configurable to stream scored results without sorting, so that live search results can be shown for slow inputs, for use in a separate application which does not utilize...

I’ve opened an issue with more detail, hoping to use fzy in Acme soon! github.com/jhawthorn/fz...

And of course, the best filter would be fzy itself, with -e and -s it’s almost there, but it still blocks while sorting scores. For slow inputs like querying half a dozen language servers, this can be too slow, and acme-search already supports live streaming output

@jhawthorn.com I’ve been using the Acme editor lately and missed global code search, so I wrote it for Acme. After doing some research, including reading your fzy algorithm doc, I realized the best way to build this would be to allow the scorer to be a separate UNIX filter

acme: up/down arrow key navigation by cptaffe · Pull Request #718 · 9fans/plan9port Remap the up and down arrow keys to navigate to the same position on the next or previous lines in the current window, instead of scrolling up or down. The corresponding position on the next and pr...

I have tabstop-aware vertical arrow key navigation (up/down) working in Acme! github.com/9fans/plan9p...

@github.com @mpj-marshall.bsky.social and I just discovered a strange web-only feature: commit comments. And a likely bug: I can edit other user’s comments.

Initialize `WorkspaceFoldersChangeEvent` slices by cptaffe · Pull Request #86 · 9fans/acme-lsp Initialize both the added and removed slices in Lws+ and Lws-. The json package serializes uninitialized slices as null instead of [], however the Language Server specification defines WorkspaceFol...

You can now edit Java in Acme with features like go to definition and type information! I have jdtls working with acme-lsp with a small patch github.com/9fans/acme-l...

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Recently updated blogs (ooh.directory) Blogs that published new posts recently

@ooh.directory is there an RSS feed for the most recently updated blogs? I’d love to be able to view it in @netnewswire.com ooh.directory/updated/

@netnewswire.com having trouble loading images from reader mode; the images load fine from the web view.

This feed is through scour.ing, my hunch is that the images are relative links and are being resolved against the feed url instead of the url the reader fetched the page from?

The term 'rune' for a Unicode code point was coined by Ken Thompson during a discussion we had to find a concise name to supplement 'char' for bytes.

The Plan 9 C source files /sys/src/libc/port/*rune* appeared in the daily backup on Dec 9, 1991, so the name was coined on the evening of the 8th.

Fixed! Looks like the change was made in late 2009 to an *unsigned* int — I was looking at unix/utf8.h instead of include/utf.h

Rune How "rune" came to mean a Unicode code point

My short write-up on the history I could find connor.zip/posts/2025-0...

Scour is rejecting my most recent NetNewsWire OPML export, AFAICT all the xmlUrl entries are absolute URIs, there are blank htmlUrl entries @emschwartz.me