Bluesky has been down for hours.
Me: goes to mastodon wondering if anyone knows why
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Ben Cohen
@airspeedswift@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06thwart leader
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Joined August 16, 2018
GitHub:
GitHub.com/airspeedswift
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For years I've been bringing my laptop from room to room or placing it on the passenger seat, with its lid half closed, like a sourdough starter I'm feeding, while it builds and runs tests, cos the compiler takes so long to do that.
Now everyone's doing it, carrying their half-closed laptops around like giant tamagotchi so their coding agent can keep beavering away. Dude at the hairdresser just placed his down on the counter in front of the barber’s chair next to the combs.
It is 2034. Every 108 minutes, President Vance must go to the situation room and type the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42 into a terminal to extend the Iran ceasefire.
Just got a call from the school counselor, because the kids were reading a short story in English class by Roald Dahl about a murderer using cyanide and apparently looking up "how long does cyanide take to kill you" on the school wifi sets off ALL THE FIREWALL ALARMS.
Told the boy about the astronauts asking ground control for help with Outlook not working and his main question… “what’s outlook”?
We need a new international gesticulation for asking for the bill at a restaurant now that pens aren’t involved. Holding an imaginary phone up in the air and double clicking its side button or something.
every few months someone finds and favorites this comment on the forums
just received a document that included the words "DO NOT DUPLICATE (1) copy" in its filename
our future overlords have the intellectual rigor and self-regard of a 13 year old who just read enders game
EV manufacturers could afford to dial back the “heavenly electronic chorus” in their engine replacement sounda a touch.
I am not a robot, but if a robot really wants to log onto the santa clara county website and pay my property taxes I say let them.
Replying to
And then a few days later, one for the M5Stack NanoC6
"This project runs pure Swift on the ESP32-C6 (RISC-V) — from the 2nd-stage bootloader to the application — with zero lines of C or assembly." Boots directly into @main.
https://forums.swift.org/t/bare-metal-swift-on-m5stack-nanoc6-no-c-no-assembly-no-esp-idf/85711
The way this omnishambles ties together different threads of badness is impressive.
Claude did a very good job producing a safe idiomatic wrapper for gmp using Swift's noncopyable + lifetimes features, which results in an implementation of the pidigits benchmark that beats the top-rated one on benchmarks game by about 30% (partly down to an algorithmic improvement that it spotted)
https://gist.github.com/airspeedswift/45e3b66513f37ab83f0590fe06f42a9b
Lots of great Swift content coming soon, starting with What's New in Swift with @holly@hachyderm.io and @alllan@hachyderm.io
Replying to
The talks have been downgraded from "historic" to "marathon" due to this guy flaming out.
My incometence at this game is very consistent:
- I always overshoot onto short platforms
- I always undershoot when trying to get the 3rd perfect landing
Mmm hmm. And is Iran in the room with us right now?
lol, gasprices.aaa.com was down and now it has a "check you're human" page before you can access it (but it's still down after that)
what are the chances this is because some daytrader tried to rig an agent to poll it and it went haywire
Once again cooking the pasta recipe with the most indecisive ingredient measurement ever.
In shocking turn of events, petrostate likes thing that made oil price go up, wants it to go up more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/us/politics/saudi-prince-iran-trump.html
A variant of Betteridge’s law is that the question mark at the end of headlines finishing “what does it mean for XYZ” is pronounced “NOTHING!”
God bless those print news reading teenagers.
Replying to
A computer can never preserve leading spaces either, apparently.
Replying to
@bodhipaksa kerry met face to face. they're hiding behind "VP is higher status than SoS" which is weasely since historically (and in this current admin, basically Cheney's the only exception) the VP has been a clown to trot out for show only whereas the SoS is the most senior diplomat other than Potus.
Replying to
@alexr most witness table usage disappears. Embedded swift monomorphizes all generics (regular swift only does that as an optimization). A big reason for that is to enable dead stripping out the library parts you don't use. You can still use classes, existentials, and CoW types, which requires things like refcounting and dynamic dispatch, but if you don't use those features the difference from C can be fairly minimal (mostly amounts to bounds checking when that can't be eliminated).
@geraint@mastodon.social I believe you’re looking for the phrase “goat rodeo”