I noticed a bug in Guile 3.0.9’s aarch64 atomics handling, and found a couple of apparent solutions (1, 2), but one of them is weird enough for me to write this post. (ETA: Nonstory. The problem was that the mov instruction isn’t idempotent! Hat tip to Andy Wingo for figuring out what the issue was. I’ve updated the rest of the article, and I’ll...

As is well-known, JavaScript’s Promise is not a monad. It will happily treat Promise<Promise<T>> as if it was Promise<T>: > [123, await Promise.resolve(123), await Promise.resolve(Promise.resolve(123))] [ 123, 123, 123 ] This can bite you in unexpected ways. Imagine you have a CSP-like Channel<T> class for sending...

Python 3.13 will, for inscrutable reasons, remove the crypt module from the standard library. The excuses given in PEP 0594 boil down to “here are some good reasons why new code shouldn’t use this module.” What about existing code? Ah well. So anyway, for those of us who need some way of generating $6$ SHAcrypt SHA-512 shadow-password-database...

direnv works fine on Windows 11, but if an .envrc tries to set the PATH, the result will be a path in Windows format, not Unix format.1 Instead of adding eval $(direnv hook bash) to your .bashrc, try the following snippet: export _unmangle_direnv_names='PATH' _unmangle_direnv_paths() { for k in $_unmangle_direnv_names; do eval...

Trusting Signal and/or WhatsApp and/or Android (google) and/or iOS (apple) with your precious photos, videos, and chats is a huge mistake. All the photos, videos and chat history on my mother’s phone are now completely inaccessible to us, despite having recent backups and all the necessary keys and passphrases. Signal Can I transfer Signal...

I’ve just updated the Preserves spec to version 0.990.0. I feel like a 1.0-rc is approaching! The main change since spec version 0.7.1 has been to simplify the binary syntax for Preserves Values: Both “short” and “medium” SignedInteger representations (starting with tags 0x9x/0xAx) were removed. They weren’t pulling their weight....