Rob Landley's Blog Thing for 2025

I'm so burned out on Linux I'm looking at writing a lua vm for bare metal.

Los Vegas died the same way Sears did: they sold the land out from under themselves, became renters where they once owned, and the slumlords drained the business dry.

Not all heroes wear capes.

We're still fighting the civil war because John Brown was hung for treason and Robert E.

Capitalism is a religion where abundance and surplus are considered problems.

The IMF and the Bank of England have issued warnings about the AI bubble.

Got a toybox release out.

This week I learned about the "Nelson complexity" of oil refineries.

Arguing with codeberg.

Methane has a half life of 7 years in earth's atmosphere before oxidizing to CO2 and water.

Yesterday I met with the Money Concierge (to print out the bank records showing we PAID those taxes: between the St Paul ransomware attack and doge gutting IRS staffing it's PROBABLY just paperwork being slow to process, but still), and while I was there…

The spammers are taking advantage of the maga prudery->spyware doom loop, with light spearfishing: "Complete your Know Your Customer form to keep your Dreamhost account".

I should tweak my release procedure to have the news entry link to the tag name, not the tag hash.

Darn it, trying to update design.html to explain how to run the hermetic build on macos without homebrew and there's STILL a circular dependency.

Email du jour about initrd removal.

Got an email from patreon that texas passed some law to take sales taxes out of donations, and...

The AI " infinite money glitch" is called a wash trade.

US farmers just did to grain exports what confederate farmers did to the cotton industry 150 years ago.

Turns out toxic masculinity is most toxic for men, not that this is news.

I blathered about history again.

I really need to submit talk proposals to the plumbers' embedded track in tokyo.

Tried to check out a Lua book from the library, since I have a shiny new library card.

Sigh, lkml is imploding.

Cut and pasted from a reply to the initrd thread, because saying this sort of thing on lkml just makes them shake their canes and smack their gums.

Here's what I sent privately to Elliott last week in reply to his reply to my rant about Google.

I have not been blogging for a while, because the world's on fire.

Noticed the "basenc" command and considered adding it, but "echo hello | basenc" says I have to specify an encoding type (no default) and it only offers --longopts not short options, which made me lose interest.

Posted publicly about how disgusted I am with Google.

Ok, find -depth and -xdev are already acting global, and the -mindepth/-maxdepth "global" behavior is crazy: $ find toys -name x -o -mindepth 2 2>/dev/null | wc -l 277 $ find toys -name x -a -mindepth 2 2>/dev/null | wc -l 0 And find . \!

Bug report in find, the OTHER side of the "warning: you have specified a global option" spam gnu/stallman/ftaghn emits.

Spent the day over at my sister's going through Mt.

Did a full build of all targets, I think I have the patches to make 6.16 work.

I am NOT posting a snarky reply, I am instead blogging it.

I updated scripts/recreate-prereq.sh to work with the new kconfig plumbing, but hit a missing bit in the new kconfig plumbing (allnoconfig wasn't honoring KCONFIG_ALLCONFIG overrides).

Huh, lkml.iu.edu is down.

And my laptop rebooted.

Ooh, a 0BSD reimplementation of Lua in Zig.

I was looking at 0BSD licensed repositories and Microsoft Github rate limited me.

The toybox "readahead" command is subtly borked in a way I _actively_ don't want to have to care about, AND YET.

It's mildly ironic that the day of the youtube boycott my phone's unable to charge and almost out of battery.

Editing a zillion old blog entries before youtube goes away and I can't verify that the link to the video I saved actually goes where I think it does.

Ok, hopefully we've FINALLY gotten the tax lady all the info we needed.

Curled up in a ball pretty much all week over stress from the ongoing censorship stupidity.

The library was closed today.

Of course youtube is going to extend the UK's mass doxxing to the USA starting on the 13th.

And the UK is censoring the internet, pushing it all over its borders.

Slowly unpacking the new apartment, and figuring out which stairwell leads to "dog jail" (the fenced square of astroturf we're supposed to take Adverb to, so he can inevitably pee on the bushes right outside of it.)

[Editorial note: I cut and paste this out of something I either decided not to post to a list, or sent in a private email, but fell so far behind on editing and uploading my blog entries that I no longer remember the context.

A nice person sent me a toybox logo image they'd whipped up... which is basically the busybox logo with "toybox" written on it.

I haven't been blogging regularly, in part because I'm exhausted from the move but also because I'm tired.