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lukehon Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem

Also, you can only deduct it in a single financial year if you are eligible for the Instant asset write-off program.

I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but this common misunderstanding about tax deductions does remind me of a certain Seinfeld episode :)

Kramer: It's just a write off for them

Jerry: How is it a write off?

Kramer: They just write it off

Jerry: Write it off what?

Kramer: Jerry all these big companies they write off everything

Jerry: You don't even know what a write off is

Kramer: Do you?

Jerry: No. I don't

Kramer: But they do and they are the ones writing it off

lukehon Hardware Stockholm Syndrome

XMOS still very much alive. But CSP comes with its own set of challenges which ironically have force one back to using shared memory.

lukehon NFS at 40 – Remembering the Sun Microsystems Network File System

It was amusing to read the comment about the flat UID/GID namespace being a problem, identified as far back as 1984. This is something that DCE addressed by using a larger namespace (UUIDs), and Windows finally got right using a hierarchical one (SIDs).

lukehon Io_uring is not an event system (2021)

io_uring can also use an eventfd to signal you need to check the completion queue. We use this with libdispatch to run a clang block on completion (the block is stored in the user_data). Admittedly this is a very specific use case.

lukehon The use of LLM assistants for kernel development

Context: I’m working on a series of patches to support MDIO-less configuration of mv88e6xxx switches. They have not been submitted to netdev yet as they’re dependent on other unsubmitted patches from another kernel developer. The code above is a WIP so fixes have been squashed. You’ll have to take my word that I found Claude Code helpful in reviewing the code, I’m not going to dig around for the previous commit hash to satisfy some HN comment.

To the point of compilers warning about uninitialized variables, this surprised me; perhaps I was building without optimization.

lukehon The use of LLM assistants for kernel development

This is the fix. The bug commit was squashed. I don’t really know what I need to prove here, except that Claude Code helped identify an issue and fix it.

lukehon The use of LLM assistants for kernel development

Sure. It was an uninitialized variable in the retry loop below. Fixed now.

https://github.com/PADL/linux/commit/b83b9619eecc02c5e95a1d3...

lukehon The use of LLM assistants for kernel development

I used Claude Code to review a kernel driver patch last week. It found an issue that was staring me in the face, indeed one I would’ve expected the compiler to flag.

lukehon Blender is Native on Windows 11 on Arm

Yes, since NEXTSTEP.

lukehon A Real PowerBook: The Macintosh Application Environment on a Pa-RISC Laptop

I stand corrected, very interesting!

lukehon A Real PowerBook: The Macintosh Application Environment on a Pa-RISC Laptop

Also was the foundation of Blue Box if I remember right. (And QuickTime’s portability layer was for Carbon.)

lukehon Arvo Pärt at 90

If you are ever in Tallinn, it’s well worth the visit to the Arvo Pärt Centre.

lukehon The curious case of the Unix workstation layout

When I was an intern at Apple in late 1997, my main machine was a PA RISC workstation running OPENSTEP for Mach (can’t recall which version). It was a lot faster than the PowerPC I had on my desk so I did much of my development on that before testing on Rhapsody.

lukehon I Switched from Flutter and Rust to Rust and Egui

We do something similar for the UI for our audio hardware product. AES70 control messages are sent over Flutter platform channels to a Swift backend. The glue is open source - GitHub.com/PADL/FlutterSwift.

lukehon Swift Android Workgroup

This was really community driven, not by Apple.

lukehon Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC

I like that last sentence!

lukehon How fast are Linux pipes anyway?

Well, it’s probably fine but, it’s an audio application where metering (not audio) is delivered from a control plane process to a UI process. Lower latency is better. But haven’t measured it.

lukehon How fast are Linux pipes anyway?

Does modern Linux have anything close to Doors? I’ve an embedded application where two processes exchange small amounts of data which are latency sensitive, and I’m wondering if there’s anything better than AF_UNIX.

lukehon What’s new in Swift 6.2

Also using it in an embedded Linux project [1]. 75% of code written for this project is Swift. The rest is Dart and C/C++. It’s a productive language.

[1] https://forums.swift.org/t/an-embedded-audio-product-built-w...

lukehon What’s new in Swift 6.2

AsyncExtensions implements many Combine-like patterns in structured concurrency.

lukehon How a single line of code could brick your iPhone

Manual page says Mac OS X 10.3.

lukehon QEMU Version 10.0.0 Released

Page 36, very droll.

lukehon The state of binary compatibility on Linux and how to address it

Windows having multiple C libraries has its own pain points, in particular it's difficult to ship binary libraries that return allocated memory to their consumer (you either need to have the library consumer allocate the memory, which probably explains why so many Win32 APIs have this behaviour, or allow alloc/free functions to be registered). Not to mention different C libraries having their own file handle, TLS, etc state. Unsurprisingly Microsoft now ships the Universal CRT (UCRT) as part of Windows.

lukehon Swiftly 1.0

Things I like about Swift: works great on Linux, fun to write in, excellent interoperability with C, C++ and even Java.

Thinks I like less: compile times, binary size, runtime type introspection overhead (Codable performance was killing our application), getting async/await right (still that's always going to be hard whichever way you slice it).

lukehon Swiftly 1.0

More and more, and Foundation is now sharing a codebase between Darwin and non-Darwin platforms for many types now.

lukehon DIY PTP Grandmaster Clock with a Raspberry Pi

https://www.timebeat.app/

Also making some very nice stuff at great price points.

lukehon Blasting Past WebP - An analysis of the NSO BLASTPASS iMessage exploit

Sure, but that’s not relevant in the timeline of the OP.

lukehon Blasting Past WebP - An analysis of the NSO BLASTPASS iMessage exploit

Just FYI to the article, more recent versions of CF are available as part of swift-corelibs-foundation.

lukehon Cobalt Networks CobaltOS: Proxmox Port

Sun paid an absolutely fortune for Cobalt if I remember right!

lukehon Welcome to Ladybird, a truly independent web browser

Swift can be just as fast as C or C++. The danger, in my experience, is that it's not always clear what the performance implications of the language's many convenient abstractions are. (A random example, I recently improved one code path by over an order of magnitude by replacing some serialisation that used Codable with hand-rolled code. Still 100% Swift, just paid a lot of attention to avoiding RTTI and allocations.)