Saturday Morning Coffee
Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
Another very quiet week at home and work.
I hope you enjoy the links.
Dan Heching and Zoe Sottile • CNN
Estey said Simmons died early on Saturday morning. He had celebrated his 76th birthday the day before. “We lost an Angel today - a true Angel,” Estey added.
I remember Richard Simmons from the 80’s. Always the showman, always enthusiastic, always fighting to teach folks how to lose weight and talking about his own struggles.
R.I.P.
Bob Newhart, the genteel but sharply satirical comic whose TV series “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Newhart” were huge hits throughout the 1970s and ’80s, died Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 94.
I know he’s well know for his television series but I really liked him as Papa Elf in the movie Elf.
R.I.P.
The probe was recorded traveling at 635,266 kilometers (394,736 miles) per hour on June 29, the second time it’s reached that speed since it launched in 2018. We’re talking around 500 times faster than the speed of sound here.
It’s impossible for me to wrap my brain around the idea of going 394,736 miles per hour. 😳
But, it’s pretty cool!
Lily Hay Newman, Matt Burgess, and Andy Greenberg • WIRED
Only a handful of times in history has a single piece of code managed to instantly wreck computer systems worldwide. The Slammer worm of 2003. Russia’s Ukraine-targeted NotPetya cyberattack. North Korea’s self-spreading ransomware WannaCry. But the ongoing digital catastrophe that rocked the internet and IT infrastructure around the globe over the past 12 hours appears to have been triggered not by malicious code released by hackers, but by the software designed to stop them.
What a day for our global network, Microsoft, and CrowdStrike.
I feel terrible for any shop using CrowdStrike and their DevOps or IT Administrators and Technicians. The only way to fix this issue is to be in the room, in front of the computer.
I once worked at a pistachio and almond processing plant that ran on Windows PC’s. At times I needed access to certain computers and had to get someone to unlock a door for me. Can you imagine having to fix thousands of computers with this issue? Sure, developers and the techies in the organization can fix it on their own and help others, but what a pain in the butt. ❤️
Hafiz Rashid • The New Republic
“I have stood up in rooms with all of these people and I have said, ‘Game out your actual plan for me.’ What are the risks of this going to the Supreme Court? And no one had an answer for me.… I’m talking about the lawyers. I’m talking about the legislators,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
What’s the plan? Seems Democrats don’t have one.
This entire kerfuffle couldn’t have come at a worse time. More than ever we need to be united to stop the GOP in their tracks. They are the political enemy and you defeat a political enemy by beating them at the polls.
Turn out, vote for the Democrat, save democracy.
It really is that simple.
With performance optimizations seemingly having lost their relevance in an era of ever-increasing hardware performance, there are still many good reasons to spend some time optimizing code. In a recent preprint article by [Paul Bilokon] and [Burak Gunduz] of the Imperial College London the focus is specifically on low-latency patterns that are relevant for applications such as high-frequency trading (HFT). In HFT the small margins are compensated for by churning through absolutely massive volumes of trades, all of which relies on extremely low latency to gain every advantage. Although FPGA-based solutions are very common in HFT due their low-latency, high-parallelism, C++ is the main language being used beyond FPGAs.
A friend worked on one of these high speed trading systems. The pressure on him to write bug free, highly performant C++ code was immense. These trading folks are crazy serious about making money and these systems need to be super solid. Their drive to be filthy rich depends on it.
He didn’t stay for long. The stress wasn’t worth it.
Heather Cox Richardson • Letters from an American
This morning, after a day of Republicans insisting that it is political polarization to suggest that Trump is a danger to our democracy, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump in the last days of his presidency, dismissed the classified documents case against the former president. She wrote that “Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution.”
It seems Judge Aileen Cannon is in the bag for Trump. She’s been delaying and dragging her feet for months on this matter. Either she’s incompetent or corrupt or maybe a little of both?
Regardless, we can also thank corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for planting the seed of this plan to dismiss the case. In the Trump Immunity decision he noted Jack Smith’s appointment may be unconstitutional. Of course the documents case has nothing to do with the immunity case. He just slipped it in there to sow doubt. It worked.
There is still a path to prosecution but it won’t happen before the election. If the Orange Clown wins it’ll never happen.
Ultimately the reaction to 18’s initial public beta may be more about what’s not there than what is. When Apple first announced its latest annual update to the mobile software platform back in June, most of the attention went to a suite of features—the top-billed ones if you look at the company’s iOS 18 Preview Page—collected under the aegis of Apple Intelligence. These marked the company’s much anticipated foray into artificial intelligence and promise everything from image generation to a reinvigorated Siri.
TL;DR - if you’re expecting to see Apple Intelligence as part of the betas, don’t hold your breath. Those features will roll out over the next year and into the future.
Outside of the excitement surrounding Apple Intelligence there are plenty of nice features to explore and enjoy.
Nick Schager • The Daily Beast
Longlegs is the horror event of the summer—a serial killer thriller that plays like a nightmarish swirl of The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Psycho and Zodiac, albeit with far less rationality and considerably more demonic derangement.
I’m excited to see this! I’d imagine this is one film I’ll be able to get Kim to see in theaters. 😃
TL;DR: put your open source code under the AGPL license.
While I don’t agree with a lot of what’s said in this piece, it is worth a read to gain a different perspective on Open Source and the problems around maintaining it.
At the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Wedson Almeida Filho and Kent Overstreet led a combined storage and filesystem session on using Rust for Linux filesystems.
I like how this was written. It’s basically meeting notes from the session.
The Rust developers will have to be the ones to absorb the pain of keeping up with changes to the filesystem. As a developer using a newer technology I wouldn’t expect anything less.
I’m looking forward to the day we see Swift showing up in filesystem components on the Mac. There is an effort underway to rewrite Foundation in Swift. That’s a great start.
Apple has approved UTM SE, an app for emulating a computer to run classic software and games, weeks after the company rejected it and barred it from being notarized for third-party app stores in the European Union. The app is now available for free for iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS.
I’d imagine European Regulators made this happen. Apple doesn’t need them crawling any further up their butts. They’re already in enough trouble.
This is the golden age of full-size pickup trucks. Because the market demands it, and because the market is enormous and extremely profitable, the latest breed of pickup trucks is comfortable, commodious, potent, and dare I say luxurious. The Ford F-150, Chevrolet Silverado, and Ram 1500 are, respectively, the top-selling vehicles in America. And with their Brobdingnagian scale, appliqué steer horns, remotely erecting towing hitches, and power-opening tailgates that drop like the rear flap on a cowpoke’s union suit, pickup trucks may be the greatest examples of overcompensation ever invented.
This is a piece from 2019 but it still holds up today. Trucks are definitely no longer the multipurpose towing and hauling vehicles they used to be. When I got one with power windows and AC I thought it was pretty luxurious, but modern pickups are like luxury automobiles.
I’d bet real farmers and workmen using trucks as trucks don’t buy the luxury models. 😁 I’ve seen the inside of real work trucks. They smell of dirt and oil and usually have mud all over the floorboards. Not to mention barebones interiors.
My grandfather was a mobile mechanic for his entire life. His trucks had flat beds with large generators, a boom, and tool chests and various tool compartments. When his motor or transmission wore out, no problem, he pulled them and replaced them, himself.
I’m sure those folks still exist today but luxury trucks weren’t made for them. 😃
This week was Apple Developer Christmas also known as WWDC. It’s a time of year we learn what Apple has in store for developers for the next year.
We had a lot of fun this week tracking down a bug in the project I’m working on. It was exposed by slow server response, which was because the service had grown. So the bug was icky. Once we tracked it down on the client side we were able to fix it up pretty quickly. I love doing stuff like this! Finding and fixing bugs is part of any developers job along with writing code.
I had to set aside my upgrade of some of the networking code changes I wanted to make on the project I’m on at work. That’s fine. I knew it would be a bit of a process to update this code and to be honest it may be a fools errand. But I still believe it would make the code more maintainable and eliminate two third party dependencies. But you have to be ready to sideline work like this when more pressing work shows up.
I thought, very foolishly, I’d be able to make $200 a month with 
Feeling under the weather today. I started getting sick in the middle of the week. I slept a lot yesterday and hope to have a quiet weekend.
Well, I’ve managed to put some time into Stream for Mac this week. I’d really messed it up trying to force the codebase into something I wanted, so I started over. Yeah, that sucks, but I think in the end it will have been the right choice.
It’s been a fun week at work. I’ve been fixing bugs here and there. For some reason I enjoy this type of work. I spent a decent amount of time looking at memory graphs for object retentions problems and fixed a couple of good ones this week. That always feels great!
I liked 
Being a huge fan of The Iconfactory’s work I was excited to see the new site and it certainly delivered. It’s absolutely gorgeous and really does put what they do front and center. I hope it pays huge dividends for them!
Goose stepping moron pictured above
The image above really captures what people like about a Trump Presidency. They think he’s going to make their lives wonderful by casting out all the people they hate; black and brown, Jewish or Muslim. What they don’t understand is he’s going to screw them over along with everyone else.
