Linkblog/2025/04/02

No, it’s not at all an April Fools’ Joke or anything along those lines… An Intel open-source engineer just posted the patch series entitled “hide the disgusting turds” for the Linux kernel.

💩

Nowadays, makefiles are ubiquitous in software. Most C and C++ projects have used them historically, and still use them as a build system. Nowadays, lots of projects written in other languages which have their own build tools also use them, not to make files, but to store and run commands in an organized manner. If this is you, you are doing it wrong. However, there is a tool designed to do just that: just.

I’m a just enjoyer.

I would however like to learn how to make cross-platform Justfiles, as I end up usually having to add cursed syntax them to make it work on both Windows and Mac/Linux, which most of the time doesn’t even really end up working.

From Wouter Groeneveld’s Favourites of March 2025

Lua should be considered a toolkit

I think it was Hisham who in his talk in LuaConf 2017 said that Lua is minimalistic (aka: “there are zero ways to do it”). This was of course about Lua offering mechanisms over policies, or how it unlocks agency in the developer by letting them adapt the language to suit their environment and not vice versa. Lua should be viewed as a base ingredient to which you add whatever you want. If you are making fruit smoothies, Lua is the milk and you add whatever fruits you need.

[…]

Complaints about object-orientation

Lua is not object-oriented. That is it. Lua has tables which are a very flexible data structure. Lua has Meta Tables, which enables even more flexibility when using Tables. This should be approached as a toolkit (can you see a theme here?). Using Tables and Meta Tables, you can build a ton of cool stuff such as namespaces, and fancy OOP systems. You are in control. […]

Some great points from Andre in this post.

From Wouter Groeneveld’s Favourites of March 2025

Vibe coding is taking the internet by storm. Popularized by Andrej Karpathy, it changes the entire industry. But why only engineers should have all the fun?

I’m in favor of making as many professions in tech redundant, as possible. I mean, if I can enjoy singularity while vibing my way through my code, why upper and middle management shouldn’t? And the reality is they should! And they can!

As of today, both ChatGPT and Claude are more than capable of replacing your average middle manager such as team lead or product manager. Here is an example of an interaction between a product manager and a potential customer that begs for a feature: […]

Vibes are all around us ✨.

Get fucked Elon.

April 1, 1999

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MURRAY HILL, NJ — Tailscale, the leading provider of effortless, private networking for modern distributed computing, today announced support for Plan 9™ from Bell Labs™, the operating system redefining how networks, resources, and computation are managed. With Tailscale’s cutting-edge peer-to-peer networking capabilities now seamlessly integrated into Plan 9’s file-centric world, users can securely connect their machines across the globe as if they were on the same local network—with zero manual configuration.

“That was kinda the Plan 9 plan from the get-go”, said Rob Pike, one of the architects of Plan 9. “Surprised it took so long”.

A funny April 1st post, but its actually not a joke, there is really a merged PR into tailscale to flesh out the plan9 port of Tailscale.

Brilliant, Plan 9 is so cool, its on my list of operating systems to try out on a machine for more than just a toy use case someday, however I’d probably pick 9front or something else, since the last official release was more than 10 years ago.

Its live on Steam! Go wishlist!

Chapters 3 & 4 are coming out for the first time on June 5th! Its going to be on Switch 2!

Also, from the newsletter:

DELTARUNE will cost $24.99.

You only have to buy the game once - upcoming Chapters will be added as free updates.

Toby is a poor business man because I would pay full price for each one individually.

Thank you Toby Fox.