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blog overreach

Posting whole, completed projects and adventures is just so simple. But when it comes to daily habits? There’s a fine line between… well, I don’t really know. I do know that on the unhealthy end we have the social media mindset where ‘doing’ is secondary to ‘posting about doing’ - doing things only to earn more little thumbs-ups by internet phantoms. But what exactly is the healthier end? Is there a healthy reason I feel reinforced when I post about my veggie garden or my pistol squat progress? Honestly, I’m not in any danger of tripping and falling into filming myself washing dishes or whatev

mira sturdivant · EN

one hundred magazine collage buttons/pins/magnets

one of the most fun and low-stakes projects i do, but what am i going to do with all these?

mira sturdivant · EN

painting collage fodder

make your scrap paper more useful!

mira sturdivant · EN

Games in 2024 NO. 2: Kirby and the Forgotten Land

Something Story Key points: Story: [-] We’ve seen the “God is angry at mankind story before” and this one didn’t add anything too novel [-] Political intrigue was good but devolved near the end as things became rapidly part of the god slaying plot [+] That being said, this one had some of the best presentation for this type of story and told it well [+] The world building was good and the story told the plight of Bearer’s quite well without explicitly saying much [+] Active time lore is fantastic The story was good. It wasn’t great – just good. It’s one of the better “opression and god slaying

The blog of Vaughan Hilts · EN

Using Codex on this blog

Disclaimer: I work at Google and have used Antigravity and the suite of models quite extensively. However, I am quite new to the actual open source tech stack outside of the so called “tech island”. This is a series of posts as I explore the open source landscape and trying projects out that are outside of the typical corporate stack. The blog has not had some activity in a long time. Since I was looking to explore and check out some of the open source stacks, I figure this was as good of a place as any to start. The first order of business: let’s see if we can get the site looking a little mo

The blog of Vaughan Hilts · EN

Why I moved comments from Disqus to Bluesky

I’ve been using Disqus for comments on this blog since I started it back in 2014. I’m now moving away from Disqus and over to Bluesky for comments. I recently began migrating my blog to a new theme after not having touched it in a very long time. I did the entire migration barely looking at the network tab. When I finally finished the migration and took a peek on mobile, I was horrified . I am sure I probably knew Disqus could inject ads before but I didn’t realize they were that bad. Hacker News has some good threads on this. . I have to imagine many of us techies are running this stack witho

The blog of Vaughan Hilts · EN

Building headless-xi-rust with Codex

This is a continuation of posts of trying out various AI tools. This piece is for education only. The notes may be very rough. I wanted to see if Codex could do something a little more interesting than moving a blog theme around. I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy XI. I’m also a pretty big fan of Final Fantasy XIV as well, having raided multiple tiers and still an active subscriber. Final Fantasy in general, really. I’ve probably played a few thousand hours on the games since the early 2000s. I’ve maxed a character on retail and at least one private server: The ToAU expansion is coming up for Hor

The blog of Vaughan Hilts · EN

Using LLMs for ephemeral on demand software

I’ve been recently toying with the idea of writing a book since 2023 to collect some of the thoughts I’ve had on sofware development and specifically around debugging throughout my career. I’ve picked it up and stopped a few times. The act of writing itself isn’t bad, I enjoy it quite a lot. But writing a book is more than just writing. I wanted to include diagrams, runnable code samples, PDFs, ePubs and more. It’s true that you can add a lot of that stuff later but to me a lot of that is intrinsic to the writing in some cases. If for example I’m writing a book about using modern web features

The blog of Vaughan Hilts · EN

We have all this AI and software still sucks

It was a Thursday evening (earlier this year) and I decided it was time to buy a new laptop as the 2015 Dell w/ an i7 5600U just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I spent way too much time trying to figure out what to buy and settled on an M5 Macbook Air after Apple had announced that yes, due to the RAM-pocalypse going on, they would be raising prices as well. I had decided already that I wanted a machine with long battery life and that would last a decade, so that was enough for me to pull the trigger. It would arrive nearly a week later, after the estimate being a mere two days. As you may be able

The blog of Vaughan Hilts · EN

Some thoughts on the Macbook Air M5

The following are some stream of thought musings and not particularly polished. Sorry in advance. I’ve been using the M5 as a casual laptop (I own the Starlight base model, for reference) for about 3 months now or so. I’m mostly writing, streaming some games, doing some research & watching some videos. I bought it mostly for durability, battery life, being quiet and cool. For additional context, I’ve been using a Macbook Pro at work as a full time machine for years with some small breaks in-between, including the Intel ones. This even includes the model with the touch bar. It wasn’t really unt

The blog of Vaughan Hilts · EN

LLMs may have immensely helped my RSI

I was playing piano for the first time in a while the other day and noticed: I didn’t feel any RSI. Maybe a bit and some tenderness, but not much at all. And no, I don’t mean recursive self improvement that is so trendy and topical right now. You see, for many years (starting as early as 2017) I had suffered some form of repetitive strain injury from as far as my doctors and I could tell was from simply typing on a keyboard and using my keyboard simply too much. I was learning to play piano, as you can imagine from the prior passage. This all added up to quite the strain on my arms at the end

The blog of Vaughan Hilts · EN

Rust Is a Harness

Why Rust will be the language of LLMs. Syntax ergonomics are a depreciating asset while compile-time guarantees are gaining value.

Walter van der Giessen - dev blog · EN

Making My Rust Program Space-Flight Ready

A crate called hugebool ships a 16-byte radiation-hardened boolean. I took the idea further: reads that repair themselves, majority voting for every type, and benchmarks.

Walter van der Giessen - dev blog · EN

I Wanted spawn() for JavaScript Threads

I wanted server-side JavaScript threads to start with spawn(). The missing piece turned out to be a carefully placed eval().

Walter van der Giessen - dev blog · EN

Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose

Reasoning scores climb while per-token compute drops. Labs are stripping world knowledge out of models, and I think that's the right trade.

Walter van der Giessen - dev blog · EN

nixpkgs and repology changes

Tl;DR: nixpkgs changed the way it exports data to repology and many packages need fixing In nixpkgs/451424 nixpkgs changed substantially how it exports data about available packages. As a result some packages like flare stopped being reported to repology.org correctly. Luckily the fix is to usually use pname / version instead of direct name . Example fix for flare package: --- a/pkgs/by-name/fl/flare/package.nix +++ b/pkgs/by-name/fl/flare/package.nix @@ -6,7 +6,8 @@ }: buildEnv { - name = "flare-1.14"; + pname = "flare"; + version = "1.14"; paths = [ (callPackage ./engine.nix { }) The bug I h

trofi - All posts · EN

sequoia pgp

TL;DR If you are a PGP newbie (like me) then consider reading sq user documentation book! It gave me an idea of how to use the sq tool and how PGP concepts map to it. The book also has a “Background” section that I missed so much to get a better grasp of PGP model. Story mode I created my first PGP key in 2008: $ gpg --list-public-keys slyich@gmail.com pub dsa1024/0x71A1EE76611FF3AA 2008-10-18 [SC] [revoked: 2018-07-04] 9929AD151B96AF651958D35871A1EE76611FF3AA uid [ revoked] Sergei Trofimovich <slyfox@...> uid [ revoked] Sergei Trofimovich <st@...> uid [ revoked] Sergei Trofimovich <slyfox@...

trofi - All posts · EN

another memory corruption case

It’s another story of a mysterious memory corruption being debugged. Story Mode It was another usual week: I updated gcc from master branch and tried to build my system with it. Minor failures are to be expected here. That’s where I draw the material to explore random packages and their failure modes. Sometimes it’s buggy build systems, flaky tests, broken downstream users of libraries that changed API. That kind of stuff. I usually search for compiler bugs to report. Mysterious ggc SIGSEGV Most builds were going without any problems. But some packages started failing in a suspiciously similar

trofi - All posts · EN

gcc-16 bugs

Almost exactly a year passed since my previous pile report . gcc-16 was branched off from master and will receive only regression fixes. master is called gcc-17 now. Instead of posting incremental updates at arbitrary tine I’ll try yearly ones. That should cover all the bugs I saw in a release cycle in a single post. Summary During gcc-16 cycle I found 31 bug: libstdc++/119970 : mingw32 libstdc++ build failure (buffer handling) target/119929 : mips build failure target/120036 : gcc ICE on highway-1.2.0 ( float16 related) c/120060 : gcc ICE on bash-5.2 (deprecated declarations) libstdc++/120147

trofi - All posts · EN

Zero Hydra Failures towards 26.05 NixOS release

NixOS-26.05 is around the corner! The schedule says it should happen around 25 May. Today the release process entered ZHF phase. There most packages with build failures are expected to be addresses by the release date. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/516381 contains detailed step-by-step to identify interesting packages. This time nixpkgs is full of build failures related to gcc-15 changes ( -std=gnu23 switch). An example package fix I usually try to fix at least one package during ZHF . Let’s do it again. I picked ior package. hydra says it is broken since January 2026. Most recent ht

trofi - All posts · EN

CONNECT passthrough on nginx

A while ago I explored easy hacks on how to encapsulate SSH into HTTPS on apache2 . Since then I moved a few my systems from apache2 to nginx to play a bit with http/2 and http/3 . I wanted to port my hack to nginx . At the time nginx did not have direct support for CONNECT handling. I used chobits/ngx_http_proxy_connect_module external module to implement CONNECT . But around the end of 2025 the extension stopped compiling against latest nginx versions and I dropped CONNECT hack. This extension is not meant to be portable across nginx versions: it applies invasive patches to nxing core to add

trofi - All posts · EN

Trying out niri

I have been using sway for a while . sway is good. I can remember only one bug where chromium was able to trigger assertion failures and compositor crashed on huge 32K-wide surfaces. It was a bug in wlroots which was fixed quickly. I occasionally look around for other compositors that I could use to check out slightly different tiling ideas and fancy features of a modern wayland desktop. This time I tried niri . It looked quite close to sway , uses rust as implementation language and kdl as a config language. I turned niri to match my sway config very quickly. niri Config Tweaks I switched Alt

trofi - All posts · EN

Five years on NixOS

Another yer, another instance of my NixOS journey log ( 2025 instance ). System maintenance As usual I don’t remember what I did to my system over the past year, so I’m at the git log for /etc/nixos as it contains all the changes: I had to switch nix GC job from monthly runs to weekly runs: a month is enough to generate so much garbage that individual GC runs are too painful. follow rename of linuxPackages.perf -> perf temporary revert to older nix to avoid CA-derivation regression follow services.resolved.extraConfig -> services.resolved.settings move temporary revert to older nix to avoid an

trofi - All posts · EN

Re: Online Friends Are Real Friends

A few days ago I booked my flights to not only attend a professional event, but also visit and stay with one of my best friends next month. This will be the sixth time that at least one of us has traveled to hang out with the other. We met each other online six years ago via Reddit (and to some degree, Instagram back when I still had an account) simply through shared interests. Never in my life did I suspect I would befriend someone online to such a degree that they feel like a true brother to me. I liked Absurd Pirate's post because it made me reflect on my own online friendships, which are s

toska · EN