iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Jake Arkinstall

Matt Godbolt @matt.godbolt.org · 17/10/2025

One of my favourite talks to have seen in person just got published: youtube.com/watch?v=sIZU... go check out Walter's brilliant presentation!

youtube.com

In Search of the Perfect Return: A C++ Programming Journey

YouTube video by Chicago C++ User Group

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

The attack surface expands considerably when relaying data through a plant pot. And that bird is definitely up to something. arxiv.org/html/2510.07...

arxiv.org

What is Quantum Computer Security?

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

The deeper I go with plugin architectures, the more I realise that the Dunning-Kruger graph for linking is actually a sin wave.

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Reposted by Jake Arkinstall

Guy Davidson 🌈 @hatcat01.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

I’m very sad to report the passing of Rainer Grimm. I can’t possibly say how great a contribution he made to the C++ community; fortunately, his blog can. www.modernescpp.com/index.php/my...

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

You still get that with devenv - in the docs link I sent you can see how to fully configure the environment. It's still also running nix under the hood. It just makes sane choices about what's local and mutable and what's static. Here's how they do it github.com/cachix/deven...

github.com

devenv/src/modules/integrations/android.nix at main · cachix/devenv

Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments using Nix - cachix/devenv

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

That's priceless for development. I used to do everything with nix derivations and stuff like "add this useful library" could take hours, when an Ubuntu user could just pip or apt install and have it in seconds. Nix itself is best for packaging once you have already made your project, IMO.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

E.g. you can say "python environment with the uv package manager plz". Then you can just "uv add" to add a dependency. The benefit - no need to specify the universe in Nix. You can install stuff like like anyone else. The cost is that reproducibility becomes trust-based - e.g. that UV is sensible.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

I have no android experience but that sounds like one of the big problems devenv solves. That which is immutable goes to the nix store and gets referenced from the venv. That which is mutable is managed locally. You're tied to hermeticity when it makes sense, whereas raw flakes prefer all the time

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Well, kind of a blog. I want to do a bunch of interactive stuff as well that would be really awkward with existing backends.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

The reason I'm revising it? To build a custom web backend, using CrowCPP, md4c, sqlite, scss, etc. Even have an ingress router and auto rebuilds on file changes. Why? For a blog. Silly? Yes. Pragmatic? Absolutely not. But there is a lot of joy in building silly stuff for the sheer sake of it is.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

I did a video on it once. youtu.be/BaR_GB7Tji4 Basically I disliked cmake, disliked Bazel, and loved Nix. Because each file is a derivation, only modified intermediates are changed on rebuild. Makes it very heavy on the nix store writes when you're in full swing dev mode though.

youtu.be

Building C++ projects in Nix using Nozzle

YouTube video by Jake Arkinstall

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Spent the evening resurrecting my old C++ build system Nozzle (written in Nix, but you define libraries and builds from source files like in Bazel). It works very nicely. Would be interesting to see if I could add support for rust too.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

For dev stuff, devenv is often the way to go IMO. It's still nix, but it works in a really nice way and has a bunch of stuff configured out of the box in a way that's super easy to share with other devs (on any Linux or MacOS setup) devenv.sh/integrations...

devenv.sh

Android - devenv

Fast, Declarative, Reproducible, and Composable Developer Environments using Nix

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

We've now even gone past postmodern C++ and are now entering late-stage C++.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

As for understanding how long Windows runners take, the physics hasn't been invented yet. One hypothesis is that they involve the use of Reissner-Nordstrom black holes, and that they complete in a reasonable timeframe - but in an inaccessible universe.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

GitHub is moving at 0.964c relative to you. This is why a CI run that GitHub Actions says took 8 minutes actually felt like 30 minutes.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

"Of course you can't actually pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that's impossible" You spent 4 days either inventing hoverboots or writing an assembler that operated through hoverboot-related means. And in the 5th day you rested.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

999 is a good choice for the final episode. Any more than that, and rumour has it that the right side of the screen corrupts, there isn't enough fruit to finish the episode, and Jason would spend eternity trying to escape ghosts.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

Nix is great for "I want to configure this once, built it a few times, and it should work many places". But that's not really the HPC use case. E.g. Spack's original paper discussed Nix (amongst others) and provided the benefits of something different. tgamblin.github.io/pubs/spack-s...

tgamblin.github.io

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

ADHDGI User: "hey chat, get me started with making a basic blog" ChatGPT: "Wordpress? Ghost? Hugo? OOHH I HAVE AN IDEA. Make every post a commit message. Your menu could be a mermaid diagram. Ooh maybe we could use an FPGA, and rebuild on push to main. Btw do you have an rj45 crimp tool?"

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

Next season of Bridgerton is going to be lit.

The cast of Bridgerton alongside their friendly neighbourhood spidergentleman

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

Where, and how many times are you going to invoke the function? If a few times and you're willing to have some execution overhead, libffi is solid and has support for many platforms. If it's executed many many times, or in a sensitive point on the hot path, I'd begin to consider JIT.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

For example, I'm strongly disinterested in being bombarded with other people's political views. They're free to air them, I'm just fed up of social media ramming it down my throat. Is there a way to mark such posts on your feed as "not interesting to me" so I can increase the signal to noise ratio?

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

With it being driven on posts liked by people with common likes, it'd be nice if there were a way to also take into account dislikes. The things liked by people who liked the same things as me aren't necessarily things I like (that's a sentence and a half). 3 degrees of separation sounds very noisy

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

Just one more domain bro it's a cool name bro you're gonna have a blog bro and actually post more than once a year bro I promise bro

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

It is much quieter, but that is a good thing for me. I saw a lot of politics on my discover feed. I don't care for left wing politics just as much as I don't care for right wing politics, so I just wanted it gone, to instead focus my content on important things like hosting NTP servers on toasters.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

Pin this: bsky.app/profile/did:...

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

I don't know what the default Bluesky Discover feed is based on, but it was the worst part about coming to this platform. Just found skyfeed's Discover feed which is based on likes and is far more relevant to me. With that and a huge list of muted words and accounts, bluesky is kind of alright.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

I've just invented the words emulatorics and emulatician, and I'm absolutely going to use them for anything emulator related as often as possible.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Following an emergency seasonal fashion committee meeting, it has been decided that the Aran sweaters rule still applies - but through sheer linguistic mastery, sweatbands have been assigned a subcategory of sweaters for the regions East Asia, Oceania, and the International Space Station.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

It is now officially Aran sweater weather. Just thought you should know.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

35,000 photos now. 30,000 are of the kids. My eldest is 4, so that's approximately 20 photos per day since he was born. It's still running through a video transcoding backlog. If I let it use my GPU, transcoding is fast but CLIP models fail (gtx1060, compute capability 6.1, basically stone age now)

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

A trailer - if a surprising mix of jet fights, lightsabers and ironing boards are your kind of thing.

youtu.be

Ironing Board Man Trailer | Jody Kamali

YouTube video by Jody Kamali

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Went to see a one-man (and 10 ironing board) show called The Ironing Board Man tonight. Man meets ironing board, they marry, man loses ironing board, man regains ironing board, they have kids, ironing board gets shot, man seeks revenge. It was hilarious. Looked like a hell of an effort too.

The co-stars, including guest stars ironing board Margret Thatcher, ironing board Geri Halliwell, ironing board Donald Trump, and General Starch.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

I haven't written a line of PHP in about 10 years. But those days were bliss. At full scale application level it was rough (modern packaging etc looks like it has changed that) but it was great to scrap together small scale things (modern packaging etc looks like it has changed that)

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

When it stops being useful as a server, I'm repurposing it as a hovercraft.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

How it's going. I don't know why I didn't think of this before. This thing has always sounded like a server room.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Oooh good question. I think about 10x on standby. Though I have excess solar power for most of the year so I'm not too fussed.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

I have a pi cluster microk8s for things like the family photo album, fileshare, etc. But it keeps crashing out and I've basically abandoned it. I think immich is too much for them. Today I had a revelation that I have an old Alienware laptop that I could totally repurpose as a node. Thoughts?

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Powis* castle. In Powys. Because naming things isn't just a computer science problem.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

Powys Castle - making the most of a surprisingly beautiful Sunday afternoon after a stormy Saturday.

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Jake Arkinstall @jakearkinstall.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

All I know is that the electricity company sent me two telephone numbers in a letter. One telephone number was the personal phone number for the Governor of the Bank of England. The other telephone number had a £ in front of it.

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