iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Me trying Linux again this year. "disable secure boot" "use manual partinionning" "installer crashed" Year of Linux desktop my ass

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Given how bad and slow Opus results are lately, I wouldn't be surprised if @anthropic.com pulled the old mechanical turk trick on us and hired an army of Indian devs to prompt smaller models to save on costs.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Of course this also means that every single AI was trained with this, and it adds even more TOCTOU issues...

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

I keep seeing `if(file_exists(path)) do_something(path)` and similar. This infuriates me. STOP FUCKING DOING 2 SYSCALLS THIS IS BOTH SLOW AND NON ATOMIC. FFS please... I've even seen it in teaching materials, do everyone a favor and read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of...

en.wikipedia.org

Time-of-check to time-of-use - Wikipedia

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

At least in userland you can actually get saved by the kernel 😂

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Oh I'm not blaming the kernel, every lock internally starts as a spinlock... And this is a very hard place to get code right given it executes user code in kernel mode 😅 I'm just amused such issues can appear there too, and will definitely use it next time someone shows me a (bad) spinlock!

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Oh mah! Look, spinlocks are at it again (this time in the kernel, there's no escape!)

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

I was going to say the same thing, they make it look like this was hard while Linux had RCU for more than 20years now 🤷

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Oh nice it makes sense! Sounds like a lot of work and tiny details to get that working. Wonder if you'll be able to optimize out things such as spinloops :p So in theory even allocations are expected to be "stable" and replay at the same memory address? Cool!

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Oh I think I get it now(or maybe not), you need to replay from scratch/dump then? Then the tool will fake/replay kernel interactions? I suppose it requires so kind of determinism of the code in the first place? I suppose "records... intrinsics" means you record atomic operations too?

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Yeah, access to old versions has been like this for a while sadly... Good luck 😅

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Sounds nice! But my first questions with time travel debugging are always : - what's the overhead? - how long ago can I go in the past on big games? (for example UE based) - what about gpu sync?

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

You'd lack most other perf counters provided by vtune though.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

You could probably add it to tracy pretty "easily" since we already support it on Linux, you'd only need to add it to the kernel etw session and do the proper translation to Tracy's event buffers.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Well, my guess is that it's mostly under documented. ETW can collect certain PMU events since win8 I believe, but for those not known to ETW you need driver support. It also (iirc) only allows sampling, not direct access through code.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

I've long been opposed to exceptions for reasons, but I have to admit there are use cases. I don't really agree with most of what is said in the article, but it does make some points. cedardb.com/blog/excepti...

cedardb.com

Why I Prefer Exceptions to Error Values

CedarDB is a database system that delivers unmatched performance for transactions and analytics, from small writes to handling billions of rows. Built on cutting-edge research to power today’s tools a...

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

Dear frontend developers: Stop fucking using buttons instead of links! I want to be able to copy, open in new tab,... Well, have links be links and not buttons. Thanks.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

Ever wrote spin-locks or had to debug them? I have, and I got tired of seeing (and writing) crappy ones, so I did a real investigation this time. Spoiler: trust your OS. siliceum.com/en/blog/post...

siliceum.com

Spinning around: Please don't! - siliceum

Embark on a journey about why you should sometimes trust your OS more than yourself.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 04/01/2026

Can we all agree that OpenSSL sucks by requiring perl to build in 2026? I'm not even asking for CMake support, just no stupid dependencies!

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Cup arrived right before Christmas, thanks @matt.godbolt.org

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 20/12/2025

It's getting harder and harder to optimize for new CPUs, we now have NUMA on consumer CPUs...

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Reposted by Clément Grégoire

Sebastian Aaltonen @sebaaltonen.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

sebastianaaltonen.com

No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen

Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

Did I mention I hate the webdev ecosystem ?

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Luckily the @vite.dev's team got it right in rollup... so it's time for us to switch to rollup and dump esbuild. Still, web dev sucks.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

As if it was not already wasteful for Objects imports (this is only really needed for non-Object types)... It creates one such object PER file doing any import, even if you only need 1 export from the original ! Now let's say you have a SDK with ~780 exports & 171files... That's 120000 functions!

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Today a new episode of "Web sucks"! When handling import of an external library, ESBuild generates some kind of import table for the whole library. But since it needs to mimick ESM modules, it creates the "exports" object using Getters instead of properties.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.

media.tenor.com

a man is petting a small black dog in his arms .

ALT: a man is petting a small black dog in his arms .

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Nice to finally see the busy/wait/idle for gpu queues, bubbling was a major issue for a previous client of mine (mitigated by fixing the command list merging, I think it's now OK upstream)

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Depends on your OS, on Linux it's easy, on windows you need to juggle with power plans (I've got an internal tool for that, I need to release someday...)

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Yep, same as the CPU and other things. Though it still matters to sometimes profile without stabilizing your machine as it's the "end-user experience", and things such as power change latency can actually kill the perf of your app. But 90%of the time please do stabilize your machine.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Mine started by finding yet another bad spinlock in a widely used library.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

If you do try it out or already use it I'd be interested in the results!

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

I'm afraid it's less exciting than it sound, it's basicly just caching! I've seen some reports (don't remember where exactly) that it does slow down the collection somehow (I didn't verify) gist.github.com/Zhentar/7f3f...

gist.github.com

Unlocking the secrets of ETW: Stack Caching

Unlocking the secrets of ETW: Stack Caching. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Interesting! I did a similar experiment in the past for another profiler but never finished it. Note you could even pack your pages by storing bidepth and numelements in the upper 12bits of your data pointers :)

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 02/12/2025

Well, there is actually an option to compress callstacks, but depending on your workload it might not save much space. (I have a link to something related somewhere, if you're interested)

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Even the minigames shipped on the minidiscs were kind of good for the time

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

"But look at that horrible microsoftism declspec(dllexport), it's so annoying and hard to understand with those macros!" - some1 in the 90s "Everything should be visible cause code is open and it aligns with my political views" - Another one, from GNU. "This is dumb" - the one banned from GNU

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

And then they openly blame devs for poor perfs.. . I blame them for poor tooling and bad optimizations.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

So UE5 has a tool that generates perf reports, with a whole Metadata generation thing (in XML) that allows to customize reports. But it still displays averages for timings everywhere. Oh, and their perf bench tool is implemented using 3layers of different technologies.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Finally took the time to buy a licence for Fork. Truly the best UI for git, as it's the only one that never disappointed me. It's only missing Linux support but otherwise well worth its price. @fork_dev@mastodon.social

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

UE5 disk size is insane, you need at least 2TB to be safe for a single small/mid-size project.

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

Just saw this has been fixed, thanks a lot, for that and the Rss feeds!

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

New blog post about my journey into the ETW depths, I had long wanted to look into it, now I'm starting to regret it (just a bit). But this is great if you want to write your own tools for profiling! www.siliceum.com/en/blog/post...

siliceum.com

ETW Events and thread names - siliceum

Thread names are one of the most crucial information one can get system activity. However Windows ETW does not make it easy to retrieve!

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Ahah, if it's too much work don't bother 😉

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

Nice! Would it be possible to add a RSS feed to your blog? Helps me keep track of new posts!

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

@openvibe.social the app is really great except for one thing killing the experience for me on android: No way to copy a link or open it on your browser because you hide the webview toolbar!

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Clément Grégoire @lectem.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

It is indeed the initial goal! But for some applications you do need it to be somewhat accurate! In any case, what I'm most bothered by is the fact that behavior really changes under load.

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