iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Damien Neil @misago.org · 27/08/2026

Kage Baker is responsible for me being married. 20ish years ago, I saw an online dating profile that mentioned liking her books, and said “that sounds like someone I’d like to meet”. Still together.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 15/07/2026

They’re all out of bubblegum. That’s the crisis.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 17/04/2026

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 08/04/2026

You’re right, still time for us to yank that football away.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 19/03/2026

The subtle and complicated ones are good, nobody has any opinions.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 18/03/2026

Next time I touch a proposal that isn’t both complicated and obscure, slap me

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 29/01/2026

You did indeed! We should do your proposal as well to make the simple case of using httptest and synctest together easy. Not sure we’ve found the right API yet, though.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 13/03/2025

High on my list of projects that got out of hand. It was supposed to just be openat! (Turns out openat has some startlingly sharp edges.)

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Reposted by Damien Neil

Go @golang.org · 12/03/2025

“Traversal-resistant file APIs” by Damien Neil — go.dev/blog/osroot #golang

go.dev

Traversal-resistant file APIs - The Go Programming Language

New file access APIs in Go 1.24.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 28/02/2025

I have a copy of IWFNE originally owned by my late elder brother. It contains a note from him on the title page: “This book rots.” Couldn’t say it better myself.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 25/02/2025

movie you’ve watched more than six times, gifs only

Walter Matthau looking like the saddest basset hound in the world so you just want to give him a doggy snack and scritch his ears

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 19/02/2025

I’m tremendously excited about the synctest package. There’s usually a tension between making async code idiomatic or testable. Synctest makes the idiomatic code testable. #golang go.dev/blog/synctest

go.dev

Testing concurrent code with testing/synctest - The Go Programming Language

Go 1.24 contains an experimental package to aid in testing concurrent code.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 16/01/2025

True story: Baby shoes. Never worn. Huge feet.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 08/01/2025

One element I particularly love is that mechanical failures don’t feel like narrative failures. Most games, you flub a critical die roll and you’re going to get a less satisfying story. Disco often gives you a more satisfying (if less successful) one.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 02/01/2025

Already bought and read it! It’s great. I love how unapologetically tragic Sarah is, without being miserable at all. She’s not very good at being an adult (with some justification) and that’s okay.

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Reposted by Damien Neil

Laurie J @lmjake.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

Christmas cats for @misago.org

A calico muppet cat possessively snuggles a jeans-clad leg in front of a lit Christmas tree.

A velvet house panther looks up while atop a crocheted blanket that is atop a human.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 19/12/2024

20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 16/12/2024

The Go protocol buffer Opaque API is released! go.dev/blog/protobu... This is a new, optional version of the generated code API which hides the internal implementation details. It’s been in use inside Google for years now. Congrats to the Go protobuf maintainers on the open source release! #golang

go.dev

Go Protobuf: The new Opaque API - The Go Programming Language

We are adding a new generated code API to Go Protobuf.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 27/11/2024

This technique scales poorly to more bits. :)

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 27/11/2024

So: Four channels! Readable/writeable/neither/both. At most one channel contains a value. To wait for readability, you select on readable/both, and so on. Two bits, four states, four chans.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 27/11/2024

In an in-memory net.Conn implementation, I found that I needed two bits of state: Readable or writable. Reads block until the conn buffer contains data, writes block until there’s space in the buffer. (This is not a Conn, this is one direction of traffic on a pair of Conns.)

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 27/11/2024

A silly Go channel trick: The idea behind the gate type (pkg.go.dev/github.com/n...) is to use two channels to store one bit of state. If one channel contains a value the bit is set; if the other it is not.

pkg.go.dev

gate package - github.com/neild/gate - Go Packages

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 27/11/2024

My grandparents had nine children, gave them good food, top class educations, the works. My grandparents also lived in an honest-to-god castle with a full-time staff of live-in servants, so, y’know. I don’t measure my parenting against them.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 26/11/2024

There’s a need for a really good fake net Listener/Conn. net.Pipe works, but it’s unbuffered which can be limiting. The good thing is that the net package has good abstractions, so this doesn’t need to be in std.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 25/11/2024

Yes, the example is not a very efficient queue. If you want a more robust one, there’s an elegant two-slice queue in net/http (not my work).

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 24/11/2024

You could make the zero value usable, but at the cost of adding a sync.Once or equivalent to control initialization. Probably not worth the cost; gate is built on channels, and since channels require explicit initialization it does too.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 24/11/2024

I don’t plan on changing working code that uses sync.Cond today, but I’ve been using gates or the equivalent in new code. The type is so simple that it’s often easier to include a copy of it in a package rather than add a dependency.

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Reposted by Damien Neil

Laurie J @lmjake.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

I have been asked by @misago.org to post more pictures of our cats for him to share, so here are the girls enjoying a sunbeam nap.

Close up of adorable cat heads snuggled together in a sunbeam

Two adorable cats, one black and the other calico, snuggled up for a nap in a sunbeam.

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Damien Neil @misago.org · 21/11/2024

Hello, Bluesky. Have a cat.

A grumpy, balding, middle-aged man wearing glasses with a cat on his head.

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Reposted by Damien Neil

Laurie J @lmjake.bsky.social · 05/11/2024

The silky void cat and the floofy muppet cat send you serenity for today.

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