Tag Archives: Tech

Revolt Of The Readers

Posted on 2026-10-01 by jcs

Last month I wrote about the new acronym AI;DR (AI didn’t read). The idea was that people were tired of having their email queries answered with AI slop that even the responder probably didn’t read. As I said in that … Continue reading →

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Practical Engineering

Posted on 2026-09-23 by jcs

A while ago, a new site popped up in my feed. That site was Practical Engineering. I didn’t know how it got into my feed until I started to write this post. When I checked, I discovered that I was … Continue reading →

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The Replacement Continues

Posted on 2026-09-22 by jcs

I’ve written several times before—the latest time here— about the pernicious effect that advertising can have on a company. I’m not talking about a company advertising itself and its products. Rather, I’m referring to the increasingly common practice of allowing … Continue reading →

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Unicode Version 18.0

Posted on 2026-09-21 by jcs

I’ve always been awed by Unicode and in particular its UTF-8 encoding that does the seemingly impossible: representing virtually every possible character in every language while still being compatible with ASCII. That means that UTF-8 text containing only the “standard” … Continue reading →

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Twenty Five Years Is Enough

Posted on 2026-09-17 by jcs

Twenty five years of what? As Bruce Schneier says, 25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough. The post at the link is a long article with Cindy Cohn that originally appeared in Lawfare. It’s a long look at how mass … Continue reading →

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How Advertising Corrupts

Posted on 2026-09-09 by jcs

Regular readers know that the Irreal bunker is a resident of the Apple Exosphere but we don’t consider ourselves fanbois. We like Apple but it’s not a religion. One area where we are especially critical of Apple is their embracing … Continue reading →

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Make Git Ignore Everything By Default

Posted on 2026-09-07 by jcs

Alex Pliutau over at Package Main has some sage advice about Git usage that hadn’t occurred to me. The advice is simple: ignore everything by default. The idea is to avoid filling up your repository with junk. Things like generated … Continue reading →

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Recipe Cards

Posted on 2026-08-31 by jcs

Today’s topic seems odd for Irreal. Even tagging it as “Tech” seems odd but bear with me. If you’re like me and have a hard time following most recipes, today’s post has a solution. It’s all about a new format … Continue reading →

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Linux Removes Strncpy

Posted on 2026-07-06 by jcs

Back when I learned C, people were still using strcpy and even gets. After a while, people started saying that strcpy wasn’t safe and that you should use strncpy instead to avoid buffer overruns, either accidental or deliberate. Those days … Continue reading →

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The CBS Report On The Unix v4 Recovery

Posted on 2026-06-30 by jcs

Today (Monday) on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, Thalia Archibald reports on a CBS report on the Unix v4 recovery at the University of Utah. Sadly, the report misses the two most important things about the recovery. The first, … Continue reading →

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