Gavin Zhao @[email protected]

New box!!! #CatsOfMastodon #RipleyAndJonesy #BoxCat

To all my compiler/programming language friends looking for knuckle tattoos, may I suggest some combination of:

S T M T

E X P R

D E C L

T Y P E

Putting @wilbowma in my SPLASH-E talk brb.

OOPSLA 2026 deadline is just a week away! Can you please help us get the word out by sharing? Thanks!
https://2026.splashcon.org/track/oopsla-2026

Spreadsheets

Also: Do NOT engage with anti-FOSS ragebait. Hold your tongue and be the bigger person. Only engage with good-faith posts and only with kindness.

Happy 10 year anniversary to this tweet! Has memory safety in C++ been solved yet?

https://x.com/CppCon/status/646386191617626112

I hope this email finds you within a block of other federal agents.

Borrowed from fakebook.

My daughter came home from school and said,
“Mom, you’re not going to believe what happened in history class today.”

Her teacher told the class they were going to play a game.
He walked around the room and whispered to each kid whether they were a witch or just a regular person. Then he gave the instructions:

“Form the biggest group you can without a witch. If your group has even one, you all fail.”

She said the whole room instantly lit up with suspicion.
Everyone started interrogating each other. Are you a witch? How do we know you’re not lying?
Some kids clung to one big group, but most broke off into smaller, exclusive cliques. They turned away anyone who seemed uncertain, nervous, or gave off even the slightest hint of being guilty.

The energy shifted fast. Suddenly everyone was suspicious of everyone.
Whispers. Finger-pointing. Side-eyes. Trust dissolved in minutes.

Finally, when all the groups were formed, the teacher said,
“Alright, time to find out who fails. Witches, raise your hands.”

And not one hand went up.

The whole class exploded. “Wait! You messed up the game!”

And then the teacher dropped the bomb:
“Did I? Were there any actual witches in Salem, or did everyone just believe what they were told?”

My daughter said the room went dead silent.

That’s when it hit them. No witch was ever needed for the damage to happen. Fear had already done its work. Suspicion alone divided the entire class, turning community into chaos.

And isn’t that exactly what we’re seeing today?
Different words, same playbook.
Instead of “witch,” it’s liberal, conservative, vaxxed, unvaxxed, pro-this, anti-that.
The labels shift, but the tactic is the same.

Get people scared. Get them suspicious. Get them divided.
Then sit back while trust crumbles.

The danger was never the witch.
The danger is the rumor. The suspicion. The fear. The planted lies.

Refuse the whisper. Don’t play the game. Because the second we start hunting “witches,” we’ve already lost.

For absolutely no reason I can guess, Google Docs starts to provide auto-complete in Portuguese (a language I never write in). I had begun to type "Represent"… Any guess what's going on? Is "9/10" somehow "Portuguese/Brazilian/Açores/… coded"?

Did you know your MacBook has a sensor that knows the exact angle of the screen hinge?

It’s not exposed as a public API, but I figured out a way to read it and make it sound like an old wooden door.

Source code and a downloadable app to try it yourself: https://github.com/samhenrigold/LidAngleSensor

I have accidentally adopted a bull. Or perhaps he adopted me. My property has a bit of land and one day a random bull turned up on there. I asked all the local farmers and nobody was missing a bull. Guess he's mine now. I named him Kevin, after the Home Alone kid.

How did we land on #CatsOfMastodon and not #meowstodon

Quokka-eating-a-eucalyptus-leaf timeline cleanse.

"Nom nom nom nom".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quokka