Andrew Helwer

TLA⁺ core developer. Love formal methods & distributed systems!

Living in Atlanta, GA, USA. Non-technical hobbies include BJJ, birdwatching, and mushroom foraging.

Other random facts: vim user, nix/arch dual-booter, dual Canadian/US citizen, loose-leaf tea drinker, cyclist, living kidney donor, vegetarian, ecosocialist dreaming of a 2000 watt society! he/him

2025-05-28

ebay patio anti-air emplacement cooper hawk auto-target gigakill

2025-05-27

I think many of us carry around a few of those historical tidbits that are impossible to tell people without them thinking you're a conspiracy theorist, even though they are definitely true & documented by trustworthy sources. My favorite is that in Canada, the RCMP did a false-flag ecoterrorist bombing attack against an oil installation in 1998!

> Their lawyer produced evidence that the RCMP bombed a wellsite and that they did it with the full support of the energy company that owned it. The Crown admits the allegations are true.

cbc.ca/news/canada/rcmp-bombed

#Canada

2025-05-27

NixOS people: on Sway at 2160p 2x scaling, how do I make my mouse cursor larger? It is currently very small (seemingly not scaled with the display) and I've been putting up with it (like how you put up with all those minor Linux things you haven't gotten around to fixing, you know the ones) for a year now. Is there an easy fix to drop in my configuration.nix?

#AskFedi #Nix #NixOS #Sway

2025-05-26

TODAY: cobbling together a Rube Goldberg-esque proof of concept call chain from OCaml -> C API -> GraalVM native image -> Java code

2025-05-26

should I become a "footnotes guy" on my blog instead of a compulsive writer of sentences broken into parentheticals, hyphens, semicolons, etc.

2025-05-26

Costco is proof americans can be tricked into going for a walk

2025-05-25

@rubenwardy being "left behind" makes no sense, it takes all of a few hours to reach the frontier of whatever these guys are trying

2025-05-25

Huh, expressing operator precedence & associativity as a hierarchy of recursive BNF rules finally clicked somehow. I can specify how to parse all the operators without making the grammar ambiguous or left-recursive. I'm free of the precedence annotation training wheels?

2025-05-25

Kept looking for alternatives but costco brand underwear is honestly goated

2025-05-24
2025-05-24

"give a mouse a cookie" ass DIY project where now that I'm in there I might as well fix THIS THING too and suddenly I have to become an expert on upholstery foams

2025-05-24

Years after the dislikable concept of "Tooze-heads" was forced into my attention I have come around and started reading things written by Adam Tooze

2025-05-24

Man who has only ever used Linux trying a home DIY project: “wow, this is just like using Linux”

2025-05-24

@sus unless your browser kills your battery I find the basic web UI to be really good!

2025-05-23

@randoneering that's a great story! I do like the idea of working in some capacity till I'm very old, it definitely kept gpa sharp & active. Was his hobby, basically.

2025-05-23

RIP Grandpa. The face of a man who is about to smoke you at cribbage. Had a great run, worked until he was 92 and loved every minute.

Photo of an older man (my grandfather) & younger man (me) holding cards sitting at a table lain with Christmas-themed decorations and a cribbage board.
2025-05-22

Spouse keeps an old can of mace in the car's central console that everybody forgets about. This led to a hapless car mechanic macing himself five years ago after going "what's this thing" and then - very, very nearly - myself, today, while ridding the car of insurance, registration, and parking documents 10 years expired. The mace can just really resembles a flashlight and I wanted to see whether the batteries still worked! An absolute menace. I really should throw it out but instead it still sits there, waiting to claim another victim in years hence.

2025-05-22

@Delib @ntnsndr @pine64 I think the matrix channel is most active

2025-05-22

Sifu is currently being given away for free (again) on EGS. Haven't played it yet but it's at the top of my list to start once I hit a work project that is boring & aggravating enough to require breaks.

store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/si

2025-05-22

Rotate the tires? Well yeah that's what they do.

Client Info

Server: https://mastodon.social
Version: 2025.04
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