Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
@chastell.net
760 followers 300 following 590 posts
👴 speedrunning retirement 🧑‍💻 (prev.) cheap science officer at Rebased 🤹‍♂️ (prev.) assistant professor at WUT’s cybersecurity division 💎 (bad co-)maintainer of Bogus & Reek 📷 (very amateur) street photographer 🫂 he/him, vim/nvim 🕸️ https://chastell.net
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chastell.net
On behalf of Piotr

It is with great sadness that I inform of the passing of Piotr on July 29th, after his long fight with cancer. He was a great man, great engineer, a wonderful husband, father, brother and son. A dedicated Ruby community member. He will be sincerely missed

Piotr's wife, Monika
chastell.net
Please consider me on a coding/work hiatus at least till the end of September, due to health reasons. 🫠
chastell.net
I was heavily offlined the last few weeks, so I’ll have Opinions™ more end-of-August at best! But my Vim clumsiness finally pays back, the basic bindings are the most I ever learnt. 😇
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
gergely.pragmaticengineer.com
... and this is why I don't like to talk to journalists. I made an exception for The Economist: sent over 7 pages of details on the comp landscape and told them they can use it, plus quote from @pragmaticengineer.com as long as they link it.

They used my chart, redrew it as their own, did not link.
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
gergely.pragmaticengineer.com
It's happened: the trimodal nature of software engineering compensation made it to the Economist!

Disappointingly though, they did not link to the original article (they never do AFAIK), they redraw the image, and do not call it trimodal. Feels like "ripping off" my research, not gonna lie.
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
strajkkobiet.bsky.social
@martalempart.bsky.social wygrała z @OrdoIuris o słynne zdanie, którego nie mogła przez lata wypowiadać.
To znaczy, że nie musicie się bać mowić, że Ordo Iuris to finansowani przez Kreml fundamentaliści.
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
joel.drapper.me
GitHub managed to make the files changed tab slower than it was before. This is astoundingly bad. 6 seconds to load the top of the page. 10 seconds to register hovering over a link. If you switch away to another tab and switch back, you need to wait about 2 seconds for it to render again. 🧵
github.com
GitHub @github.com · Jul 1
Reviewing large pull requests just got a major upgrade. Try out our faster, more accessible Files changed tab—now in public preview.

Click “✨Try the new experience” in the upper-right corner of any pull request. (You can switch back at any time!)

Comment your feedback here. ⬇️
gh.io/new-files-ch...
Improved "Files changed" experience in pull requests.
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
pfrazee.com
A couple comments about what I’ve been learning about algo engineering, but first off: if you’re interested in helping us improve Discover and all of our algorithmic systems, we are hiring algo engineers jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9i...
chastell.net
Right, apologies. 🤦‍♂️

You can mutate the array because you have access to the passed-by-value pointer to it (`a`), but you can’t repoint it (this is why `a += [3]` doesn’t change the caller’s variable).

This is also why you can’t mutate immediates.
chastell.net
This is because `a += [3]` is syntactic sugar for `a = a + [3]` – you are not modifying `a`, you create a new local `a` from the passed-in `a`.

`a.push(3)` is a call on the original `a` that modifies it.

(Ruby is pass-by-reference except some objects are immediates, like small integers… 😱)
chastell.net
Can they do Polishness next? My paternal-paternal great-grandpa was Czech, my maternal-paternal one was Silesian, the majority of them identified as Poles probably, keine Ahnung – Poland didn’t exist for 123 years (that’s five generations?).

And then what does it mean to be Catalonian.
chastell.net
(There’s also the infuriating ‘employees have to be in the office three times a week because we can’t trust them to not be doing another job in parallel’.)
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
shintonty.bsky.social
happy women having sex with robots day for those who celebrate
chastell.net
…or, just now – I had my daily blood pressure records in Obsidian oldest-first, but the list grew long and I’d rather add to the top of it:

tac blood_pressure.md | sponge blood_pressure.md
chastell.net
like Popular with Friends (one of the official ones)?

bsky.app/profile/did:...
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
headfallsoff.com
this technology that i cant even get my own employees to use without literally threatening them is definitely going to be profitable one day
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
keithfitzgerald.bsky.social
Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
ayoub.bsky.social
The death toll of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza is now estimated at 100,000

The list is 1,227 pages long.

The first 11 pages are names of babies dead before the age of 6 months.

The first 381 pages are all children.

archive.is/2025.06.28-0...
On Monday of this week, Hamas' Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip published an updated list of those killed in the war, a 1,227-page chart, arranged from youngest to oldest. The Arabic-language document includes the deceased person's full name, the names of the father and grandfather, date of birth and ID number.
Unlike previous lists, this compilation notes the precise age of children who were under the age of one year when they were killed. Mahmoud al-Maranakh and seven more children died on the same day they were born. Four more children were killed on the day after they entered the world, five others lived to the age of two days. Not until page 11, following 486 names, does the name appear of the first child who was more than six months old when he was killed.
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
o.simardcasanova.net
The crowd at the Budapest Pride is massive, in defiance of Orban

www.cnn.com/2025/06/28/e...
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
emily.gorcen.ski
Budapest Pride thread, from the ground
Reposted by Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️
tenderlove.dev
Tried to use Gemini to fix a bug in Ruby. It made a change that caused Ruby segv, told me it's too dangerous to continue, and then gave me instructions as to how to report the bug 🤣