I posted the following on my Fediverse (via Mastodon) account. I'm reposting the whole seven posts here as written there, but I hope folks will take a look at that thread as folks are engaging in conversation over there that might be worth reading if what I have to say interests you. (The remainder of the post is the same that can be found in the Fediverse posts linked throughout.)

I suppose Fediverse isn't the place people are discussing Rob Reiner. But after 36 hours of deliberating whether to say anything, I feel compelled. This thread will be long,but I start w/ most important part:

It's an “open secret” in the FOSS community that in March 2017 my brother murdered our mother. About 3k ppl/year in USA have this experience, so it's a statistical reality that someone else in FOSS experienced similar. If so, you're welcome in my PMs to discuss if you need support… (1/7)

… Traumatic loss due to murder is different than losing your grandparent/parent of age-related ailments (& is even different than losing a young person to a disease like cancer). The “a fellow family member did it” brings permanent surrealism to your daily life. Nothing good in your life that comes later is ever all that good. I know from direct experience this is what Rob Reiner's family now faces. It's chaos; it divides families forever: dysfunctional family takes on a new “expert” level… (2/7)

…as one example: my family was immediately divided about punishment. Some of my mother's relatives wanted prosecution to seek death penalty. I knew that my brother was mentally ill enough that jail or prison *would* get him killed in a prison dispute eventually,so I met clandestinely w/my brother's public defender (during funeral planning!) to get him moved to a criminal mental health facility instead of a regular prison. If they read this, it'll first time my family will find out I did that…(3/7)

…Trump's political rise (for me) links up: 5 weeks into Trump's 1ˢᵗ term, my brother murdered my mother. My (then 33yr-old) brother was severely mentally ill from birth — yet escalated to murder only then. IMO, it wasn't coincidence. My brother left voicemail approximately 5 hours before the murder stating his intent to murder & described an elaborate political delusion as the impetus. ∃ unintended & dangerous consequences of inflammatory political rhetoric on the mental ill!…(4/7)

…I'm compelled to speak publicly — for first time ≈10 yrs after the murder — precisely b/c of Trump's response.

Trump endorsed the idea that those who oppose him encourage their own murder from the mentally ill. Indeed, he said that those who oppose him are *themselves causing* mental illnesses in those around them, & that his political opponents should *expect* violence from their family members (who were apparently driven to mental illness from your opposition to Trump!)… (5/7)

…Trump's actual words:

Rob Reiner, tortured & struggling,but once…talented movie director & comedy star, has passed away, together w/ his wife…due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, & incurable affliction w/ a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME…He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of…Trump, w/ his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as [my] Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness…

My family became ultra-pro-Trump after my mom's murder. My mom hated politics: she was annoyed *both* if I touted my social democratic politics & if my dad & his family stated their crypto-fascist views. Every death leaves a hole in a community's political fabric. 9+ years out, I'm ostracized from my family b/c I'm anti-Trump. Trump stated perhaps what my family felt but didn't say: those who don't support Trump are at fault when those who fail to support Trump are murdered. (7/7)

[ Finally, I want to also quote this one reply I also posted in the same thread: I ask everyone, now that I've stated this public, that I *know* you're going to want to search the Internet for it, & you will find a lot. Please, please, keep in mind that the Police Department & others basically lied to the public about some of the facts of the case. I seriously considered suing them for it, but ultimately it wasn't worth my time. But, please everyone ask me if you are curious about any of the truth of the details of the crime & its aftermath …

Americans support a universal medical system by a large margin. Even if we count only Republicans, almost 50% support it.

So why doesn't Congress enact one? I can see only one possible explanation: our corrupt system of campaign funding.

This is what makes the difference between progressive Democrats and plutocratists (of any party). The progressive Democrats try to win by advocating laws that will help non-rich Americans; the plutocratists try to avoid the issue and raise distractions.

Deportation thugs at the Fort Bliss deportations prison have been accused of *beatings, sexual abuse and clandestine deportations of non-Mexican nationals into Mexico.*

The Labour Party's right-wing plutocratist power-bloc chose Starmer as leader, but the right wing policies he put in place have inspired public revulsion. This article speculates that they are about to replace Starmer as prime minister with another right-wing Labour minister to continue pushing for the same policies.

Local elected officials if Britain's magat party are trying to gag their opposition using the weak powers of local government. The results may be rather embarrassing for them.

The gang MS-13 used threats and intimidation to support the right-wing candidate for president of Honduras. The corrupter did the same thing using different threats.

*For months, [the corrupter and his magats] have been accusing [their] political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.*

He seems to have committed such a fraud himself. *He had two mortgages he claimed were primary dwellings, records show.*

Magat US Park Service cancels gratis entry on Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, and announces gratis entry on the persecutor's birthday instead.

This reinforces the right-wing extremist position that slavery wasn't so bad, if the slaves were blacks.

The US government is considering abolishing payment by check.

I use checks to pay bills that come to me with my name on them. They are morally acceptable because (1) being anonymous is not possible for those bills and (2) I can send checks without running a nonfree app or JavaScript program.

Sending credit card information on paper would also be morally acceptable in those cases; however, checks have the advantage that the bank does no find out what one paid for with a check, whereas I think credit card issuers get specifics about what one paid for with a credit card transaction. (In addition, credit card numbers are easy to use for fraud, easier than a checking account number.)

Systems for repression of people depend on data. Every kind of surveillance built into systems we use, including payment systems, facilitates repression and arbitrary, tyrannical rule.

US citizens: call on Congress to oppose high-deductible medical plans.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the companies that have donated for the "king"'s grand ballroom.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

With all of the different Linux kerenl stable releases happening (at least 1 stable branch and multiple longterm branches are active at any one point in time), keeping track of what commits are already applied to what branch, and what branch specific fixes should be applied to, can quickly get to be a very complex task if you attempt to do this manually. So I’ve created some tools to help make my life easier when doing the stable kerrnel maintenance work, which ended up making the work of tracking CVEs much simpler to manage in an automated way.

This is an “eat your veggies!” talk, which is an indepth review of an excellent PR by @dovgopoly. When someone first submits a PR, I like to explain every detail of how I would have done it, so they have some guidance about what the process looks like.

You can see the final result here.

Despite having a stable release model and cadence since December 2003, Linux kernel version numbers seem to baffle and confuse those that run across them, causing numerous groups to mistakenly make versioning statements that are flat out false. So let’s go into how this all works in detail.

After the previous aside on a gossip bug, I realized I should do a tour of each daemon. I started with gossipd because it’s my favorite, having changed so much from what it originally did into something which now mainly exports the “gossip_store” file for other subdaemons and plugins to use.

It’s been almost 2 full years since Linux became a CNA (Certificate Numbering Authority) which meant that we (i.e. the kernel.org community) are now responsible for issuing all CVEs for the Linux kernel. During this time, we’ve become one of the largest creators of CVEs by quantity, going from nothing to number 3 in 2024 to number 1 in 2025. Naturally, this has caused some questions about how we are both doing all of this work, and how people can keep track of it.

I stumbled over a bug while doing some work on gossipd, so I decided to record myself tracking it down.

I had reduced it to a simple test, and you can follow along from there. Not sure how clear I was, since I didn’t know where this would go! You can find the final pull request on GitHub.

This post is all about tal repostory, which is the CCAN module which I consider compulsory for any program which ever explicitly frees memory (you can write some very complex programs which don’t do that, FWIW!).

Understanding tal is a requirement for coding anything within CLN!

This post is all about the CCAN repostory, which contains all kinds of useful C routines which we use all over Core Lightning. It lives, these days, on GitHub.

This is the start of a one-per-workday video series, introducing Core Lightning Development to already-fluent C programmers.

The first video simply sets the groundwork of what the rest of the series should look like.