Huw Chaffe

Interests sort of limited to what is verifiable. History, science, current events. Show me.

[243Cal 🇮🇪 @243_cal]

24 hours after footage of an African man trying to saw the head off his Scottish victim in a Belfast street circulated online, Irish politicians and journalists openly discuss on live TV how such videos can be suppressed, in future.
We're going down a dark road. #TonightVMT

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

Dennis Ritchie invented C in 1972, co-built Unix in 1969, and his code is running inside every device you are reading this on right now and the colleague who announced his death had to do it through a Google+ post because no journalist thought to check.

He worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey for 44 years. He never gave a keynote. He never ran a company. He never appeared on a magazine cover. He just wrote code that became the invisible foundation everything else is built on.

Here is what he actually built, and why it matters more than almost anything that happened in tech.

In 1969, Bell Labs had just walked away from one of the most ambitious computing projects in history. The Multics project, a joint effort between MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, had collapsed under its own weight. Too complex. Too expensive. Too slow. Bell Labs pulled out.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie refused to let the ideas die.

Working in a small office in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix in three weeks during the summer of 1969. One week for the file system. One week for the process management. One week for the command shell. Ritchie was working alongside him, and when the system needed a language that could express what they were building, he built one.

In 1972 he completed C.

C was not just another programming language. It was a different philosophy about what a programming language should be. Before C, most systems code was written in assembly, which meant every program was tied to the specific hardware it ran on. You could not move code between machines. You rewrote it from scratch every time.

C changed that. It sat close enough to the hardware to be fast, but abstract enough to run on anything. When Thompson rewrote the Unix kernel in C in 1973, it became the first operating system that could be picked up and moved to a completely different machine without starting over. Portability was a new idea. Ritchie made it real.

The branching that followed is almost impossible to overstate.

Unix spread from Bell Labs to universities. At Berkeley, it became BSD. BSD became the foundation of macOS and iOS. Unix influenced Linus Torvalds, who built Linux in 1991. Linux now runs every Android phone, every major web server, every supercomputer on the Top500 list, and the overwhelming majority of cloud infrastructure at AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

C became the parent language of C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Objective-C. Rob Pike, who worked across the hall from Ritchie at Bell Labs for 20 years, said it plainly: "The browsers are written in C. The Unix kernel that the entire internet runs on is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C."

Ritchie won the Turing Award in 1983. He won the National Medal of Technology in 1998, presented by President Clinton. He was head of System Software Research at Bell Labs for decades.

He answered emails from strangers with technical questions until the end of his life. His home address stayed listed in the phone book. His colleague Brian Kernighan, who co-authored the definitive C textbook with him, said Ritchie was a private person who did no self-salesmanship. That was not false modesty. It was just who he was.

He died on October 12, 2011, at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He was 70. He had been ill for some time. The world did not notice until Rob Pike posted a quiet announcement on Google+, and the news spread through the programming community in hushed tones.

No front pages. No tributes from heads of state. No candlelight vigils outside corporate campuses.

The device you are reading this on runs code that traces directly back to what he built. So does the server that delivered it to you. So does the browser or app you opened to get here.

Most people will never know his name.

The ones who built everything you use every day do.

[Praise @tufpraise]

now are y'all seeing this?!? like REALLY SEEING THIS???

[David Vance @DavidVance]

The only reason we know about the horrific attack by a migrant on a defenceless man in north Belfast is because of X. Mainstream media mute.,

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

No more discrimination

[Ewa Zajączkowska-Hernik @EwaZajaczkowska]

Symboliczne. Prezes Sądu Najwyższego Ukrainy właśnie został skazany na 5 lat więzienia za korupcję❗ Łapówka ledwo mieściła się na kanapie. Zgodził się sypać na kolegów. Zamieszanych ma być nawet 10 innych sędziów Sądu Najwyższego 🤯

Przecież to wszystko bardziej przypomina strukturę mafijną, niż normalny aparat państwa. Korupcja na Ukrainie to studnia bez dna. Umoczone jest nie tylko najbliższe otoczenie Zełenskiego i członkowie rządu, ale nawet najważniejsi sędziowie.

Skazany właśnie były szef Sądu Najwyższego, Wsiewołod Kniaziew, dostał 5 lat za przyjęcie łącznie kilku milionów dolarów, skonfiskowano mu majątek, a sam zobowiązał się do składania zeznań obciążających innych uczestników korupcyjnego procederu. Niedawno ukraińskie służby antykorupcyjne poinformowały, że prowadzą czynności śledcze w sprawie przestępstw szeregu kolejnych, obecnych i byłych, sędziów Sądu Najwyższego.

To co, dalej zadłużajmy kolejne pokolenia Polaków na rzecz Ukrainy? Dalej w zamian za nic, kompletnie bezwarunkowo pompujmy tam miliardy udając, że nie widzimy gigantycznej korupcji i plucia na polskie ofiary rzezi wołyńskiej? A może od razu bierzmy ich do Unii Europejskiej? Dopóki jest to państwo na wskroś przeżarte korupcją i gloryfikujące ludobójców, to nawet nie powinno być o tym mowy.
No chyba, że unijnym pseudoelitom chodzi o to, iż ukraińskie władze będą jak ulał pasować do największej afery korupcyjnej na szczytach władz w Brukseli - tam w afery zamieszani są przecież była wiceszefowa Parlamentu Europejskiego Eva Kaili, były wiceszef PE i komisarz KE Frans Timmermans, ex-komisarz Didier Reynders, była szefowa unijnej dyplomacji Federica Mogherini, czy sama Ursula von der Leyen i jej "Pfizergate".

Od początku postuluję prowadzenie ASERTYWNEJ polityki na arenie międzynarodowej, również wobec Ukrainy, a nie robienia za bankomat, oddawanie wszystkiego za nic, a potem szok i niedowierzanie, że coraz mniej nas szanują. Każda udzielona pomoc, musi rodzić konkretne korzyści. Polska nie może robić za frajerów Europy - to musi się zmienić po najbliższych wyborach parlamentarnych!

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

Never has a crime so obscene been so confessed to, so endlessly, so shamelessly, so proudly

[DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics]

BREAKING: Israeli settlers burning Taybeh NOW - ancient Christian village under attack.

Israeli settlers are attacking Taybeh right now, setting fires across the ancient Christian village in occupied Palestine.

Taybeh is home to the oldest living Christian community in the world. It's where Jesus took refuge after the resurrection of Lazarus according to the Gospel of John. This village has existed for thousands of years.

The 5th-century Church of St. George, one of the oldest churches in Palestine, is under threat. Homes are being targeted.

Not a peep from Western mainstream media.

[Hend Amry @LibyaLiberty]

The U.S. World Cup in one horrible photo:

[Idris @7signxx]

Never forget. They use kids for target practice... 🇮🇱

[Vaibhav Sisinty @VaibhavSisinty]

Okay this is genuinely insane.

SpaceX just unveiled a satellite whose only job is to run AI. Not internet. Not GPS. Just compute, floating in orbit.

It's called AI1, and the reason behind it breaks your brain.

AI data centers on Earth are hitting a wall, not a chip wall, a physics wall.

They need staggering amounts of power and water just to stay cool, and we're running out of grid and land to build them.

So Musk's answer is: stop building them on Earth.

In orbit, the sun never sets. Free power, 24/7. No water for cooling, you just radiate heat into the vacuum of space. The two things choking AI on the ground barely exist up there.

And here's the wild part: Musk says it's easier to build than a Starlink satellite. Strip out the complex antennas and it's "a lot of solar cells, a radiator, and some laser links."

One AI1 carries the compute of an Nvidia GB300 rack, the same hardware data centers fight over down here.

AI1 is just the first one. The plan is a constellation of up to a million of them.

And the timing isn't an accident, SpaceX goes public this week at a ~$1.75 trillion target. This isn't a rocket company anymore. It's positioning itself as the power grid for AI, in space.

The race for AI compute just left the planet. Literally.

@SpaceX

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

Or……we could just leave the Middle East & do a Marshall plan-style reconstruction for OUR nation.

[Hassan Mafi ‏ @thatdayin1992]

It's a good time to remind everyone that FIFA is ass.

[Nature Unedited @NatureUnedited]

In Japan, a gorilla named Kiyomasa got into a fight with his mate. She kicked him out of their enclosure at the zoo, and he was later spotted sitting alone, seemingly rethinking his life choices

[Hussain Shiyam 🇵🇸❓🎈 @ShiyamHussain]

This is utter bullshit. When Indonesia refused to grant the Israeli under 17 team visa’s for the 2023 U-20 World Cup, FIFA stripped Indonesia’s hosting rights and moved it to Argentina. So @FIFAcom can stop with the lies.

[Kim "Katie" USA @KimKatieUSA]

@Shell Northlake Police warning about this scam.

[Chay Bowes @BowesChay]

As the professional Beggar and thief Zelensky tours Europe in luxury, and his elites cash in on the meatgrinder

Two elderly Ukrainian conscripts record a final message- "Out of six, two left, what happens now? Who knows"

The video was found on the phone. They didn't make it

[Huw Chaffe @ChaffeHuw]

@forbiddenmerch Your timing appears to be off.

[B'Tselem בצלם بتسيلم @btselem]

New footage obtained by B’Tselem uncovers the moments when the Abu Haikal family was shot. Seven-month-old Sam Abu Haikal was killed in the shooting, and both his parents were injured. The footage clearly shows that the Israeli soldier fired at the car as it was slowing to a stop. The car was far from the soldiers and posed no danger to them whatsoever.

Moments later, in another video obtained by B’Tselem, seven-month-old Sam’s father, Fahed, is seen just after his son was shot. Fahed is holding baby Sam in his arms, trying to stop the bleeding from his head with his hands, while Sam’s mother, Daniyah, who was also injured by the gunfire while holding her son, is seen sitting on the ground, next to the car.

Last Friday, 5 June, an Israeli soldier fired at a Palestinian family driving home from a family visit, as they sat in their car in the Tel Rumeidah neighborhood in Hebron. The family was shot as the car was slowing to a stop at the soldier’s command. Sam, a seven‑month‑old baby who was in his mother’s arms in the back seat, was struck in the head and pronounced dead shortly afterward. Sam’s parents were also injured by the gunfire; his mother is still in the hospital. After the shooting, the soldier who fired and another soldier who was with him left the scene without checking the car or offering any assistance to the critically wounded baby or to his mother.

In the past two and a half years, Israel has killed tens of thousands of children in Gaza and the West Bank. The immunity it gets from the international community has led to a reality where, under Israeli rule, Palestinian lives are entirely disposable – even a seven‑month‑old baby.

[Western Lensman @WesternLensman]

Pramila Jayapal runs the "Fine People” hoax trying to defend the SPLC.

Meanwhile, the SPLC was paying an organizer of the rally.

Just absolute clown world stuff.