Alexander Bandukwala

@bandukwala.me

💻 Pursuing the Future of Computing 🔬 PhD Student @ University of Michigan (Future of Programming Lab) 🪄 Building Hazel: Live Functional Programming & Malleable Systems 🐾 Dog Parent 🛠️ Ex-Software Engineer 🌟 Computing Maximalist

broski 5 years ago this would have taken me 2 years to fix and made me grow as a person and as a developer to fix

The crash report is the smoking gun and it's not a signing problem at all. The top frame jumps to 0xbad4007 (a poisoned pointer) inside ImageIO's PNG reader, loading a cursor image - and the loaded libraries show why:

libpng16.16.dylib /opt/homebrew/*/libpng16.16.dylib
libtiff, liblzma, libjpeg, libgif, libzstd -> all /opt/homebrew/

Electron is pulling homebrew's image libraries into apple's system ImageIO framework. That's DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH/DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH pollution: Emacs (launched from your shell) has a DYLD var pointing at /opt/homebrew/lib, Electron inherits it, and when macOS loads a cursor PNG the system framework grabs Homebrew's incompatible libpng -> SIGUBS. Let me confirm the env var.

Alarmed at this trend of people finally realizing MCP is a pointless abstraction, then skipping right over publishing a regular boring API, and instead launching new CLIs for agents to use for some reason. It’s baffling.

The Internet is truly dying. I don't wanna use Twitter, I don't wanna use GitHub, I don't wanna use YouTube, I don't wanna use any of the websites I used to use regularly. I have no place to go. The Internet feels like giant wasteland...

We used to have this many years ago by default. It was common to load jQuery et al from a public CDN so most people wouldn't have to download it again just for your site. Then marketers started using it to fingerprint. And hackers used it to poison cross-origin JS. The feature got removed sigh