Had a clear night yesterday and tried to get a better picture of Saturn with my phone. And it actually worked. You can get a picture of Saturn with just a Pixel 8 that lets you see the rings. Note how the stars in the background don't have the horizontal artifact (the ring) , but still smear towards the bottom. Maybe in a few years time we get even better optics and image processing. Weirdly enough the structures of the rings were better visible through the screen and slight movements than in the actual photo. Gonna be interesting to see what Jupiter and Mars look like later in the year.

I don't like the pattern of calling things `Manager` in Bitcoin Core. It is always unclear what design pattern they are actually using underneath and it seems to invite kitchen sink class design.

I was in a tiny dry stone walling museum a couple of days ago. It was interesting that they showed a bunch of techniques that were still highly specific to the region. Most of the walling was done with small slate-style rocks - very different from the Jura chalk I am used to, where we sometimes work with boulders a quarter the size of a car. They also showed a free-standing raised bed supported by dry stone, which I would love to have in my garden some day. We also came across these free-standing dry stone structures on our hikes in the region, something I've never seen around here.

Musig merged in secp 👀

Hopefully Bitcoin Core's RPC will be superceded by something different and better soon - be it a multi-reader DB or an IPC interface. But keeping everything stable while evolving the codebase is not a happy task to be doing and will create more problems in the future.

I am kind of curious if they end up going for the establishment hack, or the serial scammer.

It is cool to look at, but with a lot of it being a modern restoration the feeling inside was a bit weird. Like it made it harder to imagine what it must have been like to live within the citadel.

Seems like so many other devs were fed up with that for loop too such that my PR got no less than four ACKs and five Concept ACKs 😅

GitHub

init: Remove retry for loop by sedited · Pull Request #30968 · bitcoin/bitcoin

The for loop around the chain loading logic in init.cpp allows users of the GUI to retry once on failure with reindexing without having to manually...

That ocean mining DATUM protocol thing feels very much like not invented here syndrome.

Bitcoin Core just got its first proper useful ipc interface. If used externaly, it is more performant than querying templates through rpc, which may result in more efficient mining operations.

GitHub

multiprocess: Add IPC wrapper for Mining interface by ryanofsky · Pull Request #30510 · bitcoin/bitcoin

Add Cap'n Proto wrapper for the Mining interface introduced in #30200, and its associated types. This PR combined with #30509 will allow a sepa...

for (bool fLoaded = false; !fLoaded && !ShutdownRequested(node);) { Probably the worst piece of code remaining in the Bitcoin Core codebase. Produced two bugs this year that went into master and countless more during review cycles. And it is just there for the gui!

Ten guys jump one, what a man You fight each other, the police state wins Stab your backs when you trash our halls Trash a bank if you've got real balls

Yeah, the spam is starting to make this less fun again.

Found some new future directions to take for enabling better use cases for the kernel library. Going to be refactoring some more code over the next few weeks to make implementing them a bit easier.

The spambots are really here now.