| 18 Dec 2025 |
 rosssmyth | Of course. | 15:53:03 |
| rosssmyth | Working at a company as the newest hire in like 20 years has some funny things about using contemporary software engineering practices | 15:53:53 |
| rosssmyth | I am one of two software engineers, and I am the only one who uses version control, the only one who cares even a little bit about being able to build our firmware outside of IDE tooling, ci, and other fun stuff | 15:54:59 |
 emily | can you give a rough estimate of how many countries' national security depend on the integrity of your laptop? or maybe planes' ability to remain aloft or medical devices' proper functioning? :D | 15:55:06 |
| emily | but yeah, big builds on GHA is a pain | 15:55:14 |
| emily | and I assume your company isn't up for paying for the beefier or third-party runners | 15:55:32 |
| rosssmyth | I know we interact with the US military but I'm unsure what we do with them.
We have major contracts with the single company that does almost all testing of silicon wafers for all foundries
We have many contracts with various medical device manufactuers
No aerospace contracts (yet!)
And yeah, we just have the cheapest github plan at like $50/year | 15:56:53 |
| rosssmyth | Also if you drive a Tesla Model X, we have hardware in the rear power seats | 15:57:09 |
| rosssmyth | Though starting next year we will not as they are moving that stuff in-house iirc | 15:57:34 |
| rosssmyth | We also supply motors for the McDonald's Ice Cream machine. | 15:57:51 |
| rosssmyth | * I know we interact with the US military but I'm unsure what we do with them.
We have major contracts with the single company that does almost all testing of silicon wafers for all foundries (KLA)
We have many contracts with various medical device manufactuers
No aerospace contracts (yet!)
And yeah, we just have the cheapest github plan at like $50/year | 15:58:12 |
| emily | thankfully there are other components of the Tesla supply chain I am more concerned about, such as Tesla | 15:58:29 |
| rosssmyth | true... | 15:58:36 |
| rosssmyth | They suck to work with! | 15:58:44 |
| emily | haha, don't get fired for complaining about your clients on NixOS Matrix :) | 15:59:12 |
| emily | (aren't those the ones famous for always being broken, though?) | 15:59:28 |
| rosssmyth | they are not our client anymore, the contract expired anyways | 15:59:35 |
| rosssmyth | Yes, but it is not our part that breaks! | 15:59:49 |
| rosssmyth | Also the force feedback motor in the control stick of a certain Caterpillar tractor. Can't remember which model. | 16:00:32 |
| emily | FWIW, you can always self-host GitHub runners on your own hardware, like uh, your laptop, and there are third-party providers for faster runners like https://namespace.so/ that I believe are cheaper than GitHub's. though maybe not any more, GitHub are lowering prices: https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions/ (…while also trying to charge for self-hosted runners admittedly) | 16:01:15 |
| emily | all that said, if you can make multilib work to the point of being able to target i686 with the standard x86_64-linux environment, I think we'd be happy to accept that | 16:01:39 |
| rosssmyth | Anyways, yes there are two laptops that are very load bearing to all of our firmware. Though not as much anymore since I have been moving things to Meson+Nix as I work on them. | 16:01:40 |
| emily | we do have some ancient "multilib" stdenv stuff though I doubt it works very well | 16:01:54 |
| rosssmyth | I did see a toggle for multilib buried in there | 16:02:21 |
| emily | see all-packages.nix around wrapCCMulti = … and beyond, pkgs/test/cc-wrapper/multilib.nix… I expect it's pretty bitrotted | 16:03:05 |
| emily | I wouldn't worry too much about breaking changes to embedded stuff though | 16:03:44 |
| emily | the reasons it needs changes are the reasons nobody uses it | 16:03:56 |
| rosssmyth | I would like to work on multilib stuff, but unsure when I will have time to as I will not be doing it outside of work. | 16:04:30 |
| 19 Dec 2025 |
 Randy Eckenrode | And as someone who has ended up fixing the breakage on Darwin several times, it was a time suck for questionable benefit. | 15:59:45 |
|  janusz-bit joined the room. | 19:30:17 |
