I taught some C to my sis today and it's hard because she is smart and has questions
like, I wasn't prepared to have to explain PRNGs but I had to coz she wanted to know how random number generation is done because I mentioned that "int x;" gets a random number and she asked "so if I want a random number I should just look at some random memory location" and I couldn't in good conscience say "yeah, that is a perfectly valid way to do RNG"

@grainloom function that gets a random uint8_t by continually spawning a subprocess that attempts to dereference a random memory address. when eventually one doesn't segfault, it returns that byte. warning: random number distribution is heavily biased to 0 and also quite biased to 255

@jk upon reading this toot Dennis Ritchie's ghost manifested in my room, took the UNIX manual from my shelf and smashed my laptop with it

@grainloom @jk There's a standard library function for this.

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/pinewiki/C(2f)Randomization.html#The_rand_function_from_the_standard_library

@starbreaker @grainloom the implementation isn’t silly enough im afraid

@jk @starbreaker @grainloom go look again, it's randomly silly

@djsundog @jk @starbreaker @grainloom reimplement libc with a focus on maximizing implementation silliness

@io @grainloom @starbreaker @jk @djsundog reimplement libc by shelling out to, well, shell utilities.

did I reinvent plan9 yet?

@SoniEx2 @djsundog @jk @starbreaker @io that's almost what @Shamar 's Jehanne OS does/will do, AFAIK.
Eg. he's been throwing around ideas like "allocation should be done by writing to a file" and other stuch stuff.

@grainloom @Shamar @io @starbreaker @jk @djsundog memory should be a file.

the only syscalls should be mmap and system.

@Shamar @grainloom @io @starbreaker @jk @djsundog strcpy(mmap("/sys/mkfile", ???), "/tmp/memory"); mmap("/tmp/memory", ???); etc