I asked Grok to hallucinate a photo of three people. It gave me two pictures of four people. but insisted that there were only three people.

I just released this week's FreeBSD snapshot builds: Of note, we're no longer building i386, powerpc, or powerpcspe images for FreeBSD 15.0-CURRENT. It took a while, but the world is moving on from 32-bit systems.

A non-broken FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE amd64 ZFS RAW VM image is now available: Thanks to @vermaden for reminding me to do this and testing the resulting image.

I tend to be a 429, but for some clients I can subtract 27 from that error code.

Do I know anyone who works at @Hetzner_Online? Looking to establish a more streamlined/robust process for getting FreeBSD releases into the Hetzner Cloud than "random FreeBSD-using customer sends an email to support@".

Reminder: If you see something released in the next few days, there's a good chance it was rushed out to fulfill a promise of "second quarter". Bonuses, promotions, and even remaining employed can depend on landing code a few days earlier; but bad incentives produce bad products.

If you're running a conference in Canada with an international audience, please consider adding "how to immigrate to Canada" to your schedule. Yes, no matter what the conference is about. Seriously, a large chunk of my time at @BSDCan was talking to Americans about this.

RT @MarkJCarney: Being a father is the greatest privilege and responsibility of my life. To all of the dads who have shown up day in and….

Conferences in large hotels have their place, but university lecture rooms are very good for technical talks -- among other things, because there's desks for laptops -- and "let's head to [closest pub to conference site]" results in a lot of important conversations happening.

I have attended and spoken at many other venues over the years, but this remains my favourite conference, especially for presenting new work, due to the highly technical audience (tshirt-to-suit ratio > 10) and the relaxed university campus environment.

Since then I've given many more talks at BSDCans across the years, including announcing scrypt (2009), everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour (2010), porting FreeBSD to EC2 (2011), profiling the kernel boot (2018), and speeding up the boot (2022).

I was reminded today that it's 20 years since my first @BSDCan talk -- the one where I made the first public announcement of a side channel attack against Intel Hyperthreading. Times were very different back then: Instead of thanking me for my work, Intel tried to get me fired.

At the @freebsd developer summit at @BSDCan . Anyone who couldn't make it to Ottawa (and also people physically in Ottawa but suffering from jetlag in their hotel rooms) can watch the developer summit at

Upgrading my laptop to 14.3-RELEASE at 39000' while flying to @BSDCan. (Thank you @AirCanada for the free wifi!).

FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE is now available: Thanks to all the developers who worked on this, everyone who tested and reported bugs, and also to Amazon who sponsored my work (FreeBSD/EC2 and release engineering) for the past year.

I asked ChatGPT to "draw a picture that encapsulates what you think of Colin Percival", and it asked me if I wanted a picture which emphasized my work on computer security, or my role as an MP Candidate. I have never been a candidate for public office of any sort.

FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE images are starting to hit mirrors. Reminder: It's not official until a GPG-signed email goes out to the freebsd-announce mailing list. We probably won't have to pull the release at this point, but if we do it wouldn't be the first time it has happened.

Blog post: A year of funded FreeBSD development:

(Apologies to former inhabitants of Lubyanka, from which I appropriated the joke.).

Little-known fact about US government architecture: ICE detention facilities are incredibly tall. So tall, in fact, that you can see El Salvador from their basements.