MagAO-X 2026A Day 3: Deadlock Funlock

Multi-threaded software is hard. You get all these different processes trying to access the same place in memory, and if they do it at the same time weird things happen. We have ways to stop these “data races” with tools like “atomics” and “mutexes” (mutices? plural of mutex for mutual exclusion) — but these add a new fun bug called “deadlock” when different threads try to lock the same mutex. So I’ve been spending lots of quality time with my new third best friend GPT-Codex. We make about 20 steps forward for every step back, but it’s in the time it used to take me to take about 1 step forward. Winning.

Miles has been hard at work getting his new polarization components installed.
Here we’re using a bright red laser to chase the beam path through the instrument.

Sebastiaan and Adam arrived from Leiden today. Sebastiaan is already complaining about having to do EFC.

The door to the lodge was being guarded this afternoon. In a very friendly fashion.

A nice sunset from my room tonight.

The color of the day is HeNe laser red.

The song of the day is The Emptiness Machine by Linkin Park: