fidzu : debian

The Chinese author Cixin Liu [1] is most known for his book The Three Body Problem and it's sequels. One of the main plot elements in the book is that every species in the universe is cool with genocide and willing to commit genocide as a preemptive strike against any star system found to contain intelligent life.

It's not unreasonable to think that some planets may be by run societies like that, if one star system in 10,000 had a technological society and one society in 10,000 is run by depraved autocratic governments that would make 1,000+ planets in our galaxy that are run by genocidal groups!

To think that every single society wants to commit genocide at every opportunity says a lot about every person who makes such claims. If you believe that everyone wants to do something then it must be something you really want to do. If there's something you really don't want to do then you will be able to imagine a system of government where the majority of citizens vote against doing it.

Even in the more horrible parts of human history there hasn't been a genocide comparable to destroying and entire star system, genocide is usually based on slavery and large scale armed robbery. To just commit large scale genocide with a side effect of destroying valuable resources without any investigation or attempts at negotiation just based on fear of others is an extreme that I don't think humans have reached in history.

The Daleks are portrayed as a perverse extreme of xenophobia but even with the low budget SciFi trend of depicting aliens as mostly having a common belief system they managed to show some Daleks going against their system from time to time. Cixin Liu is a very talented writer but his attitude towards genocide has caused him to write SciFi with a major plot point that's not great by Dr Who standards.

Overall his short stories are much better than the three novels he is most known for. But he shows his ass in some of them too. One notable example is a short story where a significant plot point is declaring a "right to sex" (for men) which involves government sponsored sex workers. A "right to sex" conflicts with a sex workers right to refuse sex for a potential client who is undesirable in some way. Regardless of opinions on whether sex work should be permitted I hope that the vast majority of voters in every jurisdiction can agree that sex workers shouldn't be forced to do things that they don't want to do.

Some writers like George Orwell create deliberately fictional scenarios that they hope to inspire opposition to bad ideas, I'm sure that many proposed laws have failed to get enacted after being described as "Orwellian". But describing a fictional horror situation as inevitable is a way of driving support for such things. It's particularly noteworthy when written by a citizen of a country that's involved in genocide.

A possible counter argument would be "but he is living in a repressive country and can't oppose his government". But when Hergé (the author of the Tintin graphic novels) was threatened about the consequences of writing another book like King Ottokar's Sceptre [2] he didn't write books in favour of authoritarianism, he just avoided the topic by writing about visiting the moon instead. I don't think that people living in China now should be expected to publicly oppose evil things done by their government, but when they go out of their way to support such things it's their choice and we should note that they made that choice.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't read his work as his short stories are definitely worth reading. But the Three Body Problem series really isn't that good, he prevented many potentially interesting situations from happening by having every interaction between different species be based around genocide or the potential for it. Being a horrible person also made him a less capable SciFi author.

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Cixin
• [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Ottokar%27s_Sceptre

20 Oct 2026 8:11am GMT

We're nearing the end soon, I promise. Here's one that I see all the time:

     ...
         } else {
             var_t0_5 = temp_a0_3 - 0x140;
             var_a2_5 = 0xA0 - temp_a3_5;
             goto block_45;
         }
     } else {
         var_t0_5 = 0xA0 - temp_a0_3;
         var_a2_5 = temp_a3_5 - 0x118;
block_45:               
         var_v0_3 = var_t0_5 + 0xA0;
         var_v1_4 = var_a2_5 + 0x78;
     }

So, eh, what's that goto doing there? What happened was that the compiler helpfully figured it could help with some tail deduplication; someone wrote the same code twice, and the compiler figured taking the cost of a branch was better than keeping it duplicated. (In a sense, it's the opposite of inlining. Ish.) In most cases, it's as simple as copying the block and then you can remove the label:

     ...
         } else {
             var_t0_5 = temp_a0_3 - 0x140;
             var_a2_5 = 0xA0 - temp_a3_5;
             var_v0_3 = var_t0_5 + 0xA0;
             var_v1_4 = var_a2_5 + 0x78;
         }
     } else {
         var_t0_5 = 0xA0 - temp_a0_3;
         var_a2_5 = temp_a3_5 - 0x118;
         var_v0_3 = var_t0_5 + 0xA0;
         var_v1_4 = var_a2_5 + 0x78;
     }

Sometimes, these are nested, with multiple tails goto-ing into each other, so in that case, you'll need to reduplicate multiple times. Make sure you actually come out on the correct side afterwards, though.

As an extra complication, the code is deduplicated not on the C statement level, but on RTL instructions, so if you're calling functions with five parameters of more (which requires pushing parameters onto the stack), m2c can get really confused and start throwing M2C_ERROR() at you on the receiving side because it's not clear at all where the parameters would be coming from.

19 Oct 2026 8:00pm GMT

Another new and exciting version of our still-new package myman reached CRAN this morning, and has been built for r2u and on r-universe. The matching Python package has also been updated. The package offers twenty one hundred eighty four "My man …" posts by Kevin Kruse made on bsky during the summer of 2026. Each wave picked at one particular public persona. This package wrapse these up in the style of packages like fortunes or gaussfacts.

This release regroups two new waves of posts mocking, respectively, Peter Thiel and Michael Tracy, and make a small update to continuous integration. The short NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.12.0 (2026-10-18)

• New waves eleven (100 posts) and twelve (100 posts) made last week; total is now 2184 posts

• Small update to continuous integration

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the most recent release. More information is available at the repository or the package page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

18 Oct 2026 8:00pm GMT