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One of the hard bits of social media is feeling that the approval of people on the internet is important, and that their disapproval is to be avoided at all costs, even if it means avoiding discussion for fear of having a Wrong Take.
I'm working on myself to change this.
Rust is indeed woke. It's woke technology that embodies a woke understanding of what it means to be a programming language.
Blog post, by me.
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I agree with this post, and think it's an insightful perspective.
However, I think Rust faces a challenge with complexity. I completely failed to get any of the rest of the team to work on a Rust project I'd developed on leaving my last programming job cos they got stuck learning Rust (before they saw my code!)
Folk found things like co-/contra-variant lifetimes befuddling. I couldn't even convince people they need to know the difference between heap and stack. Not least, management stripped this exact question out of hiring interviews.
Things like async are a mistake, I think. (A mistake I used in my project until I understood why), mainly because of the way they pile on things like pinning. I coped okayish, but the project failed because I was the only compsci degree-er.
I worry that Rust is turning into C++
I don't really think Rust can hope to be inclusive while it require so befuddling concepts. I hold out hopes for maybe Zig (I've not learnt it).
I have no problem with the community.
I do agree that Rust faces a challenge with complexity.
But, I think the problem in the language is much less severe than often imagined. One can write eg Easy Mode Rust - which is still a highly performant and reliable language.
I certainly wouldn't bother novices with lifetime variance; that's advanced stuff which you hardly ever have to worry about (and as ever, either if builds it's fine, or you're an expert doing unsafe). I think "heap vs stack" is another thing novices can ignore.
It doesn't help that there's still a fair amount of perf hacker thinking even in resources for total newbies.
A very real challenge is the way that Rust programs almost never compile first time, which can be deeply offputting to people who've been socialised to be afraid of error messages. I wish we could somehow persuade folks that compiler errors are completely normal and fine, so they feel free to go ahead and experiment.
People apparently don't realise that I moderate comments on my blog. They think that if they send a 1000-word screed complaining about "wokeism" that anyone (even me) will read it.
FTR, my practice is to moderate comments vigorously so as to try to maintain the space as both enlightening and pleasant.
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NEW
“We will deport you if we have evidence against you, and deport you if we do not”
On an extraordinary witness statement from the US government - and how it has adopted the logic of the Ducking Stool
By me, at Prospect
prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/l…
We’ll deport you if we have evidence against you, and if we do not
On an extraordinary witness statement by the US governmentwww.prospectmagazine.co.uk
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I'm reminded of the WWII internment of the Japanese-Americans:
"He felt that the lack of sabotage efforts only meant that it was being readied for a large-scale effort. "The fact that nothing has happened so far is more or less . . . ominous, in that I feel that in view of the fact that we have had no sporadic attempts at sabotage that there is a control being exercised and when we have it it will be on a mass basis."" en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L…
Given the onerous requirements of the UK online safety act this is a very good way forward. mstdn.party/@pandorablake/1142…
I've spoken at length about my journey to a good solution over on Patreon: patreon.com/posts/open-source-…
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Yeah. The original UNIX philosophy was "small single-purpose tools that do one thing brilliantly and can be connected like Lego bricks"; systemd pours a pint of cyanoacrylate glue into the toy box.
mastodon.social/@LinuxAndYarn/…
@jimcarroll I'm not getting into Vim vs Emacs, Gnome vs KDE, Debian vs Rhel vs Arch or any of their siblings and children fighting amongst themselves.But systemd is the most cursed, bastardized, overcomplicated and overcompensating crock that has ever been forced upon Linux users. (AI is still a choice, after all.)
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Some of you have been eagerly awaiting part 2 of my test date with Jack. HERE IT IS!
The conclusion: love yourself before you start #dating. You'll know you're ready to #date when you can accept rejection with a shrug and 'your loss!'.
(pls share if you like it!)
girlonthenet.com/blog/love-you…
Love yourself: Test date with a blog reader part 2
Part two of the test date I had with a blog reader, and a message I don't think men get to hear often enough: love yourself before you start dating.Girl on the net (Girl on the Net)
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That's a lovely piece.
(JHR's internalised transphobia) "But!"
(JHR) "No. I'm sure you think you mean well, but no. The core message is still correct."
It occurs to me that Ken Thompson's classic lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust" has a LOT to say about code generation using LLMs.
The Thompson self-propagating UNIX hack that he described was a lot like a prompt injection attack (the right parsed input could trigger an unexpected output via opaque-to-programmer intermediate steps).
cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers…
mastodon.social/@gmh/114132067…
Something that strikes me is that news disinformation is a relatively minor threat here; there's enough news around for fact-checking AI-boosted propaganda.I think a bigger threat is AI-boosted unsafe programming. Too many people rely on Copilot or GPT to write their code for them, perform no sanity-checking, and put it into workplace production. If you pollute a LLM with backdoored code, how many people will roll it out?
The phrase 'Word macros for the 21st Century' springs to mind.
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From a 1943 article. "Standard contracts in particular could thus become effective instruments in the hands of powerful industrial and commercial overlords enabling them to impose a new feudal order of their own making upon a vast host of vassals."
Well.
Cambridge doesn’t operate on the basis of teaching you how to do things; it just assumes you can and looks and says “how sad” if you e.g. turn out to have no idea how to write an essay.
(Thing I just wrote in DMs, and thought worth grousing about in public.)
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Elite on the Apple II contains code by Ian Bell and David Braben.
No surprises there.
But did you know it also contains code by Steve Wozniak, Randy Wigginton and Rob Northen?
Find out why in my latest deep dive.
elite.bbcelite.com/deep_dives/…
#retrocomputing #retrogaming #8bit #apple #elite
File operations with embedded Apple DOS - Elite on the 6502
A deep dive into file operations with embedded Apple DOS in Apple II Eliteelite.bbcelite.com
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(Via the OU Contract Law module). Are terms and conditions better with 1990s computer music?
Shortened Terms and Conditions
For Safer Internet Day this year, we focused on our Terms of Service and how familiarising yourself with them can improve your Habbo experience.YouTube
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That works for people switching within Star Fleet, but what if I were a yoga instructor with some sort of injury and decided to retrain as a therapist and became an expert on idk, space station agoaphobia? That would be moving from a civilian role to something at least Star Fleet adjacent.
... I guess there's the TNG bartender....
They end up in the Red Shirts section and quickly get destroyed.
The fleet thinking is 'mature students have good wide range of experience therefore should survive unfamiliar conditions'. Unfortunately, lack of O2 is not something you can get used to by experience.
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we have also stopelon.eu
...but while I wait...
Stop Elon - Against anti-EU propaganda
Elon Musk is using X to target the European Union, increasing anti-EU feelings and supporting far-right parties. Help us stopping him.stopelon
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that …The Poetry Foundation
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I strongly dislike the fact that we now basically have to reevaluate all domains under management, and the infrastructure that depends on the associated DNS records, in light of this new insider threat from an asshole with a sharpie.
Especially given how eager US tech companies are to comply with whatever these fuckers come up with next.
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I was thinking over/into my beer just now. I want there to be a website for trans eggs. Is there one? Not just useful information, but actually something much closer to advertising. There's this narrative that shapes being trans as undesirable, faulty, at best a disorder to be treated and pitied.
But being trans is amazing, and I think we should be shouting about it to as many people who need to hear as we can reach.
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Marco "Ocramius" Pivetta
in reply to SaraMG 🏳️🌈 • • •SaraMG 🏳️🌈
in reply to Marco "Ocramius" Pivetta • • •@ocramius Never kink shame! Aside... anyone remember drupalconfessions.org?
Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Wez Furlong
in reply to SaraMG 🏳️🌈 • • •Claudio Zizza 🦜
in reply to SaraMG 🏳️🌈 • • •