An Incoherent Rust

Coherence and the orphan rules are a frequent source of complaints about Rust, and a common topic of language proposals. This post covers most of the existing proposals around coherence and my vision for how we should solve coherence once and for all.

The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere | Quanta Magazine

The central limit theorem started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers. Now scientists rely on it every day.

Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years

No Semicolons Needed | Terts Diepraam

More! More! More! Tech Workers Max Out Their A.I. Use.

At a number of companies, employees compete on leaderboards to show how much A.I. they’re using. They’re racking up big bills along the way.

I'm OK being left behind, thanks!

Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going…

An ode to bzip

The story goes like this. ComputerCraft is a mod that adds programming to Minecraft. You write Lua code that gets executed by a bespoke interpreter with access to world APIs, and now you’re writing code instead of having fun. Computers have limited disk space, and my /nix folder is growing out of control, so I need to compress code. The laziest option would be to use LibDeflate, but its decoder is larger than both the gains from compression and my personal boundary for copying code. So the question becomes: what’s the shortest, simplest, most ratio-efficient compression algorithm? I initially thought this was a complex question full of tradeoffs, but it turns out it’s very clear-cut. My answer is bzip, even though this algorithm has been critiqued multiple times and has fallen into obscurity since xz and zstd became popular.

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