Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

@secretasianman People think “portable assembly” is some kind of exaggerated zinger but it’s just a charitable description.

Comparing it to C, a language where the usual error handling mechanism is “rename some integers to things in all caps that start with the letter E and insert them in-band”, a system that a dead iguana could see the problems with, seems almost unfair.

Rust feels like it’s designed by people who actually care about what they’re doing and have paid full attention, which is the highest praise I can imagine giving software tooling.

@anji Every time someone refers to C as being well written, it looks to me like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wound_Man, except instead of injuries it’s code smells. But naturally this is a matter of taste.

@ian I may never know.

If you’d asked me a month ago I would have said I simply do not have fun writing in low-level languages, but I would have secretly thought: The actual problem is C, a bad language that is unpleasant to deal with. Now I feel the same way but am more confident in it.

Wrote a small amount of Rust over the holidays and, oddly, enjoyed it?

An analogy for what people are doing when they treat consumer imaging hardware like it’s perfect when it shows “orbs” or whatever: If you turn the volume way up on recordings made with even very high-quality audio hardware, you hear a hiss, which proves invisible hissing aliens are everywhere.

“1. Select the data type and date.
2. Download the PDF and print it on your printer.
3. Create a globe according to the instructions on the paper.”

https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/handmadeEarth/

Psychology texts used to be more fun.

Moving to a restricted vocabulary for the holidays where I only use the attested Basque–Icelandic pidgin phrases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque%E2%80%93Icelandic_pidgin#Pidgin_phrases

I’ve been wondering why I didn’t see sliced optimal transport used to make cartograms, so this weekend I tried it. It worked reasonably well. My instance was down so I posted most of the experiments on Bluesky, but here’s the most elaborate one – red is population, green is Foursquare POI, and blue is modeled GDP (all normalized so there are ~2.5e6 of each): https://xoc.s3.amazonaws.com/also/five.mp4

I feel like half the time I read something anonymized to protect human lifeways and artifacts, exploitable wild species, etc., it contains the equivalent of “here at ‘Penny Station’ at ‘8th Blvd’ and ‘Western 31st St’ in ‘Mew Yonk Sooty’,”.

If you’re writing an ethnography and you want to keep your study site anonymous, don’t put a map on the flyleaf and write a bunch of things about “an area of sandstone outcroppings to the north” or “the village is built at the first rapids on the river” or “here at the edge of the forest” or whatever.

Things I want from my incense: smells nice, benign ingredients, made in fair working conditions. Things incense manufacturers want to talk about: borderline illegal medicinal claims, holiness, purity.