A small gui to automate generating some pdfs from some CSV files.

There’s a small non-profit in my area helping people operate localized energy distribution (as producers and consumers). Each month, they receive a zip file containing the raw kiloWatt-hours produced and consumed by each participant over the past month as CSV files. So far the non-profit has been manually importing these CSVs into LibreOffice to generate graphs and tables and export the whole thing as an individualized PDF file for each participant. Now that they’re starting to help more than 2-3 operations, it’s become useful to try to automate that process.

I’ve been writing it in rust for a few reasons. First of all I wanted cross-compilation to be sure to work and at this point I’m more familiar with rust than go, secondly I read a blog post recently that evaluated rust gui solutions in terms of accessibility and IME-compatibility on windows. I started off looking for a “direct” pdf-writing library but eventually switched to using typst to generate the pdfs from templates I write. typst being written in rust has enabled me to bundle its engine into the program in a pretty-straightforward way.

I’m currently working on allowing the import of multiple sets of data so that the generated PDFs can show line plots of the electricity production and consumption over several months.

1. chunk_size := file_size / cpu_cores. Compile regex.

2. spawn cpu_cores workers:
   2.a. worker #n starts at n * chunk_size bytes. If n > 0, skip bytes until newline encountered.
   2.b worker starts feeding bytes from file/chunk into regex. When match is found, write to output (stdout or file, whichever has better performance). When newline encountered, restart regex state automata.
   2.c after having read chunk_size bytes, continue until encountering a newline to ensure the whole file is covered by the parallel search.

Optionally, keep track of byte number and attach them to the found matches when outputting, to facilitate eventually de-duplicating and/or navigating to said match in the file.

To avoid problems, have each worker output to a separate file, and only combine these output files when the workers are all finished.

As others have said, it’s going to be hard to get more speedup than this, and you will ultimately be limited by your storage’s read speed and throughput if the whole file cannot fit into memory.

It’s been a while since I set up my runner, and I have it on my personal desktop (which is wayyyyyy beefier than the VPS I host my forgejo instance on), but I’m pretty sure I was able to specify that only my user account can trigger actions to be run on this runner. What I’m getting at is that there is a decent amount of granularity for forgejo action permissions; you should be able to find a balance that suits you between “no actions at all” and “anyone can run any code they desire on your server”.

It’s not chatbot psychosis, it’s ‘math and engineering and neuroscience’

top-tier sneer from The Register

Your last paragraph reminds me of the following series of YouTube videos that goes over how to build a “correct” fluid simulation, starting at the quantum mechanical level (iirc): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMoTR49uj6ld32zLVWmcGXaW7w2ey7Vh4.

Multiple scales of complexity and interaction, that’s way too computationally intensive to just directly stimulate how reality works, and so each scale has to be carefully “averaged out”, in a sense, to end up with a simulation that is cheap enough to run yet still behaves realistically and reproduces as many nuances as possible.

You can use me after free() all you want, babe

Yeah, go big or go home with this kind of stuff. Give me some Linux kernel source code, maybe even some well-known RFC!

Yup! YAML is defined as a “strict superset” of JSON (or at least, it was the last time I checked).

It’s a lot like markdown and HTML; when you want to write something deeply structured and somewhat complex you can always drop back/down to the format with explicit closing delimiters and it just works™.

Now you’re thinking with portals primes!

So which is it? Are developers 55% more productive, or are they losing 20% of their time to inefficiencies and burning out at record rates?

The answer: executives are measuring—and reporting—what makes their stock price rise, not what’s actually happening on the ground.

Or if you want to get slightly more conspiratorial: the execs are all buying shares in OpenAI, Nvidia, and the like - so now they’re more interested in ordering people to use LLM tools so that these stocks rise in price, even if it means sabotaging their own company.

Hi, not OP, but: that’s known as frontmatter, it’s somewhat widespread, and thus I suspect that it’s much more difficult to have it live at the end of your markdown files than in a separate file or db altogether - unless OP is already rolling their own markdown parser.

tinfoil hat on: discord is a company based in the USA, the USA administration saw those teenagers in Nepal supposedly organise a revolt/revolution over discord, sees the inhabitants of Minneapolis organizing against ICE on Signal, and wants to preemptively know which of their citizens are using discord with which accounts in case any of them start organizing on discord.

I have the same preference for personal projects, but when I was working on a corporate team it was really useful to have the “run configs” for intellij checked in so that each new team member didn’t need to set them up by themselves. Some of the setup needed to get the python debugger properly connected to the project could get quite gnarly.

I agree with the many others who say you’re more than ready to start learning rust. I would add that if you’ve brushed up against manual memory management in C, then you might find the following a great introduction to rust and the borrow-checker: https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

As usual for discussions about starting to learn rust, I would also recommend the “special”/experimental version of The Book maintained by Brown University: https://rust-book.cs.brown.edu/title-page.html . It has little interactive quizzes that help check your understanding, and some fancy diagrams in the sections on pointers and the borrow-checker.

I think this part references it, though it’s kinda solely in passing:

Production evaluations can elicit entirely new forms of misalignment before deployment. More importantly, despite being entirely derived from GPT-5 traffic, our evaluation shows the rise of a novel form of model misalignment in GPT-5.1 – dubbed “Calculator Hacking” internally. This behavior arose from a training-time bug that inadvertently rewarded superficial web-tool use, leading the model to use the browser tool as a calculator while behaving as if it had searched. This ultimately constituted the majority of GPT-5.1’s deceptive behaviors at deployment.

In case you omitted the following out of ignorance and not by deliberate choice:

podman unshare can be used to (mostly) painlessly access the files created by rootless podman.

Quite a few! And so many overlap! Thankfully they’re all supposed to be live streamed and recorded. An excerpt of my personal schedule:

• https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/LHANGM-open_source_in_public_utilities_-collaboration_with_diy_communities_for_better/

• https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/UQUCFW-the_buyout_how_the_open_source_community_liberated_its_own_platform/

• https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/FXLB7M-outside_the_beaten_path_of_css/

• https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/3EEZZB-open-source-batteries/

• https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/WQBBR9-map-your-grid/

• https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/GTZSA8-docspec/

• https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/K7YXFT-gotweb/

• https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SK3Z3Q-epaper-driving-waveforms-explained/

This is just Saturday…

I guess it only makes sense that after Liquid Ass UI, we’d get Fuzzy Toilet Seat UI

I hesitate to bring this up because you’ve clearly already done most of the hard work, but I’m planning on attending the following conference talk this weekend that might be of interest to you: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/VEQTLH-infrastructure-as-python/

ehehehehe thanks for that mental image

Of course, one can always reclaim that space if the data truly is inaccessible. Makes me want to write a joke program for “cleaning up” after ransomware that just removes the data from the partition table (or whatever the equivalent for files is - would that just be rm?)