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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • I’ll bite. Austin, TX circa 2007. Sublet. Moved my (now) wife and one year old into a one bedroom, one bathroom house the size of a shoebox. Cooled by a single window unit, had to steal wifi, and roaches crawled in through the gaps under the doors.

    Ironically, it’s now a fond memory. First place I lived with my new family, it was just for the summer, we had cool neighbors and were like 200 feet from a bunch of really cool local businesses.




  • It’s really hard to generalize about leftist groups. The communists that feel this way have formed co-ops, or are cooperating with anarchists to do something like syndicalism (focused on unionizing existing businesses).

    But the methods to start and grow businesses in a capitalist country inherently rely on acting like a capitalist. Getting loans requires a business plan that makes profit, acquiring facilities and other businesses requires capital. Local co-ops exist because they can attract members and customers that value their co-opness, but it’s very hard to scale that up to compete at a regional level. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard to view it as an engine for vast change.

    Communists that focus on voting are delusional (in my opinion) but like all reformists they view the existing government as the mechanism to make widespread change.



  • I wouldn’t do a mailing list these days, but as someone who spent the early part of my career interacting with devs that preferred this method, it’s actually pretty ergonomic by a 2005 standard. A message thread aware, text based email client that can turn messages into patches in a keystroke makes it actually pretty comparable to modern code review…

    I think it’s hard for younger devs to get this because they’re used to email being stuck in a crappy, unthreaded browser interface or Outlook etc. (which are terrible for mailing lists) and most collaboration taking place in code review and chat platforms like Teams/Slack but for decades before these were feasible, email was the way…




  • So you’re right that this is a bit arbitrary because the line between the standard lib and the language is blurry, but someone writing Rust is going to expect Vec to work, it doesn’t even require an extra “use” to get it.

    Perhaps a better core example would be operator overloading (or really any place using traits). When looking at “a + b” in Rust you have to be aware that, depending on the types involved, that could mean anything.

    Anyway, I love Rust, it just doesn’t have the 1:1 relationship with the assembly output that C basically still has.



  • Rust can create native binaries but I wouldn’t call it close to the metal like C. It’s certainly possible to bootstrap from assembly to Rust but, unlike C, every operation doesn’t have a direct analog to an assembly operation. For example Rust needs to be able to dynamically allocate memory for all of its syntax to be intact.