I Wish There Was A Way To Say "I Think You're So Cool And I Wanna Hang Out With You And I Wanna Be Your

I wish there was a way to say "I think you're so cool and I wanna hang out with you and I wanna be your friend" without sounding like

A. I'm a four year old

or

B. I have a crush on them

Sometimes I think about the hobbies and skills I’ve picked up over the years and I wonder... why?? What about these specific things makes me happy? Is there some underlying idea that I really love that connects all the dots? Or is that just the pattern-finding part of my brain seeking commonalities?

Well, let’s take a step back: How do we pick up new skills anyways? Clearly, at some point we were exposed to them, and clearly we decide that they are enjoyable and it’d be fun to continue doing them, but what feeds into that decision? Is there something inherent in us that connects to specific skills? Or is there something special about the way we are exposed to them?

And why does it feel harder and harder to pick up new things the more entrenched we become in the old ones?

I don’t pretend to have the answers. Instead, I’ve got a mental vibe-check that makes sense in my head (which maybe is a skill in and of itself). To me it’s all about mental models -- the way we fit things into our brains. When I learn a skill, I feel like I’m connecting dots, figuring out some set of ideas, shortcuts, connections, and memories that I’ll be able to draw upon to do the skill better and faster.

But generating these models from scratch sure isn’t easy -- think about how long it takes kids to understand grammar or basic arithmetic when they have nothing to build off of. And they don’t have anything else to clog up their minds while they’re learning!

So once we’ve got a few skills modeled, suddenly some things start coming more easily! Different skills have some of the same dots and connects, and rather than building new models from scratch, I can perhaps take bits off of ones that already exist.

The more pre-built models we have to pull from, the less appealing working from scratch becomes and the more difficult it seems. So, if that’s what guides me when I learn new skills, it actually makes quite a lot of sense that there are commonalities between all the things I’ve gotten into over the years! I’ve been taking shortcuts and cheating to learn the things faster!

So wait, what does this mean about my skills? It’s not that they’re actually getting any harder to learn, it’s just that we have less time and mental capacity to learn them, and that we like shortcuts (I mean who doesn’t). But now that I realize there’s a scenic route I’m missing, perhaps I should try to take it one of these days. It suddenly doesn’t seem quite as bad :)

day 4.

new day! i am slowly figuring out what sort of things make me happy to see on my dash, and im remembering some things i forgot that I even liked :P I forgot about she-ra, diary comics, ace stuff, lesbian stuff (not me but the ✨vibes✨ of warm cuddles are just pristine). still looking for the nerdier stuff if it even exists on this platform (stuff like people going on programming adventures down programming rabbit holes, preddy workspaces/computer setups/keebs (#studyblr vibes but workblr)), but it’s staring to really feel pretty cozy here :]

also hi to both of my followers idk why you did that but thanks???

a dinner date with rust

I’m a programmer and as a programmer I write code. There are a bunch of different programming “languages” that you can write code in, and one that I frequently find myself reaching for is called C. “Ok, cool, why do I care?” Well because C is monster that will eventually consume all of humanity. Created in the void from which all computing was born, it is The One Language that undergirds all the others. Rarely written but subtly permeating every crevice of our technology. It contains deep, dark secrets understood by only those steeped in the occult, the conduits to the souls of our computers, the systems programmers 🧙 (like me!)

oh and also pretty much every piece of software ever relies on it somehow ^.^ Don’t worry though everything is fine!

“Oh, that sounds Concerning!” you may say. Well, yes!  Yes it is. And so Rust was born. The sales pitch for Rust goes something like this: “Rust! Because C is Bad and is Literally The Bane Of Your Existence.” Which... well, they make a compelling case! As a C programmer, I was skeptical of a language that claimed to have all the same features without any of the downsides, but eventually I decided to give it a go.

“Mmmmm tasty!” I say, biting into some bounds-checked arrays. I take a sip of the mutability rules and exclaim “Wow! This really is something incredible!”. For desert, I decide to order some of their world renowned ownership/borrowing system. It arrives, piping hot, and I begin to dig in. “Hmmm, this is nice... I think?” Worry begins to slip into my voice. I think to myself, “this does seem useful, but it feels like there’s some trade off being made here”. The waiter tells me how this was made with the worlds finest data race protection and my worry begins to grow.

A brief tangent on data races:

You know the little people who live inside the computer and make everything work? A data race is when 2+ little people are trying to work on the same project at once without talking to each other or making a plan. Things Will Go Wrong.

Data races are generally very bad and Rust does it’s very best to make sure that having one is literally impossible. The problem with that is that sometimes, you can have a data race, but it can actually be safe and fine and good! And by sharing the work, the program can finish it’s work much more quickly! However Rust is very quick to put it’s foot down and say “No! That’s too risky! I can’t allow you to put yourself in danger like that!” whereas C would say “Yeah, sure, go ahead, good luck ;-)”

So, this is where my dinner date with Rust started to go downhill. One of the things I write a lot of in C are “highly concurrent” which means that they have lots of little computer people working on them at once. It’s tricky, but it’s something I have a lot of expertise in. And when I tried to replicate those programs in Rust was fighting me at every turn.

It’s odd because while Rust is very picky about this stuff, and it even provides ways to tell it “Yes, I know what I’m doing, I promise you can trust me.” But these ways are just a little too clunky for my liking and proved to be enough of a pain to manage it really soured my whole meal. And I was so eager about it too!

I still would like to try Rust from time-to-time on smaller projects, but it’s really unfortunate that it’s just so unergonomic in many of the ways that matter most to me. And while it isn’t a great fit for my use-cases, I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to make their first foray into systems programming. For nearly everything aside from my specific use-case it seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of C, and C is really the only thing like it.

Rust is cool, tasty, and elegant to C’s old, rickety, and ugly, and it’s a huge boon for the systems programming ecosystem. But I get the sense that Rust isn’t exactly the C-killer it was made out to be and that C still has a place in the ecosystem (and our hearts 💖)

You ever start using a tool for a project and the vibes are just sliiiiightly off? That’s how I feel about actix-web. It seems nice, but I get the impression there may be something more sinister under the surface.

Yes! This is also an excellent point! The issue here is not one inherent in smart devices, it’s created because of how they’re designed and built. It would be very possible (and in some ways easier) to build devices that did not suffer from these issues. If it’s not possible to connect to the device from outside your home network, there’s no way anyone else could get to it! I don’t do this kind of work personally, but my (semi-educated) guess is that the “phone-home” functionality is a substantive proportion of those devices software and it really doesn’t need to be (most of the time).

The issue is that it’s hard (on a technical level) to separate “bad” internet usage (i.e. to send usage data or to grant remote access) from “good” internet usage (i.e. sending a firmware update or re-ordering more soap). While there’s a certain degree that you can manage that on a personal level, at some point you simply have to trust the manufacturer to not be evil. Which... yeah they’re evil :(

So how do we fix this? Well, you can just not buy smart products (that’s what I do!), but what they’re huge quality of life improvements? Or maybe you just think they’re fun and want to play around without putting your privacy at risk.

The only really good solution to all these issues is that companies need to stop creating products that do these things. And the only way to force that to happen is through legislation. We need more legislation like the GDPR in the EU which explicitly describes your privacy rights on the internet (among many other excellent features).

So! Next time you see a call-to-action to “call your legislator” to “protect internet privacy” -- actually do it. It really does make a difference :)

hell world hell world hell world

WHY DOES YOUR SOAP NEED INTERNET