• 10 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • I always hated the implementation for .toString() of Duration. It gives you a string like that: PT8H6M12.345S (not a hash)

    Apparently, it’s an ISO 8601 thing, but what the hell am I supposed to do with that?
    It’s not useful for outputting to end users (which is fair enough), but I don’t even want to write that into a log message.
    I got so used to this just being garbage that I would automatically call .toMillis() and write “ms” after it.

    Well, and not to gush about Rust too much, but I recently learned that its debug string representation is actually really good. As in, it’s better than my Java workaround, because it’ll even do things like printing 1000ms as 1s.
    And that’s just like, oh right, libraries can actually provide a better implementation than what I’ll slap down offhandedly.



  • Yeah, I came to Rust from Scala and Kotlin, where equality is default-implemented (for case class and data class respectively, which is basically all we ever used), so this meme surprised me a bit.

    I do actually like that you can decide a type cannot be compared, because sometimes it really just doesn’t make sense. How would you compare two HTTP clients, for example? But yeah, it certainly is a choice one can disagree with.


  • I find these videos give a very visual explanation and help to put you into the right mindset: http://intorust.com/
    (You can skip the first two videos.)

    Sort of when it clicked for me, was when I realized that your code needs to be a tree of function calls.
    I mean, that’s what all code is anyways, with a main-function at the top calling other functions which call other functions. But OOP adds a layer to that, i.e. objects, and encourages to do all function calls between objects. You don’t want to do that in Rust. You kind of have to write simpler code for it to fall into place.

    To make it a bit more concrete:
    You will have functions which hold ownership over some data, typically because they instantiated a struct. These sit at the root of a sub-tree, where you pass access to this data down into further functions by borrowing it to them.

    You don’t typically want to pass ownership all over the place, nor do you typically want to borrow (or pass references) to functions which are not part of this sub-tree.
    Of course, there’s situations where this isn’t easily possible, e.g. when having two independent threads talking to each other, and then you do need Rc or Arc, but yeah, the vast majority of programming problems can be solved with trees of function calls.




  • Hmm, I don’t know anything about Whoogle, but from other privacy-conscious search engines, I would expect it to work when you use that URL in your bookmark.

    Three things I can imagine:

    • Something in your hosting stack strips the URL parameters, like maybe your reverse proxy, if you use one. You might be able to see in the Whoogle or web server logs, which URLs actually reach it. Might need to set it to debug/trace logging.
    • Maybe there’s a flag in the Whoogle configuration you need to enable to accept these preference URLs.
    • It’s a bug in that Whoogle version.







  • I have been thinking, with how closely inspired lots of Pokémon are from real animals, that you could probably come up with a collectible card game or such, using real animals.

    I mean, maybe I’m just being an old person and kids wouldn’t find that cool, but I certainly felt at some point, that I would’ve spent my time better, if I had learned about biology rather than made-up Pokémon stats…






  • Problem is that none of the algorithms actually care about showing you things you like.

    Ads try to sell you on things that you wouldn’t otherwise buy. Occasionally, they may just inform you about a good product that you simply didn’t know about, but there’s more money behind manipulating you into buying bad products, because it’s got a brand symbol.

    And content recommendation algorithms don’t care about you either. They care about keeping you on the platform for longer, to look at more ads.
    To some degree, that may mean showing you things you like. But it also means showing you things that aggravate you, that shock you. And the latter is considered more effective at keeping users engaged.