robert

robert, 14 days ago to rust

> Unfortunately, most people seem to have taken the wrong lesson from Rust. They see all of this business with lifetimes and ownership as a dirty mess that Rust has had to adopt because it wanted to avoid garbage collection. But this is completely backwards! Rust adopted rules around shared mutable state and this enabled it to avoid garbage collection. These rules are a good idea regardless.

Yes, so much this! I'm using #Rust not because I'm building low-level resource constrained systems (far from it) but because it allows for local reasoning about state. Paired with the ML inspired syntax that makes pattern matching easy this leads to far more reliable programs.

This is also why I like #Clojure so much. Clojure's refs / atoms /agents allow for scoping mutability in an otherwise purely functional system. Scratch for the same itch. But Rust's compile time checking avoids pushing issues into the runtime, increasing reliability and hugely reduces time needed for debugging. The trade off here is no interactive / live development.

https://without.boats/blog/references-are-like-jumps/

robert, 20 days ago to emacs

org-ai got an update today. It now supports the #anthropic #claude and the #perplexity.ai APIs.

https://github.com/rksm/org-ai

#emacs #orgmode #llms

robert, 1 month ago to random

I have been looking for a good internal wiki / knowledge base for a looong time. I think I found it with https://www.bookstackapp.com/ (hating on you, confluence). The feature set almost sounds to good to be true:

• standard wiki features (create pages, link them, page history)
• open source
• flexible API
• easy to setup
• comments
• thoughtful in-page links
• WYSIWG editor and markdown editor. Switching between them is possible unless you use more advanced content
• Insert drawings and diagrams with draw.io
• UI is clean and intuitive

I mostly ignore the vocabulary around books, it is a wiki, plain and simple!

robert, 2 months ago to ai

Nice quote from network pioneer and UDP inventor (and #ai skeptic) David P. Reed regarding Jensen Huang's recent statement regarding learning to program:

"AI is not even his company's product - nVIDIA just is the Levi Strauss of a gold rush in California. it's as if Levi Strauss's wealthy CEO were saying back then that learning geology is useless, just buy pants that have rivets and go sit in mountain streams with colanders."

robert, 4 months ago to emacs

Btw the #emacs #python development setup with

• lsp-mode for code navigation and type checking: https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode + pyright

• elpy for evaluation / repl workflow https://github.com/jorgenschaefer/elpy

• jurigged for live reloading code https://github.com/breuleux/jurigged

is really enjoyable!

robert, 1 year ago to rust

Looks like there is a new #rustlang community resource in creation: https://rustmagazine.github.io/announcing/