@zanchey@aus.social avatar

zanchey

@zanchey@aus.social

Western Australian general practitioner (not a Candian dermatologist or Victorian cardiologist).
fish shell committer.
I worked in IT before I became a doctor, so of course I ended up in health IT.

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RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Where do you live and how do you feel about it?

Obviously, don't tell me exactly where you live, no actual addresses please! You can be as vague as you like.

I live in Central Missouri in the U.S.

Pros:

This is an absolutely beautiful place, green rolling hills, lots of rivers, lakes, ponds, and natural springs, cool caves to explore.

Lots of farming here, so great access to quality fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs, and dairy.

It's relatively inexpensive to live here compared with other states, because it's a "flyover".

I'm close enough to three major cities, that it's an easy day trip, and I'm about halfway to anywhere in the U.S.

We have one of the best Conservation departments in the U.S. and this is one of the few things that is a bipartisan issue. Lots of awesome nature programs that are free or cheap, state parks, conservation areas, bird watching, hunting, boating, foraging available to everyone.

Cons:

Yeah, it's a big one, it is a RED STATE, while a lot of the cities are blue, there is a large rural population, that votes red. Abortion is not legal here. People often vote against their own self interest.

While I'm not against responsible gun ownership, lots of people aren't responsible, and people have access to guns that definitely should not.

We have very few employee protections here, while the cost of living is relatively low compared with other places, it's taken years to get to a $12 minimum wage, and it's still not enough.

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

@KingShawn @RickiTarr @mentallyalex I often laugh about my view from the best room in the building (currently a construction site for a takeaway fried chicken shop) and say if I worked on the 50th floor - or somewhere like you - I'd never get any work done

hrbrmstr, to random
@hrbrmstr@mastodon.social avatar

First, I declare @klmr to officially be a tier-1 cybersecurity professional (Konrad was/is already a brilliant human).

Second 🚨 ALL R DATA FILES YOU DO NOT GENERATE / CONTROL SHOULD BE CONSIDERED TOXIC SUBSTANCES 🚨

The "fix" in R 4.4.0 for the "CVE” (it should not have been a CVE) is woefully insufficient.

I highly suggest running

$ gzip -cdS rda FILENAME.rda | strings

from the terminal on any R data files you do not generate/control before loading them.

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

@hrbrmstr @klmr strings itself is not always a safe utility to pipe untrusted data into (depending how it's compiled) - strings --all should be ok though

zanchey, to random
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

Asked for an interview for an article on AI use in primary care, in light of the CSIRO's discovery that ChatGPT doesn't give great advice (https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2024/April/Good-evidence-confuses-ChatGPT-when-used-for-health-information). I'm not great at soundbites but I did manage something like "when my medical indemnity insurer offers me a discount for using a genAI tool, you'll know it's ready"

@trent's talk from https://yarwood.id.au/blog/eggs-in-kenya/ and Cory Doctorow's article at https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/ have been helpful in helping me form my thoughts over the last few months, and @molly0xfff's outstanding article https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/ helped crystallise a number of them.

zanchey, to debian
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

Has anyone managed to backport packages of rustc/cargo to stable/oldstable?

zanchey, to random
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

I see semi-regular posts reminding men to shut the fuck up.

Please keep them coming.

I have a decade of professional experience in shutting the fuck up* but every couple of months I get halfway through writing a comment or reply that really, really doesn't need to be posted before I remember.

*: we call it "resisting the righting reflex" but it means STFU

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

Arghh - more problematic reporting, this time about robo-therapists.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/02/can-ai-chatbot-therapists-do-better-than-the-real-thing

A thread:
/1

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

@emilymbender I don't know about psychotherapists but doctors are falling over ourselves to get AI transcription and summarisation into consulting rooms. We (apparently) really, really hate writing notes, and our insurers feel that more words are always better. There's a dozen plugin products on the market which just plug OpenAI APIs together and the biggest CIS developer in Australia just announced native integration of one of these tools.

It's not cheap but people who use it are talking about going home an hour earlier than usual - that's tough to counter.

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

@emilymbender sorry, that's medical indemnity insurers, not health insurers (I'm in Australia). We have universal insurance, there are definitely compliance issues with Medicare that are part of the drive for LLMs, but it is really being sold as a convenience/efficiency thing.

zanchey, to random
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

There's a lot of new people trying - welcome! But I need to warn you: in 2013, I installed fish for the first time. Initially I thought it was cool, but impractical.

Anyway now I make the releases.

IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!

zanchey, to rust
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

rewrite-it-in progress, 2024-01-15

87029 rust lines added
76776 / 76776 C++ lines removed
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ 100%

--

So, we're done? Well, yes and no.

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

Yes, in the sense that almost all the C++ has been rewritten in Rust (at a raw line count about 10% more, which is not a particularly insightful number). The fish_test_helper standalone binary remains in C++, because it's basically entirely libc calls, uses no other fish code and never gets run by end users.

No, in the sense that none of this code is shipped to users. We've still got work to do to get this into a tarball that someone can (say) brew install - at this stage I think it looks like CMake will be hanging around, much simplified, to handle some of the configure/install targets, while cargo is used for the actual build.

Even if it we could shipped to today, there's not really any point. Performance is a bit better in some areas, a bit worse in others, but most importantly the technical rationale for the whole rewrite (see thread safety in https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/blob/27c8845075078041a3376b33bea5898f2369ebe3/doc_internal/fish-riir-plan.md) has not been achieved yet. And there are significant downsides for platform support, at least in the short term: it looks like Cygwin (and I think MSys2) is not going to be supported for a while, and building our own packages on old versions of Linux distributions is a headache.

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

However, some of the social goals have definitely been achieved. Large parts of the rewrite came from contributors who had never worked on fish before. There's been a lot of buzz in various online fora. Vibes are just as important to free/open source software as proprietary software and although there were solid technical reasons for the port, the PR outcomes are added benefits.

Finally, this is definitely not proof that you should rewrite your software in Rust. It's a data point at best, and maybe check back when the answer to "are we done" is "yes for sure". Joel Spolsky's classic article is worth a read, if you haven't, and many of his points remain accurate. We fixed some bugs as part of the port! We also definitely introduced some more, not all of which have been found.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/

zanchey, to rust
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

rewrite-it-in progress, 2024-01-08

87261 rust lines added
76766 / 77063 C++ lines removed
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░ 99 %

--

The reader and input stack have been ported, which is basically everything. There's still some entry points in C++ (PR being reviewed) and test helper binary (might make a good external contribution as it's entirely self-contained), but almost all of the C++ is gone, and with it large chunks of the FFI.

Now we just have the second 90% to go - making sure this rewritten fish is portable and distributable!

zanchey, to random
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

3.7.0 release progress

▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ 100%

It's done!

https://sourceforge.net/p/fish/mailman/message/58718534/

zanchey, to rust
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

rewrite-it-in progress, 2024-01-01

84456 rust lines added
56556 / 77063 C++ lines removed
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░ 73 %

--

Happy new year! A little cleanup this week. The input stack and reader module PRs are both ready for review, which is the bulk of the remaining C++.

mjg59, to random
@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer avatar

https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2023-December/033317.html really feels like Old Internet (read the entire thread, it's amazing)

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

@mjg59 "I was burn in Murmansk, a state far beyond the Arctic Circle; this is my fifth antarctic wintering; fourth wintering at Vostok base; second as the chief of the base. And my personal achieve is eighty degrees sub zero."

Honestly this sounds like how Matthew Reilly would write a Russian Antarctic base chief

zanchey, to random
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

Everyone complains about Python packaging but I just needed to upgrade a Ruby gem and boy are my arms tired

zanchey, to rust
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

Since there's now a bunch of / types paying attention, I'm keen to hear of any experiences you have packaging Rust projects that have more complexity than "cargo install" will handle.

fish has a documentation tree that needs generation, a series of support files which need installing, and some compile-time paths that need to be embedded using the build system.

The simplest option is probably cargo-xtask, maybe with some Makefile support but are there any good examples of how this is done in the wild?

zanchey, to rust
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

rewrite-it-in progress, 2023-11-27

77272 rust lines added
49774 / 77063 C++ lines removed
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░ 64 %

--

The universal variable communication module has been ported, and some redundant C++ removed.

The project got discussed on /r/rust and HN, and led @faho to write an informative update at https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

pwarren, to VintageOSes
@pwarren@mastodon.thewarrens.name avatar

So, I remember a game from the early 90s that was a dungeon crawler, but everything was branded with I think IOMEGA, and you had to hunt down bad sectors.

I'm pretty sure it came as a bonus with a box of 3.5" floppies.

I can't seem to find anything on google, is there a decent list of somewhere?

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

@pwarren Catacomb was full of Verbatim advertising but I don't think you had to hunt down bad sectors? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sls211iNKrI

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

@pwarren you can play it online - https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/catacomb
There's definitely a boss where the wall is labelled "Beware Bad Sectors" or something similar
We only had a monochrome (orange gas plasma) screen so seeing it in colour for the first time years later was a bit of a shock!

zanchey, to rust
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

rewrite-it-in progress, 2023-11-20

76909 rust lines added
48105 / 77063 C++ lines removed
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░ 62 %

--

So, that's a significant jump - mostly thanks to the merge of the parser rewrite branch, described as "Herculean". The parser, autoloading module, completion module, function management, history management, and the builtins for complete, disown, eval, fg, history, jobs, read, set, and source have all been ported, as well as many other parts of the code.

This also allowed the removal of lots of supporting tools, including the UTF-8 modules, and quite a few bits of the FFI.

After a few months of slow progress this is a huge step forwards.

mjg59, to random
@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer avatar

Eg:

certificate-1 {
description = "Signing cert";
data = <0x10203>;
type = "certificate";
};

works,

certificate-1 {
description = "Signing cert";
type = "certificate";
data = <0x10203>;
};

gives "Can't get image data/size" during signing

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

@mjg59 I'm putting that last line on my gravestone

JonBaker, to random
@JonBaker@mastodon.social avatar

I always wanted to be a pirate doctor but I never quite got the hang of CPRrrrr

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

@JonBaker it's mastery of the C that makes the difference

SwiftOnSecurity, to random

Controversial opinion: Everyone with a peanut allergy denies the providence of God over Earth and their genes should not be passed to another generation.

zanchey,
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

@SwiftOnSecurity the AI to eugenics pipeline in action

zanchey, to rust
@zanchey@aus.social avatar

rewrite-it-in progress, 2023-10-17

51743 rust lines added
24922 / 77063 C++ lines removed
▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 32 %

--

No big changes this week.

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