• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • However, Linus’s kernel was more elaborate than GNU Hurd, so it was incorporated.

    Quite the opposite.

    GNU Hurd was a microkernel, using lots of cutting edge research, and necessitating a lot of additional complexity in userspace. This complexity also made it very difficult to get good performance.

    Linux, on the other hand, was just a bog standard Unix monolithic kernel. Once they got a libc working on it, most existing Unix userspace, including the GNU userspace, was easy to port.

    Linux won because it was simple, not elaborate.



  • Fair. But unwrap versus expect isn’t really the point. Sure one has a better error message printed to your backtrace. But IMO that’s not what I’m looking for when I’m looking at a backtrace. I don’t mind plain unwraps or assertions without messages.

    From my experience, when people say “don’t unwrap in production code” they really mean “don’t call panic! in production code.” And that’s a bad take.

    Annotating unreachable branches with a panic is the right thing to do; mucking up your interfaces to propagate errors that can’t actually happen is the wrong thing to do.


  • Unwrap should literally never appear in production code

    Unwrap comes up all the time in the standard library.

    For example, if you know you’re popping from a non-empty vector, unwrap is totally the right too for the job. There are tons of circumstances where you know at higher levels that edge cases defended against at lower levels with Option cannot occur.



  • \1. Many retro games were made for CRT TVs at 480p. Updating the graphics stack modern TVs is valuable, even if nothing else is changed.

    \2. All of my old consoles only have analog A/V outputs. And my TV only has one analog A/V input. The mess of adapter cables and swapping is annoying. I want the convenience of playing on a system that I already have plugged in.

    \3. I don’t even still have some of the consoles that play my favorite classic games, and getting retro hardware is sometimes difficult. Especially things like N64 controllers with good joysticks.

    Studios don’t need to do a full blown remake to solve these problems. But I’m also not going to say the Crash and Spyro remakes weren’t welcome. Nintendo’s Virtual Console emulators toe this line pretty well.

    But studios should still put in effort to make these classic games more accessible to modern audiences, and if that means a remake, that’s fine with me.

    (I’m mostly thinking about the GameCube/PS2 generation and earlier. I don’t see much value in remakes of the Wii/PS3 generation yet.)










  • Mostly I use custom launchers because I don’t like the Google News feed

    What’s wild to me is that back in the Google Now era, I was so excited to root so that I could install the extension for Nova to add Google Now.

    But these days, the Google “Discovery” feed is trash compared to what Google Now once was.



  • Yeah, I know what a hydrogen fuel cell is.

    What I’m saying is that the cost to develop hydrogen infrastructure, the complexity of it’s distribution, the risk due to its high volatility, and the uncertainty of a relatively underdeveloped technology all seem to be losing to batteries, which are very mature tech and are already in the supply chain and for which we already have a well developed electricity distribution grid.

    I just don’t see what investing in fuel cells will do other than slow the adoption of zero emission vehicles by another decade.