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fasterthanlime

1,419 karma · joined August 8, 2014

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fasterthanlime··on I hate compilers
I think the intentional part is that you want to print the date and time something's been compiled, and the accidental part is that you suddenly made your build non-reproducible.

But usually the realization follows the initial intent by several weeks, if not months! Your comment shines as the embodiment of hindsight is 20/20.

fasterthanlime··on Claude Opus 4.7
I don't think it ever has. For a very long time now, the reasoning of Claude has been summarized by Haiku. You can tell because a lot of the times it fails, saying, "I don't see any thought needing to be summarised."
fasterthanlime··on OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%
Funny, I have the exact opposite experience! I use Claude to fix Gemini’s mess.
fasterthanlime··on The Promise of Rust
Yes, and the video is available in full right now. That’s my current business model. (I’m the author but I didn’t post the article here — I would expect older articles to show up)
fasterthanlime··on Zlib-rs is faster than C
True! Only, Good C programmers don’t exist.
fasterthanlime··on Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang (2022)
(author here) in which ways does Gleam come short of that? Because I'm also looking for that middle ground and I was very curious to get a look at Gleam.
fasterthanlime··on Small Strings in Rust: smolstr vs. smartstring (2020)
That’s amazing! I’m so glad you did :)
fasterthanlime··on Small Strings in Rust: smolstr vs. smartstring (2020)
Thanks for the heads up!

I fixed the SVG graphs and made a couple layout updates based on the feedback here and some earlier feedback from my subreddit, see the before-after here.[1]

I've been mostly focused on function lately, the redesign is, let's say, a work in progress.

(Oh also, I use they/them pronouns these days [2])

[1] https://imgur.com/a/before-after-2024-08-24-PAmeHFX [2] https://fasterthanli.me/articles/state-of-the-fasterthanlime...

fasterthanlime··on Just paying Figma because nothing else works
I mean it's right there in the tags.
fasterthanlime··on Just paying Figma because nothing else works
Yes, PDF is what I really want, but apparently it didn't get the "<img> tag treatment" so, we have to leave with "SVG with text as paths, and perfect layout" or "SVG with embedded fonts (a subset if you're brave), and selectable text".
fasterthanlime··on Just paying Figma because nothing else works
I love that take on it, thanks for reconciling me with this saying.
fasterthanlime··on Just paying Figma because nothing else works
It hasn't been finalized yet, I link to a bloomberg piece in the article from 10 days ago that says it _looks_ like they're going to go back on it but nothing confirmed afaict.
fasterthanlime··on Just paying Figma because nothing else works
Right, I forgot to mention that — I bought Affinity Designer 2, and I'm really with it, but diagramming in it is an absolute chore. Two completely separate usecases for me.
fasterthanlime··on Cracking Electron Apps Open
Ok I know I shouldn't let that get to me, but, re: "Was expecting a lousy post due to some typos in the text"

A) that's... rude/gatekeepy? B) what typos? I simply cannot find what you're talking about

Stylistic choices are not typos, I wonder if there hasn't been some mixup there? Folks usually use the feedback system to report typos, which then get fixed. You're probably not gonna see this so shrug, but, for the record: not cool.

fasterthanlime··on Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?
https://fasterthanli.me/

Infamous for discussions of Go.. (vs Rust..) but mostly it's me getting excited about learning & teaching computery stuff like:

ICMP in Making our own ping: https://fasterthanli.me/series/making-our-own-ping ELF in Making our own executable packer: https://fasterthanli.me/series/making-our-own-executable-pac... HTTP 1&2: https://fasterthanli.me/articles/the-http-crash-course-nobod...

Anyway yeah! Some folks hate it some folks love it, we need stuff for everyone.

fasterthanlime··on Cracking Electron Apps Open
Yes (more like squashfs, which is what AppImage is, I forgot to mention that), although honestly the border between "filesystem images" and "archives" is tenuous.
fasterthanlime··on A terminal case of Linux
> Is there something better than just screen-shotting your terminal window and making PNGs or GIFs for stuff like this?

There is and it's been on my TODO list forever. In fact, the article you just read (congrats on getting through my narrative devices) was written /while tackling that/.

https://asciinema.org does it for "moving pictures", it shouldn't be too hard to do it for stills.

fasterthanlime··on A terminal case of Linux
I mean it's a perfectly fine hill to die on, but I think "memoization for n=0 arguments" is cromulent. Or even "memoization for n=1 argument, which only has one possible value" (like a unit enum in Rust). I could see both positions being justifiable tbqh.
fasterthanlime··on Rust: The wrong people are resigning
> you try to help fix it. Sure if that doesn't work resign

Why wouldn’t you generously assumed this is exactly what JT has done? Because from what I know, that’s exactly what JT has done.

fasterthanlime··on Rust: The wrong people are resigning
Then tell the cynic in you that Prime and I are happily coexisting in the same space with different styles. I had issues with how he commented on the trademark stuff months ago, which resulted in harassment of friends of mine.

Things have gotten better since, Prime and I have talked yesterday and we’re good.

fasterthanlime··on Rust: The wrong people are resigning
When I say “I wish they could have (engaged in a more constructive way)” it’s an indictment of the lack of avenues through which one can constructively engage with the project.

I feel like the fork was exploitative, but I also feel like there isn’t a lot else they could’ve done, even if they wanted to. It’s sadness all around, right now.

fasterthanlime··on A Kubernetes Operator in Rust
Nicely done! There are however, a couple issues with the code that are concerning to me if it's going to be used as a starting point by folks coming from Go — particularly around error handling and formatting.
fasterthanlime··on Finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in H.264 decoders [pdf]
The problem with a general-purpose fuzzer is that the H.264 format is complex - you'd end up with a lot of syntactically-incorrect files (which decoders would easily reject) whereas H26Forge is a specialized fuzzer that ends up with syntactically-correct but semantically-incorrect files, and that's how it finds actual vulns before the heat death of the universe.

Re Rust: the problem here is hardware-acceleration, as far as I can tell. Even if we had a pure Rust H.264 decoder, you'd probably still want to use whatever your hardware has to use overall fewer resources. The drivers might be the place to look, and there's some progress on that front in Android for example, but as things stand fuzzing like that is extremely valuable.

fasterthanlime··on The bottom emoji breaks rust-analyzer
Ahhh, that sounds likely, thanks!
fasterthanlime··on The bottom emoji breaks rust-analyzer
This submission went from #5 to #42 in a minute so I'm assuming it's been deranked. An explanation would be nice, in case a moderator is around.

edit: now it's no longer there at all. Welp.

fasterthanlime··on The bottom emoji breaks rust-analyzer
[flagged]
fasterthanlime··on Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang
"Author is riling up the masses for clicks which generates revenue for him" is the conspiracy theory. It costs me money to serve the site and results in, at worst, DDoS attacks, and at best, hateful comments towards me.

"Author has built an audience around quality educational material that goes more in-depth than most others, and occasionally allows himself a rant" is closer to reality.

But, feel free to believe whatever you like better.

fasterthanlime··on Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33714007
fasterthanlime··on Migrating from Warp to Axum
Eh, that's definitely a matter of taste. You definitely shouldn't have to pass an additional parameter everywhere you want context there's no absolutes here, just preferences.
fasterthanlime··on Migrating from Warp to Axum
I'm afraid I'm a bit too young for OS/2 Warp, but I can write about Haiku OS in the future if that'd help?
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