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mrcus

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I am very concerned about Rust.

Rust’s “decision” to have a very slim standard library has advantages, but it severely amplifies some other issues. In Go, I have to pull in zero dependencies to make an HTTP request. In Rust, pulling reqwest pulls in at least 30 distinct packages (https://lib.rs/crates/reqwest). Date/time, “basic” base64, common hashing or checksums, etc, they all become supply chain vectors.

The Rust ecosystem’s collective refusal to land stable major versions is one of the amplifying issues. “Upgrade fatigue” hits me, at least. “Sure, upgrade ring to 0.17” (which is effectively the 16th major version). And because v0.X versions are usually incompatible, it’s not really possible to opt not to upgrade, because it only takes a short while before some other transitive dependency breaks because you are slow to upgrade. I recently spent a while writing my code to support running multiple versions of the `http` library, for example (which, to be fair, did just land version 1.0). My NATS library (https://lib.rs/crates/async-nats) is at version 34. My transitive base64 dependency is at version 22 (https://lib.rs/crates/base64).

This makes it nearly impossible for me to review these libraries and pin them, because if I pin foo@0.41.7, and bar needs foo@0.42.1, I just get both. bar can’t do =>0.41, because the point of the 0.X series is that it is not backwards compatible. It makes this process so time consuming that I expect people will either just stop (as if they did) reviewing their dependencies, or accept that they might have to reinvent everything from URL parsing to constructing http headers or doing CRC checks.

Combine this with a build- and compile-time system that allows completely arbitrary code execution, which is routinely just a wrapper for stuff like in the zx attack (look at a lot of the low-level libs you inevitably pull in). Sure, the build scripts and the macro system enables stuff like the amazing sqlx library, but said build and macro code is already so hard to read, it really takes proper wizardry to properly understand.

On a transatlantic flight I recently had the displeasure of browsing over a satellite connection. A lot of sites simply never loaded, even though the connection speed was reasonable. The multi-second latency made these sites that loaded tens to hundreds of resources completely unable to render a single character to screen.

This is a good example showing that all work is not removed by automating a task, such as selecting which products are related and displaying that on an online store’s product page. Some work may be removed, but new work is added to compensate for what the algorithms can not trivially do, such as considering whether the links between these products are ethical to present to users.

It seems to me that companies massively underestimate (or willingly don’t compensate for) the importance of this newly introduced work, only cashing in on the savings from the work removed. Other examples of similar behavior include automatic moderation, which also massively fails to remove actual dangerous content.

This kind of behavior looks like greed to me, but I guess it’s legal, and needs more regulation.

Figma Alternatives 4 years ago

Genuinely asking: Do developers look at these styles as more than helpful tips? Surely these CSS/JS blobs that Figma outputs have to be correctly and carefully merged into the codebase?

Most people seem to think w3schools has some form of association with the W3C. It is actually run by a small family company, Refsnes Data AS, from Sandnes, a depressing city on the western coast of Norway.

Good questions. The usual answer is “because it’s a good staring point for teaching the team to talk and coordinate often”. As with most scrum ceremonies, the standup should probably be adapted to match the needs of the team. It doesn’t have to be a reporting circle where you tell your PM “what did you do, what will you do, what is blocking you”.

_edit_: Adapted or removed or reinvented.

That’s from the Norwegian finals! The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation has such an impressive and passionate technical crew, it is really fascinating how they manage to make truly world-class productions with a comparatively limited set of resources, both in terms of manpower and money.

They changed their charging port once since the release in 2007 and they made one other connector change (removing the headphone jack) during those 15 years.

Nope, especially considering the implications of this, with the amount of people working remotely. Google Meet, Classroom, etc. are down. This is probably literally costing billions every minute just in loss of productivity.