Notices by Martijn Faassen (faassen@fosstodon.org)

@skinnylatte
I always enjoy the ads for apartments in Singapore saying "gardens!!!!" and then it means you can go down from the 15th floor and walk around in a garden.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands I have a big allotment plot, a small back yard and I can actually walk into the woods from my home.

I've just published a blog post that I'm looking for new challenges. Give it a read, click around to my blog for a while, and see what I might be able to do for you!

https://blog.startifact.com/posts/new-challenges-2025/

#RustLang #GetFediHired

@skinnylatte
Food being so important is very Singaporean. The Netherlands is a country where food is often treated in a utilitarian way and I sometimes call it a benighted barbarian culture for that, half joking. Other cultures are so much better at the social aspects of food.

@skinnylatte
Traditionally the Singapore government is really not a fan of this kind of stuff, though?

@skinnylatte
The Netherlands has a similar climate I think. But we don't have any big cities just lots of smaller ones jam-packed together! Singaporeans might die of decompression but you're nonetheless welcome to visit.

@ahelwer
Oh I read it so long ago I didn't remember. This review is interesting:

https://goingrampant.blogspot.com/2010/06/childhoods-end-flawed-1950s-anti-racism.html

Apparently in the fictional universe apartheid was overthrown and this is supposed to be an anti racist message trying to make it palatable for a white audience. Which is still very flawed but at least makes it less terrible.

@tk
Oh interesting! I was looking into the history of rust resistant snapdragons a while back. Turns out first there was no snapdragon rust in Europe, then one strain of rust but in the middle of the 20th century there were cultivars of snapdragons entirely resistant to it. Then more strains emerged and no now snapdragons fully are resistant, despite some efforts over the years.

@tk
What the stuff that affects my garlic and kills my snapdragons

@lila_bliblu
@skinnylatte does analog photography

@skinnylatte
2024 right?

Things I do regularly online without ads, without a need to block them:

I read my mastodon feed

I read Wikipedia

I access various tech aggregators

I use my RSS / atom feed reader and read blogs

I go to archive.org

I read the new website of the dutch public broadcaster NOS

I use a few web applications

That's quite a lot of things without anyone serving me ads. This internet still exists.

Of course I don't know exactly who tries to serve me ads as I block those.

@BrodieOnLinux

@Rataunderground

> what makes Rust special has nothing to do with it being memory safe

> Memory safety with the borrow checker, rather than through garbage collection

Um. "Nothing to do" is demonstrably too strong in your own words

@martijnbraam
I don't recall having seen this with Rust, though I saw stuff like that recently trying to build some Python code that depends on C or C++. Is it something like that?

@skinnylatte@hachyderm.
Person: bad thing
Adrianna: you did bad thing!
Person: defensive
Adrianna: no you did bad thing
Person: unfair, only trying to help
Adrianna: maybe stop being bad instead

> I want to write this software, what language should I use?

Use your favorite hammer. The hammer you are familiar with and feel comfortable with.

If you want to learn to use a new hammer or don't have a hammer, many will recommend theirs, all with good arguments!

It is rare there are constraints so your hammer doesn't work - your hammer may not run on a platform or not be fast enough, for instance. But mostly you will be fine using your hammer.

I go on a journey about a man named Quentell, and discover unsettling things about the information landscape.

It's a wild ride, and I hope you'll join me on this journey!

https://blog.startifact.com/posts/the-curious-case-of-quentell/

Thanks to @futurebird for setting me on the path and to be there for the conclusion

I just tried Typst fo for the first time. I used it for something small. It was easy to learn the very basics, and I used a things like simple tables and alignment and managed to figure it out!

https://typst.app/

@futurebird

@rayhindle

The latest image generation models do a great job on faces. They still break down massively (additional finger or even limb) but faces are fine. They can't do different flower species well at all though.

People tend to look down on print debugging as it's not using sophisticated tools at all. You're not using debuggers or profilers or sophisticated loggers.

But don't look down on print debugging. It's the tool that works for all languages. It's easy to understand and easy to implement. It focuses the mind on thorough reading and understanding of code, rather than getting lost in a forest of data.

Print debugging is really effective in many cases.

#programming

Wherein I have a few words to say about best practices in software development https://blog.startifact.com/posts/question-best-practices/

#programming