Notices by yosh (yosh@toot.yosh.is)

Saving computer folks a search as to what some C/C++/Google folks mean by certain terms:

- “temporal safety”: no use after free / double free
- “spatial safety “: no out of bounds accesses

I had to look these up, because honestly: these are pretty confusing terms. I wish they would at least consistently qualify these as: “{temporal,spatial} memory safety”.

There are a lot more non-memory related uses of the word “temporal” when it comes to safety (e.g. Temporal Logic of Actions - TLA, etc.)

Yay, Hyperlight has been released! I got to help the team (Azure Upstream) write their announcement post.

Y’all, I can’t tell you how exciting I am for this! Real virtual machines! In just 1-2 milliseconds! Instead of 120ms+!

https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2024/11/07/introducing-hyperlight-virtual-machine-based-security-for-functions-at-scale/

Like, this allows you to start using virtual machines for just about everything. Put them on the hot path. Get goofy with what you’re isolating. All with real, actual, VM-based security.

Oh heh, Cory Doctorow wrote about BlueSky and I think he’s hitting all the right marks here

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/

I think I’ve said this before, but I genuinely believe that broadly speaking communication and other “soft” skills are more important than what are considered “technical” ability. And that becomes increasingly more true as people gain in seniority.

Like, it’s absolutely not an all-or-nothing type of deal. But it’s more that if you can’t effectively work in a group setting, the importance of someone’s individual technical ability increasingly begins rounding to irrelevance.

My new crank pet theory: all portable electronics should fit one or multiple 18650 form-factor batteries. Or else not include their own batteries at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18650_battery

Regular reminder that Bluesky is a VC-funded company which inevitably is headed for the same fate shared by all VC-funded companies. It must maintain hypergrowth until it either:

- folds
- sells
- IPOs

Maybe tuning into another re-run of the social media VC show is appealing to some, but it certainly isn’t for me.

Headline: “Wow, Bluesky managed to get $8 million in funding”

What you should be reading:

“Bluesky took on an additional $8 million in debt, which they will need to be pay back with interest one way or another”

How are they going to be doing that, you wonder? Well reader, certainly not just by selling domain names at a slight markup.

Skynyrt Jynyrt

The acceptable number of people getting SARS at any given event should be zero. Not ten. Not one hundred. Zero.

SARS-CoV-2 causes chronic disease in 10-30% of infections. That means for every 10 people who are infected, for 1-3 of them that will be a life-altering experience. Some will eventually recover. Others may not.

As reports of people getting infected with SARS at RustConf roll in, it’s hard not to think of those whose life will inevitably change because of this.

What’s in my carry-on liquids bag?

I’m so happy with my toiletry system, heh. I’ve got it down to two items I carry with me in my bag:

- A Mission Workshop tool roll for all my solid toiletries.
- A leak-proof / auto-pressurizing Pelican 1050 case for all my liquid toiletries.

All liquid toiletries go into their own little Muji containers, except for the anti-viral sprays and perfume bottle (the chonky metal container). Easy, doesn’t leak, and I can just refill it after every trip.

“Be kind to people, be ruthless to systems” is such a good take.

I sometimes wonder how well the skillset of working in OSS would translate to something like, working in Politics. Not sure I'm wrong for thinking there is a significant amount of overlap?

Ok ok ok, at least the paper authors and I agree that traits for equality and ordering shouldn’t be generic over effects. Phew, haha.

Finished reading the paper! This paper is really cool, and is right now probably the closest published resource there is for the work we’ve been doing on effect generics for Rust.

The most notable difference is that our design basically functions as a subset of what the authors describe here. We’re at least intentionally starting with a constrained design to target the 80% use case. That makes it less powerful, but also means not introducing an effect algebra ^^

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3656393

I think I’ve previously stated that I don’t believe Rust’s built-in math operators (Div, Add, Mul, etc) should be effectful.

Reading a paper right now where they did *exactly* that (Lutze, Madsen, 2024), and swapping out panics for concrete errors is super useful!:

- division by zero for floats results in NaN, which means Div for floats can be marked as Pure.
- checked integers return concrete errors rather than panic on overflow. This essentially swaps a “panic” effect for a “try” effect.

I do appreciate that recruiters now cold email with: “Rust job (not blockchain)”. Good job Rust community, lmao.

When I say that COVID is on a technical level fairly easily solvable, we just choose not to - it's things like these that I'm thinking of:

https://www.mpg.de/16075350/1127-chem-ventilation-made-easy-152990

> A simple ventilation system removes 90 percent of respiratory aerosols which potentially include coronavirus particles, from indoor air […] The design is very simple and was implemented using DIY store materials worth about € 200.

Live again: continuing last week's stream to put a Wasm Component in a container and deploy it

https://www.youtube.com/live/KPdS0dznqI0

Unix tip: writing the `cat` command in your terminal will summon the nearest cat to sit on your keyboard