For all the filtering options that DigiKey has on their web site, I wish you could filter based on minimum order quantity.

No, I do not want to buy 3000 voltage regulators.

The great thing about being an adult is that if you want to have candy for dinner, nobody is going to stop you.

The terrible thing about being an adult is that if you want to have candy for dinner, nobody is going to stop you.

Something that's been bothering me about lifetimes.

When I got to this section in the book, I couldn't (and still can't) understand why it's necessary to specify lifetimes for the references a struct holds. I mean, if I have:

struct Foo<'a> {
    bar: &'a String,
}

Shouldn't it just be assumed that the data referenced by Foo::bar should have to live at least as long as the Foo object itself? Why does this have to be explicitly stated? Is there some scenario where you would want this to not be the case?

Edit: formatting fix

Reading up on NES ROM programming.

For some reason, memory addresses 0x0000-0x07ff are mirrored three times (for a total of four identical regions of memory). In a system with such a small amount of addressable memory, why would anyone do that??

God damned #ADHD brain.

I either get super hyper-focused on one project, to the detriment of other things (like eating and sleeping) or I'm so scattered between twenty things that I don't get anything meaningful accomplished on any of them.

A thing that's been stuck in my brain for a while:

A couple weeks ago, @Cory Doctorow wrote this blog post about how AI shouldn't be used to write code (edit: among other things). I agree with his rationale, but I can't help but be reminded of a (perhaps apocryphal) story I once heard about a similar argument being made against compilers in the early days of computing. The same kinds of arguments could've been made back then.

Building a small personal project in #Rust to teach myself the language. As I was looking over my code, I noticed a mistake I'd made that technically worked, but was kind of silly so I fixed it.

This got me to wondering if Rust had a linter (it does) because surely I'd made other similar rookie mistakes. I found the linter and ran it on my project. It came back with one result that I already knew about: a value in a struct that doesn't get read because I haven't written that code yet. That was it.

I was surprised. It's still a very small project, but perhaps I'm a more competent developer than I give myself credit for.

Does time::OffsetDateTime::now_local() always fail in a testing context or something? It keeps returning Err(IndeterminateOffset).
#rust

Edit: it's working fine when I use it in src/main.rs.

More musings on #Rust:

I wonder if it would be possible to write an #SNES #ROM in Rust. It seems like exactly the kind of resource-constrained system that would be a prime candidate for that sort of thing. Unfortunately, it seems that the SNES used a custom processor, so it's very possible that I won't be able to specify it as a compile target. A quick search reveals that many people have made SNES emulators in Rust, but at a glace, I see nothing about writing ROMS.

I believe the original NES used an off-the-shelf processor (6502 if memory serves?). Perhaps that's more likely to be supported, but that may be a little too resource constrained.

I shall have to dig deeper into this idea. I love the idea of building a custom ROM rather than just pirating something off the internet.

Has anyone done anything like this? Links to any relevant resources would be very much appreciated.

Newbie #Rust question time:

I wan to use the current_local_offset function from the time library, but I apparently need to import it into my project with the local-offset feature.

I assume I need to specify this in Cargo.toml but for the life of me, I can't figure out how. Can someone point me in the right direction?

Story time:

I've been holed up in the (home) office for most of the day (not uncommon). I happened to look out the window and noticed that our building was surrounded by cops.

Interesting.

Turns out they arrested one of the downstairs neighbours... for what, I don't know.

Here's the interesting bit though: apparently, the landlord offered them the key to the apartment, but they couldn't legally use it because there was no warrant. I guess that makes sense, but while they weren't allowed to to that, they apparently were allowed to enter the apartment by prying a window open or kicking the door in. In what world does that make any sense?

People who don't like #Rust: why specifically don't you like it?

I'm in the process of learning it now. There are definitely some things about the language that I can see some as finding irritating (i.e.: the borrowing system). Personally though, I'd rather have a dozen complie-time errors than a single runtime error. This is the reason I tend to gravitate towards Haskell, for instance.

It's certainly not the right language for everything, but if you want better safety in code that needs to be highly efficient, it seems a reasonable alternative to C/C++.