twiz

I wrote some thoughts on software performance: https://blog.nelhage.com/post/reflections-on-performance/ …

They’re not mutually exclusive - youthful ‘all this stuff needs fixing’ coexists with experienced ‘we learn to live with stuff we should fix but only fix that we absolutely must’. That’s priority setting :-) Possibly real veterans think you never really fix anything!

recently, some Rust programmers started doing something I think is quite harmful: `unsafe` zealotry. it is harmful for three reasons: 1) #![forbid(unsafe)] doesn't make your code memory-safe; 2) memory-safe code can have equally harmful bugs; 3) Rust is useful beyond safety.

The things that resulted in my own high performance were the basics: being motivated by the problem; being drawn to the mission; being a part of an incredible team. 3/

But they also yield atrocious UX, ripping familiar UI, workflows, look&feel, etc. out from under users involuntarily, sometimes break functionality or compatibility with existing devices. Enterprise is right not to want to deal with that shit. We shouldn't want to either.

I largely agree with this point, with the caveat that in practice a lot of complexity I see exists to solve _organizational_ problems, not scaling problems (although it's often sold as solving technical problems for a number of reasons)https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1214757164985675778 …

THREAD: Over the past few days, I've spoken extensively with career U.S. government officials as they've worked around the clock to try and mitigate the damage from Trump's ineptitude on Iran. With their permission, I'm sharing a small taste from our lengthy conversations. Enjoy.

1. I’ve had a chance to check in with sources, including two US officials who had intelligence briefings after the strike on Suleimani. Here is what I’ve learned. According to them, the evidence suggesting there was to be an imminent attack on American targets is “razor thin”.

Some #ZFS trivia: the majority of "zpool split" code was written at Vintner's Inn near Napa valley, and the rest was done on a flight from SFO to BOS. Took 4 months of testing & reviews after that before it made it into Solaris on 4 Jan 2010. Happy 10th anniversary!

La ministra dell’innovazione Paola Pisano, vicinissima a Casaleggio, dice a Radio1 che username& password digitali di ciascuno dovrebbero essere uniche e fornite dallo stato anche, per esempio, per fare acquisti su Amazon, perché: “sa quante truffe ci sono?!” No dico, scherzate?

#Soleimani: riassunto delle puntate precedenti. Thread lungo. Dal momento esatto in cui le forze Usa vi mettono piede nel 2003, l’Iraq diviene terreno di scontro tra Stati Uniti e Iran che competono per l’egemonia di un paese cruciale per gli equilibri regionali.

Dec 24: Christmas Eve Dec 25: Christmas Day Dec 26: Boxing Day Dec 27-30: Every day feels like a Sunday, proof that time is a social construct Dec 31: New Year's Eve Jan 1: New Year's Day Jan 2: Reality hits

It's (with affection) "yet another MIPS clone without delay slots and opcode bit patterns swapped around." I love the opcode encoding and potential for extensions that no one will ever use b/c extending a compiler is rarely worth the effort. The privileged spec... not so much...