miniblog.

TIL Advent of Code and Project Euler will deliberately look for puzzles where the naive solution is worse than quadratic. This ensures that people can solve them with any programming language. You don't want fast languages to be able to use the naive solution.

Today I learnt that `cargo fix` won't fix code with compiler errors by default, but you can override this! $ cargo fix --broken-code --allow-dirty && cargo clippy --fix --allow-dirty This incantation does exactly what I wanted :)

The games console market is fascinating: there's incentive to *not* provide upgraded models. You want the guarantee that a game for $X just works on any $X purchased. E.g. the Switch OLED has a bigger screen, and a better CPU than the original, but it's downclocked to match the original Switch's CPU.

Go has an elegant approach to defining example functions, which are shown in docs as `main()` with the output:

I find it really interesting how some areas of tech are widely expected to improve radically (e.g. LLMs and smart home tech), others gradually (CPU speed, battery capacity) and others very slowly (e.g. compiler optimisations). Predicting the future is hard.

A pleasant surprise: updating the direct dependencies in difftastic has reduced the total transitive dependencies. I wasn't expecting that.

It feels like a mature software project is one where bugs require multiple commits to fix. You've hammered out the basic issues, so the remaining issues are often weird interactions between components.

One interesting consequence of the rise of LLMs: there's more demand for tools that handle untrusted input. Arbitrary HTML+JS can be safely run in a browser. Lean can check an arbitrary proof. Are there other tools in this family?

One interesting consequence of the rise of LLMs: there's more demand for tools that handle untrusted input. Arbitrary HTML+JS can be safely run in a browser. Lean can check an arbitrary proof. These work really well with an LLM that can be wrong, but sometimes gives exactly what you want. Are there other tools in this family?

I love how the CommonMark Spec has a test suite that's just a JSON array. It's really easy to test a library for compliance, and I've seen developers nerd-sniped into full compliance. https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/spec.json

Learning software development through playing and contributing to a MUD:

It's really satisfying to use a profiler for the first time on a project. I always find a big performance win with only a small code change. It's never the code that I expected to be slow, however!

On thinking of books like software, treating them as evolving artifacts, and URLs versus paper book publishers:

I've released difftastic 0.62! In this release: * Updated parsers for Bash, C, C++, C#, CSS, Go, Haskell, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSON, Julia, Lua, Objective-C, OCaml, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, TOML, TypeScript and XML. * Obligatory crash fixes.

I've been building an 'extract function' refactor feature. It's surprisingly nuanced. Where do you put the extracted function? Once you've done the static analysis, what order do you use for the parameters?