miniblog.

Text to speech systems seem to have largely avoided the uncanny valley effect. I've encountered robotic sounding voices but it's way less unsettling than bad CGI. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe looking at faces is just way higher bandwidth so more things can go wrong?

Difftastic has been cited in a paper! Modernizing SMT-Based Type Error Localization https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09034 The authors use difftastic to work out which parts of a buggy program have actually changed, a great use case :)

Do users of immutable systems (i.e Nix or Guix) upgrade more or less often than other platforms? There's less pressure to upgrade (unlike a rolling release distro) but in principle upgrading is easier.