I've released difftastic 0.52! In this release:
* Support for XML and JSONL
* Word-level diffing in text nodes (in HTML and XML)
* Improved syntax highlighting
https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/releases/tag/0.52.0
miniblog.
A fun idea for a Ruby test runner: run all the tests, most relevant first, but never run for more than 1.8 seconds!
https://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2023-10-03-introducing-the-tldr-ruby-test-framework/
Achievement unlocked: when trying to work around an Emacs bug with long lines and pipes: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=6149#19 I hit a bug in Cask, the Emacs environment manager! https://github.com/cask/cask/pull/596
Software is hard.
I'm amused (and kinda surprised) to learn that shells have their own equivalent of blink tags, a blink escape code! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17439482/how-to-make-a-text-blink-in-shell-script
Seems equally annoying, I can't see a good use for it.
TIL about actionlint, a static analysis tool for GitHub action YAML files: https://github.com/rhysd/actionlint
Seems really useful, developing actions can be tricky.
Today I learnt that a continually blinking caps lock on Linux signifies a kernel panic: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3840/the-caps-lock-and-scroll-lock-lights-are-flashing-and-everything-is-frozen
(On the plus side, it's the first time I've encountered this despite using Linux for years.)
OSS components are so common in software stacks now. It might be an interesting exercise to try to build a e.g. a web service with 100% proprietary components.
Are there 2D games focused on collaborative world building? I know of text based games (MUDs/MOOs) and a few 3D games (Second Life, Roblox) but nothing for 2D.
I find myself using a "splatter then clean up" technique when working with code.
I add a ton of prints/logs/asserts/type annotations until I've found the issue. I then throw them all away!
It feels like redundant work, but I don't have a nicer solution.
TIL rustc has a style guide for suggestions! https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/diagnostics.html#suggestion-style-guide
They recommend avoiding 'did you mean' or 'the following' in favour of direct suggestions and highlighted positions.
Amazon is using LLMs to summarise product reviews!
Seems like a great application of the tool, but I haven't seen many deployments of AI summaries in the wild yet.
Uniform function call syntax treats `fido.bark()` the same as `Dog::bark(fido)`.
This seems like a really nice way of representing methods in a language. Are there any downsides? There are plenty of languages without this.
My understanding of Rust Foundation and Rust Project has definitely improved following today's talk.
Rust Foundation: Handles financial, legal and bureaucratic stuff. Requires a supermajority of votes from both sponsors and the Rust Project.
Rust Project: Focuses on building.
I'll be at RustConf this week! Do say hello.
Seen in the wild: replace all the newlines with a literal $ in sed:
sed -e 's/$/$/'
It's always bugged me that regex replace syntax looks similar to regex, occurs close to the search syntax, but actually has a different meaning. It's harder to read.
I'm adding XML support for difftastic! Still needs some tweaking, but the initial results look promising.
XML is particularly fun because early academic research on tree-diffing focus on XML.
TIL that Pong was originally a warm-up exercise for a new employee at Atari! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pong#Development_and_history
Ooh, I've just discovered that you can enable actions on GitHub pull requests by default! This is the actions settings page.
My understanding is that GitHub introduced these limits to prevent people trying to run cryptominers on GitHub actions. Sounds like GitHub has largely fixed it.
Today I learnt that the Glamorous Toolkit has its own VM, implemented in Rust, which wraps the Pharo smalltalk environment!
https://gtoolkit.com/
I've started highlighting constructors like Some and None consistently with type names in difftastic, and the results look so much more readable!
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