I wrote some rust code. I used unsafe. It was unsafe. After months of contemplating this unfortunate result, I’ve found someone else to blame.

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This post never made it into words when planned, so the references are a bit dated, but I think it’s still mostly relevant. (For those who are familiar with the references.) Some time ago, I saw a claim that the software developers who worked on Zelda: Breath of the Wild are much better than the developers for Elder Scrolls: Skyrim which has a great many bugs. I agree that Skyrim (and every Bethesda game) has an infamous reputation for lots of bugs, much more so than the Wild, but I don’t think we can conclude much about the skills of the people jamming code into vim or notepad++ or whatever.

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Before relying on compiler warnings for enum mismatches, it’s important to know when or if such warnings will be generated.

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Sometimes we have a boolean, which is great for storing two values, but we need just a little more space to squeeze in a third value. There’s a few ways to do this.

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Short followup to previous commentary on the Pixel Slate. The Pixelbook (sans go) was Google’s previous effort at a unified form factor, a 2in1 with attached keyboard. In many ways, they are quite similar in capability, with similar specs as well.

Unlike the Slate, the Pixelbook isn’t on perpetual fire sale. Google will still attempt to charge you $999 for a new one, three years later. However, I was able to find a used one for less than half that price, at which point it becomes a much better value. It’s aged fairly well, as I don’t think there are any competing devices that truly outclass it.

Most of my previous comments are still relevant, with the qualifier that anything the Slate is great at, the Pixelbook is merely very good at. The screen in particular is slightly less outstanding, but still very pleasing. Balancing that, the attached keyboard is an enormous improvement, though that only brings it into the realm of passable.

As an entertainment travel device, it’s very heavy for a tablet, my longstanding complaint for 2in1 devices. It is much sturdier in tent mode, however, so it won’t fall over if a mosquito sneezes nearby. The speakers are kinda bad, especially since they fire through the keyboard, and therefore away from screen in most multimedia modes. Bring headphones.

As a work device, its ability to function as a real laptop with keyboard crushes the Slate. The tactile feel of the keys are weird. They’re soft rubber I think? Would not want to use it as my only device, but there’s nothing I couldn’t accomplish with it if necessary.

I’m building up quite a stable of Chromebooks, which seems rather excessive considering their limitations. However, the downside is tempered by a few things. They’re fast and easy to keep updated. There’s no effort to maintaining one, so there’s no extra effort to maintaining two. As simple appliances to lookup Charlize Theron movies, there’s a certain convenience in having one in every room, and if this means Google shows me more ads for such movies, that’s a devil bargain I’m willing to make.

I got an iPhone X with the new gesture interface a while ago. My One Plus 7 Pro updated to Android 10 with a new gesture interface a few months ago. They’re quite similar, though different in some regards, and I think I’ve had enough time to familiarize myself with both and make some observations.

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I really dislike writing tests. There’s some amount of discomfort I’d be willing to sustain if I felt it they were beneficial, but I also find they’re rarely worth the bother. Some reasons why. Most of this probably applicable specifically to unit testing, but some other bits to integration testing.

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Sometimes there’s a bad implementation of a good idea, which typically results in discussions turning into shouting matches between people who see only the bad implementation and people who see only the good idea. And sometimes seems more like always when it comes to smart devices, or the internet of things, aka ioshit.

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Postel’s law, also known as the robustness principle, states that we should all be friends and try to get along. It’s also occasionally harmful. Here’s an example.

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A while back somebody posted some “amazing” images which were black and white except for the stripes that were colored. So, not black and white, but the point was to demonstrate that vision is highly perceptual and the brain will interpolate from what’s there. I thought this might be fun to play around with. I guess it kinda works, but I think some of the demo images were selected carefully.

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