Unsolicited Discourse

There are more things in language and orthography, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your ASCII encoding.

A walkthrough of the recent bitfield behavior I implemented in bitvec

An exploration of how I wrote a C++ binding API for my Rust library.

A summary of the last chapter of my father’s life.

Create a partner trait to From that allows conversion in a method chain.

I accidentally got way too invested in the astrodynamics of a complex stellar system and the mechanics of teleporting.

Rust doesn’t have a language-level concept of generic mutability, which makes “method threading” (which take self by some handle, and return it in the same way) hard to write. This article covers how to write in that pattern in a less painful way.

Rust allows for a very functional style of value “flow” without sacrificing the performance of a more traditionally imperative sequence. Furthermore, the functional flow may offer more clarity about value lifetimes and error handling that the imperative sequence might obscure.

I accidentally gave a lightning talk at Rust Belt Rust 2018.

I have strong opinions about how generic type systems ought to work and only by writing them down in a fully specified manner can people who actually know type theory tell me why I’m wrong.

My previous post was about writing blogs. This one is about reading them.

A self-involved reflection on why I have this section of my site. Blame Manish.

Some things I learned while using the nom library on a parser project.

A draft RFC for solidifying the library usage mechanisms for non-Cargo Rust projects.

A draft RFC for adding a book subcommand to Rust’s Cargo tool.

A draft RFC for attaching rationale directly to lint attributes.

A draft RFC for adding unless and until keywords to Rust.

The Rust community issued a call for blog posts about Rust’s potential in 2018 and this is my response. It’s not very much about Rust.

New Year’s Resolutions for 2018.

A story about an abusive, violent relationship of mine. I cannot emphasize enough that if you feel incapable of reading about these things, do not open this.

We regularly work with data whose size is not fixed or known ahead-of-time – text, especially C strings, are a prominent example of this – and manipulating it safely requires effort. Part of my work involves using streams of structured, unsized, data, with as little indirection and discontinuity as possible.

Far too much information about why the moon’s shadow does what it does in an eclipse.

I wrote about an event I observed on Twitter and how it pertains to popularity effects I’ve seen in real life and especially amplified on social media.

The snapchat story of a four-day trip between Utah and Michigan

The House of Representatives passed a bill that would significantly alter healthcare law in America. I wrote about some of my family’s experience with medicine. The Senate rejected the bill a month later.

An article about a small, small subset of problems with using software tools that have ASCII- and/or English- only syntax elements.

Complex data records are often only used as subsets of themselves. In languages such as C++, Java, and C♯, the class and interface systems are built in a way to allow this polymorphism using compile- or run- time typing systems, but this is often expensive or siloed within an artifact or language. This article talks about record composition and destructuring, and ways a language might aid the use of parts of a record in place of the whole.

An exploration of how programs assign meaning to patterns of data, and the theories behind that behavior.

I have some strong thoughts about immigration and social attitudes.

A brief, evergreen note about why sometimes you can’t read my website. Posting it on that website was, perhaps, foolish.

A continued exploration of computer processors and memory.

This is a very long piece which I should probably split apart, that covers the assembly of logic elements into decision evaluators, arithmetic operators, and eventually a primitive processor.

An overview of how transistors work and how they can be assembled into Boolean logic elements.

A general introduction to computing and the topics I intend to cover in more depth in following posts.

I wrote a tool to ease archival work for a subreddit I frequent.