Jordan McQueen

How does Oxide make decisions? FAQ Friday #17

I can tell @davidbarsky.com is chatting about JJ and ersc.io at #RustConf because our mailing list subscriber signups are skyrocketing despite us not yet having sent a single update

Compensation isn’t a motivator, it’s a constraint. c.f. Punished by Rewards

Something about WhatsApp’s network code is much better than other platforms. It was the only platform that successfully uploaded and sent a video on spotty plane WiFi.

Today I wrote about 300 lines of Rust featuring "unsafe" that I thought about quite carefully. Then I started adding safety comments. The act of needing to convincingly argue that something is true made me find and fix 3 bugs I had missed before. Safety comments exist for a reason!

Sometimes I wonder if rural vs city, house vs condo, and manyrepo vs monorepo and monolith vs microservice are different flavors of the same question.

I believe that people who get good at lying are irrevocably and fundamentally changed. It is a black magic; it is a skill that comes at great cost to its user.

Why Does Oxide Use Rust?

I’m confident that Japanese society will instill good values in my children and help raise them right. But one thing I feel is a personal duty to teach my kids that they won’t get here: a healthy ability to question authority.

My favorite meals in Japan are set lunches done by Izakayas whose main business is evening hours but they are just carrying the afternoon hours with some lunch specials. The meals are almost total sleepers — amazingly good and low key.

Anyone else experience this? I *always* take my backpack off left strap first. You know how you sometimes need to do that maneuver where you sling it on one shoulder to access a side zipper? If it’s on the opposite shoulder as my usual take-off side, I find it awkward to execute. 😅

Did you know: if you installed Rust with rustup, you already probably have the "Embedded Rust Book" locally. If you run `rustup doc` in your terminal, it'll open the bookshelf with all the docs installed already, including the main rust books as well as the embedded rust book.

Human effort is conserved. Creating a municipal trash collection solution spawns truck maintenance backlogs, collective bargaining effort, and landfill management projects. The net societal human effort is unchanged -- only rearranged.

There are actually good ways to try and detect AI-generated content, but the whole “em-dashes implies generated content” approach is intellectually lazy. Hint: check for fixed-width space characters, weird Unicode hyphens, zero-width joiners, ellipsis characters, right and left quotation marks, etc.

#rustlang Could be a Good Beginner Language scp-iota.github.io/software/202...

The talks from RustWeek are now available on YouTube! It was great fun and a big honour to get our Rust efforts: youtu.be/2JIFUk4f0iE?...

I’m not on the calendar. I’m on the critical path.

advice I would give my 20 y/o self. don’t stress so much about strategy and tactics and understanding byzantine organizational politics. just build things.

Whenever I get self conscious about naming libraries silly things, I remind myself that Arm (the acorn risc machine) released the ARM (architecture reference manual) for their A/R/M (application/realtime/microcontroller) processors, making the document the Arm A/R/M ARM.

Japanese society feels similar to the safety you get from having blocks marked as unsafe{}. You can default trust people generally. You can walk into a mobile phone carrier store and take all of their recommendations and you won’t get scammed or taken advantage of.

I feel the need to explain what I think Trippe was saying. Globalism and reducing the barrier to travel the world would collectively increase our foreign connections and therefore reasons to love each other, acting as a positive motivator for peace, contrasted to the typical language of deterrents.

LLMs are here to stay it seems. I hope the subscription monetization model is sufficient for them. It would be pretty dismal if we started seeing free-to-use LLM services that have an ads-injection layer before generation. "Give me a comparison of these services and pros/cons." [...] "Sure! 😈"

When you find a new song that gets you in the zone and you spam repeat it for a few days, knowing all too well that its reign will soon come to an end.

1K stars 🌟! facet-reflect was recently rewritten from scratch and all deserializers are now deny(unsafe_code) github.com/facet-rs/facet

Thank goodness the #rustlang foundation decided to take this path rustfoundation.org/media/ferrou...

Rust 1.85.1 is out with doc tests fixes (this should make you happy because you should have doc tests) blog.rust-lang.org/2025/03/18/R...

Student travel grants for AsiaLLVM are available. This is an opportunity to meet LLVM developers from across the LLVM community in person, and discuss compiler development in Tokyo. Deadline is March 31. See post for details. discourse.llvm.org/t/2025-asial...

enjoy this post from niko; I like the framing of "foundational software" much better than "systems programming" #rustlang smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/bl...

Basically anytime someone shames someone for raising discussion because they don’t want to litigate it in front of an audience, you can kind of write them off as being uninterested in the truth.

Epistemically dubious, but: A core Japanese conjugation is 〜てしまう and its derivatives, e.g. ちゃう, which can imply a lack of intentionality. I believe intentionality to be a core appeal of Japanese culture/society, so I wonder if having it as a primitive language construct helps build intentionality.

There’s a good book about this called Punished by Rewards.

Wait, I got through LHR and it was fast, smooth, painless? *Looks around skeptically, looking for the “catch”.*

All the countries doing the $20 electronic travel authorization money grab thing now — pony up and pay the toll because we told all the airlines not to let you board your international flight otherwise.

You know, it seems that whenever anyone resigns from Linux kernel work in total frustration, and cites a few of the things that were the final straws, it's always the same person whose caustic manner is at the root -- and it isn't Linus. marcan.st/2025/02/resi...

temporarily embarrassed geniuses

Thinking about this essay again. codahale.com//work-is-work/

Found my new interface for git submodules... git --git-dir=/dev/null clone --depth=1 <REPO>

You can move to another country! What is the likelihood that you were born in the right country for you? Imagine if you were stuck with the first programming language you used or the first genre of music you ever listened to and just never switched because inertia?

Not having regrets is less about not making mistakes and more about being content with the life you are living and have lived.

Not that I'm necessarily saying one should ever want to do this, but if I ever want to "do bash scripts right", I'm going to take inspiration from the rust compiler installation scripts, e.g. github.com/rust-lang/ru...

Join our Tokyo C++ Meetup on “Abstractions for Low-Level Programming”, featuring @lefticus.bsky.social ! Learn how to balance performance & complexity and more. ✅ Date & Time: February 20, 2025, 6:30-8:30 pm (JST) 👋 RSVP by February 13th at 12 pm! peatix.com/event/4273915

I would like a button on iOS that’s like “I’m awake, so don’t trip any of the alarms for the rest of today, but keep them enabled for tomorrow.”