Its worth adding, TikTok in China (it's called something else, I'm blanking) is entirely controlled on the state and there is absolutely no way that it would be permitted to host any political discussion or advocate mass action not approved by the state. Their "Hey call your congressman" stunt was the most idiotic PR move ever, because they demonstrated that this company is willing and able to leverage the userbase in the US in ways that would never be permitted in "West Taiwan".

I'm still onboard with rust as being better than C, however...

My understanding is that it is considerably harder to correctly write unsafe rust than it is to correctly write c, because if you accidentally violate any of safe rust's guaranteed invariants in an unsafe block, things go bananas.

Because Ukraine has a single unified government excepting the occupied Donbas?

Calling it the Israel-Palestine war would be misleading because Israel hasn’t invaded the West Bank which has a separate/unrelated Palestine government.

To analogize oppositely, it would be real weird if China invaded Taiwan and people started calling it the Chinese civil war.

So what, Japan just colonized most of Asia to spread zen vibes? Or, you know that time Ghengis Khan raped and pillaged his way all the way to Eastern Europe? Or, failing that the repeated wars between Egypt and the Hittites? Even the native Hawaiians fought wars between the islands prior to their colonization. Conquest, genocide and enslavement have been the human condition for all of history everywhere without exception.

Preemptive edit: This doesn’t excuse any of it and we are finally, maybe barely moving past it, but the only reason it seems like this is a western phenomenon is because the most recently globally dominant nations are from there.

It was confusing. It took me 3 tries to write the parser. The first time I didn’t realize there were multiple observations per game and the second time for some reason I was convinced the color came first.

Today in Zig

Spent most of the time running down annoying typos in the tokenizer.

I decided to learn zig this year. Usually I solve both parts in the same source file, but it was annoying so here part 1 and part 2

Modern optimizing compilers are magical. I would need to check assembly but I would actually expect the if to be hoisted out of the loop entirely to relieve pressure on the branch predictor.

I’ve seen this before and I think it is worth adding some context too.

Let’s start with, yea, it leads to absurd result like the clown show in uvalde where I wouldn’t trust that police force to rescue cats from trees.

But… the other way you can’t have a right to a scarce resource (police protection). Police calls while not exactly random can’t be accurately predicted. It doesn’t make sense for a police force to be liable for failing to protect when they might literally not have the ability to protect. Or, through chance, there are no police officers that can get to the location in time.

Instead, the point is to rely on the police wanting to actually do their job and have a legal doctrine accordingly. But in our culture it seems that perhaps that is not necessarily a warranted assumption anymore.

You need to me careful about benchmarking to find performance problems after the fact. You can get stuck in a local maxima where there is no particular cost center buts it’s all just slow.

If performance specifically is a goal there should probably at least be a theory of how it will be achieved and then that can be refined with benchmarks and profiling.

I suspect they meant it runs natively in that it’s an aarch64 binary. It’s still running a VM under the hood because docker is really just a nice frontend to a bunch of Linux kernel features.