Content roundup #4

Light week this one!

My week was packed with train travel, family gatherings, and lots and lots of Grafana board gazing.

Typed

I finally found the ultimate link to send people when they ask my opinion about LLMs!

They are tools, not authors, and should be treated as such.

A rule that I set for myself regarding LLM usage: use them freely for employer's work, use them sparingly for your own code.

Personal coding should be fun. Why automate the fun part?

576 - Using LLMs at Oxide / RFD / Oxide

Large language models (LLMs) are an indisputable breakthrough of the last five years, potentially profoundly changing the way that we work. As with any extraordinarily powerful tool, LLM use has both promise and peril — and that they are so general-purpose leaves real questions about how and when they should be used. The landscape is shifting so rapidly that static prescription is unlikely — but that LLMs are evolving so quickly also gives urgency to the question: how should LLMs be used at Oxide?

A manifesto that made the rounds roughly a week ago on Bluesky: computing should make you feel good, not trap you in someone else's vision of what you should see.

In a way, Resonant Computing is roughly equivalent to touching digital grass with a hint of positivity.

The Resonant Computing Manifesto

Technology should bring out the best in humanity, not the worst—a manifesto for resonant computing built on five principles that reject hyper-scale extraction for human flourishing.

When I first started looking at Rust, roughly 7 years ago, it seemed like the perfect language: no garbage collection, compiled binaries, safety guarantees previously unheard of in a mainstream language.

Then I started playing with it: it sucked.

Why can't I just pass this variable around?

Why can't I read/write the same data from multiple threads?

What the heck, three string types? Two array types?!

On and off, I picked it back up, tried understanding it, playing with it, doing Rustlings just like Ewan: nothing worked, I just couldn't make it fit in my head, which was already filled with Go at the time.

Rust finally clicked once I stopped doing exercises for the sake of doing exercises, and started sending patches to an open-source project.

Programming stayed roughly the same for decades, Rust requires the developer to throw most of its habits away and think differently: not an easy feat!

Of course not everything must be written in Rust - I find myself writing better backend web services in Go - it's completely fine to just ignore it and go on with your life!

So Ewan, I hear you, Rust sucks, but it'll eventually get better if you stick with it.

Or don't! The software world doesn't revolve around a single programming language luckily.

Giving Up on Rust: A Post-Mortem - Ewan’s Blog

I should not be sorry.

Have you ever wanted to play Super Mario 64 on a first-gen PlayStation?

No? Are you sure?

GitHub - malucard/sm64-psx: A very WIP port of https://www.github.com/n64decomp/sm64 for the PlayStation 1

A very WIP port of https://www.github.com/n64decomp/sm64 for the PlayStation 1 - malucard/sm64-psx

Clipped

The Linux kernel versatile, so much so you can compile a version that has just the bare minimum to boot, detect and load your network card... but not IPv4!

A chill exploration of the first generation MacBook Air.

The 11" variant still lives on as one of the best laptop designs of all time in my opinion, but it'll never match the impact the original 13" had on the future of computing.

Micro car camping is the panacea to all US car size problems.

You don't need that truck bro, there's more than enough space for the two of you in this small Honda mom car!

Jokes aside, less than 10.000$ for a build like that is very good, put a bike rack on it and you got yourself the best MTB adventure vehicle out there.