And Heres The Thing! Its Not Only Something That Can Cause You Problems If Youre Late To Pay Bills Or

And here’s the thing! It’s not only something that can cause you problems if you’re late to pay bills or have abusive partners/family or are doing something the government may not take kindly to!

Let’s say, hypothetically, you do literally nothing. Well, turns out there’s a bug in the fridge software that sets the temperature to 60 degrees when it receives some unexpected input from your fridge app. Or the manufacturer pushes out an involuntary fridge update and now, while the update is downloading, sorry! your the fridge doesn’t open until the update is done.

And these are only the issues that affect you. Generally, Smart Device manufacturers do not think for even one second about the security of their devices. So, this means that hackers will see well known and publicized security holes that have been easily available for literal years but the manufacturer is simply too lazy to fix, use those holes to get into devices, and use those devices as bots to attack whoever they please (and, as a bonus, it look like it’s coming from your home!)

You’d think that this sounds like something out of a horror movie but this is the reality we live in RIGHT NOW. Many of the largest botnets (e.g. the Mirai botnet) in the world consist largely of compromised smart/IoT (internet of things) devices.

So uh just give it some thought before you buy the SmartChair3000 -- it’s probably not as cool as it sounds :P

hell world hell world hell world

WHY DOES YOUR SOAP NEED INTERNET

a dinner date with rust

I’m a programmer and as a programmer I write code. There are a bunch of different programming “languages” that you can write code in, and one that I frequently find myself reaching for is called C. “Ok, cool, why do I care?” Well because C is monster that will eventually consume all of humanity. Created in the void from which all computing was born, it is The One Language that undergirds all the others. Rarely written but subtly permeating every crevice of our technology. It contains deep, dark secrets understood by only those steeped in the occult, the conduits to the souls of our computers, the systems programmers 🧙 (like me!)

oh and also pretty much every piece of software ever relies on it somehow ^.^ Don’t worry though everything is fine!

“Oh, that sounds Concerning!” you may say. Well, yes!  Yes it is. And so Rust was born. The sales pitch for Rust goes something like this: “Rust! Because C is Bad and is Literally The Bane Of Your Existence.” Which... well, they make a compelling case! As a C programmer, I was skeptical of a language that claimed to have all the same features without any of the downsides, but eventually I decided to give it a go.

“Mmmmm tasty!” I say, biting into some bounds-checked arrays. I take a sip of the mutability rules and exclaim “Wow! This really is something incredible!”. For desert, I decide to order some of their world renowned ownership/borrowing system. It arrives, piping hot, and I begin to dig in. “Hmmm, this is nice... I think?” Worry begins to slip into my voice. I think to myself, “this does seem useful, but it feels like there’s some trade off being made here”. The waiter tells me how this was made with the worlds finest data race protection and my worry begins to grow.

A brief tangent on data races:

You know the little people who live inside the computer and make everything work? A data race is when 2+ little people are trying to work on the same project at once without talking to each other or making a plan. Things Will Go Wrong.

Data races are generally very bad and Rust does it’s very best to make sure that having one is literally impossible. The problem with that is that sometimes, you can have a data race, but it can actually be safe and fine and good! And by sharing the work, the program can finish it’s work much more quickly! However Rust is very quick to put it’s foot down and say “No! That’s too risky! I can’t allow you to put yourself in danger like that!” whereas C would say “Yeah, sure, go ahead, good luck ;-)”

So, this is where my dinner date with Rust started to go downhill. One of the things I write a lot of in C are “highly concurrent” which means that they have lots of little computer people working on them at once. It’s tricky, but it’s something I have a lot of expertise in. And when I tried to replicate those programs in Rust was fighting me at every turn.

It’s odd because while Rust is very picky about this stuff, and it even provides ways to tell it “Yes, I know what I’m doing, I promise you can trust me.” But these ways are just a little too clunky for my liking and proved to be enough of a pain to manage it really soured my whole meal. And I was so eager about it too!

I still would like to try Rust from time-to-time on smaller projects, but it’s really unfortunate that it’s just so unergonomic in many of the ways that matter most to me. And while it isn’t a great fit for my use-cases, I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to make their first foray into systems programming. For nearly everything aside from my specific use-case it seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of C, and C is really the only thing like it.

Rust is cool, tasty, and elegant to C’s old, rickety, and ugly, and it’s a huge boon for the systems programming ecosystem. But I get the sense that Rust isn’t exactly the C-killer it was made out to be and that C still has a place in the ecosystem (and our hearts 💖)

ok, so!

The typical reader may now be wondering, “pile-o-words, what in the world are you going to do with this blog thing?”. well. now i have an answer!

You [reader] may have some Things that you think are cool. And you [reader] may want to share those Things with other people so that they hopefully can see your excitement and also get excited about your Things even if they don’t normally care or know very much about them!

I am going to talk about my Things and maybe also reblog some stuff about my Things and hopefully you get a little peek into my brain and also I get to tell you about things you wouldn’t otherwise get to hear about!

Here’s a list of my current Things, so that you know what to expect!

Short (or maybe long but no promises) programming stories, anecdotes, horror stories, whatever, written so that even if you don’t get the technical details, they’ll still make sense to you

Aro(-spec) and/or ace(-spec) things that I vibe with! Generally more on the wholesome side, or things that I experience and resonate with me :)

Cute fandom stuff. Hopefully even if you don’t like the same fandoms as me, you will also find them cute. But I’ll try and keep that to a minimum because I know it’s niche

And finally what you’ve already seen me post, things about my experience with tumblr or general things that happen to me IRL or on the interwebs!

I’m going to aim for about a post a day, maybe a few more, but we’ll see how this goes!

Enjoy! :D

I just hit 100 followers, and I am truly grateful for all of you.

I would like to do a challenge.

For every interaction this post gets (from ANYONE) I will pick up 1 item of trash.

The earth has done so much for us, and I can’t think of a better way to give back

I would like to formally thank She-Ra tumblr for inspiring me to re-watch this show. I’m 4 episodes in and I’m having such a blast. Every single character is so loveable and HORSE and GLIMMER and ADORA and BADASS SWORD, AAAARGH it makes me SO HAPPY

Something I like about Tumblr is that the science tumblrites are fucking to-the-wall feral and the writers are strange kitchen witches but the computer enthusiasts are polite helpful anarchists and the artists are mostly sensible people who teach you to do hand stretches and enjoy a short walk. It's like I'm in a best timeline AU where someone took my high school and inverted it.

This is how things should be. A gremlin biologist teaching a fantasy novelist about the Ancient Terrifying Cornfields while a graphic designer uses a friend's homebrewed tablet to draw a nice picture of a nearby horse.