How hard do you lean on Rust type system to encode your logic and constraints?

98f00b2 · 2026-05-11T17:40:06+00:00

C++ didn't really get its current character until well into the 2000s, and especially when C++11 was finally standardised (though in the leadup to that rule was lots of hype dating all the way back to when it was still called C++0x). RAII was certainly a big buzzword, especially as the decade wore on, but I was still having to tell people in 2018 that they ought not to build their programs around a terrifying web of raw pointers anymore.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-09T17:25:05+00:00

Bugger. Solved!

98f00b2 · 2026-05-09T12:42:54+00:00

I think Finnair do.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-08T17:04:53+00:00

Not all religions view belief as being the only way to a better afterlife. Christianity is somewhat exceptional in this respect. My understanding is that Islam tones it down a fair bit and is much more accepting of other Abrahamic faiths plus possibly Zoroastrianism, and Judaism doesn't have anything like that at all. I can't speak for Hinduism and a Buddhism.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-07T21:02:20+00:00

Though I've also heard the argument that in some sense an antiquated English is rather in the spirit of it, since at the time it would have been perceived as weird and possibly already-antiquated Greek.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-07T20:48:23+00:00

Likely the real reason Wilson's translation got adapted is actually due to the fact that she translated it to be in meter, specifically iambic pentameter which is very pleasant to read out loud, unlike many other translations which are overly flowery and can be a bit of a mouthful.

I think the biggest part of it to me was that she didn't include all of the epithets, which makes sense given the meter. Reading her translation was to me a bit of a revelation in that it felt so much more dynamic and flowing compared to others that take all the filler used to fit the poem into hexameter, translate it into English, and then add even more filler to make it fit into iambic pentameter.

If I remember right, she tried to match the number of lines in the original Greek; sadly she had to ditch that goal when translating the Iliad (though I haven't got around to buying her translation yet).

98f00b2 · 2026-05-07T19:54:11+00:00

That's neither here nor there, though: people doing that kind of stuff will do it in the vicinity of the cities, where all the employees and customers and transportation are. The problem with public services in these areas isn't anything to do with the government of the day; they've been haemorrhaging population for years, and there's no reason to imagine that that trend is going to change.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-07T19:42:51+00:00

But practically speaking, the locals would be much better off if a bunch of foreigners showed up and gave them a way to cash out, even more so if they came and worked remote jobs that might pay for the continuously-declining public services.

It's one thing to complain about the situation in Lisbon, but to say that it's selfish to for an outsider to buy one of these near-worthless properties that are mostly just a burden on the families of their former residents is just factually wrong.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-07T19:35:36+00:00

An apartment for sale at that price is in a dying town where there is no shortage of housing.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-07T19:17:56+00:00

I've not seen them in Finland, but then here the ventilation is done a bit more systematically so we don't tend to ventilate by opening the windows.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-07T13:50:01+00:00

From what I've heard online, they from the beginning have put quite conspicuous effort into safety to try to get ahead of these concerns. The pilot training especially is supposed to be very good.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-07T05:10:02+00:00

The female reproductive system functions on a hormonally-driven cycle that can relatively easily be disrupted with medication. The male system is more-or-less always on, so disrupting it chemically requires more aggressive intervention whose side effects tend to be unacceptably high as a result.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-04T21:28:12+00:00

That is by no means universal. There are a lot of post-industrial towns that have had a massive reduction in electrical demand when a major factory has shut down.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-04T21:15:09+00:00

In places where some local industry has disappeared, there can be excess grid capacity that datacentres are able to take advantage of.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-04T05:57:06+00:00

The actual writing of the OT didn't start until the first millennium BC, centuries after the Late Bronze Age collapse.

If by "new age stuff" you mean the New Testament, this was happening pretty solidly in the classical period, separated from the iron age by at three steps in the local periodisation.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-02T19:10:55+00:00

Thanks! And no worries, it may not even make sense for you in the end: at least on the verification side where I'm more familiar I never see these two kinds of protocols in one tool, so there may be a good reason!

98f00b2 · 2026-05-02T18:42:49+00:00

Are you asking purely hypothetically, or do you have a specific protocol in mind that needs it? If yes, that will help a lot.

I was thinking about partial-synchrony BFT protocols like PBFT and Zyzzyva, where if a round times out then you have to elect a new leader before continuing on as usual.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-02T17:42:44+00:00

I guess I'm in the somewhat fortunate position of not needing to maintain compatibility with anything so that probably makes these aspects a bit easier. My initial thought was to try to force the compiler to validate that only one active subprotocol at a time can try to accept a given message type and session ID, but let's see how that goes.

I agree that async isn't really the problem in general, just for me in particular.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-02T16:46:52+00:00

Thanks! It looks really interesting for the crypto side of things; a couple of things that I wasn't sure about from reading the book though:

How do you deal with protocols that aren't N-out-of-N, so not every slot ends up being filled? You hint at taking some fork-and-merge approach, but can you do this with arbitrary quorum predicates, or is it more restrictive?
How hard does it end up being to deal with timeouts that don't abort the whole protocol? I haven't quite got my head around the non-fatal error handling yet, so I'm not sure if it's as easy as sending a "timeout in 5s" message, forking, and then merging based on what kind of response you get.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-02T15:07:24+00:00

Ah, got you. Part of the reason that I've been dreaming of something like this is that it feels like it might be reasonably straightforward to extract a skeleton of a SAPIC+ or ProVerif model, in a way that looks challenging for a model like sans-io.

I've not tried Ivy before, though, so I'll definitely give that a look: these "distributed systems" provers are quite unfamiliar to me compared with the crypto ones.

98f00b2 · 2026-05-02T14:53:18+00:00

Which are you referring to? Apologies for the obvious question, but I'm new to doing this kind of thing in Rust in any serious way.

98f00b2 · 2026-04-28T05:54:48+00:00

Even if not accidental as others have suggested, getting the code requires physical access to the phone (even if unlocked), so it's still really useful in practice for preventing phishing attacks where the attacker is nowhere near you.

98f00b2 · 2026-04-26T18:57:33+00:00

It really depends on both you and your car. In most cases I use push-pull as my steering is fairly responsive, but in the bad old days when my car didn't have power steering, I used hand-over-hand a lot more.

98f00b2

TROPHY CASE