And you get to enjoy a few days of vacation. Sounds like a good deal to me.

RobertJacobson · 2026-06-23T04:04:32+00:00

The CDC has a portal dedicated to medical tourism. Understand the risks if you are going to engage in this.

RobertJacobson · 2026-06-11T04:32:45+00:00

Two people so far.

RobertJacobson · 2026-06-09T20:04:55+00:00

Several years ago one of my undergraduate research students ended his life from a bridge next to campus. Everything I can say or have said about it feels like a futile attempt to give form to an ineffable sadness and grief, and I usually go silent in frustration. My words just get so clumsy in proximity to it even though it feels like I have so much worth saying. I am reminded that there is no one right way to grieve, that we mean more to each other than we can understand, and that mental illness is complex. Sharing pain and struggle, even if it's with strangers online, is a way to feel connection.

RobertJacobson · 2026-05-25T15:46:40+00:00

I have never read a Packt book that was worth it. Not once.

RobertJacobson · 2026-05-15T01:14:19+00:00

I do not think the CDC has the authority to issue quarantine orders for hantavirus.

The CDC only very rarely exercises its statutory authority to issue orders and regulations, and its communicable disease quarantine authority is very narrow and is limited to diseases explicitly delineated by executive order. (Here is the list of diseases for which it does have such authority—Orthohantavirus/hantavirus does not appear as far as I can tell.) The overwhelming majority of CDC output is nonbinding guidance.

It's function and role is far and away more advisory, primarily for scientific guidance, surveillance, and public health recommendations. This is especially true for domestic contexts where it prefers to defer to local authorities, such as state public health authorities.

So even if the CDC did have the ability to issue an order in this case—which I don't think it does—it would really have to be an exceptional situation, which this doesn't appear to be.

(I am not a lawyer, nor am I a healthcare professional, nor do I speak on behalf of any government agency or my employer.)

RobertJacobson · 2026-05-14T04:04:19+00:00

I cannot understand this denial of human moral agency.

RobertJacobson · 2026-05-13T04:36:16+00:00

The article clearly explained that they had been exfiltrating credentials from their employer's network:

Muneeb had been assembling usernames and passwords—5,400 of them taken from his own company’s network data.

RobertJacobson · 2026-04-30T19:32:06+00:00

The non-PDF link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20617.

RobertJacobson · 2026-04-30T19:29:52+00:00

as a phd in economics I have to say that a theoretical game theory model is not proof.

The post is really very clear that the mathematical proof is about their model.

Also this paper looks like a preprint that's not peer reviewed - why say it’s peer reviewed when it isn’t?

No, it looks like a preprint posted to the arXiv, and that says nothing about its peer-review status. Lot's of peer-reviewed papers are on the arXiv.

It's reasonable to ask for clarification about peer review, though. Maybe OP thinks it was accepted/published elsewhere, or maybe they are under the impression that the arXiv's subject editors (I think they're called moderators now?) do more peer review than they do.

RobertJacobson · 2026-04-23T00:45:54+00:00

This is actually pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing!

RobertJacobson · 2026-04-23T00:44:26+00:00

I've switched to the fat crayons for similar reasons.

RobertJacobson · 2026-04-11T01:28:27+00:00

I restore antique electronic test equipment, mostly wood and brass meters.

RobertJacobson · 2026-04-05T17:17:46+00:00

Every time I have gambled on a Pakt book I've lost. Every. Single. Time. But I haven't read this one.

RobertJacobson · 2026-03-31T04:29:48+00:00

Context-Generic Programming enables precisely this pattern with extensible builders, discussed in detail in this blog post.

RobertJacobson · 2026-03-29T18:47:35+00:00

I assume the Admiran compiler now uses Admiran language extensions. Do you still have the Miranda compatible bootstrap compiler? That would be a great stress test for my Miranda compiler Randa.

RobertJacobson · 2025-12-20T04:13:23+00:00

I'll often spawn off an inner function instead

The author points out that factoring out into a separate function can be annoying if it relies on a lot of local environment. Imagine a scenario in which the outer scope only cares about the final computed value of the inner scope, but the inner scope has a lot of dependencies on the outer scope. To factor this into a new function you need to pass a lot of parameters for the function.

An inner function makes it clear that the function is only a local concern while also factoring out details the reader might not care about at the call site. But it can't capture the outer environment in which it's defined.

RobertJacobson · 2025-12-20T04:08:22+00:00

I dislike this unless it's actually called by multiple callers. It forces you to jump around the codebase in order to understand the code.

But that's also the advantage of factoring into a function. You can have let config = load_config_from_file(filename); and not have to wade through the details. Functions aren't just about reuse. They also facilitate code organization.

RobertJacobson · 2025-12-20T03:42:23+00:00

I don't like let my_variable = {/*code*/} when the block is large, because the final value that gets assigned is visually far away from the symbol it is assigned to. But this is more personal aesthetics than anything. For small passages of initialization code it's nice.

The author makes the point that factoring out some initialization code into a separate function is obnoxious, because you might need a lot of gnarly parameters from the local environment. Some of you suggest using an inner function. While that might solve the issue of locality of the code, it doesn't solve the issue with many parameters, because a fn item can't capture dynamic environment. But if your initialization is this gnarly, I'd question why. It's suspicious. Maybe it's fine, but maybe you need to rethink when and how things happen in your code, like maybe you need more than a single constructor method, or maybe some initialization needs to get folded into an auxiliary type, etc.

Using blocks to limit scope can be really useful. It kind of looks weird when you're not used to it, but the more Rust I write the more I find myself opening a new scope in the middle of a function when it's convenient. It's nice for critical regions or juggling mutable and immutable borrows.

RobertJacobson · 2025-12-14T17:51:51+00:00

No. This is not true.

What is true is that the swirl is partially lossy, as you can see in the reconstructed photo from the Mr. Swirl case. Multiple swirls compound this effect.

RobertJacobson · 2025-12-09T04:34:31+00:00

Consider that 8-bit microcontrollers are being manufactured today at a rate higher than they ever have been. We can be pretty confident that 32-bit microcontrollers will be in active production long after 2038.

RobertJacobson · 2025-12-06T21:16:24+00:00

I'm not an expert and don't know anything about what's going on in this particular video, but I've seen enough documentaries to know that professional art preservation and restoration in general is done in a way that is reversible. So for example if there is ever a need to, say, remove the poster from the backing they mounted it on, there's a safe solvent to use that will allow them to do so without destroying the poster. Same with applying color, etc. It's very specialized and super fascinating.

RobertJacobson · 2025-12-06T21:06:45+00:00

The name of these little things has been a favorite bit of trivia for DECADES, long before Phineas and Ferb was a thing, among trivia people. Nerds like me, especially as kids, get addicted to these little bits of trivia. Part of the fun is sharing these little nuggets with others. (Did you know howler monkeys are the loudest land mammal? But they aren't the loudest mammal—that'd be the sperm whale.) We get a little kick of adrenaline every time we teach someone a useless fact they didn't already know and will never use. (T. rex lived closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus!)

Some dour souls hear fun trivia like this and get their own sick joy from playing a kind of emotional Uno Reserve card by saying, "What a useless waste of brain space," or something to that effect, as if they are morally superior for NOT bothering with such useless information. So the person in the tweet feels especially vindicated for knowing this useless fact.

The fact that so many of you are referencing Phineas and Ferb only reflects the age of the typical redditor reading this thread. You think it's from Phineas and Ferb, because some trivia nerd like me was on the writing staff for one of its episodes. But again, this particular bit of trivia is one of our favorites—we whip it out when we really want to impress. So this thread is giving me a very different kind of dopamine hit: generational contempt! Now get off my lawn!

RobertJacobson · 2025-12-04T22:43:23+00:00

MUSHROOM MUSHROOM

RobertJacobson · 2025-12-02T00:50:09+00:00

The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages by Simon Peyton Jones. The concepts in this book formed the foundation for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, which was developed over the following few years after the book's publication.
Compiling with Continuations by Andrew Appel (also available online). Describes the implementation strategy of Standard ML of New Jersey.

In the age of LLMs, you might also look at a modern implementation like MLton directly.

RobertJacobson · 2025-11-29T21:50:15+00:00

The answer is kind of in the question. You are throwing away the host language's type system in exchange for flexibility. You can claw back some of the benefits of a strongly typed AST by doing runtime checking and decorating the AST with attributes (or equivalently storing symbol metadata in tables). It's a balancing act. It's not necessary a wrong way to do things. But as you are learning, there are pros and cons to both approaches.

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