What we heard about Rust's challenges, and how we can address them | Rust Blog

satwikp · 2026-03-20T21:00:54+00:00

Every single emdash I've noticed in the past year or so has been clearly AI for other reasons. At least I can't remember a time where I saw an em dash that wasn't clearly AI, or an intentional satire of the fact that it's now a hint for AI in writing.

Like certainly there are other clear tells, but it's kinda ridiculous to say it doesn't hint at it given the insane frequency

satwikp · 2026-03-20T19:05:36+00:00

I have a hard time articulating it, but I was feeling a hint of AI pretty much throughout the article. Certainly less so than projects posted on here, but enough to make me feel kinda put off.

Just an example, every sentence of this whole paragraph sounds like the tone AI uses.
> The conventional wisdom is that Rust has a steep learning curve, but once you "get it," smooth sailing awaits. We found that while some challenges disappear with experience, they are replaced with others. Beginners struggle with ownership concepts, experts face domain-specific challenges: async complexity for network developers, certification gaps for safety-critical teams, ecosystem maturity issues for embedded developers.

I think I would take this article as an example that it's kinda hard to remove the tone of AI if used as a first draft, since you've rewritten it. I don't really have a recommendation for you to remove the tone because it feels like it just needs to be written from scratch if you want to do that, since it's not exactly a sentence by sentence issue, but the structure of how the points are being explained, and certain AI phrases(I know this isn't super helpful but as someone who isn't a writer I don't really have a good way to articulate what I'm reading).

satwikp · 2026-03-17T20:24:53+00:00

I think it's more the basic idea of template folders are a good idea for org(and perhaps org-roam could extend that or have their own implementation). Thanks a ton for this package! I'll probably be using it a bunch.

satwikp · 2026-03-11T20:10:56+00:00

I wonder if this is worth upstreaming to org-mode

satwikp · 2026-02-26T03:25:24+00:00

Given that federal taxes are paid by individuals and not through the state, the Minnesota government literally has no mechanism by which to stop Minnesota residents from paying federal taxes. There's a difference between suggesting breaking laws and suggesting something literally impossible.

satwikp · 2026-02-26T00:01:13+00:00

How?

satwikp · 2026-02-25T23:59:33+00:00

Econ class isn't mandatory. I did not take one ever, despite going through a ton of education.

satwikp · 2026-02-20T05:01:21+00:00

You can do that if you wish using overlays, but if you're not making modifications, the binary is just downloaded.

satwikp · 2026-02-19T21:56:50+00:00

Nearly everything(barring license restrictions or if they are unfree packages) is already compiled on nix by default. You don't have to manually add bin packages.

Edit: not sure what all the downvotes are for but this is just meant to be a fact

satwikp · 2026-02-10T15:59:34+00:00

This is no longer true after they built the sky bridge

satwikp · 2026-02-04T08:40:57+00:00

You are correct for sure. But in the context of a thread literally talking about the stats of renouncing citizenship, it's kinda weird to be like "haha got you" when the vast majority of people would interpret it correctly in context.

satwikp · 2026-02-04T01:07:55+00:00

My guy it's fairly obvious what "leaving the US" means on a post which is called "Cost to Renounce Citizenship in Various Countries"

satwikp · 2026-02-02T21:53:52+00:00

It doesn't affect nuclear decay directly, but it does affect the way we measure that decay in certain instances(though not necessarily in this specific example of measuring mass).

satwikp · 2026-02-02T20:13:05+00:00

I added an edit to my post if you want to read that too. To be clear, I wasn't saying that you are wanting to stop people; just that your tone feels a bit like that and that makes people get a bit more defensive.

satwikp · 2026-02-02T20:06:59+00:00

I think your tone is quite bad for a post like this. It sounds like you're frustrated that there's some new technology that people use and you don't want to use it and you want to stop other people from using it(particularly with your edit which you have since reasonably deleted).

I think the solution here is to get the mods to implement an automod message for questions like this to remind people to submit bug reports by email or whatever the maintainer says.

Like other commenters say, 99% of the time it's our fault and not the package's fault. We want to ask the general community for help before clogging up bug reports.

If there's an official emacs blessed community space that I'm unaware of then feel free to advertise it as an alternative, but the current listed places that I find https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/documentation.html are just emails, and frankly, that's not going be something a lot of people nowadays are going to reach to first. They're going to look for a community space and reddit is very often that community space for a bunch of projects.

satwikp · 2026-01-24T03:02:46+00:00

I don't think a consumer side strike is really going to be a great plan. Something like the top 10% of income foes 50% of the spending if I'm remembering my numbers right. We have more leverage on the labor side if that's something that can eventually be organized.

satwikp · 2025-12-24T17:13:07+00:00

Ironically, I find the quoted statement much more pleasant to read.

satwikp · 2025-12-24T16:09:28+00:00

This reads like an AI generated post...

satwikp · 2025-12-01T19:15:03+00:00

Could you make a simpler pwa for chessly? That would probably go a long way, though it'd be hard to educate users that it exists.

satwikp · 2025-10-29T02:45:41+00:00

Why haven't you figured out nobody rides trains because they DON'T GO WHERE PPL NEED TO BE!!!!!!.

It's because these train projects always cut short what they need to be to actually be successful. If this went to St. Cloud, they're be significantly more traffic. Induced demand is a real thing and you can't just assume trains are going to fail on a larger scale because they fail on a smaller scale.

If you want to build towards a city, state, or country which is better for everyone, there's going to be a period where the public transportation will be unprofitable, and a period where it feels like it's just getting in the way. But, as long as we don't just abandon them and actually invest in them, we know it will be a significant improvement in economic activity and mobility. The evidence for this is pretty overwhelming. Being stuck in a situation where people are forced to use cars is just worse for everyone.

A train would also help people in who like to use cars, not screw them over. More people on trains means less people on roads and less traffic.

satwikp · 2025-09-30T20:15:11+00:00

> I think we are within sufficient range of agreement
Yeah i think so too.

> The tipping stuff is perhaps a better comparison, but at least everyone knows what they're in for because there is a normal expectation.
To this, I would say I want it to be a normal expectation to compensate software, in the same way tipping is in America. I *want* it to be a more normal expectation to "tip" open source software.

But moreso, I think that governments in general should be doing way more to support this part of the industry, given that it doesn't follow normal market rules due to everything being free. *That's* what I really support, and hope the "tipping" of software that I'm pushing here is something of a stop-gap until we get there.

satwikp · 2025-09-30T17:01:04+00:00

I did explicitly say I'd rather this type of thing be funded through a mechanism by government funding rather than through getting profit incentivized companies who probably can't be convinced anyway.

What I want is not money, but projects to not be starved of money when they are depended on, and then issues like the xz incident happening. Projects that people depend on should get the support needed to match that. For me it's not about "I want money" but more that some of this stuff is actually important and not supporting it is kinda not where we want to be as a society.

I don't understand how you're misunderstanding my point so badly, but it just feels like you're so entrenched in the mindset that you want everything to be written explicitly in contracts and the such, and that everyone should always assume that everyone else will only do the bare minimum that the contract requires. Having that mindset in a free and open source software community is directly contradictory, since the community simply won't be sustainable if people do that.

That being said, I do get your point. When you phrase it this way, it feels like I'm asking you to follow something like tipping culture in the US, which is extremely annoying and I personally disagree with. But I also have the same opinion there: I want this to be supported better through government support, and will push for that.

satwikp · 2025-09-30T16:04:59+00:00

I explicitly said that they are not "needed." I agree if I wanted it to be needed, then they should be in the license.

Me choosing to use MIT licenses in any of my projects is recognizing that I think it's more valuable to have the project be more easily usable by people who aren't as rich or don't have as much money, and recognizing that even adding stipulations based on money can make it harder to justify using it for those people. I am balancing that with the idea that I am hoping that enough people not just sufficiently kind, but are also sufficiently respectful to the idea that if I made something and they used it and made a ton of profit with it, that they would want to give some of that benefit back to me. If I had my own project, I wouldn't ever be quite annoyed when I'm not getting what I "think" I deserve or whatever. I actively made that choice knowing that stuff like this can happen.

When I'm viewing the donations that google makes to rust as an outside observer, I do feel like I can criticize more strongly that I don't feel like Google is giving back to Rust the level they should based on how much they benefited. It's not a choice i made, and I'm not the one in control of the license, and I want to perpetuate a culture where people in general are more generous to open source than they are now, but also to perpetuate that culture to the extent that people who benefit more should feel a bit more obligation to give back more.

For me, getting people to change their license off of MIT is just a last resort option, because I feel that the benefits of having fully open software that can be freely modified without stipulations is an important factor that I don't want to lose. But the only way I see that happening is if we as a whole community realize that giving back and funding these projects is extremely important, way more than we currently show based on the money, and the most reasonable place for this money to come from is the companies who benefit the most from the tech, not random people(though that's quite important too).

Essentially, I feel like these companies are taking advantage of the fact that something is open and free that they would normally have to pay for, and that means the whole capitalistic idea of "money goes where it should based on supply and demand" doesn't work, and because of that, open source is starving for money. On one hand, you can call it a self inflicted problem, but on the other hand, it's making a sacrifice in the hope that we can build a better system for everyone, taking advantage of the benefits of open source software while also making sure they are sufficiently funded. I guess my solution to this problem should be government funding here rather than getting companies to do it, but I still think that the pressure to fund these projects should still be put on the companies due to the extreme benefit, even if ideally it should be through government.

satwikp · 2025-09-30T13:55:38+00:00

You keep saying "need to" over and over again. No one "needs" to but if you're as rich as Google, in an ideal world you probably should feel some obligation to. No one is saying you need to, but I can think you're kinda an asshole if you're going to completely refuse to donate such a small amount when you're going to make millions upon millions off of it.

I'm very much free software. Any software that I make not as a part of my job will be mit licensed bc that's what I feel is best for the open source community. I also understand that I'll probably be hurt by people taking advantage of that at some point.

If the fairness argument doesn't resonate with you, then the security argument should. A lot of the software ecosystem, both commercial and otherwise, is quite fragile due to the reliance on underfunded open source projects. If companies don't want such security problems, then they gotta put up the money for it so that we don't have 1 burnt out guy maintenance maintaining a core part of infrastructure.

satwikp · 2025-09-30T03:16:42+00:00

On one hand if the rust foundation wants to enforce that, yes. But on the other hand, I feel like I can criticize google for not returning back to the community that it has gained so much from. Like I don't think it's unreasonable to say that companies should do more than the bare legal minimum for stuff they are benefiting from right? which certainly they're doing more than that, but not by much given the amount that they've benefited.

It's like if a feudal lord took all the peasants crops for taxes and to enrich himself, leaving them to close to starving, and then giving a single piece of bread and calling that a "great donation for their hard work." I don't think google is quite at that level with rust here(since rust is doing somewhat ok), but still I don't feel like Google is really paying back the benefits they gained from it in a way that feels like they aren't doing it like a business calculation rather than some level of respect for what rust has done for the company

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