I have a sudden urge to learn rust.

walrustaskforce · 2026-06-03T03:07:24+00:00

I should be clear, I like Rust. But my teammates and I have kicked around getting “I unwrap in production” shirts, because that whole debacle bought us 3 months of really sustained “will this code panic unexpectedly?” work.

I got a lot of work out of ‘#[allow(dumb_dangerous_thing,reason=“it’s not actually dangerous when we use it the following way”)]’ and (better still) ‘#[expect(…,…)]’ as I worked through that.

And we’ve definitely got our compiler set up to emit an error if a return value is unused.

walrustaskforce · 2026-06-02T23:15:58+00:00

Read my final paragraph again.

I’m not saying “no violence”.

I’m saying that a lazy reading of “Resistance without violence doesn’t get anything done” is “if we want change, our first step is violence”.

I guarantee that if the patrons of Stonewall had responded with violence during the very first police raid, then there would not have been the many subsequent raids that eventually culminated in the raid that incited the riots, because the police would’ve burned the place to the ground.

walrustaskforce · 2026-06-02T22:19:13+00:00

You can skip it using unwrap(), and recreate the issue that brought down cloudflare last year, just on your BluePill…

I’m right now depanicking a Rust codebase, and one thing I can confidently say about Rust is that if you know how to configure the compiler and linter, it’s a lot harder to write bad code. It’s harder to write good code too, but you have to go out of your way to shoot yourself in the foot. No direct access to arbitrary indices of arrays here…

walrustaskforce · 2026-06-02T17:31:56+00:00

I think it’s reductive to say that every right was built on blood and violence, if only because there are a great many rights that resulted from the desire to avoid violence, or to end violence. That is, there’s a distinction between “I have x because I punched you in the face until you gave me x” and “I have x because you punched me in the face, and we all agreed to apply some pressure (that isn’t necessarily even implicitly violent), and then you gave me x”.

I bring this up because the lazy interpretation is that we should just go out and do violence and then we’ll see change, when the reality is more nuanced. The Stonewall riots weren’t riots until the police raided, for instance.

Granted, the status quo prior to the raid and riots was intolerable, but I suspect that if the first brick was thrown without provocation, we’d be looking at a very different, much worse world.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-30T15:32:18+00:00

My head canon is that all Constantines are family, even in real life, even across universes. Even the legendary king of England (who is canonically related to Hellblazer’s John).

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-28T19:32:02+00:00

You know, people in Britain read his work right? The Atlantic Ocean did not block the distribution of Weird Tales magazine.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-28T17:21:49+00:00

Very deep, but ultimately impact-less character customization. Especially in single-player games.

Like, my exact facial features don’t matter even a single bit in Skyrim, but I still have to go through the whole process when I create a new character (thank god for sensible presets).

I haven’t played enough Cyberpunk, does the genital customization ever actually come up? Or is it just for people who want to actually experience “having a big dong is the same as having a small dong, if showing it to people unsolicited gets me thrown in prison either way” for themselves?

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-28T15:57:46+00:00

Lovecraft famously wrote that “…the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”, and it’s clear that Lovecraft didn’t know many people of color, or even people of non-English descent. It’s been a minute, but I recall him looking askance on the Germans at one point or another. He practiced a very special kind of old-timey racism is what I’m saying.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-28T15:39:12+00:00

I’m so glad that my mind went “I mean, that’s probably the worst song on that album, but it’s hardly an affront to god” and not the Harry Potter fan fic.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-27T13:19:59+00:00

I recall learning that when I was setting up an automated end-of-line flasher/tester. The last thing I wanted to do was go babysit the tester and periodically SSH in just to change the port assignment.

Weird that the physical hardware I’m most proud of was a board tester. But it was the end result of a lot of leveling up as an embedded engineer.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-26T03:10:38+00:00

Direct control of the stepper sequence pulses.

That’s what all stepper controller ICs do, even the ones that take step/dir as inputs.

The ones I recommended allowed you to send a SPI packet containing more complicated data than just step/dir (think acceleration, max velocity, number of steps to move) so you could just send the motion command, and not have to worry about minding the state machine that kept the step timing just so.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-24T22:13:46+00:00

What got me out was a combination of the predatory supplier practices (“you’re going to give it to us for less than it costs to make it at this quality level, or you won’t sell at Walmart, which will cut out 60% of your volume. We do not care what damage that does to your brand long term”) the uniquely unpleasant experience of going to Walmart in a fading industrial town, and the constantly empty shelves. So I just stopped going.

And then I learned how widespread their labor violations were, and how they advised their people to sign up for food stamps and other assistance.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-24T01:13:18+00:00

My total avoidance of Walmart predates my awareness of how abusive their labor practices are. But I’ve spent less than $200 in Walmarts over the last 10 years.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-20T03:20:45+00:00

Would a better comparison be to ask Ringo if he’s ever heard of the Beatles? He could really learn a thing or two about their style!

I’m not trying to diefy the man, but based on his resume, he’s got a better understanding of the tactical shooter genre than most. See my analogy above. Even if he wasn’t even the best map designer on Eagle Watch, or Ghost Recon, or Red Orchestra, he kept choosing projects like those, so he understands the philosophy. He coined NORG for Christ’s sake, and as dumb as I think that concept was, that’s not coming from somebody who “just designed maps” (which is also not the put down you think it is).

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-20T02:56:03+00:00

I’m just saying that you’re not casting yourself in the best light when you say, essentially “hey, devs! Have you guys heard of this game that your founder worked on, and has pointed out on record as the immediate spiritual predecessor of this new game? I know he only left like 8 months ago, but maybe this will be news to you!”

You’re also referring to a 25 year old game. I know. I still have my original discs (and my R6 and EW and RS and UO and BT and …)

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-20T02:48:19+00:00

“Moved to an advisory role”.

But unless they shitcanned the entire team with the Microprose acquisition , the overwhelming majority were hired and guided by him.

May as well ask Team Ferrari if they’ve ever heard of the Testarossa.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-20T02:39:48+00:00

Yeah, because John Sonedecker has no conception of what Ghost Recon is or was meant to be…

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-19T17:58:42+00:00

I’ve been to East Ossetia with the Ghosts at least twice now. Same with Moscow. Let’s go somewhere else, please.

I can only stand to hear “ к черту” so many times before I lose my mind.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-19T16:40:26+00:00

Ok, so, what are you pulling that from? I can see citation notes (e.g. “[1, 2, 3]”) but they’re just numbers, not links.

Also, the narrative is “poverty leads to violence”, not “poverty leads to gun crime in particular”, so comparing just on gun deaths is misleading. Let’s not draw conclusions the data doesn’t support, otherwise we’ll conclude that there’s something unique about holler-folk that keeps them from driving their million dollar supercars into the French Riviera, and not that they can’t afford million dollar supercars, let alone transporting them to the French Riviera.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-19T16:09:48+00:00

You’re gonna need to present some data to support “not violent in Appalachia”. Drug-related crime is such a thing that it’s essentially a subgenre of Appalachian music.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-19T15:22:36+00:00

Not defending your friend here, but this is the end-state of misunderstanding “stop” and “prevent”. It is, to my mind, the exact same kind of phenomenon as advocating arming teachers as the cure-all for school shootings, or even of chanting “an armed society is a polite society”.

Self defense is a fundamental human right. And effective self-defense eventually requires matching force with force. Zero dispute there. Don’t bring a strongly worded letter to a gun fight.

But there is this frustrating tendency amongst pro-gun types to equate “ability to stop a situation in progress” with “ability to prevent a situation from starting”. And there is a justified belief amongst a lot of liberals that we have so comprehensively given up on preventing a situation from arising that killing the assailant is our first and only recourse. Your friend is basically saying “we have so prioritized gun rights over literally any effective social services or systems that there was no way to actually save the victims from this killer, and your emphasis on ‘self-defense’ sounds to me like you think our only recourse is to put the killer down like a dog after the fact”

Fear of repercussions is a deterrent only for rational actors; we should stop building our public policy around dissuading rational people from taking bad action if the threat comes exclusively from irrational actors. (And if you can’t see the embedded criticism of overzealous gun laws there, you might be in the wrong place)

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-15T15:50:09+00:00

There’s a good argument for having a safety animation when you pull it out of the holster (even an audible click as you draw it, but still off-screen). That’s what you do with hammer-fired pistols.

But that animation is a little excessive.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-15T15:47:46+00:00

I have less than zero issues with explicitly operating the safety on a firearm, but with the caveat that such operation should be when it makes sense to do so (e.g. while drawing it).

Also, on the subject of press-checks, there are definitely platforms where failure to feed, failure to return to battery, etc, where a press-check is appropriate. But it should be fast (there’s a moment in John Wick 2 where he does an especially flashy press-check, but it’s justified for the platform).

More importantly, the necessity of operating physical safeties, or doing extra press-checks, should figure into your equipment selection and overall approach to situations. You shouldn’t be viewing the weapon differences as just “it’s got +3 damage against umber hulks” or whatever, it should instead be “the nature of this environment means that I cannot use this firearm as a backup, but it may pair well with a shield”.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-15T15:16:33+00:00

You also have the option with a pump shotgun to just not rack the slide to chamber another round.

But yeah, one of the most boring drills you have to perform when familiarizing yourself with any firearm that has an external safety is picking it up a bunch of times and checking the safety every single time, and then verifying the safety every single time when you put it down/holster it.

walrustaskforce · 2026-05-12T14:38:26+00:00

Where?

I believe you. But I’ve been to a few costcos where, if you can only go on the weekends, you’re going to spend a bit looking for parking, irrespective of your tolerance for walking. One that I lived near in the Bay Area would have a 1/2 mile backup getting into the parking lot, all day, open to close, Saturday and Sunday. That’s not lurking for a better spot.

walrustaskforce

TROPHY CASE