thiserror helps a bit with conciseness. But it’s still the most annoying part of writing Rust for me, even more annoying than async closure capture semantics, and one that I happily offload to deepseek whenever I have to write it. I was even thinking of making some insane proc_macro that would traverse a function and extract the list of all ?, deduce the types, and come up with the final error type (maybe with some hints). But this turned out to be too difficult for a weekend project and ain’t nobody wants to pay me to write it.

Type-safe: can’t beat errors as enum values wrapped in Result.

I’m talking more about the anyhow-style here. It’s not very type-safe.

Composable: i don’t think you can beat rust enums in composability.

Well, thiserror-style enums are composable-ish, but they can be too structured for their own good. Sometimes you want only a particular property of an error (e.g. one of the HTTP requests returned 429 or something), and don’t care about the particular branch of the call tree it came from. Rust doesn’t really have the compile-time flexibility to write such a check without a ton of boilerplate that will also break once the call tree changes.

I am well aware, I wrote quite a lot of Rust, including professionally. I’m not necessarily talking about the “clear happy path”, even though that is relatively nice to have (Rust sort-of allows that with the ? sugar and the pseudo-functor and pseudo-monad methods on wrappers); I’m talking more about the fine line between the overly verbose lists of all the errors that a function could produce (thiserror-style) or just a single messy error type that makes error handling difficult (anyhow-style). There surely must be something in between there that is concise, type-safe, and composable, but I haven’t seen it in any language yet.

Sadly there’s still no truly good way to handle errors in rust. TBH I’m not sure if we as an industry have figured out an efficient, foolproof, composable, not overly verbose way to handle errors, so it’s not entirely on Rust.

In the very old times, you’d have to be born rich already to do maths. You then don’t concern yourself with making a living, because your slaves do it for you.

In the old times, you’d live the same as artists: find a rich dude (exceptionally rarely: dudess) to pay your bills, and in exchange name shit you discover/invent after them.

Last few decades you also have a couple new options. You can work (teach) at a university for pennies, and typically have a second job/side hustle so that you can actually survive. And/or you can write books/make a YT channel, and if you’re lucky and get popular enough, that can be your living then, but it’s probably not going to be anything too advanced. And/or, if your area of expertise has some vaguely practical application (e.g. cryptography or statistics), you can actually find a job that pays you to do theoretical research in that area in hopes of finding practical application, but you’d have to be pretty lucky to get that.

Nah, social division of labour is almost as old as civilization itself. It’s not possible to do everything by yourself, if you’re lucky enough not to die of hunger in a few weeks, you’ll die of a preventable disease within a few years.

Capitalist exploitation of it (combined with faux individualism) is the issue.

Translating to this scenario, there would be no issue if we had community kitchens with cheap/free food and well-paid workers. The issue is the capitalists extracting surplus value from a basic necessity, partly by convincing everyone to hate their neighbours and eat alone.

Actually, fuck yeah. My parents also have one of those bad boys:

It’s really nice to bathe in!

Oh, yeah, that makes much more sense actually. Now I kinda want that setup, but I bet it’s expensive.

That’s still confusing to me. My parents had the water heater tank in the bathroom, between the shower/bath and the sink. The kitchen sink had a separate small water heater.

hot water circulation systems should be more common

That just sounds like a waste of energy. Why not have the water heater right next to your shower, so that there’s no wait? It’s how it was set up in my parents home. Really enjoyed that setup, never had to wait for hot water.

It was used to deliver the comic to you in the first place.

The intended use-case is for bit-banging, i.e. sending electricity to places according to certain algorithms. Think about simple automation, like the control chip in your washing machine which executes the selected program by sending enable/disable signals to the water pump, valves, and the motor. Well, the same basic principles could apply to a lot of industrial processes and such, helping us rebuild the civilization.

It would also be really fucking great for helping post-collapse engineers do various calculations. Those chips are really slow by modern standards, but insanely fast compared to an abacus, a slide rule, and a sheet of paper.

BTW there’s also dusk OS, which follows similar principles but is targeted for more advanced hardware, like the abundant x86 and ARM chips. It has a way more user-friendly interface, a basic GUI, filesystem drivers, and IIRC even networking capabilities, all possible to run on a PC from the early 90s. It also has great bootstrapping flow, allowing you to rebuild itself from source, flash itself to other computers, and flash Collapse OS onto microcontrollers.

Basically like a Linux install with all the dev-tools and sources already there, except much simpler, to the point that you probably can figure out how every component of the system works yourself, and fix issues when they happen. This knowledge will also directly translate into writing programs for collapse OS, because they share the programming language and many OS paradigms.

I like how the rememes of this only get more complicated and less stable with time; hopefully this means the collapse is approaching, or else I’m learning forth for nothing!

It’s like a clown. Funny to watch it goof about from afar, but when it comes to you OH FUCK OH SHIT THERE’S A CLOWN STARING AT ME FROM THE WINDOW AND PLOTTING A RIGHT-WING COUP

The file that’s in use may not survive.

Yes, but at least the rest of the filesystem will

I’m not too versed in the intricacies of Windows, but I don’t think that’s the case on Linux at least.

There’s a difference between telling the processes to “fuck off” (by using umount -f) and actually yanking the drive.

umount -f will at least flush the caches to drive, including all filesystem metadata and journaling, while just yanking the drive off will definitely not, and if you’re unlucky you can ruin the FS (especially if it’s not a journaling one). I’ve lost data like that before, been using umount -f ever since.

We actually have two, for both of us to ride on. It’s the main way we get around the city. They cost us ~$80 combined (I’m not in the US tho), plus maybe another $50 in spare parts over the year or so we’ve had them. Also, as a proud 30yo shitbox owner, what’s a monthly car payment?

I’m assuming not many suburbanites have bikes.

Ah yeah, that makes sense. However, if all roads are fully jammed, most people would be able to walk to a grocery store - it’s likely not insanely far away from you (quick search suggests average straight-line distance to a grocery shop in the US is ~4 km = 50 min, which sounds very far away from a non-US perspective but still not completely unreachable), it’s just that usually there’s a highway full of traffic between you and the store.

You are overestimating the danger of a punctured tire. It is easy to notice, usually gives you plenty of time (on the order of minutes) to come to a complete stop before the tire is deflated, and even after the tire is fully deflated it still allows you to stop relatively safely for a short while (until it is cut through completely). It would probably result in a few crashes (because in carbrained places many drivers don’t know how to operate a vehicle at all), but the worst outcome from this is ambulances/firetrucks being stuck in traffic jams.

Scatter random tire spikes on the roads. 10k would probably get you quite a few