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I hopped jobs to go from using Go to Rust, I was sad and bored, now I'm happy and energized. Always going to be things you dislike for sure, but life's to short to be using a language that's making you miserable.


Which is true, assuming the job market is great on the area, which even on IT isn't the case.

Thankfully I seldom have to deal with Go anyway.


Do you know anywhere to find good decoders in pure Rust for common codecs like H.264 and H.265? Great tutorial by the way learnt a lot


I haven’t seen any implementations yet, and given their patent licensing situation, they’re probably not first in line for a rewrite in Rust.

There’s rav1e for AV1 encoding.


Decoders also have the difficulty that you need to support most of the format’s features before they can support content found in the wild. Also you often need to add hacks to support encoders which technically violate the specification but are commonly used.

In contrast, you can build a very simple encoder using very few of the format features and still have it be usable/useful (albeit with poor quality/compression ratio).


Not exactly what you are asking for, but jcodec is a pretty readable codebase written in Java. (The readability part is often, ahh, lacking in the source for codecs, in my experience.) It might be a good candidate for rewriting in Rust. https://github.com/jcodec/jcodec


Are there many codecs of any sort with Rust implementations? The majority of Rust stuff I see linked are thin wrappers around existing C or C++ libraries.


Not many.

Weirdly, chatgpt can be remarkably good at translating code between programming languages.

I suspect within a year or two it'll be pretty easy to translate a lot of C libraries to native rust code (or whatever) using modern AIs.


I worked for the three largest mining companies in the world, and a much smaller miner before that. The small company had 1 geologist, 1 mining engineer, 1 general manager and an office admin person. The next place I went to was a similar sized mine with about 200 people in the office, and many more support people in the city. The resource was 1:1 coal to dirt and much higher quality, compared to the previous place which was 1:13 coal to dirt and way harder to mine. The large miners have the best resources in the world so they can afford to over-hire, those people don't actually do anything but make things worse doing "improvement projects", and then use bullshit charts to show why it's better. We had a huge downturn in mining about 15 years ago and they fired about 15,000 people across Australia, and overall production improved! I only work for startups now where I can be a core engineer, I had a role before where I knew I wasn't doing anything valuable and it's soul crushing, I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.


> I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers...

Imagine that you're paid 2-3x, the work is confined to 9-5, gourmet meals on the 2x days you're not wfh, generous vacation policy, world-class benefits, and ample time to pursue side hobbies or family.

I know so many exceptional engineers that went this route... after they got over the perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and wild ambitions to just accept the status quo. Now, their lives are comparably stress-free compared to their startup brethren, and many of them live vicariously through angel investments using the delta in comp.


> the work is confined to 9-5

tell me you haven't worked in FAANG without telling me you haven't worked in FAANG


I used to work at a FAANG and worked from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with no work weekends. Occasionally there was a longer work day, but also a shorter day. I think that was a fairly common day for many of my technical colleagues, whereas non-technical people tended to work longer.

Now I work for a legacy tech company and my workday is definitely shorter and less stressful, with European-style PTO, semi-interesting work and glacial speed of execution. My life has improved, visibly. I earn 75%-80% in CT of what a FAANG employee in an equivalent position would earn, career advancement is unlikely, but I find it exciting to have the means to live the life I want and pursue the interests I dream about at night, which are mostly non-work and non-tech related, without the time constraints and stress of a low-impact FAANG corporate position.

In the end, when I worked at a FAANG, I felt intensely the pressure of the job, the responsibilities -- mostly made-up -- and the ultimate insignificance of my work, not in the grand scheme of things, but in the context of the company. However, the money and the prospect of earning more were exciting.


Ironically, I did work at FAANG. I was a delusional youngster who was a perfectionist & workaholic like many of my peers.

The people I'm referencing who stuck around: they're now in their late-30s and early-40s. They eventually shunned ladder climbing and realized that their L6 positions could ultimately be sustained with much less grind while steadily maintaining "meets expectations" on perf.


Depends on the team. It can be.


Totally. My team often had people working past 8pm. But you could take a walk around the office at 6pm and find whole open floor plan areas that were completely empty. And you’d hear rumors that some other teams were expected to work 70 hour weeks. It just depended on your part of the company.


> I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.

Maybe they just don't want to?

Anyway. Don't be sorry. They get lots of money for almost nothing (in an engineering sense). And they have free time, so some of them they can do something valuable (incognito, of course. Otherwise faang lawyers come).

It's the big enterprise management who creates all these broken incentives leading to increase in politics instead of engineering.


> I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.

I bet there is a lot of jobs where you don't feel (and probably don't do) anything valuable with your time, but that is not necessarily tied to large organizations. There are a lot of engineers who make computers, cars, civil infrastructure components, smartphones, computers, game consoles, test equipment, appliances, power plants, industrial processes... at large organizations that feel that they are doing something valuable, and something that they could not do in this manner at a smaller company.


Sure they can. They choose not to do so.


Ultimately, yes - nobody should feel bad for FAANG employees or anybody else who has chosen the golden handcuffs of the "cushy IT salary life." It was a choice and we are all responsible for our own choices... and in a world where people are starving, we shouldn't feel bad for somebody making a cushy living.

But it gets complicated.

A typical scenario is somebody choosing that life and after X years realizing it's not for them. But by then it's too late. You've got a partner, mortgage, pets, kids, whatever. And even if you haven't chosen any of that baggage, maybe you have a few hundred grand in student debt.

Yes, these were all choices. But it's awfully tough to know how you'll feel X years later when you are making those choices and by then there's no escape.

(FWIW, I have not worked at a FAANG. Just your average HN engineer type in a less glamorous part of the country.)


I'm also interested in this, the segmentation faults Primeagen found in Bun were concerning: https://youtu.be/qAYFepR4GcE?t=370 might have been fixed by now though.

I was seriously looking at Zig, but I'm always getting faster in Rust and it feels like the downsides of extra complexity is well worth the upsides for larger projects.


What they did with Dota 2 was really surprising, the AI did a technique where if it was ahead it would go behind the enemy tower to get 100% of the gold while the enemy would struggle with last hits under the tower and take creep damage. I'd never seen anyone do this before and pro's started copying this after. The way I remember them explaining it was that the AI has something it's trying to maximize for, and it plays millions of games trying slightly different variations which can lead this kind of creativity, pretty wild.


I've made contributions to Rust repos and it was a great experience, they helped me along and were very quick with responses. I never even considered it for Go because the community shot down every idea I had.


I'm a maintainer of some smaller open source projects -- you have to consider it from the project owner's point of view. To say they "shoot down ideas" is a negative way of saying it, but from their point of view they're carefully selecting and designing features and code that fit the design philosophy of the language. If the Go developers included every idea that users submitted (and there are many! -- I read the mailing lists), the language and standard libraries would be a sprawling and incoherent pile.


Immutability, most things are expressions, no nulls. I think this is what they mean, it's a good experience if you want to go purely functional, they took influences from everything though.


Sick release notes cheers Kristoff and team


Yeah works great, Tensorflow works great as well, but if using pip need to install tensorflow-metal and tensorflow-macos. Plus I always need to downgrade protobuf to 3.20. And couldn't get the C bindings for Tensorflow to work through metal, only through CPU.

Pretty good machine learning experience on M1.


Isn't he going to be bringing back people who were banned off the platform, that's more democratic. US has a bunch of problems but the one thing you used to get right is freedom of speech before big tech had so much influence, I thought the major purpose of Elon wanting to buy twitter was to uphold freedom of speech as it is written in the constitution, given it's something of a town square now.


> one thing you used to get right is freedom of speech before big tech had so much influence

Before big tech, there were no global platforms where anyone could just speak to millions/billions of people for free (as in money).

You weren't "censored" by big tech because there was nothing much to censor. In the past, if you wanted to reach a massive audience, you had to go through the traditional news media, big book publishers, major TV stations, or the like, and they were definitely selective about who was allowed to speak.

Also, the so-called "town square" where strangers gather to discuss politics in public is largely or entirely a myth. There are of course public spaces, but what happens on Twitter is not what happens in real physical town squares. And of course there are city council and other government meetings, but they are strictly controlled by government officials, not a free-for-all free speech zone.


Indeed, the fringers scraped together enough cash to mimeograph a few dozen leaflets and tucked them under cars windshield wipers; but that didn't get them far. They might be able to take out a cheap ad in a rag magazine advertising a self-published book, but that's about it. There weren't boards to put up posters, and putting a poster on a telephone pole (etc) was a crime (recent court cases have changed that without a change in the law, where I am.)


I think it's somewhat more complicated than that.

Traditionally there was more friction to speech. I don't even mean just that the average person doesn't have access to a national platform like CNN. Even something like mailing out fliers had non-trivial costs. It's the same reason why junk mail is generally less of an issue than email spam.

In a traditional town square, people are not anonymous and the "square" was local enough for there to be social consequences to actions. On Twitter, many of the posters are anonymous and even those who aren't often live on the other side of the country.


There are different views on what freedom means.

In my experience, and I used to run a "freedom of speech" channel back in IRC many years ago where I allowed anything as long as it wasn't illegal. These sort of measures end up restricting freedom of speech much more than enabling it. The reason is very simple, if people are allowed to say anything; then harassment becomes the norm and because a lot of the targets of these harassment are more sensitive then they end up leaving. You might think this is okay, but I tend to disagree, as I believe when people harass others out of a platform that it constitutes a form of violence.

Of course, I think this is actually a very complicated subject. And that's precisely my point on why I believe we need to have better conversations on what do we actually want. But as things stand now, this conversation is always reduced to what Elon Musk now thinks should happen. To me, this form of monarchic governance is sub-par to what is required for a platform as big as twitter.


Twitter is fundamentally different form and IRC channel. In an IRC channel, everyone sees every message, that's why moderation is necessary. On twitter, people themselves choose who to follow and block, they themselves moderate their own experience.


You could ignore people on IRC too, choose whether or not to join a particular channel or not, and choose which people to message in private.

The problems I've run in to on it is that that some channels on IRC were run by powertripping assholes, and you'd get banned for disagreeing with them or having different opinions.... even if you were perfectly polite, didn't threaten or harass anyone, etc.

Of course, you could just go somewhere else... on to another channel, another network, or off IRC entirely... the internet's a big place.

Still, the fact that some popular channels were dominated by assholes and there weren't viable alternatives to them sometimes is a problem for people wanting to participate in a large public space.


The problem I had is that the space I created in the beginning was quite nice, and we had lots of nice people in it. But as word spread that people wouldn't get banned we started getting a lot of "undesirable" people, people that had been banned from every other place (and for good reason). In the end, it drove everyone else away and the channel died because once everyone was gone there was no reason for these undesirable people to stick either.

In many ways, these people don't really care about having a space to say things and instead they want a space to be able to say it to people who don't want to hear it. It is why they don't actually use the spaces they've created for themselves like parlor or truth social. They want to tell trans people that they are not valid, they want to tell women to stop having abortions, they want to tell black people that they're criminals, etc. They need an audience. And if you allow them to have it, what ends up happening is that these people being insulted and belittled will leave.


That happened to me on a Discord server I was a mod of. Too much fighting and genuine hatred led us to just shut the place down. While it was small it was fine, but after it grew it began being intolerable and all of us mods decided to just shelve it. Nobody can post, but now its just a place to store Discord emojis and stickers


Yeah, I think that's a big reason we've moved on from chatrooms to networks like twitter, where everyone creates their own moderated space.


"Yeah, I think that's a big reason we've moved on from chatrooms to networks like twitter, where everyone creates their own moderated space"

You can do exactly the same thing on IRC... and IRC had that a long time before Twitter even existed.


Not quite the same thing. Yes everyone can create their own IRC channel. But in practice ... On twitter everyone tweets and blocks people.


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At this point people like you are just being pedantic. Uses of First Amendment and Free Speech are clearly referring to having a large window of acceptable speech. If people want to include porn, gore, harassment and spam in their colloquial definition of free speech, it is exceptional enough that should point it out up front.


“Free Speech” != “1st Amendment”. The later is a US constitutional amendment which aims to protect the former, but other US laws also protect free speech (state constitutional provisions, statute law)-the Bill of Rights is legally just a minimum, so other laws are allowed to go even further. Non-legal factors (culture/etc) also have a role to play in protecting free speech. And of course, other countries have free speech as well (to varying degrees), but the US constitution has nothing to do with that.


[flagged]


His absolutism doesn't extend to bots. His absolutism probably doesn't extend to having no real recommendation algorithm, and just random views for everyone. If he throws in a PageRank-like algorithm a la the central Google algorithm; or even just the choice of that, you might get the equivalent of some pretty solid moderation. Google definitely has holes and problems, but it can't be considered absolutist re free speech.


Can you give some examples of silencing his dissenters? Or where he has undermined democracy to make money?

I'm genuinely curious if I've missed these, as I'm not familiar with any by my own recollection.


You mean other than the time where he harassed someone, called them a pedophile and hired a detective to investigate and try to dig up dirt on them because they got under his skin? That guy, who now has everything anyone has ever said in private messages on Twitter?


So that isn't an example of silencing dissenters, or of undermining democracy. I agree it's some pretty ugly character on show. But that wasn't what I was asking.


Who was that?


Wasn’t it that diver who saved all those children in Thailand or… whereever?


Yes.


Impressive deployment of buzz words.


People will leave pretty quickly if there is no moderation. People don't want to be in such places. Just check the missing popularity of Parler.


Network effects are a perfectly sufficient explanation for why people don't use parler. Can you name one example where people switched from a bigger to a smaller network, because the bigger one allowed too much freedom of speech?


Why don't "free speech" networks ever grow to be the bigger one in the first place?


Twitter and facebook did grow big when they were free speech networks.


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