Hello!

Not too long ago, a friend of mine told me about Paged Out!, a “free experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine”. (Yes, that means that you can read them online right now. In fact, you might even want to consider contributing).

I thought “Huh, that’s cool.” and then neglected to follow up on it in any meaningful capacity whatsoever, since it’s notoriously hard to remember to sit down and look at a random tab in your browser, especially if it is slowly being buried beneath other tabs.

About halfway through August I suddenly received an e-mail by someone named Aga, asking me if I’m interested in contributing a one-page article to this funny magazine thing they are running.

I was like “Huh, that’s cool… Wait, I’ve heard of this. Screw it, why not.” and hammered out an article over two evenings, combining my knowledge of random Rust trivia with the full power of the modern tech infrastructure stack (which is to say, Google Slides^{) to create a funny little one pager:}

A few notes:

• If you see any errors, reach out! Preferably before the next issue is published.
• If you want to contribute to Paged Out!, you can! Just check out their website. If whatever this page here is inspires you enough to hand something in, let me know.
• One page is not a lot of space to work with. It certainly helped me keep the scope small, though.
• On the note of empty space, the space at the bottom exists to leave enough space for the Paged Out!-footer.
• I can’t say I like that syntax highlighting color scheme, but it’s the best I could get (using an extension) without manually coloring every token.
• This is a slightly-updated version of the article. When writing the first draft I wasn’t sure why Result<bool, bool> takes up more than one byte. Someone on Reddit let me know why. In hindsight this one feels obvious, but (in the spirit of the challenge) I didn’t want to get sucked into research over what I assumed to be an optimization detail. It turns out it isn’t: It’s just that (duh) the value in the result has to have a valid memory representation, so we can’t use the remaining bits to optimize.
• If you’re not much of a Rust user, you might be horrified by the size_of::<type>() syntax. This looks weird at first, but makes perfect sense. The ’turbofish’ syntax (::<T>) allows us to specify the type passed to a generic function without needing to pass a value. It’s just a function (albeit one backed by a compiler built-in). In C/C++ sizeof requires a special keyword.
• Embedding this PDF wasn’t cheap (in terms of Javascript dependencies), and it unfortunately broke the page size counter at the bottom. Oh well, I’ll try to fix it soon.

If you don’t care about what’s going on in my life, you can leave now! This is just a few notes about what I have been up to.

tl;dr: It looks like I’ll be moving from Central Europe (working on AI) to the Seattle area (working on AI, very funny, I know).

This is objectively one of the funnier times to do that. So far I’ve not regretted decisions like this, and I hope that that pattern continues. (2+ years ago I moved from Germany to Warsaw. Warsaw is nice. The local language barrier is a drawback, though.)

As for Seattle, I am looking forward to it. I know people there. I visted a few months ago. I liked the local scene. I liked the random encounters you’ll get around Cal Anderson. I liked the $1.50 Costco hotdog. I liked the drinks served at the local furry-owned cider company. I liked the events, whether it’s local fighting game tournaments, literal Labubu raves, or random people meeting in the middle of the park to ’eat pudding with forks'.

I’ll find out. It helps that I know a surprising amount of people in the area.

As far as writing goes, I have a whole bunch of half-finished drafts that I’ll surely get around to one of these days.

There’s a lot of random things on my mind: Hot takes about memory safety, thoughts on software licensing, AI, and social contracts, thoughts on GAP, random takes on obscure video games I enjoyed, LLVM, whatever Uiua is.

Maybe I’ll finish some of those and put them here.

I don’t want to stress out too much over it, honestly. A blog is something you do for yourself, stressing out too much over it is a bad idea. I have a backlog, and that’s fine. That’s a list of potential fun projects I can pick up and work on whenever I feel like it.

Besides, If I can’t figure out how to put something into words, that’s generally a good sign that I need to take a step back and let it rest for a while (or that I need to spent some time on more in-depth research).

Anyway, have a good one!