(explaining the joke for those unaware: The Battletech setting is a “nuked ourselves from interstellar space travel back to the stone age” type scenario. An interesting component of the setting is Comstar, the AT&T-like telecommunications monopoly mutated into a religious order which 1. as basically the only extant vestige of the old Star League are convinced they will someday return enlightenment to humanity, with increasing fanaticism, 2. carry telegram-like messages at telegram-like speeds throughout known space, 3. Operate as the de facto international bank and issuer of currency (the C-bill) because milliseconds of transmitter time is the only stable monetary base, and 4. the shifty fucks will sabotage any attempt to climb out of the dark age that isn’t under their control.)

Well we see what actually scares them.

women wear a pair of panties but only one bra.

just keep cross grain situations in mind.

The peace of Blake be with you.

solid Major League reference.

I think it is more accurate to say latex is a natural plant gum.

Which Candy Kong though? The one from DKC, the one from DK64, or the one from the animated series above?

That was my first throught, followed very closely by “WHY was that even in that movie?”

Someday you’ll try that over SSH once.

Once.

I have no idea why it is the way it is.

I wonder what went through the mind of that hamster as it sat there for 3 days with its face stuck to the wall. Like that would FUCK UP a human. We made a whole damn movie about the guy who got his hand trapped under a rock that one time.

Same thing that was always going to happen to it: It’s not gonna fly. It’s been canceled or clean sheet restarted at least once by every administration since inception, and frankly that rope has been pretty thoroughly pissed up.

The sound bite I heard was “the unsafe keyword makes memory bugs greppable.”

I don’t think the shape of a bar of soap is copyrightable.

If it is a functional design, like about a decade ago I saw an ad for a system of soap where, as the bar wears down, you snap it into a new bar that has a recess in the top so you never have a small sliver of soap. That could be granted a utility patent that would expire in 20 years.

For an aesthetic or branding design, it’s possible you could take out a utility patent.

My parents used Dove soap when I was a kid; the shape was like an inch and a half thick pringle. This shape doesn’t pack efficiently; they could nest vertically but they were usually packed in rectangular cardboard boxes with a lot of space in them. Dial soap, I’ve noticed, tries to do something similar by making a roughly rectangular bar with semi-circular hollows, one running along the bar and one across. Other than making it tend to do thin in the middle and break in half this doesn’t achieve much.

I suppose I could wear my prosthetic. They actually gave me two, one is kind of mouthguard style and the other is basically a denture, and I much prefer the former.

Dovetails go brrr

Twelve men on the moon. We did it six times, out of seven attempts.

Actual answer:

Rust is a relatively new programming language. Similar to C or C++ it compiles directly into executable binary code so it can be used for bare metal or low level operating system programming. It is thus relevant to Linux kernel development as things like drivers can and are being developed in Rust.

Compare this to the likes of Java or C# which get compiled to bytecode or a kind of pseudo machine code that gets run in a virtual machine, which has advantages for application development, or something like Python which is interpreted (or just-in-time compiled) at run-time, useful as an end user scripting language.

Rust is designed from the ground up to tackle some modern problems, a key one being memory safety. It’s a lot more paranoid about memory allocation and access and it’s structured around this. Older languages like C allow the programmer a lot more absolute control over the hardware, which effectively means the C programmer has a lot more footguns in his toolbox. Theoretically, Rust offers fewer opportunities for the developer to shoot himself in the foot.

Rust also comes with some really cool tooling. Compiler errors usually point straight at the problem and say something like “Shouldn’t there be a colon here?” The build system, called Cargo, is really slick in a lot of ways, handling linking, compiling, even library package management in a very automatic fashion. It’s real slick to work with.

As with anything, fans of the language can be a bit much; they stereotypically suggest rewriting everything under the sun in Rust whether it makes sense or not, and this includes the Linux kernel, which has caused some friction in the community; Linux contributors are often very accustomed to C and some don’t want to deal with anything else.

“just stick a pot on the board bro, it’ll stay at 1.49284762340598 ohms for 9 or 10 nanoseconds after leaving the factory.”

That’s the way my dental surgeon used to do it, for me there’s a cap that stands proud of the gums that will be removed and the crown put in its place, that way there’s no “opening” of my gums, they just take the cap out, bolt the tooth on and fill in over it.