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Why? Well: The IndexedDB API is callback-based. With JavaScript being single-threaded, a blocking API would mean fully blocking the page, render and basic user interaction included, while the request is being processed. Although this is apparently good-enough for JSON.parse(), the W3C decided to make the IndexedDB API non-blocking. The first drafts for IndexedDB are from … Continue reading IndexedDB is Weird → The post IndexedDB is Weird appeared first on Quentin Santos.
tl;dr: don’t call last() on a DoubleEndedIterator How do you efficiently get the last part of a space-separated string in Rust? It will be obvious to some, but the obvious answer of s.split(' ').last() is wrong. The mistake is easy to make; I encountered it in a recent MR I reviewed, and I realized I … Continue reading Rust Gotcha: last() on DoubleEndedIterator → The post Rust Gotcha: last() on DoubleEndedIterator appeared first on Quentin Santos.
This article will quickly explain the Rust types [T; N], &[T; N], &[T], Vec<T>, &Vec<T> with C code, and what the str, &str, String, OsString and CString add. Arrays and Slices Rust C [T; N] (array)Example: [i32; 100]Allocated on the stack T[N]Example: int[100]Allocated on the stack &[T; N] (array reference)Example: &[i32; 100]N is tracked at … Continue reading Rust Strings for C Programmers → The post Rust Strings for C Programmers appeared first on Quentin Santos.
This article will be pretty short. When I built my new desktop computer, I considered ECC memory. So, I looked around for DDR5 ECC memory. Surprisingly, DDR5 memory sticks that mentioned ECC was not significantly more expensive than other DDR5 memory sticks. Sometimes, they were even cheaper! At some point, I read that all DDR5 … Continue reading On-Die ECC → The post On-Die ECC appeared first on Quentin Santos.
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My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club
Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server
The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]
Picasso got it right: Great artists steal. Even if he didn’t actually say it, and we all just repeat the quote because Steve Jobs used it. Because it strikes at the heart of creativity: None of it happens in a vacuum. Everything is inspired by something. The best ideas, angles, techniques, and tones are stolen to build everything that comes after the original. Furthermore, the way to learn originality is to set it aside while you learn to perfect a copy. You learn to draw by imitating the masters. I learned photography by attempting to recreate great compositions. I learned to program by aping the Ruby standard library. Stealing good ideas isn’t a detour on the way to becoming a master — it’s the straight route. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. This, by the way, doesn’t just apply to art but to the economy as well. Japan became an economic superpower in the 80s by first poorly copying Western electronics in the decades prior. China is now following exactly the same playbook to even greater effect. You start with a cheap copy, then you learn how to make a good copy, and then you don’t need to copy at all. AI has sped through the phase of cheap copies. It’s now firmly established in the realm of good copies. You’re a fool if you don’t believe originality is a likely next step. In all likelihood, it’s a matter of when, not if. (And we already have plenty of early indications that it’s actually already here, on the edges.) Now, whether that’s good is a different question. Whether we want AI to become truly creative is a fair question — albeit a theoretical or, at best, moral one. Because it’s going to happen if it can happen, and it almost certainly can (or even has). Ironically, I think the peanut gallery disparaging recent advances — like the Ghibli fever — over minor details in the copying effort will only accelerate the quest toward true creativity. AI builders, like the Japanese and Chinese economies before them, eager to demonstrate an ability to exceed. All that is to say that AI is in the "Good Copy" phase of its creative evolution. Expect "The Great Artist" to emerge at any moment.
