MP

Selected Reads (2020-09-07)

This is a selection of articles, videos libraries, tweets, and sundry that I've found interesting over the last week or so.

Rust Commandline Library

This library provides a rust macro that allows you to type in shell scripts exactly as you would on the commandline, up to and including piping and $ interpolation of variables and have them run via the usual Rust subprocess machinery. I'm not sure whether or not I will often reach for this, given that I don't do a great deal of shelling out from Rust, and where I need more than a few lines I feel like I'd generally write a shell script to call from Rust, rather than bothering with installing a third-party dependency. However, it's a very cool example of the power of Rust macros!

Facebook is Quietly Pressuring its Independent Fact-Checkers to Change their Rulings

An article detailing some of the cases where what seems like executive pressure within Facebook has exerted influence over the determinations of various fact-checking teams. I think the article made a clear case why the reliance on Facebook's self-policing its own platform's role in spreading misinformation can't work: the minute that doing the right thing is misaligned with the bottom line, the right thing is overruled.

As Above, so Below: Bare Metal Rust Generics

A great two-parter taking a deep dive into writing generic functions in Rust, presented in a "bare-metal" context of writing a storage driver. It does a good job of presenting the material in a way that requires very minimal preexisting knowledge of either Rust or SSD drivers, while giving the reader an excellent opportunity to learn about both.

The Corner That State Universities Have Backed Themselves Into

One Year of NuShell

This look back at one year since NuShell's official release was a really interesting read. I haven't used NuShell, but it's great to see that people are experimenting with ways to improve the shell experience, which has largely remained unchanged over the past however many years. I have been meaning to give NuShell a shot since I first saw their public release, and it seems like this is as a good a time as any.

I Don't Like Notebooks

A coworker linked me to this video as a result of a conversation we were having about Jupyter notebooks. This is a great talk, and a brave one to give at Jupyter Con! I find myself largely in the same boat as the author, although I've never been able to articulate it quite so well. Essentially, I've always really wanted to get into and like notebooks, but the experience of writing code in a proper editor has always felt so much better that I've never really been able to find any use for them. This talk helped encapsulated a lot of the things that feel like they're lacking.

Rust 1.46.0

There were a few of exciting things about this version of Rust, but by far the biggest improvement is the expansion of what's allowed in const fn functions. const functions allow you to define parameterized code that can be run at compile time or at runtime, and this update significantly expands what's allowed within a const fn. I'm currently working on a chess engine as a learning project, and I've already been able to use these improvements to help me easily generate constant bitboards representing a variety of positions at compile-time, which can then be used at runtime to evaluate moves.

Pure and Applied Chess

This is a broad, discursive, indulgent essay exploring thoughts about the game of chess its relationship with philosophy. Pulling in references from Wittgenstein, Daniel Dennett, and others, this is exactly the sort of philosophical wankery I most dearly love.

The door problem

I really enjoyed this brief exploration of the exploding complexity of even the simplest detail in a complex system. The author considers the seemingly trivial example of "let's add doors to our game," and follows up an amazing array of complications and decisions that arise. The "door problem" is also used to illustrate the role of different people involved in the production of games.

Can Greek Tragedy Get Us through the Pandemic?

One of the best things I read all week (and summarily shit on by HackerNews commenters, with the all of their characteristic performative intellectualism), this article begins with a focus on a theater group call Theater of War Productions, which began some time ago to use the medium of Greek tragedy to drive catharsis and discussion of taboo subjects among veterans and other groups that have experienced signifcant past trauma. The group has now adapted the tragedy of Oedipus to address the COVID pandemic and our associated collective trauma, performing the play over Zoom to a "crowd" of about fifteen thousand. The article covers an impressive breadth of content, ranging from the history of theater in ancient Greece to the development of the idea of catharsis in Freudian psychoanalysis as a means of processing repressed trauma to the personal history of the founder of Theater of War, whose father was a psychologist and who studied classics at University. Despite the broad range of topics, the author deftly ties them all up into a neatly reported thesis that perhaps the role of classical tragedy and other such serious theater may have always been somewhat more pragmatic than is usually realized, and that it can continue to have the psychologically healing effect for which it was originally intended on modern audiences who have dealt with their own traumas.

Created: 2020-09-07

Tags: academics, chess, classics, facebook, jupyter, philosophy, psychology, rust, software, theater