99.6 million of e digits

I wrote a Rust program to calculate digits of e. Nothing fancy. Single threaded, not optimized, just “–release”.

Here’s the result:

e_computedDownload

Click here to see it in Google Drive

I started using a Password Manager – Bitwarden – , and you should too

I’ve been always very reluctant on password managers. I have some knowledge on security and encryption and the concept, while a good idea, it always sparked some doubts on me. Better the devil you know, than entering unknown risks.

A giant leap to come in PCs by 2024

Yesterday I was watching Gamer Meld on the latest news, and holy cow, I think he doesn’t realize exactly what all this together means:

In the last days I’ve been thinking to get a proper graphics card; I have a 3080 loaned from a friend for the last months and I might need to return it soon. So I need to get something that I like sooner or later. Sadly, prices aren’t dropping as much as I would have liked, they’re still quite above MSRP.

I want an AMD graphics card for Linux, something between the 6700XT and the 6800XT. Which one? Both are good for the price given the current situation.

But that video is making me think the decision twice. Usually we should aim for the expensive side of parts when the market isn’t moving much; for example if not a lot of gains are expected in the next years. When the situation is the reverse and a lot of things are expected to change, it’s better to hold or buy cheap if possible.

I started streaming on Twitch and the computer I built might not be enough

A bit of a meta-post about what I’m doing lately; I think it has been a long time since I wrote about myself.

A review on first cup of Rust blog post

Recently I’m trying to see what we can do to make Rust appear less difficult to beginners. It’s not that hard, just that it takes a bit of time to learn.

In this entry I would like to have a look to “My first cup of Rust” by Nicolas Fränkel. He recently started learning Rust and it’s kindly sharing his experience so far. I would recommend reading it along this one.

A small shift on this blog! Advocating for a simpler Rust

Lately I’ve been writing about Rust because I like it a lot and I think it deserves more attention. But since the last post things are going to change gears a bit. I shared the last post on Reddit and it got shared by This Week In Rust too. This has caused an spike on traffic that’s hard to believe, getting a week’s worth of visits in 12 hours.

I’m getting more visibility than I never would have thought of. And comments both in the blog and Reddit that are positive, correcting me (because, heh, I’m not perfect!) and very constructive. I feel that my overall view (so far) is not rejected by the Rust community and it’s possible that my opinions here can have some effect (even if minor) on Rust itself in the future.

Therefore I believe it’s worth trying to advocate for a simpler Rust for beginners. Now it’s not (only) for the visits, it’s about trying to convince other people that Rust can change to be perceived as an easy language. And trying to show other people that Rust, currently, it’s not that hard either.

Rust – What made it “click” for me (Ownership & memory internals)

This is aimed for people who are coming to Rust from garbage collected languages, such as Python or JavaScript and have trouble with the compiler throwing errors without reason. This guide assumes you already know some Rust.

For those like me that worked with non-GC languages (C, C++) the borrow checker still feels hard to understand at first, but the learning curve is quite less and the documentation and design makes quite a lot of sense.

So I want to add some basic context for those that never managed manually requesting and freeing memory such that the underlying design in Rust ownership system makes more sense and clicks. Because this is all it takes, once it clicks, everything seems to fall together. (If you already know C or C++, you’ll already know most of the stuff I’m going to talk about, and probably notice that I’m oversimplifying a lot; but it might be worth the read as it contains how Rust “clicked” for me)

When to think about using Cloud for your service

Three years ago I wrote “The Cloud is overrated!“. Since then I joined Google as an SRE, and I’ve been asking myself if Cloud does make sense for me or not. Even before joining Google, their GCP was my first option to go for Cloud; it’s seems quite good and of the three major providers (along with AWS and Azure) is the cheapest option. And let’s be fair, my main complain on Cloud is price. Vendor lock-in is my second concern and Google again seems to be the fairest of the three. Anyway, this isn’t about which is better but more about if when it’s a good idea.

Proper Cloud deployments are pricey and also require a lot of resources from developers; if it has to be done right, it’s not about deploying a WordPress inside a VPS style service on the cloud.

What if cryptocurrencies were used to perform useful work?

With BitCoin using more than 140TWh per year or 15GW and growing, we must ask ourselves, are they really worth that much? Are they providing any useful work?

15GW is not that much globally speaking, but to put this into perspective a Nuclear Power plant on average produces 1GW, therefore this means that we need 15 nuclear plants to keep mining BitCoins.

OVH lost a datacenter on a fire, what do we learn?

We all do mistakes, but it’s easy to point fingers at others. Twitter and other social media platforms have been full of hate against OVH for the outage and a lot of lack of empathy for the people working on the problem. I’m afraid we will not learn anything, and this will repeat on the future.

https://twitter.com/Sensity_RP/status/1369496048998223873

The problem is not OVH, but us. We think we’re smart because we’re saving pennies, but in the end we fail at calculating risks and costs in such events; we deem these as impossible, because anything with a probability lower than 0.001% is just 0% for the human brain.