raphlinus

I love this question. Basically all scripts have things that make them challenging to render, sometimes little things, sometimes bigger ones. Cyrillic for Russian is reasonably straightforward, but it…

Yeah, probably should have made a more substantive comment. I'm mostly thinking of the trio of Skrifa, Harfrust, and Parley, but there is other open source Rust work that qualifies as well. There…

The more interesting question is why we're not GUI yet. I have Thoughts on this, which I'll try to briefly summarize here. * It's a genuinely hard problem The state of GUI on Windows is…

Welcome to the club of doing high performance text in a memory safe language!

Similar, in that it encodes length in the first byte. The differences are: * It does not require canonicality, it allows multiple encodings of the same value. To make things even more fun, the QUIC sp…

I'm not assuming anything about bit representations. In this case, the spec language is quite clear and unambiguous. 6.3.2.3 paragraph 7: A pointer to an object type may be converted to a pointer…

The issue is not type punning (itself a very common source of UB), but the fact that the `bytes` pointer might not be int-aligned. The spec is clear that the creation (not just the dereferencing) of a…

People interested in alternatives to Lean should also look at Metamath. It has nowhere near the adoption that Lean is getting, but is holding its own in [100] theorems results. It has some advantages …

A different approach, refining the square root based sigmoid with a polynomial, is in my blog post "a few of my favorite sigmoids" [1]. I'm not sure which is faster without benchmarking…

You can add to this the Apple terminology, which is simdgroup. This reinforces your point – vendors have a tendency to invent their own terminology rather than use something standard.

Indeed. I try not to use the word "native" these days as it has such ambiguous meaning. I also have thought for a while that Windows no longer has native UI, only legacy (Win32) and a rota…

I found this article about as compelling as all the other attempts at identifying him. Half of the cypherpunks (I was pretty active) had the same set of interests in public key cryptography, libertari…

This is a perfectly reasonable question, and I think there are two aspects to it. First, one of the research questions tested by Xilem is whether it is practical to write UI in Rust. It's plausi…

There is an Svg widget. It only supports static images, not animations, though this is certainly something I'm interested in. It does support the modern 2D imaging model. It is in transition from…

My understanding, which is to be taken with a grain of salt, is that there's an additional constraint, not stated in the Scientific American article, that the plane curve be irreducible. The ex…

Yes, I can see BIO being really good at USB host. With 4k of SRAM I can see it doing a lot more of the protocol than just NRZI; easily CRC and the 1kHz SOF heartbeat, and I wouldn't be surprised …

Thanks btw for saying clearly that BIO is not suitable for DVI output. I was curious about this and was planning to ask on social media. I've done some fun stuff in PIO, in particular the NRZI bi…

Very informative, thanks for the link! ATC audio is https://archive.liveatc.net/klga/KLGA-Twr-Mar-23-2026-0330Z.... The clearance for AC8646 to land on runway 4 is given in a seq…

Funny enough, the author of this blog post wrote another one on exactly that topic, entitled "What do executives do, anyway?"[1]. If you read it, you'll find it's written from quit…

Unfortunately, your complex script shaping for Arabic and Devanagari is wrong. The Arabic is missing the joining (all forms are isolated), and the Devanagari doesn't have the vowels combining (so…

I worked with him at Ghostscript, then we occasionally crossed paths in Rust. He was indeed very kind. Peace.

I don't agree that the clothoid is a math nightmare. One of the central problems you have to solve for roads is the offset curve. And a clothoid is extremely unusual in that its offset curve has …

Not true at all. I interacted with Meena[1] while I was there, and the publication was almost three years before the release of ChatGPT. It was an unsettling experience, felt very science fiction. […

On the official Kuycon site, it says "Since 2023, Kuycon has partnered exclusively with ClickClack.io to bring its innovative line of monitors to customers outside of China[...]". I'm s…

I had one of these as a kid, actually on loan from another microcomputer enthusiast. My dad and I had soldered an SDK-85 kit (which I have) and we swapped that for the KIM-1 with another microcomputer…

My reading is that there aren't really a lot of addressing modes on 286, as there are on 68000 and friends, rather every address is generated by summing an optional immediate 8 or 16 bit value an…

Memory safety in particular, actually UB in general (got to watch out for integer overflows, among other things). But one could prove arbitrary properties, including lack of panics (would have been he…

There's a straightforward answer to the "why not" question: because it will result in codebases with the same kind of memory unsafety and vulnerability as existing C code. If an LLM is …

That's because the 1 instruction variant may read past the end of an array. Let's say s is a single null byte at 0x2000fff, for example (and that memory is only mapped through 0x2001000); th…