I normally don’t post work stuff here cause I don’t want to have my identity depend that much on my day job, but the PQXDH project was pretty cool. My name even shows up in the blog post, mostly for minor editorial comments and a few early suggestions. But I give a lot of credit to my coworkers for the extremely smooth rollout; if you’re running Signal and you talked to anyone new recently, you’re using their PQXDH implementation. It’s cool stuff! https://mastodon.world/@signalapp/111092685323940010

This article about cargo-semver-checks found that after “maintainer literally deleted a public method”, the two most common semver breaks were (a) adding cases to an implicitly-exhaustive enum, and (b) adding fields to an exhaustively-matchable struct. This certainly makes me feel better about Swift’s choices to make enums and structs non-exhaustive by default in library evolution mode! But enums are still considered exhaustive in the default mode, with no option to change that, and package authors have asked for a while for a way around this. Maybe something for Swift 6?

Ohhhh, [big reveal near the end of Steven Universe] is why Pearl doesn’t particularly like shapeshifting.

These are brilliant and also they’re reminding me how much I hate the Big Sur roundrect. https://mastodon.social/@tuomas_h/110991907299917923

I am also a fanfiction author. It’s still got a stigma as indulgent, puerile, and low-quality, to which I say (1) like anything else, there’s good and bad fanfiction; it’s just easier to find bad fanfiction cause it’s indexed by fandom. Bad original works don’t end up getting read much at all. But also (2) it’s okay to do things that are indulgent, and it’s okay to make things that are low-quality; you aren’t detracting from anyone else by doing so. And (3), plenty of published authors have defended fanfiction and many even got their start as fanfiction writers (and have said do publicly). Fanfiction isn’t exactly the same set of skills as original fiction, but there’s plenty of overlap. https://xkcd.com/1414/ https://queer.party/@beccadax/110993663511383671

is this an insult

@lowqualityfacts

(presumably it’s because of https://social.belkadan.com/@jrose/statuses/01H9483S0WNVCC0FDD1XY213VN, it’s fine. if not, don’t tell me.)

posterity (n): how cool something would look on a poster

“We should include a bear riding a unicorn, for posterity.”

#FakeDictionary

Watching Steven Universe again. I highly recommend it as the best cartoon of the 2010s: fun, silly, moving, musical, and emotionally intelligent, packed into 11-minute episodes. Today I went through the first season and identified the eight episodes you can watch to see if you’re into it. That’s an hour and a half. Less than two episodes of most fancy shows these days.

2. Laser Light Cannon
1. Gem Glow

(yes, I suggest watching these in the opposite order. (2) is a bit more accessible in my opinion)

7. Bubble Buddies
10. Steven’s Lion
23. Monster Buddies
24. An Indirect Kiss
25. Mirror Gem
26. Ocean Gem

These are not my favorite episodes of season 1; that would have to include “Giant Woman” at the very least. But 1 and 2 and 7 and 10 set up the premise and introduce the main cast, 23 and 24 are good episodes with some plot-relevant information for the last two, and 25 and 26 have the hook into the rest of the series. So at that point either you’ll be enjoying it or you won’t, and either you’ll want to know what happens or you won’t.

Note that some places put the episodes in pairs, as they were originally aired. There’s no harm watching 8 and 9 to complete the set, but they’re just okay compared to other season 1 episodes.

It’s not perfect, but I really love this show.

One of the things that makes the Fediverse quieter than Twitter is that if you Favorite or Repost something I Reposted, I don’t hear about it. On Twitter I’d get notifications for that too. I understand why that doesn’t happen here—on the technical side it’d be an extra network request, and on the social side it feeds into the gamification/metrics monster—but it means I have little idea which of my reposts are or aren’t resonating with people. Which I’d like to know not to “grow my audience” or “curate content”, but simply to learn more about y’all. Ah, well.

It just occurred to me that the people asking for type information in Swift macros and other SwiftSyntax-based programs might not know / might not have stopped to think about what the word “syntax” means there. In a compiler sense, “syntax” is purely the structure of the source code as written, without figuring out what it means yet.

And it’s not even a precise category! For example, Swift has “context-sensitive keywords” like static that can be used as identifiers but also appear as keywords in particular parts of the grammar. It has compilation conditions that need to be evaluated to even decide what code to include in the resulting syntax tree. (It’s not a full-on C preprocessor but it does support conditionalizing on the version of the compiler being used to parse the code.) Heck, even just the idea that < and > are sometimes operators and sometimes generic parameter groupers is assigning some level of meaning. SwiftSyntax does handle all of that, because it would be impossible to present a structured view of a source file without accounting for that in some way.

But yeah, maybe people aren’t thinking about the words “syntax” and “syntactical” when they ask these things.