I wrote this over 15 years ago, and it still rings true: separate the art from the artist.
It's a key stabilizing principle for me when navigating Bitcoin developers.
Now I have a shell script `rcargo` which remote compiles rust crates: I work on my laptop but have beefy machines on my home and work LANs. You'd have to reimplement cargo to do it much finer-grained, apparently: sccache used to and gave up?
The real trick is ssh's ControlPath config var, which allows shared connection for much-improved speed: ChatGPT taught me this one!
The other option is Nix, but I'm not *that* bored!
Second Rust crate, re-implementing a utility I had written several times and see. This one takes a more thorough approach and handles corner cases a bit better. I also added percentile support which is actually quite cute.
Basically, if you have a pile of text lines, which contains some numbers, something like you've run a benchmark 20 times, produced a pile of output, line stats will gather similar lines and show you the stats on the numbers.
Sometimes people speak of Bitcoin and I get a moment of disorientation before I realize they're speaking of it as an *investment*.
Like gold, oil, Nvidia stock, etc.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a single dimension: up good, down bad.
Corollaries:
1. This is fungible: there are other investments, some of which may be better at going up.
2. They may be "really into" Bitcoin, but it's a phase: some other financial winner will come along.
3. There are no deep insights here, just a lot of effort to predict numbers.
4. They're not wrong: finance is important. But for me it's like doing my taxes: I do it, but I kinda resent the time I spend on it.
Paused my reading of The Mandibles for Xmas day: It's not exactly holiday reading.
It's one thing to know nothing stops this train. It's another thing to read through a detailed description of what the slow inevitable crash looks like: It's like the right brain equivalent of When Money Dies.
My second week of Rust (only a few hours a day though: I am on vacation after all) has me reproducing and enhancing a tool I wrote in C. It takes multiple lines and runs stats on the numbers in it.
This is useful for quick benchmarks: `for i in $(seq 10); do /usr/bin/time myprog; done | linestats`. Each line with the same literal parts is combined, with numbers replaced by "min-max(mean+/-stddev)".
The C one wasn't very clever about decimals, so it needed a good rewrite. The new code works, but needs polish, more options, optimization, tests and documentation before I release it.
The good thing about these small projects is they don't get hamstrung by Rust's glacial build times!
