Rusty Russell’s Quiet Corner of The Internet

“If you didn’t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn’t boot”

This was passed on to me by Ben Elliston, ex-gcc hacker and good guy.  Amusing in context, but the corollary is that working on free software mean...

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!

crates.io: Rust Package Registry

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.