In my case, I use it because it is dead simple to get a standalone, lean, fast, native executable (on top of the other functional programming features). Cargo is a huge part of what I love about rust.
I have a great example.
We have 100s of Markdown files. I needed a link checker with some additional validations.
Existing tools took 10-20 minutes to run.
I cooked up a Rust validator that uses the awesome pulldown-cmark, reqwest and rayon crates. Rayon let me do the CPU bits concurrently, and reqwest with streams made it dead simple to do the 1000s of HTTP requests with a decent level of concurrency. Indicatif gave me awesome console progress bars.
And the best part, the CPU bound part runs in 90ms instead of minutes, and the HTTP requests finish in around 40 seconds, primarily limited by how fast the remote servers are over a VPN halfway around the world.
No attempt made to optimise, .clone() and .to_owned() all over the place. Not a single crash or threading bug. And it will likely work one year from now too.
Reading your comment made me realize another thing: Using rust often feels like the language is a successful attempt to take the best parts of a lot of other languages and put them together into a single, rational collection of features. Most of what's in there isn't new, but it all fits together well in one place so I don't feel like I have to make a devil's bargain for important features when I start out.
Are the checks somewhat time-stable? Couldn't some of the checking (and network requests) be avoided by caching? For example by assuming that anything OK'd withing the last hour is still OK.
I've been homeschooling my children for about four years, and figuring out how to achieve experiential learning has been a primary goal for the entire time. It has been very tricky for me to get it right, because there is a constant need to balance between over- and under-challenging them, and the process of struggling that's so crucial to learning is also self-defeating because it generates so much frustration. Emotional resilience is a skill that I think is foundational to being able to learn in this way, but it's been glossed over in the materials I've read on constructivist learning. The closest I've seen is the material about growth mindsets, but it's generally vastly oversimplified in my opinion.
The approach I'm currently working with is to ask them to do difficult tasks (such as math problems that don't have a straightforward, mechanical process to produce an answer), then I watch them work. When they get stuck, I try to get them to explore what they know and think about what would help them break a bit of new ground, but so far it's been very hard to guide without showing. Generally, they struggle for a bit and then I show them a couple of ways in which they could make progress. This seems to have very good results, but I can't imagine how it could be institutionalized effectively when you start to get beyond the most elementary topics. Even with only two students it's challenging to manage.
Another related strategy: Pay an extra month on any recurring bills at the start (for services that allow you to maintain a credit balance). Then, just pay your bills as normal, except that you have an automatic one month of grace period for everything because you have a credit balance. This has saved me numerous times because of absentmindedness.
>This has saved me numerous times because of absentmindedness.
Aren't you costing yourself tens of dollars per year in lost interest by doing this? You're essentially giving them an interest free loan. A calendar/reminder app doesn't have this problem and is more reliable (on the off chance you forgot twice in a row, for instance).
I used to do this until I became competent with that sort of thing.
If you're the sort of person for whom this is a bandaid, a calendar won't fix it, and you're also not the sort of person who cares about $15/year. Hell, I haven't missed a bill in well over a decade, and I don't care about $15/year.
I think you might be overestimating what the opportunity cost is. A $100 loan to a utility at today's interest rate (say a high-interest savings account) is probably $1-2 per year.
Only worry about lost interest after you have maxed out all your investment and are holding no cash. Once you run out of cash to invest, then you can tap into these reserves. Most people though keep cash on hand anyway, accruing no interest.
Also, you might want to use the shelf space for something else. And the apartment may have a high cost per square meter so it would cost thousands in storage space.
That only works well if you're diligent about reviewing them. If the power company suddenly thinks you owe them for a new $2000 power meter, it's good to know that before the money comes out of your account (or onto your credit card).
I'm not that diligent so burden of manually making sure bills are paid is a great way to force me to check that the bill makes sense!
Just came here to say this actually happened to me. About 10 years ago I lived in a high-rise apartment in Chicago. One day we got a bill in the mail for ~$50,000 -- turns out, I got billed for the entire building. It took weeks to sort that out.
I do the same and wait until all the bills arrive at the beginning of each month to do them in one batch and do not like the cognitive overhead. Now wondering whether it would be possible to set up semi-automated payments. You get a notification about your bill and if you click/tap through it gets paid. Still in control but less manual steps. Maybe there are services for this use case already?
I will often use things like this, not because I don't know how it's done, but because I have a hope that whoever made it will maintain it and keep it working properly under future changing conditions. Today, it's easy to see if the platform is windows. Later, that may change, and if this code is maintained it will save me headaches. If lots of other people are also using it, there's a very good chance that it will be updated quickly and that weird corner cases I'm not aware of will be already taken care of.
Yea, I agree completely. While I tend to reinvent plenty of wheels, I don't find the idea of importing a package designed for one small task, bad. (edit: missing word)
_Especially_ if it's used by a ton of repos. If, as your example says, something changes where `is-windows` needs to be updated it's likely to either be updated or break so many codebases that someone will update it.
There's a bit of chaotic safety in relying on a web of dependency trust like this. On one hand more people invested in the behavior of a simple package gives you more confidence. On the other hand, it means more developers are depending on more packages, introducing possibly more brittle behavior.
The latter (brittle behavior/deps) has been my experience fwiw. While I don't dislike the idea of `is-windows`, I do dislike introducing more points of random failure. In general if I don't have the idea that my own implementation of something like `is-windows` is likely to need maintaining then I'm happy to do it myself and remove a dependency.
Coming from Rust mostly, but I wonder if the safety of the language aids this problem too. For example, I imagine `is-windows` level of dependencies is far less problematic in Rust than NodeJS.
I've only been actively teaching (at home, no less) for a couple of years, but I can definitely identify with this. I make index cards with each kind of question we encounter in the curriculum, then I draw some random cards from the deck in order to pick questions going all the way back to the start. We do a quiz every week for every subject that's made up of those questions.
It always comes down to time though, it seems like you can use all these ideas and teach for mastery, but it costs about 30% in terms of forward motion through the material. I'm lucky in that that I can just decide to pay that price, but it would be a real stretch to put all this into practice in a place where you have a coverage deadline that's already hard to hit.
Resilience Thinking, by Walker and Salt, is a concise and clear presentation of what makes complex things resilient, and how it can go wrong. I see the ideas from there everywhere from ecosystems to business. This one really made it much easier to think about the big picture and the long tail of consequences in otherwise messy systems.
Complexity, by Mitchell, is an introductory look at complex systems that changed the way I see the systems in the world and sent me off on a long tangent to learn more.
Life's Ratchet, by Hoffann, is just plain mind-blowing, or at least it was for me. It's about the inner mechanics of living cells, and does a really good job of conveying how insanely complex life is.
Slightly tangential, but regarding the definition of "natural," I personally prefer to think in terms of concentrates. The chemicals in question exist in nature in many cases, or at least there is a similar naturally occurring compound. The main thing that I think makes a useful distinction is the concentration level. Like other drugs, the danger is in the dose, and the extreme levels of potency we can get with a little chemistry is what makes them "natural" or "synthetic" in my opinion (regardless of their actual origin). I'm more cautious accepting highly concentrated substances than I am accepting the same thing diluted with the thousands of other naturally occurring substances that accompany it "in the wild."
Pesticides in organic farming are also highly concentrated (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_farming#Pesticides), which would make them synthetic per your definition. Which is fine, but it means that from your perspective organic farming is non-existent.
Yes, that's absolutely correct, and is actually part of the point I was attempting to make. I grow vegetables and fruits at small-farm scale (1-3 acres in production generally) in a way that I'd call organic if the term wasn't already taken - I don't spray anything at all, and use no concentrates for fertility or weed control. This has the predictable effect of reducing my overall yield in the short term, but I've found that I can still produce well as long as I'm careful to choose crops that are adapted to my region and use high biodiversity insectary plantings and trap crops for pest management. Weeding is done mechanically (usually with a hoe or a wheel hoe, occasionally with the walk-behind tractor for large areas).
I know many organic farmers who follow practices similar to mine as well. The organic name is really more of an indicator of intent for a lot of people - you can get away with a lot of things and still be certified, but most of the growers I know actually do make a strong effort to find another way. So, the organic label does actually carry some weight with me despite the fact that it can be abused.
I have a spice blend that I made for flavoring beans that has kind of become a new staple at the table. It's about half tomato powder, maybe a quarter hot red chile powder, and equal parts cumin, onion powder, garlic powder, and oregano for the balance. I'm thinking about switching some of the chile powder out for chipotle to see how that goes for the next batch.
Two teaspoons in a bowl of beans makes some nice ranch-style beans, but we've been using it in lots of other places as a shake-on spice (eggs are particularly good). It's a pretty decent dry rub for meat on the smoker or grill too.
