rain 🌦️
LightNews LightNews
banner
sunshowers.io
rain 🌦️
@sunshowers.io
2.8K followers 330 following 2.8K posts
(gender)queer transsexual / they/them / eng @oxide.computer / atheist and scientific humanist / 🦀 #rustlang / https://sunshowers.io

also on mastodon: @rain@hachyderm.io / https://hachyderm.io/@rain
Posts Replies Media Videos
sunshowers.io
Released cargo-nextest 0.9.111 with a pretty big improvement: in interactive terminals, up to 8 running tests are now displayed below the progress bar! This comes after some exceptional polish work by glehmann. (Thank you!)

Update now with cargo nextest self update :)
November 4, 2025 at 7:04 PM
sunshowers.io
Released cargo-nextest 0.9.109, with support for --show-progress=running to show each running test on its own line.

--show-progress=only also hides details about successful tests.

Run cargo nextest self update, or install @ get.nexte.st. Thanks to glehmann for contributing this excellent feature!
October 30, 2025 at 2:12 AM
sunshowers.io
didn't realize IBM's mainframe processors have 16 threads per core
High performance Telum provides 8 cores with 16 threads per core for parallel processing at up to 5.5 GHz. Telum II expands cache, introduces a DPU for accelerated I/O and further reduces latency for data-intensive applications.6
October 23, 2025 at 1:33 AM
sunshowers.io
USDT is so cool!
Screenshot of a terminal running cargo-nextest test suite showing two side-by-side panes, demonstrating its support for USDT probes. Left pane displays a scrolling list of passing tests from the clap crate with green 'PASS' indicators and execution times around 0.01-0.02 seconds per test. Bottom shows 'Stress test' status running iteration 3/3 with 879 tests run, 879 passed, 2 skipped. Right pane shows detailed DTrace USDT probe output with JSON-formatted trace data including function names like 'nextest_runner::runner::dispatcher::DispatcherContext', stress test IDs, run durations in nanoseconds, and test statistics. The terminal header shows the machine name 'rain@sunshowers-illumos' and the session is running in the /dev/clap directory.
October 22, 2025 at 8:32 PM
sunshowers.io
Why I like and keep working on Rust
Thank you for the kind words and the thoughtful response. I'm deeply sympathetic to your viewpoint, and some days I certainly feel like Rust is creaking under its own weight. Why does your typical backend web service need all this complexity with borrows and lifetimes and manual memory management? But allow me to present the other side of the argument. My background is in systems-level developer tools, and Rust has a combination of things that no other programming environment has: * & and &mut, which enforce a rigorous separation between mutable and immutable state. I think this is the single most important feature of Rust, and the closest analog to this in other environments is purely functional languages like Haskell * enums with data + exhaustive pattern matching; the latter is something even Haskell lacks * high-level idiomatic code that performs like low-level code (e.g. iterators): Rust achieves this through an extraordinary combination of monomorphizing and inlining * working in memory-constrained environments: tracing GC tends to have significant memory overhead, and I've worked in server environments where a big limiting factor was the amount of DRAM being produced globally * good polymorphism: I think OOP is a suboptimal paradigm that breaks under day-to-day development stress. I've written about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42512629 * fast startup times: this is a requirement for command-line tools people use hundreds of times a day—I spent many years working on Mercurial where Python's slow startup time was a very common complaint * first-class support for using native OS calls directly; many higher-level languages like Java abstract away the details, so things like signal handling are hard to hook into * first-class Windows support: again, non-negotiable for many developer tools, since the plurality of developers are on Windows (cont) * and last but not least, a great dependency ecosystem, which ties into all of the above points: & and &mut mean that some transitive dependency three levels down won't suddenly alter the list you pass in, idiomatic performance means that perf regressions are rare, first-class Windows support means most dependencies just work on Windows, and so on Is it possible to have an application-level/GCd/managed language that meets most or all of these requirements? Certainly. Does such an application-level language exist today? No, and there's nothing on the horizon either (Haskell has its heart in the right place, but is missing many of the more practical features here). Rust isn't a great application-level language, but it's the best application-level language. And given how high the barrier tends to be for a new language to reach adoption, I'll probably be retired long before something like that shows up. And yeah, async really is quite confusing in so many ways, and it's really unfortunate that this situation has seen no improvements in so many years. And yet, through its characteristics combined with the other things listed here, it enables developers to solve real problems that are completely infeasible in any other language. So I keep trying to make Rust better :)
October 16, 2025 at 11:52 PM
sunshowers.io
The number of people on HN who believe platform holders have no responsibility to their customers is shocking to me. I do basic QA against the users of my open source projects!
How else do you get the message across? Do not use the private APls. Electron is most likely using a whole ton more. Apple is sending a message. "Fix your crap or expect more." Who's to say Apple didn't test it and pushed it out anyway to force the Electron devs hands. It's their garden and they can move the walls It seems as though a lot of arguments about this boil down to a few inane implications: 1. Apple should test every (common?) app and any change to the OS that they make that makes an app worse shouldn't be done regardless of why they wanted to make that change. 2. Even though Apple tells people not to use private APls, if a program uses a private APl anyway Apple should build a workaround into their 0S instead of letting apps suffer their own repercussions. 3. Apple should test everything ahead of time and then go around telling all the app developers that there's a problem, as if those app developers are going to do anything about it. No matter what Apple did here, their actual choices boiled down to 1. Add workarounds for misbehaving broken apps, giving those apps no incentive to fix their issues, and forcing Apple to support those workarounds indefinitely; this also undermines their "don't use private APls, they could break later" position. This is the kind of thing that made Windows into an unmaintainable sack of cruft. 2. Do what they did, which is change the APl and let broken apps be broken to the user's detriment. Everyone blames Apple even though it's objectively not their fault. 2. Add some kind of non-workaround that caused problems for the app and not the user; e.g. have this private API rate limited or something so that the app ends up blocking in the call. Could cause problems for actual consumers of this API, and people would still blame Apple but in this case it would be more of their fault than option 2. In the end, Apple can't spend their time fretting over what bad developers do wrong; they spend their time on their and software and if a developer writes bad software and causes problems then so be it. Here's the thing: they undoubtedly did test these and shipped Tahoe anyway. Electron was using an undocumented API. There is no guarantee at all that undocumented APls will continue to work or to be supported. Why should Apple encourage this behaviour?
October 16, 2025 at 6:49 PM
sunshowers.io
My talk made it to /r/rustjerk! Honored
via Claude: Reddit post titled 'Days without being outjerked by [a title] in the main sub: 0' showing a screenshot of another post about 'Cancelling async Rust'. The screenshot displays a RustConf 2025 conference slide featuring a speaker (me) with purple/pink hair at a podium. The slide's title reads 'Cancelling async Rust' by Rain (they/she) for RustConf 2025. The slide includes the RustConf logo, the Rust Foundation mascot Ferris the crab, and text indicating this is 'The original annual Rust programming language conference' with a link to rustconf.com. The post has 115 upvotes and 39 comments.
October 13, 2025 at 8:45 PM
sunshowers.io
Been meaning to put this somewhere for a while — a real, solid technical reason linear VCS history is better than one full of merges, going beyond taste and subjective preference

lobste.rs/c/cix1sm
> git works best when it has the full merge history available I used to work on source control. This is actually not true, because (among other things) having a full merge history leads to the likelihood of what are known as criss-cross merges: situations where there isn't a single nearest common ancestor/merge base between two commits. (Merge bases are a crucial piece of information for many source control algorithms.) Criss-cross merges are a pain to deal with, both within the version control system itself and within tools written on top of the VCS. As a result, many tools simply consider criss-cross merges to be outside of their design parameters. In contrast, a linear history can never have criss-cross merges, greatly simplifying many algorithms. In general, linear history is friendlier for both tools and humans. edit: to give an example, a tool I helped build for work needs to load files from the merge base of a commit so it can ensure that "blessed" files don't change in nontrivial ways. The tool simply (and correctly) considers criss-cross merges to be out of scope: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/dropshot-api-manager/blob/bb71488cfa2f642b232ef619bbb3d2c287c8e336/crates/dropshot-api-manager/src/git.rs#L22 Opting into a history full of merges means imposing a burden on the entire ecosystem.
October 13, 2025 at 5:36 PM
sunshowers.io
reminder: the primary goal of most enterprises is to produce goods and services for its customers. the primary goal of meta is to evaluate its employees
Erik Meijer @headinthebox "... Guido van Rossum: I honestly think the importance of the GIL removal project has been overstated. It serves the needs of the largest users (e.g. Meta) while complicating things for potential contributors to the CPython code base (proving that new code does not introduce concurrency bugs is hard) ...". [0] It does not even sever the needs of Meta; the actual reason was simply to do something impressive sounding ("until now every previous attempt failed miserably") allowed a few engineers at Meta to claim "industry wide impact" during their performance review.
October 11, 2025 at 12:33 AM
sunshowers.io
Screenshot of a LinkedIn connection request from a matchmaking/dating service. The message reads: 'Hey Rain, weirdest connection request you'll receive, but are you single? I came across your profile and think you're a catch (we're a professional matchmaking service)! If you are single, are you open to a discovery call?' followed by a Calendly scheduling link. The sender's name and company name are redacted with red marks. There are 'Ignore' and 'Accept' buttons in the top right corner.
October 7, 2025 at 6:12 PM
sunshowers.io
it's all just gender huh. deepest religion
Himpathy affects how we think of political parties and ideologies. Male-coded conservatism is offered sympathy and understanding, its bad behaviour framed as a reaction to female-coded liberalism—what I call “what did you say to make him hit you?” politics. Increasingly, the resistance to fascism is divided not by policy views, but how much agency the right is seen as having (and hence how much people on the right can be blamed for their actions). This gendered framing also impacts perceptions of authenticity. Men are seen as more authentic than women, more straightforward, so male-coded entities or ideas are seen like that, too. Reactionary centrists have bought the right’s conceit that nativists and bigots are authentic, that they are salt-of-the-earth representations of “real” Britain. The many, many UK citizens who reject their values are (again, often subconsciously) seen as inauthentic. They are elite, overly cosmopolitan, out of touch.
October 1, 2025 at 5:06 AM
sunshowers.io
what an opening (h/t @there.is.no.aarch64.mov)
IPv6 Flow Label: Misuse in Hashing joel jaeggli — 12 Jan 2018 7 min read When RFC1883 was published in 1995 it marked not the end of the process that produced the IPv6 protocol architecture, but rather was a milestone in the evolution of the IPv6 protocol.
September 25, 2025 at 5:21 PM
sunshowers.io
POSIX specifies that ‘df’ and ‘du’ must output sizes by default in units of 512 bytes. What users want is units of 1k, so that is what we do by default. If you want the ridiculous behavior “required” by POSIX, you must set the environment variable ‘POSIXLY_CORRECT’ (which was originally going to be named ‘POSIX_ME_HARDER’).
September 24, 2025 at 4:12 AM
sunshowers.io
GNU gettext on Windows What does Woe32 mean? “Woe32” denotes the Windows 32-bit operating systems for x86: Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista and Windows 95/98/ME. Microsoft uses the term “Win32” to denote these; this is a psychological trick in order to make everyone believe that these OSes are a “win” for the user. However, for most users and developers, they are a source of woes, which is why I call them “Woe32”.
September 23, 2025 at 7:24 PM
sunshowers.io
This just looks so bad to me—very much marketing to the person looking over the shoulder, not the one using it for their job
screenshot of liquid glass macOS 26 with a number of contrast ratio and usability challenges. some parts look okay, others (eg glass notifications on a white background) have a remarkably low contrast ratio
September 18, 2025 at 7:08 PM
sunshowers.io
There are no new arguments. This was Bhagat Singh over a hundred years ago
Well, you Hindus, you say all the present sufferers belong to the class of sinners of the previous births. Good. You say the present oppressors were saintly people in their previous births, hence they enjoy power. Let me admit that your ancestors were very shrewd people, they tried to find out theories strong enough to hammer down all the efforts of reason and disbelief. But let us analyse how far this argument can really stand. From the point of view of the most famous jurists punishment can be justified only from three or four ends to meet which it is inflicted upon the wrongdoer. They are retributive, reformative and deterrent. The retributive theory is now being condemned by all the advanced thinkers. Deterrent theory is also following the same fate. Reformative theory is the only one which is essential, far and indispensable for human progress. It aims at returning the offender as a most competent and a peace-loving citizen to the society. But what is the nature of punishment inflicted by God upon men even if we suppose them to be offenders. You say he sends them to be born as a cow, a cat, a tree, a herb or a beast. You enumerate these punishments to be 84 lakhs. I ask you what is its reformative effect upon man? How many men have met you who say that they were born as a donkey in previous birth for having committed any sin? None. Don't quote your Puranas. I have no scope to touch your mythologies. Moreover do you know that the greatest sin in this world is to be poor. Poverty is a sin, it is a punishment. I ask you how far would you appreciate
September 14, 2025 at 9:47 PM
sunshowers.io
Hornet says "mates" without
specifying gender, she is a bisexual queen
Via Claude: An illustration showing the Great Conchfly, a fictional creature resembling a conch shell with a large spiral red horn and small white glowing eyes, with wing-like appendages extending from its sides. The image includes text that reads: "Great Conchfly. Elder Conchfly crowned with a huge coral horn. Once partnered with a mate, they will rarely be seen alone." Below this is a small white mask-like symbol representing Hornet, followed by more text: "To pair with another is a base instinct, and one that brings some bugs great joy. I once sought similar union, but of my own mates none could match my lifespan."
September 12, 2025 at 9:59 PM
sunshowers.io
fascinating
Claude says: A Google Books Ngram Viewer chart tracking the usage frequency of two phrases in English books from 1800 to 2022. The red line shows "from the jaws of defeat" and the blue line shows "from the jaws of victory." The red line demonstrates early usage starting around 1820, with notable peaks in the 1860s-1880s, followed by decline and then steady growth from the 1940s onward. The blue line remains nearly flat until around 1960, then shows rapid growth starting in the 1970s. Both phrases experience dramatic increases from the 1980s through 2020, with their usage converging at high levels by the end of the time period. The chart shows that while "from the jaws of defeat" appeared earlier in literature, "from the jaws of victory" eventually caught up and slightly exceeded it in recent decades.
August 24, 2025 at 3:45 AM
sunshowers.io
"What is Jira?" Gibson said when I asked if they used the task-management application. "Is it a software?" Pellen said, adding that they'd briefly used Trello before their account was deactivated because they didn't use it enough.
August 21, 2025 at 3:45 PM
sunshowers.io
It's funny how people have zero self-awareness about the just world fallacy
HN comment: dilyevsky 1 day ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Job Listing Site Highlighting H-1B Positions So Am... > You can't just quit and start looking. So? You’re not entitled to always get your favorite thing. Shocking, i know. Get a transfer, then turn in the notice. How hard can that be? Id argue if you cant just get another job you’re probably not entitled to this visa designed for workers in high demand
August 15, 2025 at 3:37 PM
sunshowers.io
I am SO, SO SORRY
virgin vs chad meme the free will virgin (left figure): "noooo just use git correctly" introduces C vulnerability for 1000th time thinks people who screw up OOP are lazy "gambling problem? simply use willpower" thinks what goes around comes around thinks they're a bad person for not exercising the determinist chad (right figure): lifts uses jj RIIR (rewrites it in rust) injects zepbound bans sports betting uses typeclasses "it's all just luck lmao"
August 6, 2025 at 9:03 PM
sunshowers.io
yeah. though it's not a git tool! it is a VCS that has git as one of two supported backends

it is extremely well designed in many ways, and eliminates things like stashes while providing all the power through providing better primitives. it also has a first class undo operation

see my testimonial
I've spent many years of my career working on version control. What I like most about Jujutsu is how it has non-obvious solutions to UX problems that we've run into in the past. What most people may not realize is that there are many novel features which all interlock to make it easy to use. For example, consider Jujutsu's support for automatically rebasing descendants of amended revisions. When we implemented that in Mercurial, we ran into an issue: what if there's a merge conflict? Our solution was to warn users and just not perform the auto-rebase. Now, suddenly, users have to understand that there can be old versions of the same revision visible in their log, and learn how to fix this state. In contrast, Jujutsu's solution is to simply make merge conflicts first-class. This is not just an improvement in general, it is also specifically an improvement for auto-rebase — users no longer have to learn about old versions of a revision unless they want to look at the obslog. Over and over, I'm struck by how well Jujutsu demonstrates this kind of evolved thinking, which as an experienced version control developer I deeply appreciate. — Rain, engineer at Oxide Computer Company, former VCS developer
August 6, 2025 at 3:28 PM
sunshowers.io
hi
Me with vibrant pink/magenta colored hair styled in a short, sleek cut, wearing a black sleeveless top and a necklace with a small pendant. I'm smiling in an environment with dim ambient lighting and blurred background elements
August 4, 2025 at 3:15 AM
sunshowers.io
Mary Lattimore, Julianna Barwick and Floating Points live at the Fox Theater! Three of my fav artists all at once
Julianna Barwick live on synth and Mary Lattimore on harp
August 4, 2025 at 3:12 AM
sunshowers.io
What your average person wants as soon as they wire a down payment
Spirit Island card called Absolute Stasis
July 30, 2025 at 7:57 AM