It was 1999. In my memory, I’m in Mr. Wilson’s chemistry class when I hear about the cause of the crash, but I’m not sure about that. What I am sure about, though, is the feeling: overwhelm at the sheer magnitude of the blunder. $327.6 million spacecraft was lost in seconds. Three years of development. Ten months traveling through space. All because two teams used different units. Could Rust have prevented this disaster? ...
In the much-vaunted style of literate programming, here’s an emacs-lisp function I wrote recently. The motivation was to convert a shell alias I added this morning, which counts the number of Zettelkasten notes I’ve written that day. (“Jesus, him, too?” Yes, dear reader, I’m afraid that this is one trend I haven’t managed to dodge forever, but my adoption has been cautious and deliberate.) alias today_count="fd $(date -u +"%Y-%m-%d") ~/org/zd | wc -l" Using the lovely fd utility, I find all files in my Zetteldeft directory, which start with today’s date. Then, I pipe that output to wc -l to get the count. Easy peasy, chicken breezy; took me about two minutes to write. Turns out this doesn’t work as an alias; the date isn’t recalculated every time the alias is called. ...