Last weekend I wrote my first Rust program, which made an LED flash on an Arduino, following this blog post and with the help of this hardware abstraction setup The impetus to getting into microcontrollers came from playing around with modular synths: I've got a little quad DAC chip and the next project is to hook it up so that the Arduino can sent control voltages to the synths. Like a lot of my musical tinkering, this feels a bit like deferring the actual act of playing or writing music, so I've also been trying to write down tunes and chord progressions and ideas for songs as a daily practice.
Jo Walton on Samuel R Delany's Tales of Nevèrÿon - earlier this year I finally finished the last volume in this cycle of interlinked novellas and novels, and it is probably still my favourite fantasy series, although N K Jemisin's Broken Earth stories - which owes it something of a debt - is close behind.
Google's helpful content update is a very peculiar and passive-aggressive document, and thinking about it made me realise that my internal mental model of what Google does is obsolete. I still think of it in terms of web pages created by people who add links to other pages which they think are worthwhile, which was the basis of Google's original algorithm, and then I thought, when was the last time I created a web page with a link to something on it? That's not really how the internet works anymore, and it gave me the idea of collecting the daily links which I try to post to Mastodon and putting them here.
A blog post from nine years ago about why most programming languages use array indices which start at zero rather than one and another, more recent post which disagrees with the first. Both of these are frustrating in different ways and I think the idea that there's one definite answer to the question is a bit misguided, history, even the history of something as recent as programming languages, is always contestable. It made me think of Primo Levi's story from The Periodic Table about the paint factory who continued to add chloride to their chrome-based paints long after the practice had ceased being useful, but "no one any longer knows why".