everyone's always on about the Virtual Boy as the origin of virtual reality or whatever but this completely erases the far older history of "Wink-o-Vision" which clearly defined all the standard conventions and tricks that the entire industry is just rediscovering the hard way 🧵 Wink-o-Vision's founder was a japanese player-piano technician in the days when they were enormous machines that filled rooms. while doing some routine repairs, he discovered that his flashlight shining through the piano's "roll" made his assistant wink and blink uncontrollably

mnghgh i should probably write an article digging into how compilers and interpreters/sanitizers "think" about provenance and how people get confused when they conflate the two and also how allocations in even existing OSes are extremely hierarchical

but i'm so tired.......... it's weird because i would be 100% bullshitting as someone who doesn't work on either of those but also compilers aren't actually that complicated because we solved the halting problem and its friends decades ago with the trivial insight of "a 'maybe' is actually a fine answer"

hey did you know that Java has an amazing hack where comparison operators (==) on floats have the terrible IEEE754 partial order where NaN != NaN...

but 'compare' doesn't? So all generic code that handles comparables properly gives floats a total order?

docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase… floats just silently swapping to a proper partial order when it Really Matters is the most chaotic-good choice i have ever seen a programming language make, and i am lowkey obsessed with it and trying to figure out how to hack it into other languages

OK DON'T PANIC BUT I JUST REWROTE RUST'S MEMORY MODEL AND NOW ALL CODE IS UNDEFINED AND NEEDS TO BE FIXED RIGHT AWAY

...ok no, I didn't, but the Strict Provenance experiment just hit nightly and is VERY IMPORTANT and I have SO MUCH to say about it!!

github.com/rust-lang/rust… I will explain Rust's Strict Provenance here, but everything I will say can already be found at these links:

* The Docs: doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/pt…

* The Tracking Issue: github.com/rust-lang/rust…

* The FAQ: github.com/rust-lang/rust…

* The Stable Polyfill: docs.rs/sptr/latest/sp…

can't sleep, so here's a big braindump on the social and historical relationship between speedrunning and glitches, and how the concept of a glitch is too blurry for simple hard and fast rules so like i could start this either by digging into definitions or the historical/social context. i think it's more interesting to start at the context, so for now what exactly a "glitch" is will be left unspecified