David Coles 🌠

David Coles 🌠

@dcoles.net

Principal Software Engineer and Systems Architect at Sony Interactive Entertainment (PlayStation). Rust, Linux, System Architecture, Hijinks. They/them | πŸ³οΈβ€πŸŒˆ | dcoles.net

341 followers17 following321 posts

David Coles 🌠 reposted

James Elder
@jameselder.bsky.social

Wow. I hadn’t realised how much LLMs had killed StackOverflow (the site where coders traditionally go to ask questions when they’re stuck): β€œJust before the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, there were more than 100,000 monthly questions asked on the site; last month, there were fewer than 1,500.”

ft.comWho cleans up after the vibe-coding party?Our obsession with AI code-writing tools is overwhelming the web’s unsung human caretakers
David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Well, that's not at all concerning, finding at least two songs in my Music folder with data corruption. I have backups, but not exactly reassuring to think that the SSD might be silently corrupting data.

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

I'm deeply thankful for fully disconnecting myself from Slack for this year's mid-year break. I'm almost at the point where I feel itching to solve some problems rather than feeling overshadowed by worrying about them.

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Dang. A dark horror-coded Myst would have been amazing. What a beautiful and terrifying looking age.

Cyan Worlds@cyan.com

Over a year ago, we built a prototype for a new Myst Universe game meant for publisher eyes only. This project is NOT in active development, but we're proud of the work the team did, and wanted to share it with you all. Presenting: Project Anglerfish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvNGt02yZNc

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Writing safe Rust wrappers around C libraries takes time, but I was just reminded why it's worth the effort. Even if you're still working with raw-pointers under the covers, a borrow (e.g. `&CStr`) ensures the owning object can't be mutated while a bare raw-pointer makes no such promise.

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Raw-pointers are particularly vulnerable to "action at a distance" where a small change change in behaviour somewhere else in a codebase can easily invalidate what looks like a safe pointer (particularly `*const`).

David Coles 🌠 reposted

Carl Lerche
@carllerche.com

Three years ago, trying to use Rust for web apps was crazy talk. Today is very different than three years ago. Announcing Topcoat, a batteries-included Rust framework for building reactive web applications: tokio.rs/blog/2026-07...

tokio.rsAnnouncing Topcoat: a framework for building full-stack reactive web apps with Rust | Tokio - An asynchronous Rust runtimeTokio is a runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. It provides async I/O, networking, scheduling, timers, and more.
David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

I'm already using Firefox as my day-to-day browser, but at this point I'm considering uninstalling Chrome and just using Edge when a need a Chromium based browser. Yes, Google. Somehow you've managed to make Chrome feel more pushy than Edge.

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Having an eye patch would be nice right about now. Any amount of light in that eye seems to be too much at the moment. Right now I'm wearing my hoodie like an extremely edgy hacker.

David Coles 🌠 reposted

nrc
@ncameron.org

Grateful for my trans friends and all the wonderful trans folk I’ve met in the Rust community and elsewhere. Hoping with all my heart that the world becomes a better, safer place for trans people

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Oh neat. The Siemens REV24 thermostat of the hydronic heating unit supports basic remote control via a pair of potential free contact terminals. I think that means I can just use something like a simple optocoupler to control rather than replacing the thermostat entirely.

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

I guess I could also look for a WiFi enabled smart thermostat with local control or something like a Shelly 1, but this is pretty low-cost/low-effort and puts one of my small pile of ESP32 microcontrollers to productive use.

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Sorry for not being particularly active of late. I just moved across hemispheres which has meant nearly every aspect of my life has been reset (even the weather!). It's actually been nice to be able to finally sit down this weekend and enjoy looking out the window.

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

I have a half dozen digital temperature sensors and none of them can give me a consistent value. (β•―Β°β–‘Β°)β•―οΈ΅ ┻━┻

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Genuinely curious what will happen if I upload this HDR photo (AVIF) to Bluesky. My guess is it's going to get converted to a JPEG either by being tone mapped or end up horribly corrupted. Let's see which! Left is SDR, right is HDR.

David Coles 🌠 reposted

Anna πŸŒΏπŸ‘οΈ
@annacwebs.bsky.social

After discussions about poor behavior by DICE attendees last month, I thought I'd bring these out again at GDC dawns. AND DUDES... PLEASE CALL OUT YOUR FELLOW DUDES IF YOU SEE BAD BEHAVIOR. Rock that boat!

Anna πŸŒΏπŸ‘οΈ@annacwebs.bsky.social

Due to recent discussions: when I worked at a library, I was trained on how to politely but directly respond to unwanted sexual comments. Unfortunately commonly-marketed fantasies about librarians mean it happens a lot. Rehearse these. Be comfortable saying them forcefully, but politely.

David Coles 🌠 reposted

James Munns
@jamesmunns.com

Oh, regular reminder: we're about to start the awkward weeks where US and EU (and probably other) daylight savings time don't agree. Double check your usual meeting times this week, especially if the person that scheduled it is in another country!

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Another likely casualty of coding agents seems to be that sourcegraph.com/search is now slow to the point of being unusable. It feels like the days of dial-up where you would start a page loading and then go off to grab a coffee or something while you wait for the page to load.

sourcegraph.comSourcegraph | The code intelligence platform for enterprisesSourcegraph gives developers and AI agents instant context and control across every repo, branch, and language–succeeding where other tools break under scale and complexity.
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David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

I'm definitely glad to see it can be used to improve code quality. Having a deep technical conversation about a code-base is also fun. Not so much a fan of the sycophant fawning language or how it can still hallucinate with the voice of authority. The ethical debate seems far from settled either.

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

It's feels like feeding an animal. Kind of magical to watch it eat from your hand, but need to be wary that it could bite you for any number of reasons. I guess the trick is positioning yourself so being bitten is the least likely outcome yet remembering being bitten is still always a possibility.

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Many of these tools are getting some traction at work, so I have a vested interest in understanding what they do and to re-calibrate some of my biases. My experience with full-line autocomplete (and debugging issues caused by it) had previously left a sour taste in my mouth for these tools

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

First, the positives. During the code walk-through it unearthed one major implementation bug and three minor issues (documentation, spelling, recommendations). I put my thoughts on the PR to fix the issues.

github.comFixes for code quality issues based on Claude review by dcoles Β· Pull Request #252 Β· flipperzero-rs/flipperzero-rsSome small fixes based on a cautious conversation with Claude about how idiomatic Rust this codebase is. The changes themselves are pretty uncontroversial, but the use of GenAI tools is, so I figu...

David Coles 🌠 reposted

imperio
@imperioworld.bsky.social

Starting tomorrow, you will be able (on linux without cross-compilation) to install and use the Rust GCC backend directly from rustup! To do so: rustup component add rustc-codegen-gcc Thanks a lot to @jberanek.bsky.social for all their work to make it a reality! github.com/rust-lang/ru...

github.comAdd GCC and the GCC codegen backend to build-manifest and rustup by Kobzol Β· Pull Request #151156 Β· rust-lang/rustThis PR adds the GCC codegen backend, and the GCC (libgccjit) component upon which it depends, to build-manifest, and thus also to (nightly) Rustup. I added both components in a single PR, because ...

David Coles 🌠 reposted

Rust Language
@rust-lang.org

Rust 1.93.0 has been released! 🌈 πŸ¦€βœ¨ This release includes a new musl version for the *-linux-musl targets, adds support for #​[cfg] inside asm!(), and adds [T]::as_array, VecDeque::{pop_front_if, pop_back_if}, Vec/String::into_raw_parts, fmt::form_fn, and more! ✨ blog.rust-lang.org/2026/01/22/R...

blog.rust-lang.orgAnnouncing Rust 1.93.0 | Rust BlogEmpowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Really scratching my head why WireGuard explicitly disables IPv6 link-local addressing. Sure there's no MAC address for EUI-64, but you could easily derive one from the interface public key or allocate a random one like many operating systems now do.

David Coles 🌠
@dcoles.net

Sure, there's no need for IPv6 ND to provide ARP-like features on a Layer 3 only point-to-point link, but it's still heckin' convenient not to have to manually assign IP addresses just to get two endpoints to communicate. Even PPP will allocate one when IPv6 is enabled.

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