Galen S. Swint

Choice of language for software projects has become a very different game now that we have robot friends to do most of our code generation and translation for us. I have people wondering why I just shipped a project in Rust when I don't like the language and don't hand-code in it myself. I did this because I am adjusted to current reality, and now I'm going to talk about that. The age of hand-coding is mostly over. It no longer matters as much whether the computer language I use is comfortable to my hand, only whether the robot friend I'm using can generate it at high quality. It also matters whether I can read the language, because I am going to want to run my eyeball over it to review the code. Rust meets that bar - I find it kind of spiky but basically readable. Rust is a good deployment language for me to choose when (a) I want solid memory-safety guarantees, and (b) the code is already mature and I don't expect to need to do exploratory programming or serious feature development on it in the future. In particular, this makes Rust a good place for me to land my old C projects. Which is why in the last couple of months I have migrated two of them to Rust. C to Rust translation by robots is cheap and easy now; I will probably continue to do this. Each time I get a bug report on one of these projects in the future, boing! Rusticated. You may believe that Rustacea is stuffed with Communists and sexual deviants. You might even be right. I don't have to care whether that's true anymore, because I have a robot friend who is in all relevant ways smarter than they are. The wider lesson here is that the developer and user community around a language doesn't matter as much as it used to in whether you should get involved with it. Because in the future, we're going to be relying on human community brains less and artificial intelligences more. And that future is now. Not everything C gets moved to Rust, though. I lifted cvs-fast-export to Golang instead, because I think it's fairly likely that I'm going to have to do significant development work on it is in the future, so the payoff from a language I'm more comfortable reading and modifying by hand goes up. I'm certainly never going to start a project in C again. What would be the point, other than masochism? I spent 40 years writing C and I'm very good at it, but I will cheerfully leave it and it's buffer overruns and its heap corruption and its undefined behaviors and its portability problems behind. It helps that my robot friends are good at writing C code that doesn't have those problems, but...why even go there? Why expose yourself to those risks if the robot misses something? These days I do my exploratory programming in Python or Golang. My robot friends are extremely good at generating code in both those languages. I think they're slightly higher leverage on Golang, possibly due to that language having a smaller surface? Python used to be my favorite language. I soured on it for a while after the 2-to-3 transition was massively botched, and the GIL meant concurrency in it was a disaster area, and managing library dependencies became an even bigger disaster area. I'm a little happier with Python now that I can declare strict typing and uv has reduced dependency pain somewhat. But I think if I think I'm going to have to write anything much larger than a glue script in Python, I just shrug and reach for Golang instead. I'm very comfortable in Golang. Over time, I'll probably migrate my older Python projects to Golang because that's cheap and easy now and the performance win can be quite significant. I don't know what other languages I'm going to be using in the future. I do know that choosing a development language is a much less grave commitment than it used to be, because if it turns out to be not well suited for the job I'm doing, I can simply have my robot friend translated to a better one.

☀️ Today in Utqiagvik (the northernmost city in the United States), the sun rose above the horizon at 2:57 AM and won’t set again for 84 straight days or until August 2nd! Here's a look at a timelapse showing the sunset and sunrise this morning. #akwx

I toured the Sagrada Familia in 1971 with my family. I have never forgotten that experience. I was 13 years old, and the projected completion date of the cathedral they gave us then seemed impossibly far in the future. The interior is utterly bizarre, like a hallucination about exotic biology frozen in stone. There is nothing anything like it anywhere else in the world, and that's why I'm glad they've finally finished it.

blainsmith.com/articles/just-… This is truth being spoken. Golang isn't perfect - I have my grapes with it - but this article zeroes in unerringly on what the language gets right.

Let's talk about what's going on in Texas

this is a big deal, on the order of Kelsey Hightower’s “Kubernetes The Hard Way” and probably all ai engineers should go thru this once mostly i advocate “just in time learning”, but this is one scenario you want “just in case”

Weather in May 😂

Allow me to rock your world. America has about 6000 hospitals. 5121 of those are publicly accessible and 1224 are completely free. That's twice as many charity hospitals as Canada has Tim Horton's. Literally. Then, when you see a doctor, the doctor speaks English and went to school somewhere you've heard of. Harvard is not the only way to get educated, but it is nice in the fall. We don't push people into medically assisted suicide for cost reasons. We don't ask people with emergency conditions to sit in the ER for 10 hours before they see a doctor. So yes, if you have a cutting-edge disease and you go to a private hospital and get the best care in the world, you're on the hook for it. But note that you are also ALIVE.

Too good not to share! I did not know this. If you want to "void" a row in a paper tape, you punch out every dot, and that happens to be the DEL character in ASCII.

The biggest winner of the draft is this old dog who got his spot on the couch back.

Found out Pope Urban II forced married crusaders to get permission from their wives and I am now imagining a sitcom episode about a guy trying to go on crusade without his wife finding out

SLS vs. Saturn V, a real time comparison. Saw a comparison yesterday using my video on the left at 50% speed. Here's a proper comparison with both rockets launching at their real speeds. You'll notice SLS is significantly faster off the pad because of the dual massive SRBs!

Orders of Magnitude

@DataRepublican @shadihamid @washingtonpost You know, Taylor wrote a song about being oppressed... azlyrics.com/lyrics/taylors…

Hello Mr. Hasim, You've already reached levels of institutional validation that remain inaccessible to nearly all Americans: a professorship at Georgetown, a position on the Washington Post's editorial board. At that point, saying you still need to prove yourself is like Taylor Swift insisting no one listens to her music. If assimilation feels out of reach, it isn't because the system has excluded you. By any reasonable measure, it has already brought you into its highest ranks. What remains is a decision about whether you're willing to fully embrace where you already stand. And all signs point to "no." This is a you problem.

My new @washingtonpost column: Why do Muslims need to be like everyone else? A case against assimilation. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/…

I was in class last week. One of my students raised their hand mid-lecture and asked something that stopped me for a second. "Why is every AI tool built on Python? C++ is faster. Rust is faster. Even Java is faster. So why Python?" Honestly it’s a fair question. And the answer reveals something really interesting about how the AI industry actually works. Let me explain this properly. 🧵

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I post this every year during Holy Week! 😂 It cracks me up every time. Good Christian humor.

Sawyer Robertson gives John Gruden the best gift he has ever received! #SicEm @SawRobertson12 @BarstoolGruden