once again, the internet has been violently reminded that the true joy of notational standards is that there are so many to choose from! that's right, social media is once again abuzz over an arithmetic expression using the worst symbol, the obelus, '÷'.

neither the specific expression nor the form of it are new. arguments over "8÷2(2+2)" can be found on forum posts at least as early as 2016, and "48÷2(9+3)" was apparently a major controversy in 2011, having its own Know Your Meme page.

if you're working in Rust, I recommend that you learn how to work with macro_rules. specifically, I recommend this because you can use macros to build custom assertions that can remove a lot of boilerplate from your test functions.

for example, if you have an iterator that produces some complicated enum or struct, you could write a macro that will:

• advance the iterator, failing if it doesn't have anything remaining
• match the structure of the contents, failing if it isn't the right variation for the position
• extract value for further assertions

in fact, I can show you that very scenario.

Announcing the overhaul of the infrastructure for raptros.com!

I've managed to replace a cumbersome and not-well-planned setup based on github pages and hakyll with a new setup based on Zola, Gitlab, and S3.

This new setup has automatic deployment as well as a preview-site setup, which means it should be much easier for me to add new content.

You can see the source code for the new site in my raptros.com gitlab repository.

albums

added all but the first of these albums today.