The Uno Q has 4 times the RAM plus 16 GB of eMMC built in so what's your point? Its idle and max power consumption and CPU benchmarks are more in line with the Zero 2W.
I know I'm biased, but Rust is the closest thing we have to a perfect programming language. Is the borrow checker a pain in the ass? Yeah. But is it necessary? Absolutely. Imagine writing the same buggy program in C, deploying it, and then it blows up at runtime—you still have to fix it, right? A bug is a bug, and it needs fixing. The difference is Rust forces you to deal with it before you even get a binary, while with C you might get a 3 a.m. wake-up call trying to figure out what went wrong. So it’s not that Rust is harder, it’s just different. It takes a paradigm shift in how we think about writing safe and secure code. Change is uncomfortable in general for humans and that paradigm shift is precisely why most (I hope not) people feel this way about Rust.
* I think Rust gives the compiler too much freedom to choose whether or not to apply Deref (and in what order). The whole .into() and From trait allows the compiler to perform arbitrary type conversions to make the code work (the standard library is full of similar "convenience" traits and functions). All of these tend to hide the types of a objects, making it hard to map a function call to an implementation (though a good IDE can help with that).
* I think implicit return values is a misfeature as it makes flow control implicit, hiding it from programmers reviewing the code. I'm also not fond of the question mark operator, though syntax highlighting helps a lot with that.
* Rust modules are generally too small so that you need hundreds of dependencies to do anything useful. Each of which you need to separately vendor and periodically update if you need deterministic builds.
* Async Rust is a hot mess right now
I didn't say perfect, I said closest to perfect. Regarding the implicit return types, it's all a matter of taste. I think they're very clean, but Rust is not forcing you to be implicit—you can be explicit if you like. e.g., if a function's return type is String, then whether you write the implicit "Hello".into() or the explicit "Hello".to_string() or String::from("Hello") is entirely up to you, and Rust will not complain.
> Is the borrow checker a pain in the ass? Yeah. But is it necessary?
You've missed the primary point of the post entirely. Borrow checker per se is not the problem; it's the sheer amount of everything. There's multiple ideas of perfection. Those of us to have very much enjoyed ostensibly imperfect Rust of 2018 find this particular, current flavour unappealing. It may as well be capable tool in deft hand, however, as-is the case with everything in life, you cannot help but ask yourself THE question; is it worth my effort? For me personally, if I were looking for better C/C++ in 2025, I would choose Zig before Rust any day of the week (one exception being Postgres stuff, pgrx ecosystem that is really special!)
But then again, anything beats writing C for a living.
Affine types, variance, higher-rank trait bounds, phantom data, MaybeUninit, and the whole macro and proc-macro systems are some examples of concepts that I found to be challenging when learning Rust.
Dyn-safety is another but I had encountered that previously in Swift.
I see that you're using gemma3n which is a 4B parameter model and utilizes around 3GB RAM. How do you handle loading/offloading the model into the RAM? Or is it always in the memory as long as the app is running?
Can relate. I've also shifted towards generating small snippets of code using LLMs, giving them a glance, and asking to write unit tests for them. And then I review the unit tests carefully. But integrating the snippets together into the bigger system, I always do that myself. LLMs can do it sometimes but when it becomes big enough that it can't fit into the context window, then it's a real issue because now LLMs doesn't know what's going on and neither do you. So, I'll advise you to use LLMs to generate tedious bits of code but you must have the overall architecture committed into your memory as well so that when AI messes up, at least you have some clue about how to fix it.
What's it called when you choose a task because it's easy, even if it's not what you need to do at all? I think that's what LLMs have activated in a lot of us: writing code used to be kinda hard, but now it's super easy, so let's just write more code.
The hard parts of engineering have always been decision making, socializing, and validating ideas against cold hard reality. But writing code just got easier so let's do that instead.
Prior to LLMs writing 10 lines of code might have been a really productive day, especially if we were able to thoughtfully avoid writing 1,000 unnecessary lines. LLMs do not change this.
Where? How? I get a totally blank home screen. If I subscribe to some channels, then manually go to subscriptions, it just shows new videos from those channels.
When I watch a video, then I get related other videos under that. Those seem reasonably related, but only a few usually successfully attract my attention.
It might matter what kind of content the initial video was. My subscriptions currently include Usagi Electric, Maggie May Fish, Rick Beato, EEVblog, Primagen, James Hoffman, and several more vintage tech like Adrain Black and Techmoan.
Back before they blanked out the home screen, my home screen did often have sssniperwolf and mr beast even though I never watch those. This was still with history turned off, just before a year or so ago the home screen still had content regardless of history.
Now those kinds of things never show up in the related recommendations following either a subscription or a manually searched video. Well I presume if I manually searched for mr beast I would get them attached to that.
Anyway I was mostly just taking a shot at YT for trying to coerce people into turning on history by making the experience, which I pay for, worse.
I can safely say they want history on, not just because the obvious we all just know it, but also because they say it themselves. In place the previous screen full of videos, now it always shows a message that is not only an active suggestion to turn history on, it's even worded like it's an error that you need fix. Every time. No concept of "yes, thank you, I have already intentiinally declined your kind offer. I didn't forget from 8 minutes ago, and after 15 years I didn't change my mind either." No, it just hits you with that front and center action item every. single. time. Maybe the 8341st time will be the one!
They are doing the simple math of it's free and effortless to make the machine say that infinite times, but each user has to spend a little effort to go around it every time they use the service. They win by pure attrition some percent of the time.
I agree with most of what you said. For me though, it's really hard to go to YouTube without wasting at least an hour. That's why I built this app. So far, it's working great for me. I've added my favorite channels into different lists based on categories and set up weekly reminders for all of them. For example, every Friday evening at 7 PM, I get an email about the latest videos from Veritasium, 3Blue1Brown, Mark Rober, Ben Eater, Steve Mould, SmarterEveryDay, and Tom Scott. This way, I don't feel the urge to go to YouTube and lose track of time.
Generating playlists is one of the things that Watchlist does. Here are a few more:
1) You can actually set very flexible notification schedules and use a medium of your choice (email, webpush) to receive the notifications about new/unwatched videos in a list.
2) You can keep track of your progress by marking the videos in a list Watched/Unwatched. This is good if you’re taking a course on YouTube.
A few things I am building in near future if all goes well:
1) Adding the “tags” functionality which will suggest similar channels to users based on the kind of videos & channels they’ve added.
2) A video summary feature which will send a short summary of the video to you.
Thanks for sharing this. This tool is a very small subset of what I am trying to do with Watchlist.
1) In the current version, you can actually set very flexible notification schedules and use a medium of your choice (email, webpush) to receive the notifications about new videos.
2) You can create lists by cloning YouTube’s playlists and then keep track of your progress by marking them Watched/Unwatched. This is good if you’re taking a course on YouTube.
3) I am working on adding the “tags” functionality which will suggest similar channels to users based on the kind of videos & channels they’ve added.
4) I will also be adding a video summary feature which will send a short summary of the video to you.
I have many more features in mind, just need to get some initial validation of the idea.
