Today was a bit hectic and I was running out of time to get a game in but I was able to get a solo game of Carcassonne played on the awesome mobile app.
Thankfully I was able to grab a glorious win for the day!
As always, thank you for reading and don't forget to stop and smell the meeples! :)
-Tim
One of my goals this year is to learn new things that take more than a few weeks to learn. I've been learning Rust. One of the claims I saw is that Rust's borrow mechanics allow it to optimize better than C++ does. I wanted to see this in action so I ran some simple examples through godbolt. Here's some C++ code that reads from array A and writes to array B:
int test(const int* A, int* B, int i) { int x = A[i]; B[i] = x+1; int y = A[i]; return x+y; }
This C++ code compiles to assembly, with -O2:
movsx rdx, edx lea rcx, [rdi+rdx*4] mov eax, DWORD PTR [rcx] lea edi, [rax+1] mov DWORD PTR [rsi+rdx*4], edi add eax, DWORD PTR [rcx] ret
Note that it is loading DWORD PTR [rcx] twice and loading DWORD PTR [rsi+…] once. That means it's accessing A[i]'s memory twice and B[i] once. It knows that A hasn't changed and it knows i hasn't changed but it doesn't know that A[i] hasn't changed. It's possible that A and B overlap. That means it has to load A[i] twice, even though it's marked const.
Here's the Rust version:
pub fn test(A: &[i32], B: &mut [i32], i: usize) -> i32 { let x = A[i]; B[i] = x+1; let y = A[i]; return x+y; }
and the output (some parts omitted):
push rax mov eax, DWORD PTR [rdi + 4*r8] … lea ecx, [rax + 1] mov DWORD PTR [rdx + 4*r8], ecx add eax, eax pop rcx ret
This code has only two DWORD PTR accesses. It knows that A is a shared reference (so there are no other writers), and B is a mutable reference (so there are no other readers). That means it can conclude that A and B can't overlap. Once it's read A[i] from memory it doesn't have to read it again. Cool!
C (but not C++) has the restrict keyword for this. You can tell the C compiler "trust me, these don't overlap", but C doesn't check. Rust checks this at compile time.
So far I'm enjoying learning Rust. It has many of the things I wanted in a language since the mid-1990s. I don't know if I'll actually use it for a real project, but that's not my goal right now. My goal is to learn some new things that challenge my brain, and Rust is doing that for me.
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| Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm will see the welcome return of a familiar face. |
Out of all the privacy-focused products and apps available on the market, Brave has been voted the best. Other winners of Product Hunt's Golden Kitty awards showed that there was a huge interest in privacy-enhancing products and apps such as chats, maps, and other collaboration tools.
Last year has been a pivotal one for the crypto industry, but few companies managed to see the kind of success Brave did. Almost every day of the year has been packed witch action, as the company managed to officially launch its browser, get its Basic Attention Token out, and onboard hundreds of thousands of verified publishers on its rewards platform.
Luckily, the effort Brave has been putting into its product hasn't gone unnoticed.
The company's revolutionary browser has been voted the best privacy-focused product of 2019, for which it received a Golden Kitty award. The awards, hosted by Product Hunt, were given to the most popular products across 23 different product categories.
Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt said:
"Our annual Golden Kitty awards celebrate all the great products that makers have launched throughout the year"
Brave's win is important for the company—with this year seeing the most user votes ever, it's a clear indicator of the browser's rapidly rising popularity.
If reaching 10 million monthly active users in December was Brave's crown achievement, then the Product Hunt award was the cherry on top.
The recognition Brave got from Product Hunt users shows that a market for privacy-focused apps is thriving. All of the apps and products that got a Golden Kitty award from Product Hunt users focused heavily on data protection. Everything from automatic investment apps and remote collaboration tools to smart home products emphasized their privacy.
AI and machine learning rose as another note-worthy trend, but blockchain seemed to be the most dominating force in app development. Blockchain-based messaging apps and maps were hugely popular with Product Hunt users, who seem to value innovation and security.
For those users, Brave is a perfect platform. The company's research and development team has recently debuted its privacy-preserving distributed VPN, which could potentially bring even more security to the user than its already existing Tor extension.
Brave's effort to revolutionize the advertising industry has also been recognized by some of the biggest names in publishing—major publications such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, NDTV, NPR, and Qz have all joined the platform. Some of the highest-ranking websites in the world, including Wikipedia, WikiHow, Vimeo, Internet Archive, and DuckDuckGo, are also among Brave's 390,000 verified publishers.
