Thought Parsing

Well, why not? The usual answers boil down to either an appeal to arithmetic intuition (e.g. treating division as repeated subtraction, you can never subtract zero to get anywhere) or definition (you can't divide by zero because zero is defined not to have a multiplicative inverse, i.e. "because I said so"). But the former is mathematically naïve and the latter is unsatisfyingly circular. So let's dig in to why we want to define zero out of division.

Last time, I set out to build a Result<T, E> type in Kotlin, and discovered some awkwardness around parameterizing the types of the variants. This issue, I realize I totally forgot about covariance, which significantly mitigates the awkwardness.

Starting in Buster, Debian enabled the subpixel hinting functionality in Freetype (commonly known as the “Infinality” patches, though the enabled functionality is a small, more performant subset of the patches actually submitted by Infinality). To no one's greater surprise than my own, this badly broke my font rendering. Here's how I fixed it.