subset

Shoutout to the [wasm-bindgen](https://github.com/wasm-bindgen/wasm-bindgen) maintainers who do an awesome job of allowing Rust to be compiled to WASM smoothly. I built an [eigenvalue solver](https://abstractnonsense.xyz/blog/2025-12-31-eigenvalue-solv...) in Rust for an interactive component for my blog, and it was super smooth going. Felt like magic! I've noticed that the binary sizes can blow up a bit by including libraries, but if you're careful I think the binaries are pretty small, tbh.

I'm just picking up Julia for my DSP course at uni, and came across this nice intro. It's very well-paced for a first introduction to programming!

In Australia, the Reserve Bank is finally [banning surcharges](https://www.rba.gov.au/payments-and-infrastructure/review-of...) from October 1st. We also have the EFTPOS network, but the payment rails change depending on the card payment method.

Over the years, the "hidden fees" were accumulating, and card surcharges could hit 1-2.5%. Now, _most_ places don't have any fees (with some food places charging weekend surcharges and some egregious places adding unsolicited tips).

I learned R for statistical programming at uni, where there was less emphasis on vectorised computation, so it didn't jump to mind, but yes! I've never quite felt like numpy 'clicked' for me in the same way, though. It always felt a bit bolted on, which I suppose it is, as a library (though @ operator overloading etc makes things somewhat nicer now).

As it happens, I had the same job as the author at uni. I shelved books at the biomedical and sciences library. As a life-long book lover, it was a dream uni job being surrounded by all sorts of historical treatises on medical arcana.

I've been really exercising my non-fiction reading muscles of late. I'm trying weaponise it as an antidote to AI slop and doom-scrolling. My last read was Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Klepmann (the newly released second edition), it was a wonderful read!

I'm no fan of closed-source languages, and lord knows MATLAB has its warts. But I can't deny that it was pretty seamless to write efficient vectorised code for numerical simulations at uni. I don't have much experience with it, but my understanding is that Julia is the closest thing to a more modern and expressive language that has similar vectorisation capabilities.

Iago Leal's blog: https://iagoleal.com/

Some incredibly interesting perspectives on maths and computing