miniblog.

Adding differentiation as a first class concept in Swift, enabling stepping through ML code and type safety:

I write a considerable amount of markdown these days, but I've developed a numbering style that is deliberately not part of the syntax. (1) Foo. Bar. (2) Baz. Auto (re-)numbering can be really surprising, and numbered sections tend to be narrower and harder to read.

The development of multicore Haskell, its runtime and garbage collector:

Today I learnt that there's a vim implementation of paredit!

On the importance of 'microbrowsers', small HTTP agents that fetch web pages to be displayed in embedded card UIs: https://24ways.org/2019/microbrowsers-are-everywhere/

Homebrew console game tools mean that you can write Gameboy games on a modern machine but also offer them on web platforms too! https://www.gbstudio.dev/

I've found Inbox Zero to be useful approach with many communication systems: maintain a separate TODO list, minimise email, process them oldest first. There's a failure mode though: You get productive, allow the input rate to increase, then one day you massively fall behind. 😧

The "Rule Of Least Power" makes a great argument in favour of less computationally capable languages. It claims this helped HTML/CSS adoption. https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html Applying this principle, I'd expect total languages to be popular. This hasn't happened AFAICT: what's missing?

@greenjon I used to follow the Openmoko project with interest! I'm not sure I'd want a dev phone as my only device, but I often carry two phones anyway. I'm really excited about the pine watch too.

I've realised that I don't have a good sense of how much a website costs. Presumably it has gone down significantly over time? If you need bespoke customisations there's labour costs, but a basic VPS can do a lot. CPUs and data transfer are both cheap.

The consequences of forcing users to log in before they can access content: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/login-walls/ It makes sense for very personalised services like email, but I wonder how much stores could increase their sales by offering 'checkout as guest'.

The challenges of web components, with string attributes and DOM-based APIs:

Generalised computation is becoming less common: it's much easier to run or debug arbitrary code on a Linux/BSD machine than anything else. It's even worse on mobile though: simply *writing* is hard and creation is hindered further.

Why are papers still primarily distributed as PDFs? It seems to be easier to generate a PDF from HTML than the reverse. I'm a big fan of arxiv-vanity but it's awkward reading other papers in handheld devices.

Dependency management in Go: https://research.swtch.com/vgo-principles There's a tradeoff between work for libraries (declare your minimum version/any incompatibilities) vs work for programs (investigate when dependencies aren't compatible). If programs are more common, should we empower them?