On instant gratification versus memory forming in the Internet age: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-25/yes-the-internet-can-make-us-happier
I have fond memories of meeting Internet friends in person, learning new skills, and even games I enjoyed a teen. I'm not sure whether Internet activities are less memory forming.
miniblog.
Are you spending a lot of time looking at this content, or are you just forgetful? I'm never quite sure how to react to Google's visit counts when I search for things.
Nifty demo of a git GUI in Pharo Smalltalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdBHpdyFgZE
As the Pharo community moves towards using git more, of course they're going to build impressive UIs!
Words per minute is an unfortunate measure of typing speed. The average length of letters differs between natural languages. For many computing activities it's even less representative: IDE shortcuts, punctuation in programming, etc.
Since AlphaZero isn't open source, a group of enthusiasts have written a public project Leela Chess Zero based on the paper. When new versions of the paper come out, they are able to refine their implementation! https://blog.lczero.org/2018/12/alphazero-paper-and-lc0-v0191.html
I'm coming round to the view that services should avoid implementing their own username and password system. It's easy to screw up (cf crypto) such that a DB compromise leaks users' passwords for other sites.
It's also more convenient for users, who don't need a pw manager.
Incompatible Lego elements, and combinations that are avoided in Lego products: https://bramlambrecht.com/tmp/jamieberard-brickstress-bf06.pdf
Round Numbers and Security Returns by Edward Johnson et al: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7731/c305735ecb9cf3f3f48afff5293ecb934e14.pdf
Prices of stocks tend to cluster around round numbers! The paper doesn't find any clear explanation, but it seems likely it's a human bias somewhere.
At what rate is the library ecosystem improving? If you could only use a 1/2/5 year old cache of npm/Maven/gem repositories, how much would it bother you?
Programmatically generating chess puzzles from a database of games played by users: https://lichess.org/blog/U4sjakQAAEAAhH9d/how-training-puzzles-are-generated
The try! macro has been removed in Rust 2018 edition! https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/53686#issuecomment-417441634
(It's now its own keyword.)
Plans for low-level font rendering API in Rust and ultimately Firefox: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aw41q_izail-p99mN8dHrJeh9tMQ-Pldi54W6m7MHU8/edit
Rendering fonts is one of those hugely complex issues that computer solve and I'm very ignorant about. We are lucky to not start with blank machines.
Today I learnt that clippy doesn't run on your tests by default! `cargo clippy --all-targets` will make lots of additional useful suggestions on your Rust code.
Trying to update bfc for recent LLVM, and reviewing the Rust docs to see what I need to update. Not sure if I should be complimented or concerned that bfc is suggested as an API example! https://crates.io/crates/llvm-sys
New features in Java 12, including a new switch statement!
https://blog.gypsyengineer.com/en/tech/what-is-new-in-java-12.html
Impressive bug investigation story using Jepsen to test Cockroach DB: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/jepsen-tests-lessons/
Training a neural net on Linux kernel patches to decide which ones should be cherry-picked to stable: https://lwn.net/Articles/764647/
(Features used: 10,000 most common words, code metrics, author IDs.)
Google research concludes that there's no viable fix for Spectre in vulnerable hardware: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/149-security/12556-google-says-spectre-and-meltdown-are-too-difficult-to-fix.html
An incredible paper showing a technique for compaction in C/C++ when the program can futz with raw memory addresses!
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04738
I've written a lot of lisp, including a respectable number of macros, and I don't think I've ever been caught out by hygiene.
I've definitely written broken macros that expanded to the wrong thing though.
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