Food for thought: suppose better libraries/tools over the next 5 years doubled software productivity. A six month project today would take three months in 2024.
Would we even notice? How often do we compare like-for-like projects for improvements in development speed?
miniblog.
TIL there are AI competitions for rock-paper-scissors! https://www.rpscontest.com/
Is writing a perfectly space efficient data format comparable to hand writing assembly today? Today's generic compression algorithms are excellent.
Moving from SMS (charged per message) to data-based chat apps shows how billing impacts usage.
It's quite common for me to split text up into several messages for clarity. I didn't do that when I first used SMS!
Being able to choose your target browsers in Babel is a little like -march in a native code compiler!
Browser targeting has the nice property that you can collect popularity metrics to make quantitative decisions too.
A reminder of how people from different programming language backgrounds will judge your language choices. (Everyone has biases and their own favourite stack too.)
Despite the library churn, JS is a very stable language underneath. All my old projects still work, although some of them depend on long abandoned libraries.
Does a "blog comments" style system make sense on a PL docs site? E.g. official PHP docs: https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.count.php or community Clojure docs: https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/count
You want to promote contributions, but official docs are better off being patched. Tradeoffs!
GitHub enables you to do a ton via the browser, but AFAICS there's no way to rebase a pull request you've opened against someone's repo.
This is really handy when upstream has fixed tests. I've used it in some $JOB environments and it saves a few precious clicks.
Building a bug bounty system that attracts talented researchers, how much they earn, and how many bugs they find:
https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/01/14/on-bounties-and-boffins/
"In world championship [chess] matches, [...] players were ensconced behind polarized glass walls to prevent anyone in the audience from passing computer advice through signals."
AI and human chess today: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/human-chess-survives-artificial-intelligence-by-kenneth-rogoff-2018-11
@cstanhope I wondered the same thing!
Was he constrained by computer power at the beginning? Did he set out to spend three years typing, or was he just fascinated by the results each day?
I don't know the answers, sadly.
I've seen an interesting phenomenon where people watch videos on their phone even when sitting in a room with a TV.
I sometimes do it and I've met others who do it.
I think it's a partly habit. You pull out your phone in lots of environments which don't have a larger screen.
"smartphone sales have peaked, and seem to be levelling off at around 1.4bn units a year"
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/01/12/the-maturing-of-the-smartphone-industry-is-cause-for-celebration
The JavaScript ecosystem, dependencies, and reflecting on best practices for tooling:
https://increment.com/development/the-melting-pot-of-javascript/
There are so many topics where you can do online tutoring on Skype anywhere!
E.g. chess: https://lichess.org/coach foreign languages: https://www.verbling.com/find-teachers or programming: https://www.codementor.io/python-experts
It's amazing to have a teacher on the other side of the world.
On the design of programming languages, a great introduction to the constraints in choosing keywords, and a proposal for new keywords in Java: https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/amber-spec-experts/2019-January/000945.html
Do you ever find yourself doing something manually, even if the computer could do it with a bit of programming?
Even Ken Thompson has done this at times!
From
Over the last 15 years, ~50% of improvement in chess engines is due to smarter programming, not better hardware: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/76cwz4/15_years_of_chess_engine_development/
What other domains are like this? Lossy audio/image compression is definitely better today. There must be others situations.
One fascinating property of chess engine design is that a deeper tree search can be more valuable than a smarter board value metric.
If a metric is more accurate but more computationally expensive, it might not be worthwhile! It's a precision/brute force tradeoff.
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