I'm amazed to learn that Tesla normally disables parts of the battery on cheap models, but was able to remotely enable the full battery during hurricane Dorian!
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/09/12/how-the-world-will-change-as-computers-spread-into-everyday-objects
A car is turning into a computer with wheels, and that computer is sometimes a thin client.
miniblog.
Designing interfaces that take full advantage of the capabilities of the human body:
Remarkable history of building radios during the second world war in prisoner of war camps. Very few premade components and all schematics were from memory!
A discussion of different Rust libraries and the cost of using them (compile time, binary size).
A fun 1994 article about the first purchase on the web using encryption!
Phil Brandenberger uses his visa credit card, X-Mosaic and PGP to purchase a $12 'compact audio disk' by Sting.
It includes an explanation of the World Wide Web too :)
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/12/business/attention-shoppers-internet-is-open.html
The Rust mascot is a crab called Ferris. I've only just realised this is a pun! Ferris/ferrous.
Await a minute, why bother?
A great discussion of what Rust's async syntax enables over futures, particularly with conditionals and borrowing.
Unison is exploring the idea of storing source code by the hash of its AST, which allows some interesting refactoring and testing designs: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/09/26/unison_programming_language/
One of the best internal talks I've seen was a teammate demonstrating Docker in the early days of containers.
After explaining the concepts, he showed running `rm -rf /` in a container shell. The drama value made the talk way more memorable and concrete.
Here's a computing paradigm that I think (hope) will become more common: context flowing between devices.
I want to switch between devices (e.g. laptop/smartphone/TV/smart speaker) and have state follow me (e.g. music/messaging/browser/documents).
High level programming languages and internet-oriented package managers have definitely made programmers more productive. Smaller teams can do more.
I don't think we expected the result though: major products can end up spending on libraries written by a single maintainer!
Using machine learning to help moderate Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/17/meet-the-bots-that-help-moderate-stack-overflow/
It's a grassroots campaign! There's definitely value in human moderation but it's helpful to automatically spot e.g. unkind comments to flag early.
How has V8 reduced memory without hurting runtime performance? Lazily building function feedback data, GCing little used bytecodes, and even avoiding generating source positions!
What exactly is a subtype?
I've gone through a whole range of mental models as I've learnt about type systems.
How do you think about them?
Twitter treats #foo and $bar as special syntax due to emergent behaviour of users.
I keep seeing similar emergent features in other domains, e.g. airport wifi using '_Foo Wifi' to ensure it's sorted first. Ideally there'd be a priority flag, so a printer is never shown first.
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