miniblog.

Thoughtful longform analysis of the different video on demand services, and how they aren't necessarily competitors: they have very different approaches and goals.

Open source is sometimes simply groups of people helping each other out because they asked nicely.

I'm really intrigued by Next, a scriptable browser. https://next.atlas.engineer/ There's definitely interest in alternative browsers designs, e.g. Conkeror and vimium. The neat design of Next is that it's deliberately abstracting the underlying engine, giving future flexibility.

Firefox 69 is shipping with protection from cryptocurrency mining running without the user's knowledge: https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/09/firefox-will-now-let-you-block-fingerprint-tracking-and-cryptojacking/ I know CI services like Travis have to worry about this, but I wouldn't have thought JS mining would be anywhere near worthwhile.

Some cunning NLP research which has found that really simple statistical models (e.g. does the sentence contain "not"?) is sufficient to answer a good number of text comprehension datasets: https://thegradient.pub/nlps-clever-hans-moment-has-arrived/

I've been learning about the fascinating hobby of amateur radio: https://youtu.be/ysOq6ywTSzU It reminds me of chat roulette, except all the users have a license and many of them build their own equipment!

Fun creative side project: get an email alert when your dog barks! https://github.com/FoxDotBuild/woof-alert (The author describes it as a 'project to learn something' rather than solving a real need they have.)

Golang's package manager has a rather elegant shared checksum database (a merkle tree), making it easy to trust mirrors:

Shower thought: in the 80s it was more common to have a protocol rather than a single canonical implementation (e.g. SMTP). Presumably this was partly due to the diversity of computing platforms then? These days it's often sufficient to have a website and a mobile app.

Comparing WeWork with AWS: https://stratechery.com/2019/the-wework-ipo/

Today I learnt that GNU readline supports editor macros! If you often find yourself typing something, you can create a shortcut.

There are periodic dumps of usernames and passwords acquired maliciously, forcing people to change passwords. Presumably it's only a matter of time before we start seeing similar dumps of wi-fi passwords?

Amazing write-up of security exploits found in iOS: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-dive-into-ios-exploit.html (Found in the wild and used indiscriminately! These weren't targeted attacks.)

I am delighted to announce propcheck, a property-based testing library for #emacs lisp! https://github.com/Wilfred/propcheck If you like quickcheck or hypothesis, you should like this too!

I've realised that there are text transformations I can do in markdown that often aren't possible in rich text. E.g. from [foo bar](https://example.com/) to foo [bar](https://example.com/) Rich text usually forces me to remove the old link then highlight the new range.