miniblog.

Apple will start treating iPads differently to iPhones (rather than iOS on both) so apps can target iPad traits more effectively:

Bee Smalltalk is an impressive self-hosting Smalltalk implementation! https://esug.org/data/ESUG2014/IWST/Papers/iwst2014_Design and implementation of Bee Smalltalk Runtime.pdf

A cute Pharo IDE feature that I miss on other editors: you can view all the subclasses that implement a method, and edit them from inside that search UI! It's a lovely way to refactor.

Pharo doesn't distinguish between the IDE and the running program you're developing. This enables fun features, like opening a class editor from a value in a REPL. (In this picture I'm learning about the class you get from array literals.)

Applying machine learning to paywalls, only opening content if your signals suggest the user might subscribe!

The level of sophistication in tool-assisted speed runs of video games is really impressive. "Both bosses are incredibly annoying: they are liable to desynch on any changes to earlier levels due to differences in the RNG." https://tasvideos.org/2416S.html

DARPA sponsoring more radical hardware designs, designs driven by software use cases, and even 3D system-on-chip designs targeting old manufacturing techniques! https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/darpas-planning-a-major-remake-of-us-electronics-pay-attention

Where do you go for data on programming language popularity/usage? In the past I've relied on TIOBE, but I've come to prefer Stack Overflow survey data. It seems to match my (N=small) observations.

I increasingly view data in the context of a cloud service. Until a commit has been pushed, or my kindle book position has been synced, it doesn't feel finished. In both cases the data is already available to me, but not shareable or backed up.

"the satisfaction that I get out of building Envoy and working with the larger community is primarily driven by a desire to have huge industry impact and solve deep computer science problems. It’s not driven by maximizing my monetary income" https://twitter.com/mattklein123/status/875921591489576960

The evolution of Rust compiler error messages, the approach taken by the core team, and even some sample code from the Rust lexer and parser!

Interesting, nuanced discussion of Leela Chess Zero (a neural net) beating Stockfish in a recent competition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027838 Whilst the original DeepMind result was impressive, it's great to see reproducible results and a project that's available to the public.

5nm processes for chip fabrication, the companies that are offering it, and how it's mobile processors that drive the cutting edge more than FPGAs today: https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/another-step-toward-the-end-of-moores-law

Pharo 8 is shaping up really nicely. When I find issues with Pharo 7 I often find that Pharo 8 has fixed them already! There's also a bunch of UI polish and a dark theme default.

Had my first Pharo pull request accepted! https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/3439 🎉