miniblog.

Altruism versus fun in open source motivations: https://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2019/03/14/altruistic-innovation-and-the-study-of-software-economics/

Woah, today I learned that Rust has a doubly linked list in its standard library! It's a common example of something you can't do in purely safe Rust. Nonetheless, the core Rust devs have done the hard work already!

Shower thought: there's already some precedent for intelligent, self-driving vehicles. Horses! Admittedly the speeds are much lower.

At what point do we start talking about a minimum expected level automation in industries? To what extent are there industries that still lack basic automation?

A code completion tool built on n-grams could be very effective. Many special cases for types arise naturally from this. `foo.` is probably a void method, whereas `await foo.` is an async method. `return foo.` and `x = foo.` probably have different properties too.

Ideological diversity producing better articles for Wikipedia articles about both politics and science: https://m.nautil.us/issue/70/variables/wikipedia-and-the-wisdom-of-polarized-crowds

Reinventing, rethinking and playing with UI that is just fine already: https://uxdesign.cc/the-worst-volume-control-ui-in-the-world-60713dc86950 A nice example of creativity in software design, and the value of building things that already exist!

The rise of type inference and its impact on language syntax:

An interactive site that asks to press random buttons, and predicts your next key press: https://www.expunctis.com/2019/03/07/Not-so-random.html

It's now possible to edit results buffers inside deadgrep! This has been a much requested feature. https://github.com/Wilfred/deadgrep/issues/12 I'd love to hear any feedback you have on the design. #emacs

A fun project for generating random Stack Overflow questions with a neural net: https://stackroboflow.com/about/index.html It's also fascinating to read that the author was unable to predict question popularity, even by manual examination.

Why data science often doesn't suit specialisation by team members:

Contrasting consequences of bazaar and cathedral style development, and the role that fun plays:

It's funny how common round UI elements have become. Round avatars are widespread, and Android is moving to round app icons. It's especially odd when so many UIs are built on a grid. You necessarily waste space with circles. Are they more ergonomic for fingers, somehow?

I'm excited to learn that there are good tiling window manager options for macOS! https://koekeishiya.github.io/chunkwm/