miniblog.

I've realised that I have a much better understanding of the semantics of languages that are value oriented. You avoid murky questions like this: try: raise Exception('') except: return 1 finally: return 2 There's no 'right' answer here when choosing how a PL should work.

Really impressive result: using generative adverserial networks to increase the resolution of videos! Abstract: https://ge.in.tum.de/publications/2019-tecogan-chu/ Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZXFXtfd-Ak

I'm playing with GatsbyJS today. It's a really interesting design approach: it's a static site generator, but it uses a GraphQL server during development so you can pull data from lots of different sources.

Blogged: The Siren Song of Little Languages

Wish, a huge online retail app targeting affordable products, and the problems of scale:

The limitations of Twitter's design today, and how it's hard to structure conversations:

I'm really impressed with the TabNine completion engine's design. By building on top of the language server protocol, it can offer its completion tricks to any programming language! https://tabnine.com/semantic

.mdx files are a mix of markdown and JSX, used for writing content heavy websites like blogs: https://reacttraining.com/blog/gatsby-mdx-blog/ Interesting file format that I haven't seen before.

On the difficulty of making money from FOSS, and how having a widely popular project does not mean it has commercial value:

LLVM 8 is out, with improved RISC-V support!

I'm all in favour of simple websites without unnecessary JS, but I find a large comment section skews my sense of article length. If I'm reading a medium length post, the scrollbar can be very misleading if there are many comments.

Amazing writeup of how a series of exploits were chained together to root a mac, starting from a Safari JS JIT bug.

Unicode 12.0 has Egyptian hieroglyph formatting, exotic chess pieces, and a bunch of new emoji! https://blog.unicode.org/2019/03/announcing-unicode-standard-version-120.html

Regex search of gigabyte scale code repositories: https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep Similar to Etsy's Hound, which is also excellent.

Today I learnt that gcc can mean 'Google Closure Compiler'. It's a sophisticated compiler, but I suppose its use cases are sufficiently non-overlapping with C compilers to avoid confusion. Surprised me though.