miniblog.

"I met Intel employees at XDC who were working on a continuous integration system wherein Intel offers a massive Intel GPU farm to Mesa developers free-of-charge for working on the open source driver." https://drewdevault.com/2019/02/10/Wayland-misconceptions-debunked.html Companies promoting FOSS!
JS build systems have a definite learning curve, but we demand a ton of features in modern frontend development! https://css-tricks.com/annotated-build-processes/
Things to consider when auditing Rust code (especially if security sensitive):
A lovely demonstration of Objective-Smalltalk, and demonstrating some of the techniques that this style of PL enables:
Beating an optimising compiler at compiling division calculations: https://lemire.me/blog/2019/02/08/faster-remainders-when-the-divisor-is-a-constant-beating-compilers-and-libdivide/ (TIL that gcc, clang and libdivide use different techniques!)
DeepMind building an effective StarCraft AI, and why it's a hard game for a computer to play: https://deepmind.com/blog/alphastar-mastering-real-time-strategy-game-starcraft-ii/ (When you build an AI using a ton of self-play, it's pretty likely that you end up finding some novel strategies too!)
Computational photography: putting increasing smarts into camera devices: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2019/2/5/cameras-that-understand
Making programming accessible and enabling makers: https://hbr.org/2019/01/what-will-software-look-like-once-anyone-can-create-it (The analogy with IFTTT is interesting. Primarily it asks worthwhile questions!)
It seems to be easier to write a compiler that supports multiple languages than a VM. The vast majority of VMs target a single language. Sometimes PLs are written to target an existing VM (e.g. Clojure), but it's rare to take an existing PL and build a production implementation.
Streaming income for record labels has reached a point that total revenue is growing!
Lying in TCP ACKs to treat it as a best effort protocol:
My Linux systems used to use Xorg, but they all use Xwayland now. I'm not sure exactly when they switched. That's a big a achievement! Replacing a major part of the desktop Linux stack (without hiccups) is no easy frat.
Spent some interesting time reading about the Secure Scuttlebutt protocol. The idea of syncing all the posts of a person or server ('pub') by gossip reminds me of FireChat, but I wonder how it scales.
Bootstrapping a compiler is rather like yoghurt:
Moving from JS to statically typed Flow or TypeScript prevented 15% of bugs found in trunk: https://earlbarr.com/publications/typestudy.pdf Interesting paper. Whilst I think this number might be used to justify both static and dynamic types, I'll take anything lightweight that reduces my bug count!
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