miniblog.

Stack Overflow is adding a new Ask Question wizard, with a lot more structure to guide users!

Programming in Rust has become so much easier than when I first started. Not only the continuing polish of the core tools (e.g. error message clarity, rustfmt is bundled now) but also the increasing breadth and quality of the libraries available!

The use of emoji/likes to signal the end of an online conversation: https://allthingslinguistic.com/post/126044747014/im-especially-intrigued-by-use-13-a-twitter A useful convention!

Reports of a new hardware bug in Intel CPUs, exploiting the Visualization of Internal Signals Architecture: https://hardwaresfera.com/noticias/hardware/se-ha-descubierto-una-vulnerabilidad-muy-grave-en-los-procesadores-de-intel/ My Spanish is rubbish, and I can't find any English coverage yet. Looks like it's from a recent conference and they've given 90 days to patch.

Email innovated over many other messaging systems by adding structure. To/Cc/Bcc, Subject/Message. Could it have gone further? Should it have mandated more metadata?

The challenges of digitising hospitals, both cultural and technical:

A wonderful tutorial on adding random emojis to your bash prompt. Covers shell script arrays, escape sequences, and even the mysterious $PS2 variable!

It's funny how 'tap to pay by phone' apps show a picture of a credit card. Is it a temporary skeuomorphism to help users understand, or will it become a generic symbol like the floppy disk 💾?

Most online stores seem to prefer explicit pagination rather than infinite scroll. Perhaps infinite scroll is better for time-oriented content, unlike a catalogue? Or maybe it helps sales in some fashion?

Maybe Not by Rich Hickey: https://youtu.be/YR5WdGrpoug Makes an interesting point on Maybe/Either: they require updating the call site, even for compatible changes! E.g. from returning a Maybe Foo to returning a Foo. Argues for *union* types.

I have days where I communicate more in written form than spoken. Given the popularity of messaging on smartphones, and the frequency of emails in the average workplace, will we reach a point where text is the most common medium? Has it happened already?

@MonzoStatus @monzo your status page suggests that Monzo is very broken: https://mondo.statuspage.io/ -- is this true?

Usually, npmtrends is a great way of choosing a library that's widely used and probably more reliable and better documented. When choosing a JS parser, the options are remarkably close!

Several times a year I get emails from academic projects that have crawled GitHub and want to do surveys. I wish them luck, but there's a tragedy of the commons going on here.

If you pay users to store copies of your data, how do you ensure that they don't claim they have extra copies? An interesting problem! Public Incompressible Encoding for e.g. FileCoin: https://hackingdistributed.com/2018/08/06/PIEs/