miniblog.

How to take a screenshot in the 80s: https://www.kmjn.org/snippets/wilson85_screenshot.html How things have changed! That process is hilariously complex compared with today's screenshot facilities.

Operating systems, smartphone platforms, they're all rather oriented around isolated programs/apps. Is this Conway's Law in action? Does a more integrated system require a more integrated developer community?

Great to see the Python community converging on packaging, dependency management, and even project structure!

The Opus sound codec had released 1.3, and there's a noticeable quality improvement! 9kb/s voice quality is really impressive. https://people.xiph.org/~jm/opus/opus-1.3/ It does make you wonder where the limit is. These are significant improvement in an already efficient codec.

Woah, Slack has bought Hipchat and Stride from Atlassian! https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/26/slack-acquires-hipchat-and-stride-from-atlassian/ Whilst they were niche players, Hipchat was one of the few on-premises commercial group chat products available.

Superb article on building a real time rich text editor: https://ckeditor.com/blog/Lessons-learned-from-creating-a-rich-text-editor-with-real-time-collaboration/ Discusses operational transforms with hierarchical text (e.g. you edit text whilst the other user makes part of it a link) and markers (persistent regions that automatically move when you edit).

How reliable should we consider Google search results to be? From

Contrasting Bing with Google, and whether search engines should be portals: https://www.wired.com/story/tried-bing-search-google-microsoft/

Type systems can be nominal or structural, they might force an option type, and they might even encode side effects (IO or exceptions). I think the biggest single improvement (where compiles≈correct) is exhaustiveness checking. This produces thoroughness and often robustness.

I don't always have anything to add, but I always appreciate folks responding to my toots <3

An incredibly ambitious project to archive all software source code, *and* all commits, to preserve it for future historians: https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/10/231366-building-the-universal-archive-of-source-code/fulltext Impressively, they've already mirrored GitHub and Debian!

It was amazingly easy to add Tramp support to deadgrep.el. A single function change and suddenly you can run searches on remote machines too!

Whilst IPv6 addresses are often longer, I do like that ::1 is less typing than 127.0.0.1.

This is a neat idea (alias works in zsh, bash needs a script). Even better, perhaps our websites need to exclude $ from being copied the way line numbers are usually excluded. https://twitter.com/brandon_rhodes/status/1050570678032850944

Websites designed for desktop often don't work well on mobile. I've started noticing sites where the opposite happens: they've gone mobile-first, and the desktop UI suffers. It probably makes sense to prioritise mobile, but it's hard to do a good job on such diverse platforms.