miniblog.

Browser tab sync between phones and laptops is pretty good these days, but I've not found a good equivalent for the clipboard. Are workflows too different? It seems like it could be really handy.

It's fascinating that older lisps let you adjust the load factor in hash maps yet few newer languages expose this setting. For example, Rust doesn't have it yet:

I paid £8 for an ebook today that was 1.25 MiB. I think that's most I've ever paid for content per byte.

Bill Gates wrote about the importance of content online, the challenge that publishers (magazines, newspapers) will face, and the potential of making money with online adverts, all in a 1996 article!

Amazon is building a smart hone ecosystem that's easy to integrate and has a much simpler out-of-the-box experience: https://staceyoniot.com/amazon-just-pulled-an-apple-on-the-smart-home/

It's funny how competing tools get created around similar times. Both git and mercurial were created in 2005!

Rust 2018 has a much simpler approach to importing modules: https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/edition-guide/rust-2018/module-system/path-clarity.html

Bayou is a tool that can automatically generate Java code from a 'sketch' of the desired types and methods to use! https://info.askbayou.com/how-to-use-bayou/ This uses a neural net trained on a corpus of existing Java code.

Good read on the early history of JSON, and how it became the ubiquitous format it is today:

Today I learnt that Emacs has a notion of 'permanent' variables! https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Creating-Buffer_002dLocal.html These are variables that persist even when you change major mode (which generally resets buffer-local variables).

If you download an Emacs source tarball, it comes with .elc files so you don't need to byte compile anything. This enables you to compile the remaining (much smaller) C parts quickly: I've seen installs take under a minute!

Emacs as a platform: https://two-wrongs.com/why-you-should-buy-into-the-emacs-platform Great overview of some of the Emacs killer apps!

Google is setting up an independent committee for the AMP standard: https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/18/17871666/google-amp-open-source-committee-governance-instant-article

Fascinating discussion of whether it's safe to read past the end of a buffer if you stay on the same page: https://stackoverflow.com/q/37800739 (A technique used in some high performance assembly code!)

Fun short article on the need for new and innovative computer architectures now Moore's Law has ended: