miniblog.

Given the number of game companies that have re-released old games by bundling an OSS emulator, perhaps it's only a matter of time before Microsoft includes Wine in something!

Apparently eBay decided to change their background colour gradually, to avoid user backlash! https://kulor.medium.com/how-ebay-secretly-changed-their-background-colour-from-yellow-to-white-ffd9718e7bb

One nice thing about quadratic algorithms: if you can reduce your N, you get a really nice speedup.

I think I've used fewer third party libraries in bash scripts than in any other language. I just use the built-ins and invoke binaries. I can't think of any other programming language where the stdlib felt like it was sufficient.

YAML is a funny language: it's not Turing complete, but it can have arbitrary code execution bugs.

On the limits and perils of being data driven: https://twitchard.github.io/posts/2022-08-26-metrics-schmetrics.html (Worthwhile improvements are often not amenable to A/B testing, and metrics can harm intrinsic motivation.)

I've just released difftastic 0.34: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/releases/tag/0.34.0 Minor release, but it fixes some build issues introduced in 0.33, so worth upgrading if you've had any issues with 0.33 :)

It's perhaps appropriate that a programming language database has its own syntax for entries! https://github.com/breck7/pldb/commit/bde872b5b8e1cf9fb3114c1fbf3c40e405b5388d It looks like a simplified YAML I think.

PLDB is an ambitious project to catalogue all the different programming languages out there: https://pldb.com/lists/languages.html It's showing a ton of potential (over 4,000 items recorded!) although it's still pretty young (I just fixed the LLVM IR comment syntax).

The bottom type has a different name in a bunch of languages. I've seen nothing, _|_, !, never and empty. I don't know which is the most approachable to users though. `List[Empty]` reads very nicely for an empty list, whereas `never` reads nicely for error functions.

I've heard of quines, but today I learned about radiation-hardened quines! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)#Radiation-hardened These are quines where *any* single character can be removed and they still function. Fun concept, seems easier in a language with eval().

TIL about the box.leak() method in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/boxed/struct.Box.html#method.leak This leaks the box, but it also gives you a reference that can live longer! E.g. you can leak a Box<u64> and treat it as 'static. It makes sense, but being able to use a value after leaking is new idea to me.

@takloufer@fosstodon.org @emacsomancer Fascinating, an authoritative slide! Thanks for sharing :)

I admire hobbyists who build their own kernels, but the size of modern systems is intimidating. Even something like a Bluetooth stack is bigger than historic kernels, and tends to require multiple people. I think it's just the cost of compatibility? Tech collaboration is hard.

Sure, your templating language might be good, but is it so good that the manual includes a warning for addiction? 🙃