Await a minute, why bother?
A great discussion of what Rust's async syntax enables over futures, particularly with conditionals and borrowing.
https://docs.rs/dtolnay/0.0.3/dtolnay/macro._01__await_a_minute.html
miniblog.
Unison is exploring the idea of storing source code by the hash of its AST, which allows some interesting refactoring and testing designs: https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/09/26/unison_programming_language/
One of the best internal talks I've seen was a teammate demonstrating Docker in the early days of containers.
After explaining the concepts, he showed running `rm -rf /` in a container shell. The drama value made the talk way more memorable and concrete.
Here's a computing paradigm that I think (hope) will become more common: context flowing between devices.
I want to switch between devices (e.g. laptop/smartphone/TV/smart speaker) and have state follow me (e.g. music/messaging/browser/documents).
High level programming languages and internet-oriented package managers have definitely made programmers more productive. Smaller teams can do more.
I don't think we expected the result though: major products can end up spending on libraries written by a single maintainer!
Using machine learning to help moderate Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/09/17/meet-the-bots-that-help-moderate-stack-overflow/
It's a grassroots campaign! There's definitely value in human moderation but it's helpful to automatically spot e.g. unkind comments to flag early.
How has V8 reduced memory without hurting runtime performance? Lazily building function feedback data, GCing little used bytecodes, and even avoiding generating source positions!
https://v8.dev/blog/v8-lite
What exactly is a subtype?
I've gone through a whole range of mental models as I've learnt about type systems.
How do you think about them?
Twitter treats #foo and $bar as special syntax due to emergent behaviour of users.
I keep seeing similar emergent features in other domains, e.g. airport wifi using '_Foo Wifi' to ensure it's sorted first. Ideally there'd be a priority flag, so a printer is never shown first.
I'm regularly impressed by the engineering quality of OpenBSD.
They're very much keen C developers, but many of their techniques apply to other PL communities. Software designed collectively, refactoring for clear design, even things like pledge.
Fun research demonstration of multi agent completion for machine learning training. The content is interesting, but the cute visualisations really add to the effect: https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/
On the value of tracking upstream open source projects: https://github.blog/2019-09-09-running-github-on-rails-6-0/
I'm amazed to learn that there are voice codecs that function at 700 bits/second! https://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452
The target use case is amateur radio but I'm sure there's a range of useful applications.
On the dynamics of memory unsafe code, the economics of big finding, and future trends: https://www.cloudatomiclab.com/fuzz/
Excellent deep dive into the chain of events that led to an outage at Cloudflare in July: https://blog.cloudflare.com/details-of-the-cloudflare-outage-on-july-2-2019/
Making your JS run faster, including some interesting comments on how expensive literal parsing can be: https://v8.dev/blog/cost-of-javascript-2019
Sometimes I wonder of the class browser is a local maximum for class/method definition in Smalltalk.
It works well, but the pane design seems arbitrary.
I know it's common to define methods from the debugger too, but perhaps other UIs could suit the ST model as well?
Remarkable discussion of the use of emoji as evidence in court: when is it evidence of harassment or a threat of violence? What if it renders differently on different devices? https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/08/tech/emoji-law/index.html
Old meets new: van eck phreaking with neural networks! https://leveldown.de/blog/tensorflow-sidechannel-analysis/
What happens to developers specialise in a technology that has become obsolete? They tend to be very adaptable: https://qz.com/work/1702462/what-happens-to-tech-workers-when-their-skills-become-obsolete/
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