Technology seems to tend toward integration: my desktop used to have a separate smartcard, modem, network card: all now integrated hardware.
https://about.gitlab.com/2018/10/16/github-launch-continuous-integration/ talks about a similar effect in GitHub: from hosting code to issues+wiki+projects+security+CI.
miniblog.
Excellent article on level design in games to encourage player exploration, and considering the movement motivations: https://gamasutra.com/blogs/AndrewYoder/20190808/348237/The_Door_Problem_of_Combat_Design.php
Typing out a Python program in vim, using purely speech recognition! https://youtu.be/ddFI63dgpaI
The tool used in the video is Talon: https://talonvoice.com/
One Phabricator feature I really miss in GitHub is persistently associating commits with PRs.
Phabricator commit messages have a specific syntax to show what change they're associated with. You can amend the commit without losing that metadata.
Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices: A Simple, Low-Cost, Effective Method for Increasing Transparency https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002456
'Open Data' badges on scientific papers hugely increased the amount of open data. Reminds me of READMEs with testing badges!
Foldit is an online game where users compete to fold the structures of proteins.
It's remarkable to see an example of a brute compute tool (Rosetta@home) being replaced by human analysis! I generally expect to see the reverse, especially as ML grows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit
A wonderful video from 1995 introducing the Self language.
It demonstrates a uniform evaluation model, "direct" programming where you can modify object inheritance live, break apart GUIs and build new ones from methods, and even a cheesy CGI finish!
https://youtu.be/Ox5P7QyL774
Could you build an entirely automated open source project?
For example, suppose you're trying to make the fastest gzip library. You could write a bot that automatically accepted and released any pull requests that improved the benchmark! No human intervention needed at all.
It's rather meta, but I've been really enjoying https://github.com/tonini/overseer.el. If you have a test suite for your elisp library, you probably use ert-runner to confirm your project works in a fresh Emacs instance.
overseer.el then allows you to run ert-runner tests from inside Emacs!
Looking back on 10 years of the verified seL4 microkernel: https://microkerneldude.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/10-years-sel4-still-the-best-still-getting-better/
Includes some interesting design notes and comments on avoiding a kernel heap entirely.
Some of my OSS projects are largely feature complete. For them, virtually every commit is just fixing bugs reported.
It's a strange routine, because it means the time I spend maintaining is dependent on the bug report rate, which largely depends on the size of the user base.
There will be an EmacsConf this year, on the 2nd of November! https://emacsconf.org/2019/
There's an open call for propsals: https://emacsconf.org/2019/cfp (deadline 31st of August)
I still can't decide whether M-x ielm fits into an optimal elisp workflow.
The 'strict Emacs' view is that it's better to use buffers for everything, so you can edit and build up expressions there.
The 'tailored UI' view is that ielm is better, because it's a dedicated REPL.
@azure@pleroma.site Agreed, just-so stories often sound plausible and then some releases a great Free software implementation of $THING.
I do suspect there are some domains where the incentives don't work for FOSS though. Projects needs to be fun to work on (for small hobbyist/side projects) or valuable for corporations to publish (so they hire someone to work on it).
AAA games or tax software probably won't become FOSS. Am I too pessimistic?
It's weird how smartphone game design has converged on certain features. I downloaded Tetris (Blitz) and I could spend money on in-game currency, it had daily challenges, and even XP!
I'm not sure how much this relates to revenue vs users just preferring this design.
ADSL works on two metres of wet string (if the water is salty), giving 3.5Mb/s downlink! https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet-string.html?m=1
It's oddly frustrating writing tests for a test library. You want better testing features (hence writing the library), but you have to write tests without them (due to bootstrapping.
I used to hear debates over whether proprietary software or open source was higher quality, but I haven't in some time now.
Perhaps it's because virtually all software stacks are partly open source now?
Gerbil Scheme has a great looking website with a friendly overview: https://cons.io/
How does Rust allow different language versions ("epochs") to interoperate? https://stackoverflow.com/q/57332016/509706
The SO answer even includes the relevant source code from the compiler!
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