I used to read articles about how consumer CPUs were going to grow the number of cores exponentially, but most stopped at 4.
This is for server CPUs, but it's amazing to hear about 64 core parts!
https://www.techquila.co.in/7nm-amd-epyc-rome-cpu-64/
miniblog.
When I started out writing lisp, I found the distinction between foo and 'foo tricky to grasp. It bothered me that 'foo wasn't printed 'foo.
I think this is easier to learn when symbols are printed differently. If 'foo is printed user::foo it's easier to grasp what a symbol is.
It used to be much more common for websites to allow users to modify CSS on pages that showed their content. MySpace profiles were sometimes so busy they were hard to read.
This seems to have almost entirely disappeared. Reddit is the only exception I can think of today.
Smalltalk shows a lint error if you recurse unconditionally: you've basically written a pointless infinite loop.
I've not seen lints for this elsewhere, but it's a really nice touch.
Today I learnt that Arch Linux has a paccache.timer built-in service. This service (you can enable it from systemctl) ensures your package cache doesn't grow excessively.
Really handy, though I wonder why it isn't enabled by default.
Skimming the docs, it's interesting to see that they allow you to return values inside a void function: https://sorbet.org/docs/sigs
The value is thrown away by their signature wrappers though.
Stripe has released a static gradual type system for Ruby! https://sorbet.org/blog/2019/06/20/open-sourcing-sorbet
Perhaps the moral here is to worry about a building a great runtime, and only worry about the type system if your language gains traction?
Super impressed to see that Monzo (a modern mobile-first UK bank) has published a detailed post-mortem of a recent outage: https://monzo.com/blog/2019/06/20/why-bank-transfers-failed-on-30th-may-2019/
Favouring interface inheritance over class inheritance, and some examples of gotchas: https://www.javaworld.com/article/2073649/why-extends-is-evil.html
Perhaps 'awesome lists' on GitHub are today's web ring?
Although the nice property of awesome lists is that anyone can contribute to them, not just the original authors of the sites.
Smalltalk takes a hardline view on syntax errors and undefined variables: you can't save a new method until it's fixed.
It's a nice way to work, as methods tend to be small, so virtually all your code is in a runnable state all the time.
The performance overheads of webassembly (roughly ~55% native), and attributing them to design decisions vs implementations: https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.09056
Neat Emacs package of the day: git-messenger: https://github.com/syohex/emacs-git-messenger
It's a popup for git blame on the current line. Feels much lighter weight than displaying blame information on the whole file.
Factoring out observability from business logic, with a worked example: https://martinfowler.com/articles/domain-oriented-observability.html
This excellent post by @patio11 on building a personal portfolio: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/do-not-end-the-week-with-nothing makes an interesting comment about GitHub. He argues that a custom website for a project is much better than just having a repo!
A discussion of trends in Wikipedia contributors and the consequences of its policy changes: https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism
I'm regularly impressed by just how good Google Translate is.
I wonder if we'll reach a point where translation tools replace foreign language dictionaries for language learners? A dictionary might say a word has 5 meanings, but a translation tool can consider the context.
There's a threshold where it's just easier to write a patch than to file a bug. It's more likely to result in a fix, but it can be more labour intensive.
I don't know where the line is. It seems to depend on the community's interest in patches, and whether you have commit privs.
I'm not a text supremacist. I've seen fabulous GUIs for inspecting data (database explorers, morphic halos, browser tools). WYSIWYG has a ton of advantages.
Yet I can't find a rich text UI I prefer over writing markdown directly. It's less surprising.
Demographic changes on the internet, the cost of access, and the eternal September in class terms: https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-granddad-on-the-internet
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