miniblog.

There are labels that make technology ideas sound more exciting. For example, 'augmented intelligence' was used early in the history of computing. (A pocket calculator would qualify but it's less cool.) Is there a good term for this phenomenon? It's hype that inspired projects.

Difftastic is effectively computing the "tree edit distance" between two ASTs, and there's a bunch of papers on this topic. Literature review is hard though: sometimes a paper takes a while to digest, only to realise that they're solving a slightly different problem.

Modern computer systems are hard to bootstrap. If you had to rebuild computing from older tech (say 20/30/40 years old), which would you prefer?