miniblog.

It's fascinating to see the adversarial relationship between the developers of Incognito Mode and those trying to detect it. JS is a very rich environment with a ton of options. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-incognito-mode-can-still-be-detected-by-these-methods/

I think it's only a matter of time before we have programming languages that hard enforce a standard formatting. For example, suppose a compiler only accepted formatted code when it's optimising.

This is a really neat alternative to find: it honours .gitignore and makes it way easier to combine filters (tricky in find). The docs argue SQL syntax is easier, which I totally agree with. I do wonder if SQL is ergonomically optimal though: is it the qwerty of query syntax? https://twitter.com/xenozoid/status/1161210113669156864

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.

Excellent article on level design in games to encourage player exploration, and considering the movement motivations:

Typing out a Python program in vim, using purely speech recognition! https://youtu.be/ddFI63dgpaI The tool used in the video is Talon:

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.

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)