@greenjon I used to follow the Openmoko project with interest!
I'm not sure I'd want a dev phone as my only device, but I often carry two phones anyway.
I'm really excited about the pine watch too.
miniblog.
I've realised that I don't have a good sense of how much a website costs. Presumably it has gone down significantly over time?
If you need bespoke customisations there's labour costs, but a basic VPS can do a lot. CPUs and data transfer are both cheap.
The consequences of forcing users to log in before they can access content: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/login-walls/
It makes sense for very personalised services like email, but I wonder how much stores could increase their sales by offering 'checkout as guest'.
The challenges of web components, with string attributes and DOM-based APIs: https://dmitriid.com/blog/2017/03/the-broken-promise-of-web-components/
Generalised computation is becoming less common: it's much easier to run or debug arbitrary code on a Linux/BSD machine than anything else.
It's even worse on mobile though: simply *writing* is hard and creation is hindered further.
Why are papers still primarily distributed as PDFs? It seems to be easier to generate a PDF from HTML than the reverse.
I'm a big fan of arxiv-vanity but it's awkward reading other papers in handheld devices.
Dependency management in Go: https://research.swtch.com/vgo-principles
There's a tradeoff between work for libraries (declare your minimum version/any incompatibilities) vs work for programs (investigate when dependencies aren't compatible). If programs are more common, should we empower them?
npm based projects make it really easy to factor out individual general-purpose functions as packages.
It's a really nice way to work. Separate packages get their own README, and the combined project is smaller and easier to reason about.
Gate is exploring transferring program state (like Smalltalk images), but leveraging wasm to execute untrusted code. An exciting model!
https://savo.la/introduction-to-gate.html
Execution of untrusted code still feels like a really underexplored space.
I'm impressed to see that GraalVM supports Smalltalk bytecode and therefore you can run Squeak and even interoperate with other supported languages! https://www.javaadvent.com/2019/12/smalltalk-with-the-graalvm.html
Cute article contrasting AI black boxes with human black boxes: https://behavioralscientist.org/principles-for-the-application-of-human-intelligence/
The challenge of exploring new syntax and language features whilst soliciting feedback from the community:
https://metaredux.com/posts/2019/12/06/ruby-where-do-we-go-now.html
Very readable discussion of different ways of expressing applicative and monads in ocaml. Discusses the necessary operators and new syntactic sugar: https://jobjo.github.io/2019/04/24/ocaml-has-some-new-shiny-syntax.html
I rather like that npm says "installed 123 packages from 45 authors". It gives you a sense of how big the team you're depending on is.
I'd love to see something similar for other parts of the stack: "43 kernel developers have worked on your wifi driver!"
Fun article on refactoring J to be point free, and drawing trees to model its computation: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/handwriting-j/
This is my favourite genre of web design: simultaneously advocating for a style and demonstrating why you should/shouldn't use it!
Smaller, cooler chargers using gallium nitride: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/1/30/18203879/gan-chargers-anker-powerport-atom-pd-1-ravpower-45w
Rust is doing constant propagation on its internal IR before monomorphisation. This can give faster compiles because LLVM is given less code!
https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2019/12/02/const-prop-on-by-default.html
Purgecss is a really cool tool for removing unused CSS based on an analysis of your HTML. For example, unused classes.
https://www.purgecss.com/
This gives CSS libraries much more scope to add features without hurting bundle size!
Air to ground and satellite connections for in-flight WiFi: https://onezero.medium.com/what-makes-it-possible-to-browse-the-internet-at-35-000-feet-1afaea83eb5
(It's expensive, affects the plane's shape and fuel efficiency, and the fastest is still only 100 Mbps!)
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