miniblog.

Today I learnt that there's a vim implementation of paredit!

On the importance of 'microbrowsers', small HTTP agents that fetch web pages to be displayed in embedded card UIs: https://24ways.org/2019/microbrowsers-are-everywhere/

Homebrew console game tools mean that you can write Gameboy games on a modern machine but also offer them on web platforms too! https://www.gbstudio.dev/

I've found Inbox Zero to be useful approach with many communication systems: maintain a separate TODO list, minimise email, process them oldest first. There's a failure mode though: You get productive, allow the input rate to increase, then one day you massively fall behind. 😧

The "Rule Of Least Power" makes a great argument in favour of less computationally capable languages. It claims this helped HTML/CSS adoption. https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html Applying this principle, I'd expect total languages to be popular. This hasn't happened AFAICT: what's missing?

@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.

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:

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!