miniblog.

The level of sophistication in tool-assisted speed runs of video games is really impressive. "Both bosses are incredibly annoying: they are liable to desynch on any changes to earlier levels due to differences in the RNG." https://tasvideos.org/2416S.html

DARPA sponsoring more radical hardware designs, designs driven by software use cases, and even 3D system-on-chip designs targeting old manufacturing techniques! https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/darpas-planning-a-major-remake-of-us-electronics-pay-attention

Where do you go for data on programming language popularity/usage? In the past I've relied on TIOBE, but I've come to prefer Stack Overflow survey data. It seems to match my (N=small) observations.

I increasingly view data in the context of a cloud service. Until a commit has been pushed, or my kindle book position has been synced, it doesn't feel finished. In both cases the data is already available to me, but not shareable or backed up.

"the satisfaction that I get out of building Envoy and working with the larger community is primarily driven by a desire to have huge industry impact and solve deep computer science problems. It’s not driven by maximizing my monetary income" https://twitter.com/mattklein123/status/875921591489576960

The evolution of Rust compiler error messages, the approach taken by the core team, and even some sample code from the Rust lexer and parser!

Interesting, nuanced discussion of Leela Chess Zero (a neural net) beating Stockfish in a recent competition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20027838 Whilst the original DeepMind result was impressive, it's great to see reproducible results and a project that's available to the public.

5nm processes for chip fabrication, the companies that are offering it, and how it's mobile processors that drive the cutting edge more than FPGAs today: https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/another-step-toward-the-end-of-moores-law

Pharo 8 is shaping up really nicely. When I find issues with Pharo 7 I often find that Pharo 8 has fixed them already! There's also a bunch of UI polish and a dark theme default.

Had my first Pharo pull request accepted! https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo/pull/3439 🎉

Develop in Pharo, deploy in Seaside: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/pharoproject/yesplan-10-years-later Interesting to see commercial web projects written in Smalltalk! Their JS stack sounds like it's evolved with framework conventions. (Mentions the excellent GT debugger. Maybe their use case is like mixing clang&gcc?)

Great talk from @strangeloop_stl about failure modes for machine learning. The content is both insightful and entertaining. https://youtu.be/yneJIxOdMX4

"Instead of a community of active contributors, open source often looks more like a few developers playing air traffic controller to thousands of users who are lightly involved." https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer-projects/ Fabulous post on how software contribution dynamics have changed.

WireGuard: a wonderful example if newer protocols having simpler designs and learning lessons from old systems! https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/wireguard-vpn-review-fast-connections-amaze-but-windows-support-needs-to-happen/ (An alternative to OpenVPN in this case. Cf. wayland.)

Shower thought: Smalltalk (and to some extent other OO languages) replace pattern matching with dynamic dispatch. I miss pattern matching in Lisp dialects without a good implementation, but I haven't noticed its absence in Smalltalk.