Saw a cute definition of open technology today: "it's well suited for unplanned purposes".
miniblog.
An unsoundness in Rust using only safe code!
Rust provides a bunch of guarantees so it's always interesting to see the rare ways it can be broken. I think this is the first unsoundness since the thread spawn issue after 1.0?
https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/unsoundness-in-pin/11311
FOSS businesses, cloud service models, and who is eating whom: https://www.platformonomics.com/2019/11/dining-preferences-of-the-cloud-and-open-source-who-eats-who/
Optical disks can suffer from a 'rot' where the material degrades over time, rendering the content unreadable: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9pdv/the-hidden-phenomenon-that-could-ruin-your-old-discs
Arbital is a really neat website design intended to help readers learn concepts.
Unlike e.g. Wikipedia, it can present the same content at different levels of complexity and dynamically show you the prerequisites for learning a given topic!
https://arbital.com/learn/Arbital_author_basics
I really like the gather macro, abstracting the idea of accumulating a list of results: https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/05/fun-with-macros-gathering/
I often use `yield` for this in Python, but it gives both laziness and accumulation, so the reader has to work out which you wanted.
Huawei developing a FOSS operating system and trying to get it off the ground: https://commonsware.com/blog/2019/08/10/harmony-compatibility.html
Looking at performance of a new site I've written, and realised I'm slowly serving over 600 KiB of CSS!
I suppose the first set of profiling data is often surprising.
PHP is adding union types, and even has a 'false' type to clarify the possible return values from built in functions! https://wiki.php.net/rfc/union_types_v2
Clippy has a ton of clever lints I haven't seen before.
E.g. it suggests that `let _v = println!("hello");` could be `println!("hello");` because a variable of type () is pointless.
Warning about recursion in main is an excellent idea too.
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#rust-139
On sleep, human factors, and things that are known to improve performance more than technology choices: https://increment.com/teams/the-epistemology-of-software-quality/
Using spaced repetition apps with 1Password to help you memorise passwords without storing them in plaintext: https://boinkor.net/2018/11/memorizing-passwords-with-anki-1password/
Cute idea, although ideally a password manager minimises the memorisation necessary. It's a nice example of composing apps though.
A (slightly dramatic) history of Engelbert's vision for knowledge tools, his prototypes on early timesharing systems, and the transition to personal computers:
https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/09.html#Chap09
"Real languages start with all types on the left, and then drift to the right in old age. Like people."
Fun, tongue-in-cheek review of Rust.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/27/in_rust_we_trust_stob/
As blog comments become increasingly less fashionable, I've often seen people write "email me instead".
Perhaps there's a compromise between these? A website could have a comment box that emailed the author. This minimises friction for commenters, but avoids spam on the site.
Excellent discussion of different types of comments, their value, with a ton of examples: https://antirez.com/news/124
I'm increasingly persuaded that the best kind of architecture diagrams are ASCII text art. It seems to be the only format that others will edit.
I keep seeing an antipattern where someone draws a comprehensive diagram and it keeps getting used even as it becomes less accurate.
After experimenting with emoji on a range of platforms, I've realised it's really hard to develop a good visual across different platforms.
Emoji rendering varies massively based on the system's default emoji set. I ended up using image rendering so all users get the same style. https://twitter.com/_wilfredh/status/1198699943592112128
I've seen steganography in images, but putting secret data in text is a clever idea: https://medium.com/@umpox/be-careful-what-you-copy-invisibly-inserting-usernames-into-text-with-zero-width-characters-18b4e6f17b66
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