miniblog.

The limitations of Twitter's design today, and how it's hard to structure conversations:

I'm really impressed with the TabNine completion engine's design. By building on top of the language server protocol, it can offer its completion tricks to any programming language! https://tabnine.com/semantic

.mdx files are a mix of markdown and JSX, used for writing content heavy websites like blogs: https://reacttraining.com/blog/gatsby-mdx-blog/ Interesting file format that I haven't seen before.

On the difficulty of making money from FOSS, and how having a widely popular project does not mean it has commercial value:

LLVM 8 is out, with improved RISC-V support!

I'm all in favour of simple websites without unnecessary JS, but I find a large comment section skews my sense of article length. If I'm reading a medium length post, the scrollbar can be very misleading if there are many comments.

Amazing writeup of how a series of exploits were chained together to root a mac, starting from a Safari JS JIT bug.

Unicode 12.0 has Egyptian hieroglyph formatting, exotic chess pieces, and a bunch of new emoji! https://blog.unicode.org/2019/03/announcing-unicode-standard-version-120.html

Regex search of gigabyte scale code repositories: https://github.com/livegrep/livegrep Similar to Etsy's Hound, which is also excellent.

Today I learnt that gcc can mean 'Google Closure Compiler'. It's a sophisticated compiler, but I suppose its use cases are sufficiently non-overlapping with C compilers to avoid confusion. Surprised me though.

GitHub provides a REST API for rendering markdown! https://developer.github.com/v3/markdown/ It's handy for quick throwaway projects, but I'm struggling to think of where I'd use it otherwise.

It's amazing how many different research papers are used in LLVM, and they're often cited in the source code!

Altruism versus fun in open source motivations: https://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2019/03/14/altruistic-innovation-and-the-study-of-software-economics/

Woah, today I learned that Rust has a doubly linked list in its standard library! It's a common example of something you can't do in purely safe Rust. Nonetheless, the core Rust devs have done the hard work already!

Shower thought: there's already some precedent for intelligent, self-driving vehicles. Horses! Admittedly the speeds are much lower.