miniblog.

Incredible post showing the reverse engineering of a Fitbit style device, so you can reflash it with custom software:

GitHub READMEs work exceptionally well for projects which only need a single page of docs. Transitioning to a hosted, multiple page documentation structure is hard though. I've dabbled with a few tools but not found a clear favourite yet.

A snake game implemented entirely in the browser element inspection interface! https://matthewrayfield.com/goodies/inspect-this-snake/ A wonderful example of creative computing.

Stack Overflow is changing the wording of some of its close messages. For example, "unclear what you're asking" is now "needs detail or clarity". https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/337013/new-post-notices-rollout-on-stack-overflow Definitely seems like a positive step.

Excellent overview of WebAssembly, its asm.js predecessor, and how the Rust ecosystem fits in: https://youtu.be/CMB6AlE1QuI

An English teacher introducing the notion of 'digital humanities', live coding with Wolfram Alpha and The Great Gatsby, and showing text mining projects done by students! https://youtu.be/UaCrK6vyz_0

Deno is a JS/TypeScript runtime from the creator of node, with built-in sandboxing and URLs for importing packages without a central npm server:

Bugs in AMD Ryzen microcode, BIOS updates, and how CPUs report capabilities: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/how-a-months-old-amd-microcode-bug-destroyed-my-weekend/

A critique of XML usage, and annotating documents rather than exchanging data: https://www.devever.net/~hl/xml It's rare to see discussions of good XML usage! I've seen marked-up word definitions (a multilingual dictionary) that were a nice fit for XML, but it's rare.

Lots of people have pointed out the advantage of https://foo.bar/ or foo->bar for syntax. It makes it easy to explore things you can do with foo. I think it's an instance of a more general pattern: prefix syntax that an IDE can spot. This has interesting consequences!

Impressive growth in the Indian tech startup scene:

Delightful talk on teaching programming to children: https://youtu.be/g1ib43q3uXQ Explanations are important, teaching them to read code aloud helps, and skill development begets motivation!

The rise of platforms that promote unique users, digital content, and staying useful after a consumer has been matched up with a supplier:

Bert, a machine learning model for understanding natural languages, is showing some impressive results for parsing Google search terms:

Coalton is a remarkable ocaml-style language embedded in Common Lisp: https://github.com/stylewarning/coalton/ It includes a static type checker too!