miniblog.

Discussion of how to add features written in Rust to the Linux kernel!

How much content belongs in a website header menu? I'm playing with blog layouts, and wondering if all the navigation would be better suited to a footer. I'm hoping it prioritises content.

Libreoffice and trying to build sustainable OSS business models:

Several security vulnerability types are due to misusing strings: command injection, SQL injection, cross-site scripting. How far could you go with a language that didn't have strings? You might need a Prose type that's a list of Unicode chars, but only use it for printing.

I keep thinking about the parallels between type checkers and abstract interpretation. E.g. abstract interpretation saying "this is one of two values, but I don't know which" feels very much like type checking a boolean. Have any tools taken advantage of this?

Compiling Linux so it can fit on a floppy and boot on a 486! I'm really impressed you can still make it small enough. https://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/283

`npm outdated` is a useful command that colour-codes output based on semantic versioning compatibility. I wonder if time information would help too? If I'm on 1.0.1 and 1.0.5 is the latest, but 1.0.1 came out in 2010, that's useful knowledge.

Using stack traces to explain type inference:

physical-cpu-count is a lovely example of small packages on npm doing one thing well. It's a cross-platform solution with clearly discussed limitations and design decisions regarding hyperthreading.

I'm really enjoying using Parcel for my web build needs. Everything just works out of the box, without configuration.

Hardening Android, including a neat jemalloc alternative that can mitigate memory corruption bugs:

@neko@radical.town Thanks for the pointer! I'd been sceptical of tools for single users (personal notes have a high write:read ratio), but wikidata does seem fairly nice to edit.

@bamfic Lisp Machines had hardware supported tagged pointers, but I'm not aware of other features. Nonetheless, the ability to add custom hardware for your programming model worked out really well for them :)

It's interesting that Twitter sets limits on content size, but not distribution. What if the number of retweets/comments on a tweet was rate limited, or had a cap for new users Would it promote slower or thoughtful conversation? C.f. Stack Overflow limiting new user abilities.

Compelling demonstration of parser combinators for date parsing: https://medium.com/mercury-bank/a-magic-date-input-using-parser-combinators-in-typescript-3c779741bf4c You build up a series of functions for parsing elements, which composes much more nicely than regexps.