miniblog.

Deep dive on the Fuchsia kernel, ots architecture, and how it is hardened against exploits:

Rust introducing a friendlier inline assembly syntax, and avoiding LLVM assumptions:

I've seen computer games that give you gameplay tips on loading screens. Perhaps compilers could do same thing? Whilst you're waiting for the compile to complete, you could say "now in version X, new syntax Y!"

Extending Gameboy emulators to sewing machine hardware addons!

Gitpod has an interesting model where you can bring up VSCode against an arbitrary GitHub repo and start coding. Are disposable IDEs a trend?

Elegant code search for literals in Cuis Smalltalk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mRwtRvw5Vo You can search for e.g. the literal 1, a literal expression 5-1, or a datatype literal 1@2. Really nice demonstration of AST search.

Cybercrime is poorly-paid, tedious and unglamorous: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/05/career-choice-tip-cybercrime-is-mostly-boring/

TIL that root certificates are just self-signed certificates!

Compiling the original Unreal Tournament to wasm so it all runs in the browser!

I've been experimenting with multiple link colours on my notes website: https://notes.wilfred.me.uk/HomePage I tried mediawiki-style red for nonexistent links, but it confused my test user. I'm relatively happy with grey here, but I can't think of other sites with different colour links.

Magic login links are underrated. They're a great way of logging in to little-used services, and faster than the password reset process.

On the many problems that have improved due to better algorithms more than faster hardware: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/12/08/algorithms-vs-moores-law/

Idris 2 is self-hosting, faster, compiles to Chez Scheme, and has a bunch of PL design lessons!

Generating type-safe Go code from hand-written SQL: https://github.com/kyleconroy/sqlc Really interesting approach, but I wonder if generated code is the right approach? It's certainly IDE friendly.

I keep implementing random choice features and discovering that users don't really want randomness. 'Show me a random page' really means 'show me a different page to this one, that I haven't seen before'.