miniblog.

reCAPTCHA is going to start charging a fee for use!

Quantifying rate of language change in Rust! https://words.steveklabnik.com/how-often-does-rust-change Putting numbers on this is hard, but produces some interesting methodologies.

It's striking how many Docker features get ported when people build alternatives. It's a great day of easing migration. Podman deliberately mimics Docker's CLI and can even run Docker images!

When I look at incredible code completion tools like TabNine (using deep learning), I'm not surprised that JetBrains is focusing more on ML techniques in their IDEs! https://www.tabnine.com/blog/deep/ https://www.infoworld.com/article/3518429/jetbrains-taps-machine-learning-for-full-line-code-completion.html

Smart devices that have continued despite the original company ceasing: https://www.engadget.com/2020-03-03-undead-gadgets.html The secret seems to be a great developer ecosystem, a cute form factor, or a cult following.

A bunch of diagnostics polish in clang 10: https://releases.llvm.org/10.0.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html One particularly cute addition: spotting that 2 ^ 10 is the user confusing exponentiation with xor!

Upscaling textures on SNES emulators to improve graphics on today's displays: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/hd-emulation-mod-makes-mode-7-snes-games-look-like-new/ Really neat approach. I've seen emulators do clever 2D smoothing, but this feels closer to 'original intent'.

A defence of microservices, from a successful mobile-first UK bank:

pdqsort ("pattern defeating quicksort") is an incredibly fast sort that even outperforms timsort and std::sort in C++!

Thoughtful criticism of postgresql and its weaknesses (mostly in clustering): https://medium.com/@rbranson/10-things-i-hate-about-postgresql-20dbab8c2791

A recurrent neural network for improving voice quality on an unreliable connection! https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in-duo-with.html There's something magical about advances in encoders. Unlike hardware changes, you never know when/if techniques will get better.

Standardising Python build information and tooling configuration with pyproject.toml. It's great to see Python moving away from executable package descriptions which had bootstrap issues! https://snarky.ca/what-the-heck-is-pyproject-toml/

Some excellent new error diagnostics from gcc with -fanalyze: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/03/26/static-analysis-in-gcc-10/ The multi-function analysis reminds me of Infer, and the cute nested ASCII display resembles rustc.

JITs are blackboxes that can make it hard to reason about performance in production:

All of Debian's patches for rustc: bugfixes, tweaks for the Debian environment, and even some reproducibility improvements. https://sources.debian.org/patches/rustc/1.40.0+dfsg1-5/ Many have a separate comment, which is really helpful.