miniblog.

I tend to favour explicit numbers of arguments in functions: I rarely find auto-currying a useful default. Explicit arity gives good errors! I've realised that auto-currying allows you to handle generic functions though. `a -> b` can be any function!

I'm surprised that "free for OSS" is a common pricing model, without rate limiting the number of free projects/users. Perhaps OSS isn't really that big? Or maybe it drives paid-for adoption sufficiently?

Changing how microwaves are constructed and emit power, potentially making the turntable design obsolete:

GitHub Container Registry seems like a pretty drop-in replacement for Docker Hub:

Reactive notebooks: cell state is immutable, unordered (unlike Jupyter) and naturally lends itself to interactive web UIs!

Reflecting on some of the more surprising APIs in the Haskell ecosystem: https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2020/10/haskell-bad-parts-1

Google will be capping Google Photos at 15GiB free storage: https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/ I'm "more than four years away" from filling it. I wonder what the typical usage rate is?

I enjoyed watching this documentary on RuneScape (an MMO game): its MUD origins, the challenge of complex 3D models making iteration more expensive, and the team culture around it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RNK0YBdwko

Automatically offering the Internet Archive when a page 404s in the Brave browser: https://blog.archive.org/2020/02/25/brave-browser-and-the-wayback-machine-working-together-to-help-make-the-web-more-useful-and-reliable/ Feels like all browsers should do this.

LLVM is introducing v1 to v4 of x86-64, so you can target newer chips: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/012dd42e027e (gcc will do the same thing)

The developers of games can feel very distant from players, so I'm not surprised to see sites that track dev discussion across platforms:

Design differences for small websites designed for specific, geographically focused communities: https://web.archive.org/web/20040411202042/http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html (article is from 2004, a basic server is even cheaper now!)

So many UIs are fuzzy text completion now. For example: ivy in Emacs, VS Code's command selector and Firefox's address bar. They scale really well, have good discoverability, and they're forgiving of typos. Is this a local optimum in UI design?

Variable length arrays in C, the change in Linux kernel developer viewpoints, and the effect of clang constraining its VLA featureset:

Contrasting Rust traits with C++20 concepts: https://mcla.ug/blog/cpp20-concepts-are-not-like-rust-traits.html (Rust traits are stricter, which can enable better errors)