Alex Schroeder compares Fediverse and Atmosphere server costs. Fediverse allows for cheap small instances, but big ones are expensive. Atmosphere can only have expensive ones. The level of expensive is similar.

Let’s go over a few demos using the new customizable <select> feature that may be wild, but also give us a great chance to learn new things in CSS.

Instead of using git as a database, what if you used a database as a git?

Painting: Wen Hui Tu ( Gathering of the Literaries ) by Zou Ji (Emperor Hui Zong of Song Dynasty)

1082-1135 A.D. Collection at the National Palace Museum, Taiwan

OpenStreetMap surveyor app

They develop the Sugar DE, a limited and focused DE meant to give children access to computing and knowledge. An honourable project. But what interests me the most is the design decisions. Gotta take a closer look.

via aartaka

Cool tool

Using parametric templates to draw Truchet tiles, then placing them randomly to create generative patterns.

Rob Pike's notes from 1989. Some of these recommendations are still found in modern Go recommendations.

If strcpy is not easily replaced with memcpy then the code is
fundamentally wrong. Either it’s not using strcpy correctly or it’s
doing something dumb and should be rewritten. Highlighting such problems
is part of what makes memcpy such an effective replacement.

In this paper, we first present an analysis and comparison of

the energy efficiency of 27 well-known software languages
from the popular software repository The Computer Lan-
guage Benchmarks Game. We are able to show which were the
most energy efficient software languages, execution types,
and paradigms across 10 different benchmark problems.

C wins in every regard. Other compiled languages perform very well too.

Was setting up something with scp, but then remembered about rsync's existence and found this little tutorial.

Modern-style text editor in terminal

Yet another critique on PIM and the art of collecting links. I'll keep a link to it here and make an archive.

life←{↑1 ⍵∨.∧3 4=+/,¯1 0 1∘.⊖¯1 0 1∘.⌽⊂⍵}

I know, I know. I should have started with the introduction. But doesn’t it introduce itself rather well? You can see for yourself that it’s ultimately concise, expressive and utterly alien to all the mainstream computer languages.

Collect data and analyse

Hugeping's IDEC echo and personal site.

IDEC server software by hugeping.

A thoughtful comparison of Christopher Alexander's ideas (the architect) with software engineering.

I have “A Pattern Language” in paper in my home library, with Flancian annotations! I guess I'll get to it after I finish Fowler's Patterns book.

Wayland is slower.

A macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch. Uses Vision framework for real-time posture detection.

Encyclia makes ORCID records available on the Fediverse. You can use it to follow researchers who don't have a Fediverse presence and see their new publications on your feed!

This specification defines a standard for sticker compatibility from multiple vendors. By following this specification, implementors can ensure they meet the expectations of sticker consumers. A standard allows producers to supply tools that help ensure maximum compliance and enjoyability.

Movim provides a quick comparison between the two protocols and shows how blogs work. Wow, this makes so much more sense than ActivityPub tbh. There's also a good example of XML strength: embedding an Atom feed in XMPP messages.

Task manager like the one in Windows but for GNOME. It looks better in GNOME. A bit sad I've migrated away from GNOME just a few days ago.

A bookmarking community. Bookmarks mostly tech-related, of course. Expect some reposts from there.

There was a long write-up in this note, but then I removed it. Read the bookmarked article with an open heart.

BookmarkFS is a FUSE-based pseudo-filesystem which provides an interface to the bookmark data of web browsers.

A romanticised description of Merveilles (which I'm part of btw!). When I come across a mention of offline Merveilles meetups, I'm a bit sad, because they're all far away from me.

Greg highlights that there aren't that many community projects given the number of members. I think there're quite more than one might expect! I don't really participate these days though.

The title is a bit misleading, there are of course more than two markup languages. The author says that only TeX and SGML families are proper arbitrary markup languages. Lightweight markups are not arbitrary, structured languages like YAML are not markups.

Bugs Apple won't fix. Why else would they keep them around for so long? We did the math.

A collective of Go developers maintaining popular and critical libraries, sometimes taking over the work when asked to. Should I join their ranks one day?

Handy is a cross platform, open-source, speech-to-text application for your computer

The 20 year old Apple iSight camera. This is my original Apple iSight camera (Rev C) that I purchased sometime around 2005. Its specs don't mean much today with a mere 640×480 resolution, but to me it stands out as a remarkably well-designed piece of hardware. The best detail was the rotating aperture

Pretty camera pretty

There used to be atlases of so-called “strip maps”, which are in a way precursors to modern navigators and metro line maps. The artist put less emphasis on legibility than modern designers do; they cared more about decorations. Beautiful!

Stolyarov leaves us no rest.

A git subcommand to explore the dependency history of your repositories.

Platypus is a developer tool that creates native Mac applications from command line scripts such as shell scripts or Python, Perl, Ruby, Tcl, JavaScript and PHP programs. This is done by wrapping the script in a macOS application bundle along with an app binary that runs the script.

type INI struct {
  Properties []*Property `@@*`
  Sections   []*Section  `@@*`
}

type Section struct {
  Identifier string      `"[" @Ident "]"`
  Properties []*Property `@@*`
}

type Property struct {
  Key   string `@Ident "="`
  Value *Value `@@`
}

type Value struct {
  String *string  `  @String`
  Float *float64  `| @Float`
  Int    *int     `| @Int`
}

From the Zed Blog: A look at how we use Zed's native collaboration features to run our entire company.

Turn your Mastodon archive file into a standalone static HTML site. Easy to customize, easy to search, all posts also indexed not just chronologically, but on tag pages.

A list of approaches to completely avoid when designing software. A bit too extreme, on the impractical side, but manifestos like this inspire thought.

Joseph Stiglitz explained why he and others got the Nobel prize.

... economists used simple economic models that assumed that information was perfect – i.e. that all participants have equal and transparent knowledge of the relevant factors. They knew that information wasn't perfect, but hoped that a world with moderate imperfections of information would be akin to a world with perfect information. We showed that this notion was ill-founded: even small imperfections of information could have profound effects on how the economy behaved.

Среди изучающих китайский мало кто не слыхал про ту самую лапшу бян-бян, в которой biáng записывается через довольно увесистый иероглиф:
В 2020 году его даже добавили в Юникод: 𰻞 (трад.), 𰻝 (упр.).
Многие ошибочно полагают, что его создали не так давно и просто забавы ради, однако не всё так просто. По всему Китаю существует множество похожих иероглифов, и все они имеют историю как минимум в 200 лет.

George Akerlof, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz. Market for lemons and whatnot.

Marius claims domains as user ids are not good. Good points

Wolfram language never cease to amaze me with how it manages to introduce mind-blowing features that are not possible everywhere else without introducing any syntax. In today's episode: wrap a resource-intensive computation in this function, and it'll magically happen on our enchanted cloud computers; there will be an email notification. Truly awesome. Sometimes I envy scientists because they have a reason to use tools like Wolfram.

Explore why Markdown, despite its ubiquity, might not be the best fit for technical content.

rand($.) < 1 && ($line = $_) while <>;

Pick a random line from a file without knowing its size beforehand. The algorithm can be easily adjusted to many a thing...

How come Perl is so fun?

Disables theming (enables Classic theme)