Super low bitrate codecs are making video calls on 56kbps internet connections feasible! https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/02/lyra-new-very-low-bitrate-codec-for.html
Rust and LLVM progress in 2021: https://www.icloud.com/keynote/09ZXbPfbCKm8vCtAnWdfi2xIg
PGO in rustc is showing promise, and the Motorola 68000 LLVM backend was upstreamed just to enable usage in Rust!
Dr John Shutt, the author of the kernel lisp language and exploring f-expressions, has passed away: https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews_mourns_loss_of_volunteer_John_Shutt
TikTok and remix culture (long read but worthwhile): https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2021/2/15/american-idle
I like writing web applications in memory managed languages because you shouldn't get pwned by RCE. RCE in Python from *just a number* is scary.
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2021-3177
At one point, all of Germany's air traffic control message routing was in Emacs!
https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_emacs_lisp_as_a_general_purpose/gnvzisy/
Deliberately overclocking the Super Game Boy 2 so one instruction fails(!) and the ROM contents can be observed: https://gekkio.fi/blog/2015/dumping-the-super-game-boy-2-boot-rom/
Nice, accessible discussion of linear types, giving an example where you can prevent sockets being bound and listened to at the same time: https://www.tweag.io/blog/2017-08-03-linear-typestates/
Incredibly impressive: reverse-engineering and modifying SNES games so they run on the faster CPU in the cartridge, not the console CPU: https://www.retrorgb.com/vitor-vilelas-race-drivin-sa-1-hack-released.html
A remarkable number of developers continually undo changes or copy-paste code so they can refer to the previous implementation! https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/yestercode.html
I definitely use the GitHub web UI as a reference for the current code sometimes.
On the large number of similarities between software engineering and other kinds of engineering: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/crossover-project/we-are-not-special/
Making the most of Magit, and a helpful pointer to magit-file-dispatch which was new to me:
https://emacsredux.com/blog/2020/12/10/essential-magit-file-commands/
Programming geek, natural languages nerd, and occasional writer. he/him