Wilfred Hughes @wilfredh@mastodon.social

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: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/09/monzo_microservices/

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

https://github.com/orlp/pdqsort/blob/master/readme.md

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: https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/03/28/jitu-brutus.html

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.

TXR Lisp describes its stdlib as "a significant standard library of userful functional combinators". I can't decide if "userful" is a typo or a pun.

https://www.nongnu.org/txr/txr-lisp.html

From simple IP blocks to probabilistic deep packet inspection: the evolution of web censorship technology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22659534

Woah, Chrome is looking at dropping the user agent entirely! https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/03/chrome-phasing-user-agent/

Feature detection is good practice anyway, so this seems like a push in the right direction.

Apparently smart thermometers are a thing, and social distancing has led to observable drops in flu prevalence: https://qz.com/1824020/social-distancing-slowing-not-only-covid-19-but-other-diseases-too/

A cute, high-performance text search engine (cf Elasticsearch), written in Rust, with a RESTful API!

https://github.com/meilisearch/MeiliSearch

JavaScript libraries are rarely updated in the wild. Cloudflare is observing increasing usage even for old versions of jQuery! https://blog.cloudflare.com/javascript-libraries-are-almost-never-updated/amp/

It'd be interesting to normalise against total web traffic size.

The Shelf is a NeXTSTEP alternative to a clipboard, but more flexible and powerful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_(computing)

You can put a source file and destination directory on the shelf, enabling a cut-and-paste style operation. You can still refer back to them afterwards!

Google offering game server hosting as a service: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gaming/introducing-google-cloud-game-servers

I'm surprised there's sufficient commonality between games that you can offer a generic server!