Wilfred Hughes @wilfredh@mastodon.social

I'm amazed to learn that there are voice codecs that function at 700 bits/second! http://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452

The target use case is amateur radio but I'm sure there's a range of useful applications.

On the dynamics of memory unsafe code, the economics of big finding, and future trends: https://www.cloudatomiclab.com/fuzz/

Excellent deep dive into the chain of events that led to an outage at Cloudflare in July: https://blog.cloudflare.com/details-of-the-cloudflare-outage-on-july-2-2019/

Making your JS run faster, including some interesting comments on how expensive literal parsing can be: https://v8.dev/blog/cost-of-javascript-2019

Sometimes I wonder of the class browser is a local maximum for class/method definition in Smalltalk.

It works well, but the pane design seems arbitrary.

I know it's common to define methods from the debugger too, but perhaps other UIs could suit the ST model as well?

Remarkable discussion of the use of emoji as evidence in court: when is it evidence of harassment or a threat of violence? What if it renders differently on different devices? https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/08/tech/emoji-law/index.html

Old meets new: van eck phreaking with neural networks! https://leveldown.de/blog/tensorflow-sidechannel-analysis/

What happens to developers specialise in a technology that has become obsolete? They tend to be very adaptable: https://qz.com/work/1702462/what-happens-to-tech-workers-when-their-skills-become-obsolete/

The most successful code review tools have a clear path to getting your patch included.

It feels much more collaborative to ask for changes before a patch is accepted. Afterwards, a reviewer can be seen as difficult, even with the same feedback!

Quibi is exploring a different model to on-demand video content, even adding cute features like horror series which can only be viewed at night!

https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/steven-spielberg-quibi-jeffrey-katzenberg-horror-1203237395/

Usage of many raw materials has actually decreased due to smartphones replacing other consumer devices: https://www.wired.com/story/iphone-environment-consumption/

C : C++, Java : Scala/Kotlin, JS : TypeScript. There definitely seems to be space for languages that target the same platform.

AFAICS the success criteria are: great interoperability, similar toolset, similar syntax, and a more elaborate type system.

Are there counterexamples?

Thoughtful longform analysis of the different video on demand services, and how they aren't necessarily competitors: they have very different approaches and goals.

https://redef.com/original/the-streaming-wars-its-models-surprises-and-remaining-opportunities

Open source is sometimes simply groups of people helping each other out because they asked nicely.

I'm really intrigued by Next, a scriptable browser. https://next.atlas.engineer/

There's definitely interest in alternative browsers designs, e.g. Conkeror and vimium.

The neat design of Next is that it's deliberately abstracting the underlying engine, giving future flexibility.

Firefox 69 is shipping with protection from cryptocurrency mining running without the user's knowledge: https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/09/firefox-will-now-let-you-block-fingerprint-tracking-and-cryptojacking/

I know CI services like Travis have to worry about this, but I wouldn't have thought JS mining would be anywhere near worthwhile.

Some cunning NLP research which has found that really simple statistical models (e.g. does the sentence contain "not"?) is sufficient to answer a good number of text comprehension datasets: https://thegradient.pub/nlps-clever-hans-moment-has-arrived/

It makes me wonder if there's a software equivalent of this.

Perhaps you could design an IRCish protocol that encouraged users to build their own clients?

I've been learning about the fascinating hobby of amateur radio: https://youtu.be/ysOq6ywTSzU

It reminds me of chat roulette, except all the users have a license and many of them build their own equipment!