Monthly Archives: May 2020

It’s Time to Get Back to RSS

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The HN comments expose the real shame of it; Everyone is trying to turn web content into a hustle, and RSS is not designed for that. It doesn't let the platforms control what the users sees. It isn't built to enable the ad spend bubble. These are _features_ from the user perspective, and why I've never stopped primarily consuming through RSS.
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Unreal Engine 5 is meant to ridicule web developers

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is quality satire.
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The Linux Kernel FPGA Subsystem

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Hmm. Interesting. Mainline support to program one already-generated bitstream on bring-up. I suppose for machines that use a glue FPGA.
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Snow Crash: HBO Max adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I will be extremely impressed if they can not fuck this up. It _should_ make great TV.
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Senate rejects amendment limiting warrantless government internet searches

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

Article note: Disappointing.

The Senate on Wednesday fell one vote shy of passing a bipartisan amendment drafted by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) that sought to limit warrantless government Internet searches and browsing history.

The vote required a three-fifths majority, and only 59 lawmakers supported it. The 37 no-votes were comprised of both Republicans and Democrats, while four senators, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), didn't cast a vote, though it's reportedly unclear if their participation would have changed the result.

Four Senators who did not vote
ALEXANDER
MURRAY
SANDERS
SASSE

I've reached out to their offices. (Alexander is self-isolating because a staffer has COVID.)

— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) May 13, 2020

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), one of 10 Democrats to reject the amendment, said he did so out of concern that passing it would effectively kill the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act completely, while Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) thinks the FISA court will serve as a "sufficient check" against such requests on its own.

Shaheen, another Dem who opposed Wyden’s amendment, says she believes the FISA court will act as a sufficient check on the government’s requests for Internet browsing history.

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) May 13, 2020

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College Advice from a University Instructor

I’ve seen a spate of articles pop up recently discouraging people from going to college in fall 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic situation. They’re mostly from self-mythologizing startup douches and/or carpetbaggers trying to sell alternative education products, so there isn’t much of value in them and I won’t be linking.

However, talking about them has me refining and recording the advice I give to prospective college students.
So in that interest, a list of my usual advice. Which is very, very explicitly prefaced with the usual “Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer” disclaimer.

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Federal complaint against new girls-only STEM school in Lexington says it’s unfair to boys.

Source: Kentucky.com -- Education

Article note: I've been helping out with UK's WIE program for years. I've always been of the opinion that it would be great if we could offer it to everyone, but there are no where near the resources available to do so, and we're maximizing effect with the demographic targeting. I have very mixed feelings about single-gender primary schooling in general, and STEM-focus primary programs seem to produce interesting pathologies.

Federal Department of Education sex discrimination investigations have been opened on Fayette County Schools’ new all-girls elementary STEM program and four female-only STEM programs at the University of Kentucky following … Click to Continue »

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Rust concurrency: the single-writer principle

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Single-Writer (or "Owner Writes") is _the_ way for doing hardware description language work, and usually the least-awful way to do most parallel programming. We've known that for _at least_ a decade, but software people hate to hear it because it means you have to do actual mental work instead of grunt programming to solve problems. It's really clear why you don't fuck around with contention when you're thinking in terms of "I'm going to have to drive this D flipflop with two different wires, so I need an extra layer of arbitration logic, so I did this wrong."
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The Cost of JavaScript Frameworks

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Optimizing for developer experience, speed, and hiring ease. Pushing costs onto the end user. All the way up and down the stack. For gadgets where, most of the time, "shitty solution" is markedly worse than nothing for the majority of people affected. Then again, here I am using WP because I'm a lazy shit.
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Google unifies all of its messaging and communication apps into a single team

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Oh yes google, another reorg will surely fix your wasteland of fragmented, ill-conceived, and no longer trustworthy due to repeated shutdowns messaging situation. Until I hear them addressing it from the perspective of "We want to reward engineers who spend their energy maintaining core services, rather than only for working on shiny new things" I don't see a plausible way for them to fix their shit.

In October of last year, Google hired Javier Soltero to be the VP and GM of G Suite, its set of office apps and — importantly for today’s news — Google Meet and Google Chat. Now, the company is putting him in charge of yet another set of products: Messages, Duo, and the phone app on Android.

The move puts all of Google’s major communication products under one umbrella: Soltero’s team. Soltero tells me that there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of Google’s apps, so don’t get your hopes up for that (yet). “We believe people make choices around the products that they use for specific purposes,” Soltero says.

Still, Google’s communications apps are in dire need of a more coherent and opinionated production development,...

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