Today I LearnedRSS

April 2024

Why Technologists Need To Get Involved In Public Policy?

You can either get involved in your polity to help shape the future you want or accept what other people without your point of view decide for your future without asking you. Politics is just the methodology by which groups of people decide who gets what when. If you want things, maybe get involved, even if you just want to be left alone. It would be great if computers could go back to being a niche hobby for the socially distant. Too bad we let them eat the world.

Sections 11 And 12 Of The OSS's Simple Sabotage Field Manual

http://svn.cacert.org/CAcert/CAcert_Inc/Board/oss/oss_sabotage.html

This one definitely needs an introduction to help read it critically. This is part of the declassified Office of Strategic Services' Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It's goal was to outline the, innumerable simple acts which the ordinary Individual citizen-saboteur can perform to help the WWII war effort within axis aligned institutions while trying to hide behind plausible deniability. Essentially, weaponize incompetence. When reading this, stop and think about the point. Not only about what it says to do, but what the opposite of that involves.

Why I Hate Frameworks

https://www.fredrikholmqvist.com/pages/why-i-hate-frameworks.html

It just goes back to solving the problems you actually have. If you have the discipline, you can obviously do better than a framework.

XML Is The Future

https://www.bitecode.dev/p/hype-cycles

Another piece talking about the tech pop culture problem.

Efficiency Is The Enemy

https://fs.blog/slack/

Great bit of philosophy to rethink your metric for action. Doing nothing is usually better than being busy doing nothing of value or being fully engaged in doing the wrong thing.

Object-Oriented Programming is Garbage: 3800 SLOC example

One big 3800 SLoC Example.

Object-Oriented Programming is Embarrassing: 4 Short Examples

Four small 200 SLoC Examples.

Object-Oriented Programming is Good*

Theory buildup.

Object-Oriented Programming is Bad

Starting a lecture series going through why object orientation never delivered and in many cases actively made things worse.

John Carmack on Inlined Code

http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.html

I really wish I had something like Jai's use block. When you dangle a function out there that only one location's supposed to call, you just know someone will add it to their code to spite you.

Optimizing Javascript For Fun And For Profit

https://romgrk.com/posts/optimizing-javascript

Great rundown on common places to get better JavaScript performance. I really hope it goes without saying that you have to profile your actual code and not just rely on these micro-benchmarks. That said, micro-benchmark write-ups are a great place for inspiration for things to try in your own code.

The Real C++ Killers (Not You, Rust)

https://wordsandbuttons.online/the_real_cpp_killers.html

Great look at how C++ was undermined on many fronts.

Unix terminals and shells - 5 of 5

Part 5/5 on better understanding what a terminal is and how it works.

Unix terminals and shells - 4 of 5

Part 4/5 on better understanding what a terminal is and how it works.

Unix terminals and shells - 3 of 5

Part 3/5 on better understanding what a terminal is and how it works.

Unix terminals and shells - 2 of 5

Part 2/5 on better understanding what a terminal is and how it works.

Unix terminals and shells - 1 of 5

Part 1/5 on better understanding what a terminal is and how it works.