Curated – Abacus Noir

Monthly Curations: May 2020

May 14, 2020 AgamLeave a comment

How Google ruined the internet 🙂
On malleable programming environments
ACM made a bunch of good stuff free for a while
Inspiring story on how the Crafting interpreters book was completed
On “the power of Prolog”
On the understandability of computer systems
An interesting (and old) paper on “Common Lisp, typing, and mathematics”
On ZIO
(on that note …) on “the death of Scala”
A sort of cross-post, for fans of Zizek: A pervert’s guide to programming languages
Comparing Linux and FreeBSD
On overcoming the grip of Von Neumann Architecture
Advocating for Emacs (yes!)
Using “boring technology” to good effect
A fun song by Peter Norvig

Interesting Links: April 2020

May 9, 2020 AgamLeave a comment

Heh, BioShock: the collection (!)
A 210,000-year old human skull
On the economic impact of the coronavirus
On how Leo Tolstoy’s children’s stories aren’t considered “safe for kids” these days
A NYTimes article from 2006, on … an interesting geological artifact
> At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.
> On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction – toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.
Once upon a time, there was planned an animated film, by Salvador Dalí & Walt Disney’s set to the Music of Pink Floyd
On higher education as a Ponzi scheme
On the design of escape pods from space
Wolfram continues trying (image above) to reconcile fundamental physics (and a couple of papers)
On Bernie Sanders dropping out (and … yet)
”The normal economy is never coming back”
Rethinking the human migration story
On how deep sea squid communicate using skin color
On building. Building things.
Remembering Mark Fisher
On how a fan persuaded Ian Fleming on a tiny detail about James Bond
John Denver and Placido Domingo, recording Perhaps Love (eh, before I was born!)

Monthly Curations: April 2020

April 14, 2020 AgamLeave a comment

On the differences in dynamic linking between Swift and Rust
Fascinating account on what it took for the PS2 (yes, for old-timers) to have the backward compatibility that made it popular
Another historical interest piece: the Taos Operating System
Fun talk about Perl 6
An even older article, Ted Nelson introducing “Hypermedia” in … (yes, I was a toddler then) … 1988
One of those things where I’m just gonna leave the headline here: “Finding Mona Lisa in the Game of Life”
Many “April 1st”s ago: an RFC for TCP Packet Mood
Remembering a 1980 article about Lisp as it was then.
A rant about web browsers
On the mathematical underpinnings and interconnectedness, of nature and computation
I remember coming across Matt Might’s blog a decade ago and … then I saw this talk that was really moving and inspiring

Monthly Curations: February 2020

February 13, 2020February 13, 2020 AgamLeave a comment

Datomic overview
An attempt at Typed lisp
Another look at Guix
“Programming like Kent Beck”
Report on the 20th anniversary of SBCL
On tests as code
A humorous look at how programming has changed in 20 years
Size comparison of various hello world programs
A database with branches, like git (!)
A comparison of JVM and the BEAM
(since I was reading up on Elixir during the holidays …) a look at how Discord used Elixir successfully
A paper titled A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms
A short story John McCarthy wrote long ago, titled The robot and the baby …
On the pains of transitioning to Python 3
On why SQLite should be thought of as “serverless”
Somethings about Self: an old paper and an old video
Something about FreeBSD

Interesting links: January 2020

February 5, 2020 AgamLeave a comment

Proposed telescope for Project Diana, that never got built.

“The rise and fall of New york city …”
On the fractured sense of time in the 2010s
Turns out this building near where I work is a “Silicon Valley” prop
On how hard it is to truly forget these days
On “neo-reaction”
On how Youtube gives “love without the messiness”
The earth’s hidden, deep oceans
An analysis of Pynchon novels
On how Krugman’s writing has become both repetitive and incoherent
On how America is still, in many ways, in the 2000s
Crazy fascinating look at how spiders might “use” their webs to “think” (!)
The influence of Master of Orion on later games
Lionel Shriver on … a passing fad
Interesting historical bit on something that almost happened: “The Cold War Plan to Build Earth’s Largest Telescope”
Generative Art, this time using Ant-colony optimization
Bizarre creatures edition: Sea Cucumbuers
My favorite recent “science read”: the forgotten mystery of Inertia
A strange (creepy) musical instrument
The title says it all: before the Iron Age, most iron came from … space meteorites

Monthly Curations: January 2020

January 15, 2020 AgamLeave a comment

A mix of parody and seriousness, on Haskell and Ocaml: take 1 & take 2
What’s new in Scala 3
A look at Raku (and some myths)
On Paradise Lost
On math vs simulation
I might have posted this already, but: a shot of Emacs in Tron Legacy …
On web pages that are … built to last
Crux, an open-source bitemporal graph database backed by Kafka (and featuring a testimonial for Confluent Cloud)

Interesting links: December 2019

January 10, 2020 AgamLeave a comment

The tedious, annoying, banal “crypto-grifters” on the Blockchain cruise
There are still new Nazca lines to be discovered!
On the extent of “trolling by bots” on Twitter
On Trump’s strangely stable approval rating
This one is going to be weird: me sharing someone’s sharing of something Mark Fisher once wrote, as a tribute to him
The title says it all: The Failure at the End of History
Someone’s ways of dealing with OCD
AGM–114R9X … or, targeted killing with minimum collateral damage
A prehistoric turtle had a shell nearly six feet long!

Monthly Curations: December 2019

December 14, 2019 AgamLeave a comment

The title says it all: Running a bakery on Emacs and Postgresql (!!)
If anyone remembers Terry Davis, a BBC episode of The Digital Human about him, his life, his work (it’s one of those truly bizarre achievements)
Cheering Drew DeVault for an insipiring side-project taken to Alpha and beyond
On really teaching computational thinking
Carl Hewitt (of Actors) on Reusable Scalable Intelligent Systems
Extremely comprehensive set of musings on text editors
Looking back at twenty years of Erlang
Bit of absolutely hilarious satire (or at least that’s what I thought it was)

Note: Many parts of this post are true or at least plausible, but I did not actually install Emacs in my car. Neither should you.

Ways in different programming languages, of achieving fearless concurrency, another comparison of “actor frameworks” across languages
A video about live-coding … from a decade ago
An interview of Arthur Whitney (of K and Kdb) by Bryan Cantrill
Speaking of which … he’s part of an interesting new company now.
An interesting comparison of Swift and Rust
On switching to Plan 9
A “real-life example” of using Datomic
An adventure with the JVM, from one of the folks behind JRuby
Another deep-dive into an example of JVM bytecode
A “FUD FAQ” for Scala
On the weird orbital movements of Neptune’s moons
File this under “weird things parasites make their hosts do”
An interesting interview on “the aesthetics of programming tools”
Couple of examples of applying modern perf tools in Linux
Command-line tools in Clojure!! Which work fast thanks to GraalVM!!
Updates on Project Valhalla for the JVM (Part 1, Part 2)
Interesting take on database indices vs hash tables
Putting too cool things together: Smalltalk and Graal_ (one very old, and the other very new)_
A look at new Garbage Collectors for the JVM (and a brief look at the equivalent in Go)