- 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
Tag: Curated
Interesting Links: April 2020

- 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 Dalà & 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
- 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
- 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

- “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
- 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

- 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
- 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)
Monthly Curations: November 2019

- Applying the lessons of the Golang scheduler to the Tokio scheduler in Rust
- Speeding up Nixpkgs by avoiding subshells
- Pessimism about engineering software
- The Racket programming language is heading in a new direction
- Ben Lynn’s “most functional compiler”
- Someone tries TLA+ and comes away impressed
- Something recommended by a co-worker: CMU 15-721, a course on Advanced Database Systems
- Matt Godbolt (of Compiler Explorer) on “why C++ isn’t dead”)
- Urbit is here
- Comparing APL and C (!)
- Remembering the era of Flash
- Clojure at “the immutable bank”
- Zen and the art of software maintenance
- Shareware and floppy disks …
- Reminiscing about different versions of Microsoft
- I recently discovered all the different “server-less options in GCP”
- Looking back at the first version of Redis, written in … wait for it … in Tcl !!
- A periodic reminder about microkernels
- Why text editing is so hard to implement
- (Re-)Assembling the Apollo Guidance Computer (!)
Monthly Curations: October 2019
- Leo talking about making games in Common Lisp
- Moving log data at massive (10x LHC) scale
- Habits of good software design(ers)
- An OS being built for … after the apocalypse
- Quirky selection of nerdy books
- A new software forge
- A fully distributed software team