flâneur

Eric Zhang

86 followers · 18 following · 2103 views

on the atlas — 56

highlights — 110

  • Color scales often have a bright, saturated middle, but diverge at the extremes: the lower the brightness, the higher the saturation needs to be, and vice-versa. This helps preserve the character of the colors at darker points in the scale.
    Heart of dark mode: done, and still in progress
  • You’ll miss the yearning—for some unspoken, unseen daydream that you have to believe will finally bring you peace.
    things you'll miss when you become a mother
  • You’ll miss hiking up mountain trails in the middle of the night with no destination in mind, holding hands with someone or many someones, walking into acacia bushes and laughing at your own aimless absurdity.
    things you'll miss when you become a mother
  • “Cleverness under pressure” is not a valuable data point.
    The Hiring Post — Quarrelsome
  • Like, they’re trying to tell you the most important thing they’ve ever said - at the very moment the ship is pulling away from the dock.
    The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements | ANU College of Science
  • many great essayists, such as Michel de Montaigne and Henry David Thoreau, are interesting precisely because they call the reader to watch them think things out in real time on the page, a process that can reveal vivid contradictions
    M.F.K. Fisher Taught Americans How to Nourish Bodies and Souls | The National Endowment for the Humanities
  • LOLWUT should remember ourselves that the work we do, programming, did not start just in order to produce something useful. Initially it was mainly a matter of exploring possibilities. I hope that LOLWUT also will remind the Redis community that computers are about humans, and that it is not possible to reason in an aseptic way just thinking at the technological implications. There are people using systems, people building systems, and so forth.
    LOLWUT: a piece of art inside a database command - <antirez>
  • Linus put his device files in /dev, and so should you.
    The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
  • My life is littered with ghost ships, with broken sails and missing floorboards, fallen to the wayside.
    holding onto spring - by Lilian Caylee - beauty and terror
  • Ugh [ʌx] ("Disgusting!") ends with a velar fricative consonant
    Interjection - Wikipedia
  • 習相遠 (xí xiāng yuǎn) (But) their habits make them different (from each other).
    Three Character Classic - Wikipedia
  • 人之初 (rén zhī chū) People at birth, 性本善 (xìng běn shàn) Are naturally good (kind-hearted).
    Three Character Classic - Wikipedia
  • Combined with the previous feature of interpreting on as a boolean, this leads to a dictionary with true as one of the keys. It depends on the language how that maps to json, if at all. In Python it becomes the string "True". The key on is common in the wild because it is used in GitHub Actions. I would be really curious to know whether GitHub Actions’ parser looks at "on" or true under the hood.
    The yaml document from hell
  • Combined with the previous feature of interpreting on as a boolean, this leads to a dictionary with true as one of the keys. It depends on the language how that maps to json, if at all. In Python it becomes the string "True". The key on is common in the wild because it is used in GitHub Actions. I would be really curious to know whether GitHub Actions’ parser looks at "on" or true under the hood.
    The yaml document from hell
  • However, I realized that this line of thinking is misleading. Yes, it would be a one-line change in C or C++, but only because in these languages, I would have to first write the whole process spawning infrastructure myself! Or I would have to use a third-party library, but then I would encounter a similar issue - I would either have to fork it, copy-paste it in my code or get a (potentially controversial) change merged to it. I’m actually really glad that it’s so easy to use third-party libraries in Rust and that the standard library allows me to use fundamental functionality (like process sp…
    Process spawning performance in Rust | Kobzol’s blog
  • the best way to help the project is to keep contributing for it for years. to do that, you have to avoid burning out, which means you have to treat yourself well.
    the rust project has a burnout problem
  • you haven’t worked on the things you want to work on in weeks, and no one else is working on them because you said you were going to (“they won’t happen unless you do them personally”, a voice says). you want a break, but you have a voice in the back of your head: “the project would be worse without you”.
    the rust project has a burnout problem
  • As mentioned before, there are several typical use cases of compression. For an algorithm to be compelling, it either needs to be extraordinarily good at one specific use case, such as compressing human readable text, or very good at many diverse use cases.
    Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard - Engineering at Meta
  • “Time wasted” on someone is time dedicated to them.
    attention is the beginning of devotion - by Lilian Caylee
  • the excellence, the openness, and the independence
    Claudine Gay resigns as president of Harvard
  • It turns “Message Oriented Middleware”, a phrase guaranteed to send the whole room off to Catatonia, into “Extra Spicy Sockets!”, which leaves us with a strange craving for pizza and a desire to know more.
    2. Sockets and Patterns | ØMQ - The Guide
  • Hemp, or industrial hemp, is a botanical class of Cannabis sativa cultivars grown specifically for industrial use.
    Hemp - Wikipedia
  • There are more rules and interactions than anyone reasonable person can manage. Which means we shouldn't expect people to be the ones managing it.
    Using HTML as a compile target
  • The text of A Sea Symphony comes from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Though Whitman's poems were little known in England at the time, Vaughan Williams was introduced to them by Bertrand Russell, a family friend. Vaughan Williams was attracted to them for their ability to transcend both metaphysical and humanist perspectives.
    A Sea Symphony - Wikipedia
  • For example, the following interesting command if called as first command in a function will automagically make it a memoizing version of the function:
    Tcl the misunderstood
  • Even better, you don't need serialization. Have a big complex Tcl list and want to send it via a TCP socket? Just write: puts $socket $mylist. On the other side of the socket read it as set mylist [read $socket]. and you are done.
    Tcl the misunderstood
  • We went ahead knowing it was a mistake. We went ahead knowing it was a mistake. We went ahead knowing it was a mistake. [error] [kernel stack memory corruption detected]
    306 — This week on Cargo
  • There is no #define capability. Terry’s explanation for this is that he’s just “not a fan”.
    A Language Design Analysis of HolyC - Harrison Totty
  • However, because try - catch constructs are structured, a compiler can always order the entries of the exception handler table such that, for any thrown exception and any program counter value in that method, the first exception handler that matches the thrown exception corresponds to the innermost matching catch clause.
    The Java® Virtual Machine Specification
  • The normal method invocation for a instance method dispatches on the run- time type of the object. (They are virtual, in C++ terms.)
    The Java® Virtual Machine Specification
  • However, 1-byte opcodes also mean that the Java Virtual Machine instruction set must stay small. As a compromise, the Java Virtual Machine does not provide equal support for all data types
    The Java® Virtual Machine Specification
  • The specialized load and store instructions should encourage the compiler writer to reuse local variables as much as is feasible. The resulting code is faster, more compact, and uses less space in the frame.
    The Java® Virtual Machine Specification
  • Implementation details that are not part of the Java Virtual Machine's specification would unnecessarily constrain the creativity of implementors.
    The Java® Virtual Machine Specification
  • the P-Code machine of UCSD Pascal
    The Java® Virtual Machine Specification
  • Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son
    To the Lighthouse
  • who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world? 7 But his son hated him.
    To the Lighthouse
  • While these aspirations didn’t resonate with me, they spoke of these goals with such certainty that I couldn’t help but feel admiration — and envy. They just know. Somehow, for as long as they can remember, they’ve known what the good life, to them, is. They’ve always had conviction that their definition of a good life was the right definition.
    holding onto spring - by Lilian Caylee - beauty and terror
  • Because of the limited size of our working memory, it is best to change code in small, well-documented iterations. This helps the code author, any code reviewers, and future developers looking at the code history. Between iterations, a significant majority of the code remains fixed while only small portions change. This allows Git to use difference algorithms to identify small diffs between the content of blob objects.
    Git's database internals I: packed object store - The GitHub Blog
  • I sometimes don’t know how I feel about someone until I take his or her picture.
    Nan Goldin | The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, excerpts, 1986
  • One problem in art, eminently fashionable (that is, related to the practice of fashion) is: how do I create a “valuable” work — a work that is interesting, which contains novel information or stimulus — given the established discourse that my audience will be familiar with.² Not incidentally, this is also the process by which human beings just have conversations.
    Oscillation / Fashion – Suspended Reason
  • frequency of meet-ups is important! every week is great.
    on-running-a-react-learning-group - Chloe Chia
  • Back in 2020, I left my job because I grew frustrated with a ruthlessly optimized way of developing software, so devoid of character and ideals. I wanted instead to work slowly, governed by rigorous principles, yet still guided by fun and feel.
    Issue 001 / Introducing Woolgather
  • A naive approach would have been for the client to treat S3 like a network file system and use it the same way a desktop app would use its local file system. This would have two problems:
    Browsertech Digest: Figma is a File Editor
  • You can’t write an interruption-robust server for websokets while remaining data agnostic.
    WebSockets, caution required!
  • There is one thing, I didn't tell you so far: Raku is actually Perl 6.
    Felix Blog - Raku is pretty damn Cool
  • (I feel obliged to mention that Marijn's work has been very personally inspiring. The code he writes is incredibly principled and well thought-out; I felt like I connected with a clearer sense of software design just by reading through the CodeMirror 6 codebase.)
    Syntax highlighting on the web | Joel Gustafson
  • You could say that lack of financial and social responsibilities is the entry ticket to the open source world. And that shows—we're mostly a young white guy club. The open source endeavor is, in a way, missing out on lots of programming talent, both that of people who never are in a position to enter our world to begin with, and that of people who grow up, get a mortgage, and move on to a safe commercial job.
    More Money For Better Open-Source Software
  • Thus, we've invented copyright, using the law to try and make the copyable less copyable, and allowing us to go back to the classical model of selling by the unit.
    More Money For Better Open-Source Software
  • along with a link to the PR that implemented the fix.
    A locking war story
  • I had never realized how much Americans like to should you to death.
    My FOSS Story - Andrew Gallant's Blog