2021-10-29 Nerd Roundup!
This week we've got Marc Danziger, Jon Kern, and James Grenning, aka Whatisname all lined up for the roundup. Buckle up, it's going to be fun!
It's always a completely different kind of roundup when Marc Danziger visits. The conversation ranged from linux kernel coding to city planning and shifting urban demographics. Most excellent.
This should work in iTunes. (This link http://danielbmarkham.com/podcast/rss is a podcast feed) If it doesn't work, here's a direct link to the mp3: 2021-10-29 Nerd Roundup!
| STORY | BUT WHY? |
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Watsapp scaled to over a billion dollars with less than 50 developers
Check out the lead HN comment regarding quality vs quantity of ideas. Looks to me like this is yet another example of the difficulty of maintaining organizational focus, even with great people coming up with lots of great ideas. You simply can't do everything both in detail and at any sort of scale. Has implications for automated A/B testing and HDB. Perhaps there is another "iron triangle" of ideas, architecture, and staffing? Here's the engineering stack |
Continuing to love this story on many levels. Did the architecture drive the management/employment strategy, or was it the other way around? Can we artificially limit one and thereby control the other? They also had no meetings, like zero meetings |
| CSS is finally getting if-then statements! | You think long nested ifs are fun, try out long nested, cascaded ifs. Oy vey, what a tech we are dumping on future gens of devs. Also, no new ability to see here, just syntactic sugar? Srsly? None for me, I'm on a syntactic sugar diet |
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Microsoft no longer signs Windows drivers for Process Hacker
HN discussion. This right-to-inspect and/or repair situation is getting completely out-of-hand, and DRM is the thing facilitating it. It's not doing what it's supposed to do, and doing a bunch of stuff nobody warned us about. See UEFI |
Because why would a programmer ever need to know about what's going on under-the-hood with the processor unless we let them? |
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Remote work is bringing the city to the suburbs
Interesting look at this from the demographic side. There's an unmet desire that some have to move to more rural areas. Is there a market or a movement here, or just general malaise? |
I've been reading about this for 30 years or more. Is the combination of high-speed internet and CV-19 finally making this happen, or is it just another "year of unix on the desktop"? |
| Raspberry Pi 3 Fastboot - Less Than 2 Seconds | Some uber-serious nerdiness here. Also Pis. Double win! |
| What is OWASP? What is the OWASP Top 10? | Top ten security threats for DevOps folks updated yearly. Great to have in my back pocket for potential use later! |
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Uranium glass
Wikipedia article., uranium glass |
Didn't know there was such a thing, and if I had known, I would have suspected such a thing would always be dangerous. Turns out there is, and it's not. Some cool side project ideas here, but not sure if you could ever purchase it again where its not an antique |
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Why aviation’s compass is shifting towards True navigation
Wikipedia article, dead reckoning |
I think we're making a mistake by requiring tech for freeflight. If you want to seriously go somewhere in a plane, you should know dead recknoing using as little gear as possible at a minimum, in some cases moreso than flying. I still remain quite concerned that GPS is going to go down one day and end up killing a lot of people in the air that didn't have to die |
| Tesla's Dojo Technology | New standard floating-point format is emerging because AI needs a lot more precision than other uses of floating point (including most all scientific uses. AI is eating the world) |
| Five votes for anger, one for likes | We programmers like to look at the world around us in terms of computer systems we can program, but for a decade or two now, computers and other people's tech has permeated our lives. It's much more a situation of the internet contining to program us in various ways than us programming it. We ignore this erality in our day-to-day lives because it is, by design, mostly invisible. |
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An Ultra-Precise Clock Shows How to Link the Quantum World With Gravity
The paper cited |
More on the super clock science narrative. If clocks can get both super cheap and super accurate, tricorders won't be far behind |
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