Bits (microblog)

🕑 May 26, 2025

This is really bad. EU is planning a new mass surveillance law that includes mandating data retention, built-in backdoors, sanctioning non-compliant services and is asking you for feedback.

EU citizens, please give them your feedback.

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1kvmguc/eu_is_planning_a_new_mass_surveillance_law_that/

🕑 May 21, 2025

How convenience kills curiosity

"[...] Those friction-filled experiences are nearly extinct now. We’ve optimized them away in the name of convenience, and something important has been lost in the transition."

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/how-convenience-kills-curiosity/

🕑 May 21, 2025

Debugging time increases as a square of the program’s size.

-- Chris Wenham

🕑 May 20, 2025

Product Pseudoscience

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/product-pseudoscience/

🕑 May 20, 2025

I have found that the reason a lot of people are interested in artificial intelligence is the same reason a lot of people are interested in artificial limbs: they are missing one.

-- David Parnas

🕑 Dec 17, 2024

Write a paper promising salvation, make it a 'structured' something or a 'virtual' something, or 'abstract', 'distributed' or 'higher-order' or 'applicative' and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

🕑 May 17, 2025

The problem is that coding isn’t fun if all you can do is call things out of a library, if you can’t write the library yourself.

-- Donald Knuth

🕑 Apr 28, 2025

I’ll throw away code as soon I want to add something to it and I get the feeling that what I have to do to add it is too hard.

-- Ken Thompson

🕑 Apr 27, 2025

Cognitive load is what matters

https://minds.md/zakirullin/cognitive

🕑 Apr 25, 2025

Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)

https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

🕑 Apr 25, 2025

One of the greatest joys in computer programming is discovering a new, faster, more efficient algorithm for doing something — particularly if a lot of well-respected people have come up with worse solutions.

-- Danny Hillis

🕑 Apr 24, 2025

Bet on systems, not sparks

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/bet-on-systems-not-sparks/

🕑 Apr 24, 2025

The efficiency of the code decreases with an increase in the number of people working on the program. The most efficient programs are written by a single person.

-- Charles Simonyi

🕑 Mar 3, 2025

The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.

-- Fred Brooks

🕑 Feb 28, 2025

3,200% CPU utilization

"I always thought of race conditions as corrupting the data or deadlocking. I never though it could cause performance issues. But it makes sense, you could corrupt the data in a way that creates an infinite loop."

https://josephmate.github.io/2025-02-26-3200p-cpu-util/

🕑 Feb 26, 2025

A TypeScript-types-only WebAssembly runtime

"This engine was built to service a project that aimed to demonstrate why Doom can't run in TypeScript types. Well. The funny thing is.. It can."

https://github.com/MichiganTypeScript/typescript-types-only-wasm-runtime

🕑 Feb 26, 2025

Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

🕑 Feb 25, 2025

Writing a regular expression engine

https://twomorecents.org/writing-regex-engine/index.html

🕑 Feb 21, 2025

On running systemd-nspawn containers

https://benjamintoll.com/2022/02/04/on-running-systemd-nspawn-containers/

🕑 Feb 20, 2025

Examples of great URL design

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/examples-of-great-urls/

🕑 Feb 20, 2025

Google is on the wrong side of history

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/02/google-wrong-side-history

🕑 Feb 19, 2025

Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.

-- Chris Sacca

🕑 Feb 17, 2025

Cold-blooded software

https://dubroy.com/blog/cold-blooded-software/

🕑 Feb 17, 2025

If you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime.

-- David Leinweber

🕑 Feb 16, 2025

"A calculator app? Anyone could make that."

https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app

🕑 Feb 15, 2025

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.

-- Eric S. Raymond

🕑 Feb 14, 2025

You'll regret using natural keys

https://blog.ploeh.dk/2024/06/03/youll-regret-using-natural-keys/

🕑 Feb 14, 2025

Communication must be stateless in nature, such that each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server.

-- Roy Fielding

🕑 Feb 13, 2025

There are many terrible mistakes to make in program design, so go ahead and make them so that you understand them better.

-- Marijn Haverbeke

🕑 Feb 12, 2025

Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

-- Fred Brooks

🕑 Feb 11, 2025

Boring tech is mature, not old

https://rubenerd.com/boring-tech-is-mature-not-old/

🕑 Feb 11, 2025

A framework can provide 90% of the features we need quickly - giving us a false sense of confidence early in the development cycle - and then be frustratingly hard when it comes to implementing the last 10%.

-- Tony Parisi

🕑 Feb 10, 2025

Premature abstraction is as bad as premature optimization.

-- Luciano Ramalho

🕑 Feb 8, 2025

I've never been a lover of existing code. Code by itself almost rots and it’s gotta be rewritten. Even when nothing has changed, for some reason it rots.

-- Ken Thompson

🕑 Feb 7, 2025

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

-- Niklaus Wirth

🕑 Feb 6, 2025

The real problem with throwaway code comes when it isn't thrown away.

-- Joseph Yoder

🕑 Feb 5, 2025

Program designers have a tendency to think of the users as idiots who need to be controlled. They should rather think of their program as a servant, whose master, the user, should be able to control it.

-- John McCarthy

🕑 Feb 4, 2025

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.

-- Jeff Hammerbacher

🕑 Feb 3, 2025

Writing a Wasm interpreter in C

https://irreducible.io/blog/my-wasm-interpreter/

🕑 Feb 3, 2025

Coding is "90 percent finished" for half of the total coding time. Debugging is "99 percent complete" most of the time.

-- Fred Brooks

🕑 Feb 2, 2025

Tools for 2025

http://yosemitesam.ch/3-tools-for-2025/

🕑 Feb 2, 2025

In JavaScript, there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders.

-- Douglas Crockford

🕑 Feb 1, 2025

Thoughts on the software industry

https://linus.coffee/note/software-industry/

🕑 Feb 1, 2025

What is programming? Some people call it a science, some people call it an art, some people call it a skill. I think it has aspects of all three.

-- Charles Simonyi

🕑 Jan 31, 2025

"We ran out of columns" - The best, worst codebase

https://jimmyhmiller.github.io/ugliest-beautiful-codebase

🕑 Jan 31, 2025

A skilled programmer is like a poet who can put into words those ideas that others find inexpressible.

-- Danny Hillis

🕑 Jan 30, 2025

One man's error is another man's data.

🕑 Jan 30, 2025

In handling resources, strive to avoid disaster rather than to attain an optimum.

-- Butler Lampson

🕑 Jan 29, 2025

Be humble, communicate clearly, and respect others. It costs nothing to be kind, but the impact is priceless.

-- Addy Osmani

🕑 Jan 28, 2025

A few months of writing code can save you a few hours in design.

🕑 Jan 28, 2025

I’ve got this need to program. I wake up in the morning with sentences of a literate program. Before breakfast -- I’m sure poets must feel this -- I have to go to the computer and write this paragraph and then I can eat and I’m happy.

-- Donald Knuth

🕑 Jan 28, 2025

My afternoon project turned into four days of AI lies, USB chaos, and hard lessons

https://nemo.foo/blog/day-4-of-an-afternoon-project

🕑 Jan 27, 2025

Making things easy is hard.

-- Ted Nelson

🕑 Jan 27, 2025

Dualities in functional programming

https://dicioccio.fr/on-dualities.html

🕑 Jan 27, 2025

Over half of the time you spend working on a project is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you.

-- Richard P. Gabriel

🕑 Jan 26, 2025

Does current AI represent a dead end?

A good TLDR on the current state of things: https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/does-current-ai-represent-a-dead-end/

🕑 Jan 26, 2025

JavaScript is the only language that I'm aware of that people feel they don't need to learn before they start using it.

-- Douglas Crockford

🕑 Jan 26, 2025

Immutability Changes Everything (Pat Helland, 2016):

web version: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2884038
pdf: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2857274.2884038

🕑 Jan 25, 2025

How to build your own ZX80/ZX81 and how it works:

http://searle.x10host.com/zx80/zx80.html

🕑 Jan 25, 2025

File systems: The original hypermedia

https://jon.work/og/

🕑 Jan 25, 2025

Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.

-- Linus Torvalds

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

Snowdrop OS - a homebrew operating system from scratch, in assembly language

http://sebastianmihai.com/snowdrop/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

A WebAssembly compiler that fits in a tweet

https://wasmgroundup.com/blog/wasm-compiler-in-a-tweet/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

No matter how slow you are writing clean code, you will always be slower if you make a mess.

-- Robert C. Martin

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

Ignore the grifters - AI isn't going to kill the software industry

https://dustinewers.com/ignore-the-grifters/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code

A good intro to text search: https://bart.degoe.de/building-a-full-text-search-engine-150-lines-of-code/

🕑 Jan 24, 2025

This is interesting - two QR codes overlaid in such a way that a reader randomly catches one or the other:

https://mstdn.social/@isziaui/113874436953157913

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Taking a look at compression algorithms
(dissecting various compression algorithms)

https://cefboud.github.io/posts/compression/

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Out of the Tar Pit (2006)

This is one of my favorite computer science papers: https://curtclifton.net/papers/MoseleyMarks06a.pdf

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Most influential papers in computer science history

https://terriblesoftware.org/2025/01/22/the-7-most-influential-papers-in-computer-science-history/

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

-- Linus Torvalds

🕑 Jan 23, 2025

Creating a highly-integrated open-source laptop from scratch

https://www.byran.ee/posts/creation/

🕑 Jan 22, 2025

Minimal 64x4 home computer - a DIY home computer with VGA and PS/2 and 4x(!) the processing power of a Commodore C64 or Apple II.

https://github.com/slu4coder/Minimal-64x4-Home-Computer

🕑 Jan 22, 2025

Simple CPU design

http://simplecpudesign.com

🕑 Jan 21, 2025

Death By Specificity (from Rich Hickey's talk Clojure Made Simple)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSEQfqNYNAc

🕑 Jan 21, 2025

Investigating an "evil" RJ45 dongle

Reverse-engineering hardware can be difficult -- but sometimes, all you need is a comfy armchair and some Google Translate.

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/investigating-an-evil-rj45-dongle

🕑 Jan 21, 2025

The computing field is always in need of new cliches: Banality sooths our nerves.

-- Alan Perlis

🕑 Jan 20, 2025

It's time to make computing personal again.

How surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/3292/the-pc-is-dead-its-time-to-make-computing-personal-again

🕑 Jan 20, 2025

One man's constant is another man's variable.

-- Alan Perlis

🕑 Jan 19, 2025

Booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit

https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=35.%20Linux4004

🕑 Jan 19, 2025

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.

-- Alan Perlis

🕑 Jan 30, 2024

Think twice before you start programming or you will program twice before you start thinking.

🕑 Jan 18, 2025

A filter that blocks AI spam and bad websites from appearing in search results via uBlocklist:

https://github.com/popcar2/BadWebsiteBlocklist

🕑 Jan 18, 2025

Write your own static site generator

https://g9h.io/write-your-own-static-site-generator.html