Two Days Ago
Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.05
Published on in Movies
Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]
- How it Ends (2018) — 5/10
- Will Younger (Theo James) and Samantha Sutherland (Kat Graham) are expecting. Her parents know that they’re together, but they don’t know that they’re pregnant. Will travels to Chicago to have dinner with her parents Paula (Nicole Ari Parker) and Tom (Forest Whitaker). Tom is a dismissive hard-ass, a control-freak Marine with 27 years of service. They’re apparently also wealthy, so they’re of course entitled to... [More]
3 days Ago
Links and Notes for May 10th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Table of Contents
Building RegEx from scratch with Stephen Toub
Published on in Programming
This is another excellent 1-hour tour of another complex corner of .NET. Toub describes and shows how the source-generated RegEx engine works.
- The generated source is human-readable and debuggable.
- It is well-commented.
- It updates in real-time as you change the expression.
- It includes XML documentation that describes the regular expression in plain English.
- They rewrote the compiler in .NET 7 to not only better support source generators, but also to be able to emit not only IL, but source... [More]
Building async/await from scratch with Stephen Toub
Published on in Programming
This is another video from Stephen Toub that is just chock/full of useful information.
At 27:30, they start to discuss about the nomenclature of Task
and how it differs from an Action
. It’s funny that neither of them mentioned that tasks in .NET are called promises pretty much everywhere else (JavaScript, Java, etc.). Some libraries also use the word future. For more information, see Futures and promises (Wikipedia).
As he’s building everything, it is really astonishing to note that Hanselmann has to... [More]
Building LINQ from scratch with Stephen Toub
Published on in Programming
This is a great interview with the master of performance-optimization in .NET Stephen Toub. If you’re relatively well-versed in C#, .NET, and Linq, then you can just jump to the second video (linked below). I actually watched the second one first. I didn’t feel like I’d missed anything.
Stephen Toub’s the guy who writes the 100+-page release notes on performance. See the following links.
- Performance Improvements in .NET 5 (46 pages)
- Performance Improvements in .NET 6 (109 pages)
- Performance... [More]
1 week Ago
Links and Notes for May 3rd, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Table of Contents
KRAZAM videos are gold
Published on in Fun
KRAZAM makes videos about working in tech and, more specifically, about working in a tech team that has been scrummed out, with lots of layers of management.
This is one of the more recent ones.
“Your friends and family understand what you do.”
“Your friends and family appreciate your humorous work stories…”
“DevOps is a meaningful term.”
“That joke you told in your meeting was funny! If your coworkers were not on mute, you would’ve heard them laughing.”
At the beginning, it shows that... [More]
ESC 2024: Semifinal #2
Published on in Fun
- Malta
- Body suit. Naked-looking. Getting dragged around by a bunch of 90s-era-looking background dancers. This is just f*%ing awful. My ears hate me already. Jesus Christ, anyone who thinks this is good should reevaluate their life choices. This is how we’re starting off? No-one will notice when the robots take over. They’ve blindfolded her, flipped her around, they all threw their shorts off, now they’re porn-dancing. She’s got quite a Madonna-style tooth-gap going on. Good for her. There was... [More]
ESC 2024: Semifinal #1
Published on in Fun
- Cyprus
- Dances way better than Dua Lipa. But, then, doesn’t everybody? She’s 17 and lip-synced in English. Her backup dancers all look like they go to high school with her. She’s very, very cute. Gorgeous, actually. And, for ESC very special: not in a porn-y way. Good for them.
- Serbia
- Alone on the stage. Goth-y. Low, slow song. She sang in what I assume was Serbian. She was barefoot. Utterly forgettable. We won’t have to hear her again.
- Lithuania
- Not English. Rappy. Boys got some backup... [More]
2 weeks Ago
Generating trash pandas with Copilot
Published on in Technology
I was chatting with someone about some picture and I noted that maybe we could find something appropriate.
I prompted DuckDuckGo with “raccoon trash panda digging in garbage can”. It gave me a whole grid of pictures, of which I quickly picked the following as my favorites.
My interlocutor had never really used any of the LLM-based machines before, so I gave GitHub Copilot a whirl. I prompted GitHub Copilot: “Show me a cartoon of a raccoon digging in a trash can with its butt in the air”.... [More]
3 weeks Ago
Links and Notes for April 26th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Table of Contents
Links and Notes for April 19th, 2024
Published on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Table of Contents
Freedom as a means of control
Published on in Quotes
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
1 month Ago
It’s 2024. How’s it going, JavaScript?
Published on in Programming
This video is from a great channel, which published a lot of great videos a while back. They covered pretty much everything already, but circled back to JavaScript for 2024.
Some choice quotes from the video.
“We push on save.”
“2024 is the year of the serverlesslessness.”
“They say that every year, but this year they’re out of VC funding.”
“Don’t write this down, next week all of this is gonna change.”
This guy just keeps knocking it out of the park. Pretty much everything he mentioned... [More]
The Cosmic Call
Published on in Fun
The article Try it and see by Mark Dominus (The Universe of Discourse) discusses the graphic below, which is part of the “Cosmic Call”, a message to extraterrestrials.
The author says that he told his 11-year-old niece,
““I bet you could figure it out if you tried.” She didn’t believe me and she didn’t want to try. It seemed insurmountable.”
I sent this to a few people in my family.
Hint #1
After a little while, I provided some context. The Cosmic Call is:
“In 1999, two Canadian astrophysicists, Stéphane Dumas and Yvan Dutil,... [More]”