Generally interesting links – Mar 2021

Books

In which I develop an unhealthy obsession with small mechanical keyboards: The Planck
- They can be ergonomic too
On bringing back the old git email flow
VSCode is really, really big
Why Mastodon isn’t the full solution to the problems of Twitter
Keeping my eye on the development of the Lem editor

Unlike the 90s and before, the government is trying hard to report UFO sightings, but no one cares
The fascinating account of Walter Pitts (never knew about the connection with Norbert Weiner and the earlier beginnings of what came to be known as Cybernetics)
A counterpoint tale from academia, on certain ideological forms
David Suchet on how he speaks like Poirot
Chris Hedges sounds the alarm
Some Tom ‘n Jerry for you: Cat Concierto
Meeting the “soul guards” of Gengis Khan

Un-intuitive performance trade-offs
Sussman on flexible systems
On biologically-inspired computing
Another fun Gilad Bracha talk
On Smalltalk
On Unison
On Tuple Spaces
Looking at some good ideas that were forgotten with Joe Armstrong, a short while before he passed away
A manifesto on Protocols, not Platforms

A take on Async programming in Rust
Apparently, Python includes Tcl
The continuing relevance of the Solid principle
The Linux kernel is nothing like what it was 15 years ago when I last mucked around in it … here’s a look at the intersection of bpf and io_uring