History
- Stone age art “in a new light”
Concave stone lamps filled with animal fat, on the other hand, are smokeless and can offer more than an hour of focused, candlelike light.
Science
- “What Termites and cells have in common”
the collective dynamics of nanometer-sized macromolecules self-organize into micrometer patterns that affect the cellular perception of shape-changing extracellular cues in our own cells
Tech
- Gartner looking back on their predictions for past hype cycles
- “The most hyped technology in 1995 was Intelligent Agents”
- “I think of the Gartner Hype Cycle as a Hero’s Journey for technologies. And just like the hero’s journey, the Hype Cycle is a compelling narrative structure.”
- Missed big trends like “x86 virtualization” and “Open Source” (!!) and NoSQL
Tools
- Using Sublime Text for prose
Commentary
- Andrew Sullivan on the “turn against liberalism” (as an old Obama fan, I find myself agreeing … and as someone who also lived in New York around the same time (the Bloomberg era), I find myself agreeing with this take on Eric Adams)
- Looking back at an old pessemistic study
- Slavoj Zizek on how we’re in a pre-WW1 time
Software engineering
- The “IDE divide”
- language features vs tool features
- Another view (had to track this down, since it was a broken link that wasn’t captured by archive.org either)
- Further digression, into a meta-view:
“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t”.
- Anyway, like all such divides, the final answer to “which one” is “both”
- A look ahead at computing performance by Brendan Gregg
- On “Portable and stable software”
Computing
- Fascinating and painful, an account of the very early web
- Of shells and operating systems
- Clasp (CL on LLVM) lives on!
- Databases within … static pages?
emscriptensql.js
- Arthur Gleckler showing a cpu “card” running bare-metal Lisp: