Why do ARM chips have instructions with JavaScript in the name (2018) - remember kids, if your programming language becomes popular enough, its primitive operations will become CPU instructions. I wonder if there’s been any analysis done on this? Like look at where a sufficient sample of programs spend their time and make that into instructions. You’d need a size/complexity heuristic to not just leave it at main but I’m sure companies such as Google or AWS which run big sever workloads would have the data.

Why isn’t functional programming the norm? (2019) #video - the short answer is “it’s complicated”. The longer answer is that FP languages lack either a “killer app” or some serious corporate backing. Add do that a bit of a definitional problem - like what is an FP language? Is Common Lips where you can have imperative constructs more FP than Rust where everything is immutable by default? OTOH many modern languages have functional programming capabilities, so in that sense FP is the present.

The observer effect with Daniel Ek (2020) - an interview with Spotify’s CEO. There’s a lot to take in, but perhaps for me the most interesting part was about the coaching he provides to his reports.

AirBnBaller (2020) - an analysis of why in the long run AirBnB might be the “breakout” startup of the 2010s, eclipsing the likes of Uber, or Palantir. Right now, things are dire with the global pandemic, but it won’t last forever. If anything, as a supply gateway AirBnB will have a very strong hand to play vs traditional hotel chains.

40ms of latency that just won’t go away (2020) - another case of being tripped up by Neagle’s algorithm for TCP - which batches short message bursts into bigger chunks to more efficiently utilize bandwidth. At the expense of latency. Disabling it is set via some flag on the socket. What I always find peculiar about these low level APIs is how much they had that you’re doing a “big thing(tm)” with these things.Sometimes it’s not even clear it works or is enough to work. I definitely like the higher level API where you’d instantiate a NoBufferingConnection or something of the sort and make it really clear and semantic what you’re trying to achive.