Bookmarks

10 Mar, 2025

Design

• [Aresluna] The hardest working font in Manhattan
• [Matthew Ström] How to generate color palettes for design systems
• [Scott Smitelli] Et tu, Panera?

Computer Graphics

• [boringcactus] A 2025 Survey of Rust GUI Libraries (13 Apr 2025)
• libvips: a demand-driven, horizontally threaded image processing library

Text, Fonts & Typography

• [behdad] State of Text Rendering 2024
• [i3D 2018] GPU-Centered Font Rendering Directly from Glyph Outlines
• [Sebastian Lague] Coding Adventure: Rendering Text
• BiDi in Terminal Emulators
• HarfBuzz WASM Shaper Demonstrations

Open-Source Intelligence

• [bellingcat] A Beginner’s Guide to Seeing More With Satellite Imagery

Computer History/Folklore

• [ArsTechnica] Mac OS X DP3: Trial by Water (2000)
• [unixdigest.com] The real motivation behind systemd
• [Steinar H. Gunderson] Migrating away from bcachefs
• [Ken Shirriff] The origin of the cargo cult metaphor
• [xiph/ogg Merge Request] "A 3 year old MR, to fix a 14 year old bug, now arguing about using a 26 year old language, in a project that hasn't had a release in 5 years"

Operating Systems

• [Blog System/5] Revisiting the DOS memory models
• [loonytek] Advisory File Locking – My take on POSIX and BSD locks
• [Tanuj Ravi Rao] Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive
• [StackOverflow] How did Wine64 manage to handle macOS?

Distributed Systems

• [transactional.blog] Talks: Enough With All The Raft
• [transactional.blog] Decomposing Transactional Systems

Databases

• [transactional.blog] How to Learn: Userland Disk I/O
• [transactional.blog] Modern Hardware for Future Databases
• [transactional.blog] Data Replication Design Spectrum
• [transactional.blog] Torn Write Detection and Protection
• [Jepsen] Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4
  • [Null Bitmap] How To Understand That Jepsen Report
• The DuckLake Manifesto: SQL as a Lakehouse Format
• [Xata] PostgreSQL Branching: Xata vs. Neon vs. Supabase - Part 1
• [OrioleDB] OrioleDB Architecture Overview
• [OrioleDB] The differences between OrioleDB and Neon

High Performance Computing

• Blosc, an extremely fast, multi-threaded, meta-compressor library
• [Taichi Lang] How does Taichi Compare to CUB/CuPy/Numba in Numerical Computation?
• [Data Intellect] Apache Arrow, DuckDB, Polars and Vaex

Networking

• [Vincent Bernat] VXLAN & Linux
• [nftables] Quick reference-nftables in 10 minutes

Berkeley Packet Filter

• [GitLab] 464XLAT CLAT in BPF (from freedesktop NetworkManager)
• [Kong Inc.] How to write an eBPF/XDP load-balancer in Rust

Linux Administration

• [systemd] Network Configuration Synchronization Points
  • [StackOverflow] Cause a script to execute after networking has started?

Computer Graphics

• [GitHub] An attempt at reproducing unreal nanite in threejs

Electrical Engineering

• [mitxela.com] Fluid Simulation Pendant

Security & Cryptography

• [Soatok] Don’t Use Session (Signal Fork) - Dhole Moments
• [Soatok] Going Bark: A Furry’s Guide to End-to-End Encryption

Functional & Logic Programming

• [Abhinav Sarkar] Solving Advent of Code “Seating System” with Comonads and Stencils
• [Computer Things] Solving a "Layton Puzzle" with Prolog
• [MOSEK] MOSEK Modeling Cookbook
• [Entropic Thoughts] Parser Combinators Beat Regexes

Filesystems

• Series: [Die wunderbare Welt von Isotopp] 50 years in filesystems: towards 2004 – LFS
  • 50 years in filesystems: A detour on vnodes
  • 50 years in filesystems: 1994
  • 50 years in filesystems: 1984
  • 50 years in filesystems: 1974

Programming & Query Languages

• Google's Common Expression Language
• Exploiting Undefined Behavior in C/C++ Programs for Optimization: A Study on the Performance Impact
• desugar: Unravelling Python's syntactic sugar source code
  • [Tall, Snarky Canadian] Unravelling async and await
• [dynomight] I don't like NumPy
• [The Trail of Bits] Unexpected security footguns in Go's parsers
• [mcyoung] The Best C++ Library

Web

• Get out of my
• [overreacted] Functional HTML
• APCA Contrast Calculator

Type Theory

• [Hey There Buddo!] A Python frozenset interpretation of Dependent Type Theory

Computer Science

• [samwho] Reservoir Sampling
• [EPFL] Adding linear-time lookbehinds to RE2
• [code4k] Crinkler secrets, 4k intro executable compressor at its best
• [Aras Pranckevičius] Lossless Float Image Compression
• [Algorithmica] Binary Search

Computer Engineering

• [Made of Bugs] The ITTAGE indirect branch predictor

Misc

• [GitButler] How Core Git Developers Configure Git
• [Chad Nauseam] "A calculator app? Anyone could make that."
• [wolf@nereid.pl] Viewing images
• [Ankush Menat] Missing the Forest for the Trees With Flame Graphs
• ECMAScript Proposal: Temporal API
  • Ambiguity Due to DST or Other Time Zone Offset Changes
  • Ambiguity Caused by Permanent Changes to a Time Zone Definition
  • RFC 9557: Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps with Additional Information (Extended Format)
• [Mete Balci] Lustre Installation Tutorial
• YAML Monsters
• Infinite Mac
• [Etienne Jacob] Algorithms for making interesting organic simulations

Essays

Software Industry

• [Scott Smitelli] Dirty, disgusting, filthy, lice-ridden boids
• [Ludicity] Ludic's Guide To Getting Software Engineering Jobs

Silicon Valley

• [Dave Gauer] I'm an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don't speak for me
• [lori] Why I Lost Faith in Kagi
• Large Language Models & AI Hype
  • [Out of the Software Crisis] The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con
  • [Xe] They squandered the holy grail
  • [Fly.io] My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
    • [Ludicity] Contra Ptacek's Terrible Article On AI
    • [Deciphering Glyph] I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now
  • [METR] Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
    • [Fight for the Human] Are developers slowed down by AI? Evaluating an RCT (?) and what it tells us about developer productivity
  • [Iris Meredith] Coding in a material world
  • [fuzzy notepad] The rise of Whatever