20 random bookmarks

@msfjarvis@androiddev.social's personal link log, mostly revolving around tech and tech-adjacent culture.

2025-03-11

65.

20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3)

ploum.net/2025-03-08-linux_desktop3.html
63.

20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1)

ploum.net/2024-10-20-20years-linux-desktop-part1.html

2025-03-01

59.

How CouchDB Prevents Data Corruption: fsync

neighbourhood.ie/blog/2025/02/26/how-couchdb-prevents-data-corruption-fsync

Very neat explanation of how databases work hard to keep your data safe. I was surprised to learn about the failure mode of reading from page cache twice and the database convincing itself that the data has been written out even though it really hasn't.

2025-02-20

58.

The origins of Firefox

vmst.io/@jalefkowit/114037556786892479

Today I learned that Firefox started as an act of protest from Mozilla engineers who hated the bloated product they were being forced to create

57.

What is the post launch Discovery Queue – How To Market A Game

howtomarketagame.com/2025/02/19/what-is-the-post-launch-discovery-queue

Super interesting look into the #Steam discovery queue system and the impact it has on your game's visibility on the platform

2025-02-19

56.

Someone has to save the Film and TV that Studios won't

aftermath.site/ricky-jay-defector-archive-preservation

A great interview with Chris Person of Aftermath, who has over the course of the past 2 years has become something of a VHS decoding savant

2025-02-16

55.

"A calculator app? Anyone could make that."

chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app

Super interesting deep dive into why the Android calculator app is so much better than iOS', and the incredible amount of work Hans Boehm put into making it so. I have never been more interested in calculators than reading this post!

2025-02-07

52.

Stifle Hungry Tasks using BuildService

www.liutikas.net/2025/02/06/Stifle-Hungry-Tasks.html

Gradle will always parallelize tasks to the maximum possible degree, which might not always be desirable when tasks have extreme memory and/or CPU usage and end up starving the whole build out. Aurimas shares a great trick with Gradle BuildServices that lets tasks have a maximum parallelism.

2024-12-31

48.

Raymond Chen's 2024 linklog

devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20241231-01?p=110698

A great round up of interesting stuff, mostly centered around C++

2024-12-01

45.

Kotlin trick: writing shared Enum utility code

whtwnd.com/p-y.wtf/entries/Kotlin trick: writing shared Enum utility code

Some tips from P-Y to write handy utilities for enums like ensuring entries are sorted or that they have unique labels, in a generic fashion.

2024-11-28

42.

Beyond Bcrypt

soatok.blog/2024/11/27/beyond-bcrypt

Great write up on password hashing techniques and their pros and cons

2024-09-10

31.

How to Monetize a blog

modem.io/blog/blog-monetization

Anything I say about it will ruin the delight of experiencing this page for the first time.

2024-08-30

28.

The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

eieio.games/essays/the-secret-in-one-million-checkboxes

A great read about a bunch of smart hackers who converged around the One Million Checkboxes game and started hiding secret messages inside it, their eventual discovery by the game's creator and everything they accomplished while the game was still up. Honestly made me a tiny bit emotional.

2024-07-06

16.

Properly Testing Concurrent Data Structures

matklad.github.io/2024/07/05/properly-testing-concurrent-data-structures.html

2024-07-04

13.

Generative AI, Which Is The Future Of Art, Cannot Draw A Map Of The United States

aftermath.site/generative-ai-map-of-the-united-states

2024-07-02

11.

On Burnout, Mental Health, And Not Being Okay

ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/on-burnout-mental-health-and-not-being-okay

Just beautifully written. I would recommend reading this even if you are in a good place mentally.

2024-07-01

10.

The Shareholder Supremacy

www.wheresyoured.at/tss

Businesses prioritizing shareholder value over everything else seems to have become the norm, but I didn't know how this insane sounding behavior started and this is a great history lesson on it.

2024-06-24

8.

How TED talks became the Picotop of millennial intellectualism

www.joanwestenberg.com/ted-talks-the-picotop-of-millennial-pop-intellectualism

2024-06-19

5.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

2024-06-10

3.

So you want to build a browser engine

robert.ocallahan.org/2024/06/browser-engine.html