I was watching The YPU Debates Noam Chomsky — “Resolved: End the American Empire” and he mentioned Orwell’s proposed introduction to Animal Farm.
Category Archives: Chatter
Recent articles
So via r/programming today: Modern storage is plenty fast. It is the APIs that are bad. and Anti-Patterns When Building Container Images.
And via lobsters: How Does NTP Work? and The curse of scalable technology.
MIT Has Predicted that Society Will Collapse in 2040
Slavoj Žižek
Today I learned of Slavoj Žižek while reading my MEAP copy of Street Coder.
goto conference talks
Some talks from the goto conference that came through recently:
Flash Fiction Stories: 25 Examples of Lighting-Fast Stories
Today I discovered: Flash Fiction Stories: 25 Examples of Lighting-Fast Stories. There’s some cool stories in there. I didn’t read all of them.
PHP DoH endpoint
This in the news today: A simple PHP script that can be used to add a DoH endpoint to a HTTPS server.
InfoWorld articles
Today I discovered InfoWorld with these articles:
- Complexity is killing software developers
- Why you should use a microservice architecture
- No one wants to manage Kubernetes anymore
And a bonus article from Spotify: How We Use Golden Paths to Solve Fragmentation in Our Software Ecosystem .
Also, I should note, I very much like the InfoWorld URL format: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3614850/no-one-wants-to-manage-kubernetes-anymore.html — this is the same URL structure I use in my own designs.
Unicode bidirectional override hack
Interesting: Security advisory for rustc (CVE-2021-42574).
As an example, the following snippet (with {U+NNNN} replaced with the Unicode codepoint NNNN):
if access_level != "user{U+202E} {U+2066}// Check if admin{U+2069} {U+2066}" {
...would be rendered by bidirectional-aware tools as:
if access_level != "user" { // Check if admin
Number of Programmers
From here some interesting stats:
- 6 million PHP programmers
- According to Linkedin, Facebook currently employs approximately 8850 software developers.
- At Amazon, there are around 36,000 developers writing code.
- Apple employs around 20 million developers, and together they have made about $100 billion in revenues.
- As of now, Netflix employs only 80 software engineers, who build 50 applications.
- According to the official Google employee report, 27,169 software engineers work at Google (i.e. research & development).