This is weird - my mother very rarely drinks but she’ll be hard pressed telling you exactly when was the last time time . This doesn’t make her an alcoholic.

Or should you start the rule with ‘you’ve been drinking everyday for a while’?

If can't remember the last time she DID NOT take alcohol, it does make her an alcoholic. Or just an old person with severe memory issues, who shouldn't even live alone at that point.

Computer architecture a quantitative approach by Patterson and hennessy

It’s the real life exchange rate for algorithms and data structures. Basically understanding your infrastructure and its performance characteristics will help you design simpler ( and therefore better )systems

I used mplayer ( the ancestor to mpv as I’ve just realized ) in the early 2000s which I think could handle everything under the sun back then.

That's ffmpeg. Neither mplayer nor VLC were doing anything special that let them "play everything". They just used ffmpeg.

(nb they did often use their own demuxers instead of libavformat)

Cloudflare, google project zero.

This is a truly remarkable book, and a must read for any engineer who depends on a gc . And if you don’t need a gc, the book starts by talking about allocators, which are actually very important too !

It’s pretty standard in many places I think - the point here is not the null gc but rather exact memory requirements being proved statically.

I liked window maker and enlightenment, both of a which appeared a bit later.

I only used Enlightenment for a while, now AfterStep/Windowmaker were my favourite window managers.

It’s also not a solved problem unlike what the article claims, unless ‘solved’ doesn’t mean ‘works all the time ‘.

Very nice post thanks - I didn’t know about cakeml and bootstrapping formally verified compilers.