This week, I’ve got a bunch of cool things from Github, various posts about parsers, and some fun meditations on removing oneself from the machine. Enjoy :)
Business
TikTok and the new American capitalism - Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk My weekly Margins piece, and this one is a doozy. It focuses on the Oracle/Walmart/TikTok deal the absolutely bare-faced the crony capitalism that it entailed. I wrote about Scott Galloway’s Crony Capitalists piece a few weeks ago and it’s interesting to see that same terminology cropping up a few weeks later in a different context.
Culture
Brunello Cucinelli – On my Om I love fashion and I’ve always been into Brunello Cucinelli, but I never knew how philosophical or interesting the man was. I kinda stumbled upon this link by accident but I couldn’t stop thinking about it all day that I read it.
Tech
Holbert: A Graphical Interactive Proof Assistant Designed for Education Liam O’Connor is a programming languages researcher in London and they just released a really cool-looking theorem prover that, unlike many automated theorem provers, comes with a graphical component for the visually oriented. I recommend anyone who’s interested in theorem proving or formal verification to check it out.
My favorite Rust function I’m working on a lot on parsers at work, so I’ve got tokenizing on the brain, and this post was a great deep dive into a great Rust function for tokenizing (a function that I learned about in Bodil Stokke’s post about writing a parser in Rust!). If you’re interested in Rust, parsers, or even just clever programming in general, you should check this post out (and Bodil’s too!)
The 3 Tribes of Programming When researching the author of the previous post I noticed they referenced this article when it came to classifying different types of programmers. Personally, I don’t think anyone fits into a neat box when it comes to programming styles, but this article is a fun read if you enjoy pieces that make you look internally and classify yourself.
Make Now Just Lab on Github In reading about parsers in Scala I stumbled onto this guy’s Github portfolio, which blew my mind. You owe it on yourself to check out this body of open-source work.
Quine Codes. This is the personal website of the aforementioned Github page! Of course it’s one of the coolest personal website I’ve stumbled upon.
Ousterhout’s dichotomy I hadn’t heard of this concept before but it’s an interesting classification of languages. Personally, I think it’s a pretty arbitrary distinction, but at least it got my thinking about how to categorize different types of programming languages.
In the computer This is my new favorite meta-article on reasoning about program logic. Whether you’re a declarative, imperative, or functional programmer (or any composition of the 3); I imagine you’ll get value out of this piece.
The Missing OS. I don’t really know much about OS design but this piece was really exciting to me because the ramifications of what’s being proposed (an operating system optimized for networked distributed systems, aka a DatacenterOS) would be incredibly impactful in modern computing, especially in open-source.
Work
Side Project Marketing Checklist One of my big hobbies during the COVID-19 pandemic has been to learn more about (and spend more time working on) side projects, and I found this guide helpful. It’s a bit too thorough for the types of projects I’m currently doing, but it’s comprehensive, and I recommend it for anyone who’s interested in marketing their side projects and doesn’t know where to start.
PalanThiel: The Uncola. This week’s Scott Galloway goes after Palatir, and makes the case that Palantir is an over-valued, over-hyped government services company who’s only skill is in losing money at a more impressive rate than the US government itself.
Why it is important that software projects fail. The thesis of this piece is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but basically it comes down to “we need projects to fail so that bureaucrats can relax about their projects failing and maybe address project management with a more realistic scope instead of holding on to success at all costs”.