Loris Cro:

In front of you are two personal websites, each used as a blog and to display basic contact info of the owner:

1. One is a complex CMS written in PHP that requires a web server, multiple workers, a Redis cache, and a SQL database. The site also has a big frontend component that loads as a Single Page Application and then performs navigation by requesting the content in JSON form, which then gets “rehydrated” client-side.
2. The other is a collection of static HTML files and one or two CSS files. No JavaScript anywhere.

If you didn’t know any better, you would expect almost all normal users to have [2] and professional engineers to have something like [1], but it’s actually the inverse: only few professional software engineers can “afford” to have the second option as their personal website, and almost all normal users are stuck with overcomplicated solutions.

For №2 to be successful for “normal” users I think there needs to be an approachable UI to be able to make changes on the fly… and the implementation gets complicated quickly if you’re doing it on the website itself.

The funny thing is that we we had such a thing in the early days of the web: native apps for authoring a website and uploading it, such as Frontpage, Dreamweaver, or Netscape Composer. It’s strange that these seem to have fallen out of favour now.

Julio Merino:

All of this growth has been in service of ever-growing programs. But… even if programs are now more sophisticated than they were before, do they all really require access to a 64-bit address space? Has the growth from 8 to 64 bits been a net positive in performance terms?

Let’s try to answer those questions to find some very surprising answers.

⋮

We observe massive differences in the machine code generated for the trivial main function. The 64-bit code is definitely smaller than the 32-bit code, contrary to my expectations. But the code is also very different; so different, in fact, that ILP32 vs. LP64 doesn’t explain it.

Was the move to 64-bit CPUs all upside? Julio runs the numbers to show some pros and cons.

Eugen Rochko writing on the Mastodon blog:

Mastodon 4.3 just landed! If you’re a mastodon.social user, you might have already seen some of this in action as we’ve been gradually rolling out these updates over the course of the last 11 months in nightly releases, but we’re finally making a new stable release available to the community. If you use a different server, you will get access to these improvements once your server operator upgrades.

This one’s been in the works for a long time. The notification improvements are most welcome. I have been using the Phanpy Mastodon client for a while, partly due to grouped notifications. Glad this has functionality has made it to the official client now.

sdomi:

In 1999, some members from the MMC Association decided to split and create SD Association. But nobody seems to exactly know why.

I’m sure there’s some folks out there that were part of these associations. Hopefully they will get in touch with sdomi and enlighten us all.

Nathan Dyer:

A couple weeks ago I decided to purchase a MacBook Air M2, with the specific purpose of running Asahi Fedora Remix. I chose this particular model because it’s the newest chipset that is supported by Asahi, and Best Buy was having a $200 off sale on them, presumably before Apple announces a new slate of laptops and stops offering the aging M2-based systems.

There were several things I really loved about the system (battery life was astounding, the trackpad was marvellous, and the display was beautiful), but ultimately I made the decision to return it; the experience just wasn’t what I needed for a daily driver.

Seems like there’s still a bit of polishing required for Asahi to match the experience of Linux on non-Apple hardware.

Arnaud Carré:

The Commodore Amiga 500 had a blitter chip. Its main function was to move bitmap graphics from one location to another while applying logical operations. The Amiga’s blitter could handle up to three bitmap sources at once and perform logical operations between them. To specify which operation to use, you needed to set an 8-bit value in the chip, known as the “minterm.”

Three bitmap sources and an 8-bit value to control logical combinations! Doesn’t that sound like a primitive version of the modern AVX vpternlogd instruction?

An unexpected correlation between a particular AVX-512 instruction and 35 year old Amiga graphics hardware.

Dion interviewing Julius Gustavsson, System Architect at Volvo Cars on the Tweede golf blog:

It turned out the low-power processor was a perfect fit for using Rust! It was not classified as a safety-critical component and it was an Arm Cortex-M processor, so there was no technical or bureaucratic blocker for using Rust.

And so it has come to be that, at this moment, EX90s and Polestar 3s are rolling off the assembly line that would not work without their Rust components.

Great to see embedded Rust see more industry adoption.

Jeffrey Starr:

In December 2022, Adobe, through the Computer History Museum (CHM), released the source code for PostScript®, version 1.0. PostScript is one of the foundational technologies of the desktop publishing revolution of the early 1980s, along with laser printers, the graphical user interface of the Apple Macintosh, and Aldus PageMaker. PostScript is a programming language and a page description format for translating visual content into printed documents.

Adobe immediately enjoyed business success through licensing PostScript to laser printer manufacturers and it became the de facto digital publishing format. While multiple histories have studied this event through a business lens, what historical questions may be answered through the source code? Further, as software practitioners, what can we learn from the source code to apply to present and future designs?

Detailed dive into the history and development of PostScript. Remarkable what was possible on the resource constrained computers of the time.

Laura Chambers, Mozilla CEO:

Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

This feels like them throwing in the towel and declaring there is no viable way to make money online without embracing advertising.

We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history. And that willingness to take on the hard things, even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.

I can’t see how more ads makes the internet better, even if those ads are less creepy than those from the likes of Google and Meta. For some reason Mozilla continues to refuse to just let us pay for Firefox.