Weekly Review - Week 15

Posted on April 17, 2017

This post is a summary of links related to coding and software I followed and read (sometimes, skimmed over) in the past week. Its purpose is both to serve as a high-level personal log and as a potential source of interesting (or not so interesting) links. Entries are provided in no particular order with minimal comments…

2017-04-10 Monday

qmuli/qmuli: Qmuli - Serverless framework for Haskell: While preparing my talk about configuration management with Haskell, I went back to this fascinating idea: Execute Haskell code over AWS Lambda.

2017-04-11 Tuesday

Problem 1 - Project Euler: Thinking about building something like Project Euler but dedicated to philosophical questions…

2017-04-12 Wednesday

run emacs.app or emacsclient on Mac OS X: Still working on getting a decent emacsclient-based setup on Mac
Getting the source directory of a Bash script from within - Stack Overflow: Surprisingly not straightforward esp. if one wants to take care of all corner cases
AIME - {TEC·REF}: Back to AIME project while working on my talk for newCrafts. Most of the links below are residuals from a trail of surfing the web starting from trying to better understand the TEC/REF crossing and following references from there
What Is Object-Oriented Ontology? A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to the Philosophical Movement Sweeping the Art World | Art for Sale | Artspace: It seems there exists something called Object-Oriented Ontology or OOO for short which is quite an earth-shaking news to learn for a former OO programmer slowly shifting towards FP. Maybe there is some reverse movement going on in the field of metaphysics and speculative philosophy where people coming from a purely logical framework (aka. classical logic, logical positivism, intuitionism…) would move towards an object-oriented approach. Seems mostly relevant and very active in the aesthetics.

Things.pdf: This one I read in more details, the author being somewhat supportive of OOO but apparently with some peculiar twists:

objects have an existence of their own which is incommensurable to us
we go into a state of terror when we realise this as exemplified by the mechanic from the introductory short story whose tools come alive and flesh-like
following Heidgger, Shaviro posits that objects, things, tools are withdrawn from mere presence, they “cannot be reduced to its presence-at-hand - that is to say to the sum of its delineable properties” => contra correlation of things and human mind
but this dissolution, this alienness has a dual movement which manifests itself especially with broken tools: things become more-than-present, they spring to life against us, in their singularity
we don’t use tools, we ally with them to reach our goals
things proposition me (Whitehead): They are not only a mere packet of sense-data
things have a relation between themselves which is aesthetical: feeling an object for its own sake
linked to romanticism and wholeness (??), the world as a “single gigantic system of references”
democracy of fellow creatures
anthropomorphism goes against anthropocentrism => imbues things with feelings, “thoughts” and desires
vitalism and panpsychism => Gaia ?

Category Theory proofs in Idris - sitr.us: Using Idris to institute a Categorical framework and make proofs with it
dsn14-bftsmart.pdf: Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed consensus is the algorithmic problem at the heart of blockchains. This article claims to reach tens of thousands of TPS with its implementation of BFT consensus in Java. There quite a few companies like Symbiont.io building upon this technology to provide so-called “smart contracts” capabilities.
Remote work: For programmers, the ultimate office perk is avoiding the office entirely — Quartz: Another nail in the coffin of office work?
The economics of software correctness | David R. MacIver and The Rise of ``Worse is Better’’: Those two articles go hand in hand…

2017-04-13 Thursday

Le réalisme kitsch | Zilsel: Une critique du nouveau réalisme dont le réalisme spéculatif qui a parti lié avec l’Ontologie Orientée-Objet dont je parle plus haut. Ainsi que de Latour, Meillassoux, Garcia et autres philosophes post-post-modernes.
sdkmanager | Android Studio: On a more practical matter, I paired with Bernard on setting up an environment for mobile apps development based on Cordova. Setting this up is less straightforward than one would like and requires things like installing the Intel® Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (Intel® HAXM)…
OCaml Calendar FAQ: Working on a follow-up to my first post mixing DDD and Type DD, I started shaving some yak: Implement a (naive) dependently-typed date module in Idris. I got a gentle reminder in this SO question that handling dates correctly is extremely challenging, as this detailed post on dates handling from an OCaml library exposes.
Spotify’s Love/Hate Relationship with DNS: How Spotify leverages DNS in its microservices architecture

2017-04-14 Friday

The Twilight of Becoming (and Process) | Naught Thought: Another post related to my exploration of OOO.

2017-04-15 Saturday

The Programmers’ Stone » Implications for Software Engineers: I don’t know how I stumbled on this blog which seems to be an online version of a book. Some more comments on C2 wiki… Looks like yet another instance of “developers are special” and “there are 10x programmers” myths, resting on some midly interesting research results from neurosciences related to Kahneman’s work on behavioural economics.
the wackids: And now for something different: A rock band playing rock classics on toy instruments!
Arnaud Bailly - Sur “Critique de la raison pure” (2): Published notes from last year’s reading of Kant’s CRP

2017-04-16 Sunday

Hexing the technical interview and Typing the technical interview: Two fantastic posts from Kyle Kingsbury of Jepsen fame, demonstrating the breadth and depth of his knowledge of computer systems, from writing bytecode in clojure to type-level programming in Haskell
Régler sa vie more geometrico: Spinoza: Comment s’inspirer de l’Éthique ?