Off-The-Record Messaging part 1: the problem with PGP

Code specialization for the MIR lightweight JIT compiler

The FreeBSD Boot Process

Issue #171

2/17/2022

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Hola
I realized shortly after sending yesterday's issue that I actually removed the patreon link a while ago, so if you looked for it and didn't find it, you're not crazy. I added it back now at the bottom of the issue. Also if you have an Apple email, you might've missed yesterday's issue because it bounced. Not 100% sure why. Probably contained some lines that triggered their spam filter.
There are two things I wanted to briefly mention today. Firstly, I came across an article that discussed the "primitive obsession", which I hadn't heard of before. Basically it's when you use language primitives (chars, strings, integers) to represent domain specific ideas (full names, money), rather than writing a class or wrapper for it. I realized that this is something I seriously suffer from, and just wanted to share it with anyone else who might not have heard of the concept, but feels like it applies to them after hearing about it. Looking back, there have been so many cases in the past where it would've been the better design choice to implement a custom data type, rather than use primitives with a bunch of constraints littered throughout the code. Ya live and you learn.
Secondly I wanted to float the idea of a technical deep-dive search engine that uses the articles I curated as the basis for results. Fortunately Pek of Morning Cup of Coding shared with me the articles he curated before closing shop, which brings the total individual article count to just under 2,000. I honestly don't know how useful it is, but my experience with popular search engines these days is, for the lack of a better term, poopy. Lot's of SEO spam or just straight up duplicated sites (especially with Stack Overflow QAs). This could be an interesting little experiment to see how what value a niche, humanly curated search engine might bring. If you have any ideas, comments, or thoughts, let me know.
Finally, here's the last issue of the week. Hope you all have a lovely weekend!

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Off-The-Record Messaging part 1: the problem with PGP

Published: 15 February 2022
Tags: cryptography


Robert Heaton explains how PGP works, its limitations, and introduces OTR messaging as a better alternative.


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Code specialization for the MIR lightweight JIT compiler

Published: 16 February 2022
Tags: c, compiler, linux


Vladimir Makarov "discuss[es] how [he] plan[s] to support the generation of specialized and deoptimized code in MIR, and what support has already been implemented in the MIR project".


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The FreeBSD Boot Process

Published: 16 February 2022
Tags: os


A deep-dive into FreeBSD's boot process, including a breakdown of all of the different modes.


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Stats (updated daily)

Sent: 2738

Opens: 1337

Clicks: 333

Link Clicks Clicks % Unique Clicks Unique Clicks %
Off-The-Record Messaging part 1: the problem with PGP 112 41.18% 129 43.88
Code specialization for the MIR lightweight JIT compiler 54 19.85% 56 19.05
The FreeBSD Boot Process 106 38.97% 109 37.07

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