Links

I’m pretty psyched about the upcoming .NET6 release. I’ve already touched on ASP.NET 6 Minimal APIs. Continuing on the long-established tradition, the team has also worked hard on the performance side of things. File IO, for example, is seeing impressive gains: For .NET 6, we have made FileStream much faster and more reliable, thanks to an almost entire re-write. For same cases, the async implementation is now a few times faster! We also recognized the need of having more high-performance file IO features: concurrent reads and writes, scatter/gather IO and introduced new APIs for them. TL;DR File I/O is better, stronger, faster! ...

I stumbled upon a personal growth article this weekend, and that’s odd because I tend to stay clear from such things. Yet I found it quite relevant, so much that I thought I would share it (the delivery is also amusing, which is something new for this kind of content). It’s just another day… and you’re just doing what you need to do. You’re getting things done, and the day moves forward in this continuous sequence of checklists, actions, and respites. But at various moments of your routine, you pause and take a good look at your surroundings. The scenes of your everyday life. The blur of this all-too-familiar film. And you can’t help but to wonder… If there is more to it all. For some reason — this country, this city, this neighborhood, this particular street — is the place you are living a majority of your life in. And it is this thought that allows a daydream to seep in. You start thinking of all the other places you could be in this world. Or more accurately, all the places you’d rather be in. Somewhere more exciting. Somewhere new. Somewhere that can provide experiences that are foreign to you. ...

In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. The reason: The country applies the “Housing First” concept. Those affected by homelessness receive a small apartment and counselling – without any preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected thus make their way back into a stable life. And: All this is cheaper than accepting homelessness. Finland’s take on the homelessness problem is remarkable and gives hope. I live in a small town where the problem is not as apparent as in, say, San Francisco. Whenever I think back to my short time in San Francisco, I shudder at the terrifying homelessness situation I met there. There, in San Francisco, I realized the magnitude of “true liberalism”’s failure. ...

Like everyone else on the planet, I’ve been following GitHub Copilot since its launch. It is an impressive achievement and a remarkable milestone for the deep learning industry, that’s for sure. We are obviously at the early stages in deep learning applied to software development, and it is somewhat unsettling to ponder what the future might hold in this field. Like many others, however, I worry about code quality issues and the risk of license infringements1. I am also concerned that the advent of Copilot-like tools might fundamentally change the software developer experience, if not the software developer role as a whole, and for the worst. ...

Terrific piece by Jonathan Zittrain, on The Atlantic, on link rot and digital preservation. I love how well documented and informative it is. Yet, it remains perfectly approachable for both the non-knowledgeable reader and the technically savvy. Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. We need more content like this.

A long-sought first draft of Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’ surfaced a few years ago. Its fascinating story and intriguing news are revealed in a Tablet article titled Proust’s Madeleine Was Originally a Slice Toast. Being the Tablet “a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture”, it makes sense that a good part of the article focuses on Proust’s ambivalence about his Jewishness. Still, there are many other interesting tidbits to be learned. On the novel itself and its development, on some relevant characters and their real-world counterparts, and Proust himself. ...

Sam Enright assembled a friendly Beginner’s Guide to Miles Davis. If you’ve always been curious about jazz but never really managed to get into it, then this resource might serve as a good starting point. I cannot say I’m one hundred per cent aligned with his choices, but we’re close. One remarkable statement I concur with is this one: Jazz is so interesting to me because of its fusion of intricate underlying structure with improvisation and spontaneity. As Ken Burns put it, jazz is “familiar, but brand new every night”. Moreover, I enjoy the intellectual demandingness of jazz as a genre. Jazz musicians seem to be the most thoughtful and intelligent of any genre. Many of the more Avant Garde songs mentioned in this post don’t sound good unless you’re really concentrating. Some of it sounds cacophonous to a newcomer. This is why jazz is considerably more difficult to get into than other genres and has a lack of listenership among the youth. ...

Linus Torvalds’ reply to an anti-vaxxer on the Linux kernel list is a must-read. Pre-2018, Linus would have destroyed the poor chump. He’s discouraging further discussion (Kernel list is not the place for that) while providing crystal clear and detailed mRNA vaccine information, all without renouncing to an opening salvo of his good-ole, grumpy style. As John Gruber affirms, this is one rant we can all get behind.

The article I’m linking today is authored by Aaron Stannard and focuses on the drama currently going on in the .NET Open Source ecosystem. We’ve all been there. A dependency we took aeons ago goes unmaintained or changes its licensing model. Why does this happen? Because at some point, projects need to become sustainable or else they fail. […] it’s inexpensive for maintainers to support a small number of users with relatively similar demands - but once a project achieves critical mass and the demand on the maintainers exceeds their desire to supply, something will have to give. ...

Trade Wars 2002 was a great 1991 online game I hosted on one of my BBSes back in the day. Not sure if it was Lorien or Phoenix BBS; it might have been the latter given the game’s release date. I totally forgot TW2002 until yesterday when I spotted this 1991: Trade Wars 2002 article on the 50 Years of Text Games newsletter. I humbly confess that, until yesterday, I never made the obvious connection between TW2002 and Eve Online. That’s quite startling considering that I’ve been a beta player first and then an avid Eve player for a few years (Eve was also the last game I seriously played on a computer.) ...