binarycat

blog about programming and general tech stuff
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stop calling things transparent
11 Nov 2024 | original ↗

in the context of programming, transpernt is a contranym it can either mean that a system is hard to see (like a pane of glass) or easy to see into (like a transparent gameboy). !--more-- these two meanings are pretty much exact opposites, and it's frequently difficult to know which one is being spoken about. FORTH systems often pride themselves...

Un-Deprecate big
28 Oct 2024 | original ↗

My Plea to the W3C: Giving a semantic meaning to an "Obsolete" element. !--more-- I'll cut right to the chase, here's my proposal: span style="font-size-adjust:0.7;"The big element can be used to represent the "big idea" of a document or section, ie. text that should still be read when skimming through a document/span Rationale Why do we make...

Reliable Immutable Transfer Protocol
28 Oct 2024 | original ↗

an incredibly simple protocol for reliably and correctly downloading large immutable files. !--more-- (this is a follow-up and successor to my RTP proposal) Problem Statement Downloading large files is hard. Networks are messy, and while there are plenty of protocols that aim to abstract away this messiness, they all have their own problems....

WriteFreely Draft Blogs
26 Oct 2024 | original ↗

One simple trick to fix the worst part of the platform. !--more-- WriteFreely has a built in "drafts" feature (write.as calls them "anonymous posts"), but there's several problems with it: when you save a draft and go to the "preview", it will not use your custom css hashtags are inert when used on drafts, which means there's no way to organize...

RTP
25 Oct 2024 | original ↗

One protocol to rule them all: refining the ideas behind HTTP, BitTorrent, Gemini, and 9p. !--more-- Goals as simple as possible without sacrificing our other goals (less complex than http) performs well under poor network conditions, even when payloads are large (unlike gemini) performs well under high latency (unlike 9p) good single-source...

Bookmark Keywords
24 Oct 2024 | original ↗

Firefox's best-kept secret feature. When you bookmark a page, firefox opens an editor with the following options: Name Location Tags But there's actually a secret fourth field... !--more-- The Other "Edit Bookmark" menu there are two ways of editing a bookmark: going to the bookmarked page and clicking the star icon (this is the same menu that...

a protocol for reliable notifications over a 1 bit fallible connection.
4 Oct 2024 | original ↗

What imagine you have two devices, a client and a server, connected in a peculiar way: the server cannot send messages to the client without the client asking for them there are two channels, a request on one channel can only be responded to on the same channel the first channel has infinite bandwith and is perfectly reliable, but each message is...

Cursed Rust
3 Oct 2024 | original ↗

Rust is a language with a lot of features. Sometimes those features have rough edges. Sometimes those rough edges are funny. Let's look at some. !--more-- Copy and Clone can diverge [derive(Debug)] struct OhNo(u32); impl Clone for OhNo { fn clone(&self) - Self { OhNo(self.0 + 1) } } impl Copy for OhNo { } fn main() { let...

inferred implicit parameters for ergonomic object capabilities
11 Sept 2024 | original ↗

a system that elegantly provides the security benefits of an effect system and ocaps, while also being convenient to use. !--more-- inspired by scala's implicit paramaters and the object-capability model (ocaps). background: what is an ocap put simply, an object-capability is an object that represents a capability to do something. for example, on...

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