Interactive visualization of technological history.

Microservices only pay off when you have real scaling bottlenecks, large teams, or independently evolving domains. Before that? You’re paying the price without getting the benefit: duplicated infra, fragile local setups, and slow iteration.

— Oleg Pustovit, Microservices Are a Tax Your Startup Probably Can’t Afford

Tags: software-architecture, startups, microservices

David Remnick, in a fine short piece for The New Yorker on Signalgate:

This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world view and negotiating points of Vladimir Putin but their comfort in expressing them, barking them, at the Ukrainian President in front of reporters in the Oval Office.

Stupidity and ignorance as a governing style. That’s it. They are exactly who they claim they are, and in private speak how they do in public. There is no secret plan.

These idiots do not believe polluting the atmosphere with carbon emissions has caused calamitous damage to our climate, despite the fact that experts, decades ago, almost universally predicted it would. Few issues in science had as much expert consensus.

These idiots think vaccines — one of the great breakthroughs in the history of science and medicine — are a bigger health risk than the diseases they immunize against. Now there are unvaccinated American kids dying from measles, a disease that was effectively wiped out in the modern world by the time I was born.

These idiots think the universe is 4,000 years old.

Now they’re bringing the same sort of idiocy, unbound by critical thinking, history, or anything recognized as economic expertise, to trade policy.

The Graphing Calculator Story

Utterly delightful story from Ron Avitzur in 2004 about the origins of the Graphing Calculator app that shipped with many versions of macOS. Ron's contract with Apple had ended but his badge kept working so he kept on letting himself in to work on the project. He even grew a small team:

I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive

Via Kellan

Tags: apple, computer-history

TypeScript types can run DOOM

This YouTube video (with excellent production values - "conservatively 200 hours dropped into that 7 minute video") describes an outlandishly absurd project: Dimitri Mitropoulos spent a full year getting DOOM to run entirely via the TypeScript compiler (TSC).

Along the way, he implemented a full WASM virtual machine within the type system, including implementing the 116 WebAssembly instructions needed by DOOM, starting with integer arithmetic and incorporating memory management, dynamic dispatch and more, all running on top of binary two's complement numbers stored as string literals.

The end result was 177TB of data representing 3.5 trillion lines of type definitions. Rendering the first frame of DOOM took 12 days running at 20 million type instantiations per second.

Here's the source code for the WASM runtime. The code for Add, Divide and ShiftLeft/ShiftRight provide a neat example of quite how much complexity is involved in this project.

The thing that delights me most about this project is the sheer variety of topics you would need to fully absorb in order to pull it off - not just TypeScript but WebAssembly, virtual machine implementations, TSC internals and the architecture of DOOM itself.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: typescript, webassembly

A few years ago, the idea of running PC games on a Mac, in Linux, or on Arm processors would have been laughable. But the developers behind Asahi Linux—the independent project that is getting Linux working on Apple Silicon Macs—have managed to do all three of these things at once.

The feat brings together a perfect storm of open source projects, according to Asahi Linux GPU lead Alyssa Rosenzweig: the FEX project to translate x86 CPU code to Arm, the Wine project to get Windows binaries running on Linux, DXVK and the Proton project to translate DirectX 12 API calls into Vulkan API calls, and of course the Asahi project's Vulkan-conformant driver for Apple's graphics hardware.

Games are technically run inside a virtual machine because of differences in how Apple Silicon and x86 systems address memory—Apple's systems use 16 KB memory pages, while x86 systems use 4 KB pages, something that causes issues for Asahi and some other Arm Linux distros on a regular basis and a gap that the VM bridges.

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