Plurrrr

Google recently announced the rollout of their Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a new advertising-surveillance initiative that seeks to replace third-party cookies with a new user profiling technique that garners data generated by the browser itself.

The EFF has written an overview of FLoC and it’s threats and has also developed a useful tool to test if a user’s browser is being used for data collection and fingerprinting.

Plausible Analytics has also chimed in with an article explaining FLoC as in relation to users and developers — which was the inspiration for this short guide.

Let’s implement an immutable, singly-linked list. Singly-linked means that each node contains a reference to the next node, but not vice versa. To make this data structure really performant, let’s use plain references instead of heap-allocated types. This would be dangerous in memory-unsafe languages like C, because it could easily cause vulnerabilities because of dangling pointers, but Rust’s lifetimes protect us from this. We’ll see what this means in a moment.

I've been a freelance developer for 12 years, and Emacs has been at the center of my working environment for 10 of those. I use it for a lot of things - including writing this post - but today I'm concentrating on my workflow.

Here's how I use Emacs and org-mode during a regular day.

Disclaimer: this is a very nerdy blog entry. It is about lightweight markup languages and why I think that Org mode is the best lightweight markup language for many use-cases. And with lightweight markup language, I do mean the syntax, the way you express headings, lists, font variations such as bold face or italic, and such things.

You might have heard people say that functional programming is more academic, and real engineering is done in imperative style. I’m going to show you that real engineering is functional, and I’m going to illustrate it using a computer game that is designed by engineers for engineers. It’s a simulation game called Factorio, in which you are given resources that you have to explore, build factories that process them, create more and more complex systems, until you are finally able to launch a spaceship that may take you away from an inhospitable planet. If this is not engineering at its purest then I don’t know what is. And yet almost all you do when playing this game has its functional programming counterparts and it can be used to teach basic concepts of not only programming but also, to some extent, category theory. So, without further ado, let’s jump in.