Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 13, 2026

• Quanta Magazine ☛ Is ‘Attention’ the Essence of Intelligence?

  Translation is not as simple as swapping each English word for a French one. Languages have different grammatical structures and are riddled with idioms and connotations, all of which had long stymied attempts to automate the process. You can’t simply implement rules of translation because there are none. But neural networks seemed promising because they learn by example. They can be trained on huge databases of paired English and French sentences to, eventually, absorb the quasi-rules, exceptions, and subtleties.

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ The 2026 curl team

  I decided to write this blog post to help show the light on some of my fellow curl maintainers. I think I often get too much credit and that curl is frequently called a one man show. It really is not and it has not been exclusively my project for many years. We are a team behind this.

• Philip Zucker ☛ Category Theory of Terms Emphasizes the Argument List

  One can’t see the forest for the trees.

  I think I have a cute story about data structure refactoring that brings a standard Term data structure more in sync with the categorical presentation. The trick is to emphasis the argument list / forest (which in turn can be seen a substitution, which is a more standard thing to say).

• Mark Dastmalchi-Round ☛ Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum

  In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many decades later, I’ve finally managed it! I’m now the proud author of a hand-rolled retro demoscene intro that runs on a stock 128Kb Spectrum. It features all those late 80s tropes: A smooth scrolltext (with ‘leet custom fonts!), a three-channel AY soundtrack, bouncing VU meters and the essential parallax starfield. It’s currently 10287 bytes of code, or 19552 bytes as a complete tape image - which, given I’ve been working on this since December 13th last year, means my average rate of code-production is a paltry ~ 455 bytes per week!

• James Cherti ☛ git-commitflow - Never make mistakes when committing using Git

  The git-commitflow tool is an interactive command-line interface that combines git add, git diff, git commit, and git push into a single, mistake-proof workflow.

• Sebastian ☛ your c is not standard c

  this is an incomplete list of some incompatibilities between c as it's written in the standard and c as it exists in the real world for people who use gcc/clang + glibc/musl.

• Ruby ☛ Ruby 4.1.0-preview1 Released

  We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 4.1.0-preview1. Ruby 4.1 introduces Ractor local GC, backdoored Windows support of YJIT, autoload_relative, and adds many improvements.

• Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Steinar H. Gunderson: Decompilation patterns part 9, sign extension

  Today, for something completely different: [...]

• Perl / Raku

  • Raku Weekly News ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2026.41 Riscy Business

    The past week Andrew Shitov just kept on coming with amazing developments again. Let’s look at the blog posts describing these: Raku++ on RISC-V and more Better ways to install modules in Raku++ And they created Webraku, a full-stack web framework for Raku.

• R / R-Script

  • Gavin Simpson ☛ Ordered set partitions and formulas in permute – From the bottom of the heap

    I’ve been giving permute a bit of attention recently. Two additions should make it easier to set up permutation tests: an option for ordered set partitions, and formulas for specifying plots and blocks. That’s a rather grand name for the first addition, so let’s start with what it does.

    These changes are in the development version. To follow along, install it from my R-universe: [...]

• Java/Golang

  • Redowan Delowar ☛ Partial updates with field masks

    While the answers there explore how to support this case, I think we can simplify the design and make our lives considerably easier. Currently the address field does this: [...]