Jeffrey Starr:

In December 2022, Adobe, through the Computer History Museum (CHM), released the source code for PostScript®, version 1.0. PostScript is one of the foundational technologies of the desktop publishing revolution of the early 1980s, along with laser printers, the graphical user interface of the Apple Macintosh, and Aldus PageMaker. PostScript is a programming language and a page description format for translating visual content into printed documents.

Adobe immediately enjoyed business success through licensing PostScript to laser printer manufacturers and it became the de facto digital publishing format. While multiple histories have studied this event through a business lens, what historical questions may be answered through the source code? Further, as software practitioners, what can we learn from the source code to apply to present and future designs?

Detailed dive into the history and development of PostScript. Remarkable what was possible on the resource constrained computers of the time.

Laura Chambers, Mozilla CEO:

Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

This feels like them throwing in the towel and declaring there is no viable way to make money online without embracing advertising.

We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history. And that willingness to take on the hard things, even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.

I can’t see how more ads makes the internet better, even if those ads are less creepy than those from the likes of Google and Meta. For some reason Mozilla continues to refuse to just let us pay for Firefox.

Emily Terrell and Patrick Nemeroff writing on the Cloudflare blog:

In the end, Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000, grant Cloudflare a royalty-free license to its entire patent portfolio, and to dedicate its patents to the public, ensuring that Sable can never again assert them against another company.

You love to see it. Cloudflare single-handedly controlling large swaths of internet traffic leaves me a little concerned, but I’m glad they’re using their size to fight back against patent trolling.

Jesse Chen on the Engineering at Meta blog:

Instagram uses Python (Django) for its backend. By using the same backend for Threads, we could leverage a lot of the existing tech stack for Threads and reuse most of our existing data models, business logic, security features, and server infrastructure. This also meant users could sign in to the app with their existing Instagram account, making it super simple to onboard and set up your Threads app.

The Threads mobile apps themselves were built primarily with Swift on iOS, and Jetpack Compose on Android.

Always interesting to get a peek behind the curtain of large proprietary systems. I had no idea Instagram and Threads were built with Python.

Evan You:

I have founded VoidZero Inc., a company dedicated to building an open-source, high-performance, and unified development toolchain for the JavaScript ecosystem. We have raised $4.6 million in seed funding, led by Accel.

Picking up where the Rome Tools project failed, VoidZero hopes to build a suite of high-performance tools atop a common foundation: the Oxc toolset implemented in Rust.

The goals are admirable and as the creator of Vue.js and Vite Evan You has a track record of making tools that gain adoption, but there’s no mention of how they plan to make US$4.6M plus return for investors.

Roderick E.J.H. Gadellaa:

iOS Safari is more than an inconvenience for developers, it’s the fundamental reason interoperability has been stymied in mobile ecosystems; frequent showstopping bugs, a large patch gap, and lack of competing engines ensures the web is not a credible competitor to native. Here are the receipts to prove it.

Incredibly detailed and well researched collection of bugs in Safari on iOS over the years. The bugs would be fine if it were possible to use a browser with anything other than the version of WebKit Apple ships on the OS, but unless you’re in the EU that isn’t possible.

Casper Storm on Mastodon:

Halloy is my spare-time project I’ve been working on for a little over a year. Halloy is an open-source IRC client written in #rustlang , using the Iced GUI library. I love the IRC, and I’m happy to be able to give something back to the community I’ve been connected to for over 20 years!

Really nice take on a cross-platform IRC client. It’s got a subdued and text-centric UI, but because it’s built with a GUI framework it’s got a few niceties that aren’t possible with a TUI in the terminal.

Till Wegmüller:

With all this said I would love to have some more rust folks in the illumos community. And I know this has been expressed by others as well. Userland tools are easy to make in Rust and I for one would love to have people help me with the new Installer and with the package Forge We have gained rust crates for our unique API’s such as libcontract Our new image builder for ISO’s is in rust image-builder and we are always looking for driver developers.

For folks wanting to dabble with Rust in a battle-hardened production open-source operating system Illumos seems like a great option.

My day job involves working on the Prince HTML to PDF converter. Simon Willison used LLMs to do the reverse:

Google Research released a PDF paper describing their new pipe syntax for SQL. I ran it through Gemini 1.5 Pro to convert it to HTML (prompts here) and got this—a pretty great initial result for the first prompt I tried!