Arnes Weekly: What’s in the box?

Welcome to Arnes Weekly! Ever thought about creating your own newsletter? You should definitely go for it! Check out Buttondown (that’s what I use) or Substack and make sure to send me the subscribe link. 🙌

Tweet of the week

i think we, as a society, need to look at why it takes a netflix documentary for us to believe something — @aniacopian on Twitter

Story of the week

• Signal: Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app’s perspective — Cellebrite announced “Signal support” and Signal hacked back, fun read.

Culture

• Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit! — A tech tale of greed, desperation, and the power of expectations. By Mad Ned.
• We Don’t Need Tech Infomercials — Did you watch the Apple Keynote on Tuesday? Shira Ovide makes a good point here, it could’ve been a blogpost (or two).
• 20 patterns to watch for in your engineering team (pdf) — Good collection of patterns that can happen in engineering teams and how to deal with them.

Rust

• What’s in the box? — Amos delivers again and dives into the Box type in Rust, comparing Rusts stack/heap handling with Go in the process. Super interesting.
• Are we Yeet Yet? — A bikeshed-avoidance placeholder for syntactic sugar (return Err(e) ⇒ yeet e).
• Zellij: a Rusty terminal workspace — Interesting project, works similar to tmux/screen but has a WebAssembly plugins system.
• Rust Language Cheatsheet — A Rust reference by Ralf Biedert.

Go

• proposal: expression to create pointer to simple types — A proposal which would make getting a pointer to a simple type a lot easier (&int(3) for example).
• Go 1.17 will allow converting a slice to an array pointer (some of the time) — Be aware of panics though.
• Last weeks issue had a link to My Go Executable Files Are Still Getting Larger, the Hacker News thread has an answer from Russ Cox to follow-up.

Watching

• I made an entire OS that only runs Tetris — Very entertaining video, the source is on GitHub: jdah/tetris-os.

Cutting Room Floor

• Software infrastructure 2.0: a wishlist — I agree with most points Erik Bernhardsson does here.
• Podcast Subscriptions vs. the App Store — In case you missed it: Apple introduced podcast subscriptions in Tuesday’s Keynote. In this article Ben Thompson compares it with the AppStore model.
• Compute@Edge: porting the iconic video game DOOM — Fastly ported DOOM to their edge platform (every tick is an HTTP request).
• Apple AirDrop shares more than files — Researchers at TU Darmstadt discovered that AirDrop leaks your real name and phone number to an unknown attacker in proximity as well as embed your name in file metadata shared with AirDrop.