Hello everyone!

We have some unfortunate news. @fastmail has made the decision to lay off 60% of our bargaining unit, including our bargaining committee, in a surprise restructure while we were in the middle of contract negotiations. Fortunately, we were able to negotiate for a much better severance package than we would have gotten had we not unionized when we did. We are grateful for the work that the Communication Workers of America put in on our behalf to get us the best deal they could.

✨ I spent 3 months writing the best interactive introduction to queueing I could, and it's live now!

You can read it here: https://encore.dev/blog/queueing.

It starts off by showing what happens when you have no queue...

I've been studying algorithms for collaborative text editing recently. The best way for me to understand something complex is to implement it myself, so I made my own simple text editing CRDT. It comes with an interactive demo to show what goes on "under the hood":

https://madebyevan.com/algos/crdt-text-buffer/

The code is small enough to understand (only 500 lines including comments). But the internals use optimized block-based storage similar to Yjs (a popular CRDT text library), so it should be pretty realistic.

Memory errors in consumer devices such as PCs and phones are not something you hear much about, yet they are probably one of the most common ways these machines fail.

I'll use this thread to explain how this happens, how it affects you and what you can do about it. But I'll also talk about how the industry failed to address it and how we must force them to, for the sake of sustainability. 🧵 1/17

I was always dissatisfied with my WebGL atomic orbital visualizer, so...I made a new one 😅

It shows (real-valued versions of) all orbitals from 1s to 4f, can switch between density cloud and isosurface modes, and it also just looks cool 😎

https://lisyarus.github.io/webgl/orbitals.html