Ordnance Survey Updated 2025-07-16
Has some of the best map data available for the United Kingdom, but their data appears to be proprietary?
Sic Updated 2025-07-16
A slow development test cycle will kill your software.
New developers won't want to learn your project, because they would rather shoot themselves.
This means that build time, and the time to run tests, must be short.
5 seconds to rebuild is the maximum upper limit.
Of course, at some point software gets large enough that things won't fit anymore in 5 seconds. But then you must have either some kind of build caching, or options to do partial builds/tests that will bring things down to that 5 second mark.
You also have to spend some time profiling execution and build from scratch times.
A slow build from scratch will mean that your continuous integration costs a lot, money that could be invested in a new developer!
It also means that people won't bother to reproduce bugs on given commits, or bisect stuff.
One anecdote comes to mind. Ciro Santilli was trying to debug something, and more experience colleague came over.
To reproduce a problem, ciro was running one command, wait 5 seconds, run a second command, wait 5 seconds, run a third command:
cmd1
# wait 5 seconds
cmd2
# wait 5 seconds
cmd3
The first thing the colleague said: join those three commands into one:
cmd1;cmd2;cmd3
And so, Ciro was enlightened.
Figure 1.
xkcd 303: Compiling
. Source. They should be benchmarking and fixing their shitty build system instead.
Cardano Updated 2025-07-16
This was getting very hot as of 2022 for some reason. Would be good to understand why besides the awesome name.
Google Maps Updated 2025-07-16
Owned/developed by Google as of 2020.
Early on jumpstarted from several acquisitions, notably Keyhole Inc. and Where 2 Technologies.
JPEG Updated 2025-07-16
Q Updated 2025-07-16
R Updated 2025-07-16
S Updated 2025-07-16
Bible Updated 2025-07-16
Big companies like Google are able to publish white papers as peer reviewed papers just due to their reputation, e.g. without giving any source code that is central for the article.
It is insane.
E.g.: AlphaGo is closed source but published as www.nature.com/articles/natnure16961 in 2016 on Nature.
ThinkPad Updated 2025-07-16
This is Ciro Santilli's favorite laptop brand. He's been on it since the early 2010's after he saw his then-girlfriend-later-wife using it.
Ciro doesn't know how to explain it, but ThinkPads just feel... right. The screen, the keyboard, the lid, the touchpad are all exactly what Ciro likes.
The only problem with ThinkPad is that it is owned by Lenovo which is a Chinese company, and that makes Ciro feel bad. But he likes it too much to quit... what to do?
Ciro is also reassured to see that in every enterprise he's been so far as of 2020, ThinkPads are very dominant. And the same when you see internal videos from other big tech enterprises, all those nerds are running... Ubuntu on ThinkPads! And the ISS.
Those nerds like their ThinkPads so much, that Ciro has seen some acquaintances with crazy old ThinkPad machines, missing keyboard buttons or the like. They just like their machines that much.
ThinkPads are are also designed for repairability, and it is easy to buy replacement parts, and there are OEM part replacement video tutorials: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vseFzFFz8lY No visible planned obsolescence here! With the caveat that the official online part stores can be shit as mentioned at Section "Lenovo".
The only thing Ciro never understood is the trackpoint: superuser.com/questions/225059/how-to-get-used-of-trackpoint-on-a-thinkpad Why would you use that with such an amazing touchpad? And vimium.

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