Issue 2021-W13

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This week has been about GPU.js, the downsides of SQL, the politics in Machine Learning and Git workflows.

# Using GPU to Improve JavaScript Performance

A tutorial on GPU.js to speed things up on both the Web and Nodejs.

# Some opinionated thoughts on SQL databases

An article analysing the downsides of SQL databases. A mix of issues with SQL itself, the query planner, type systems and of course migrations.

# The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets

An essay on the impact of the intentional or unintentional choices made while composing training sets on the results of a Machine Learning model. Although it centres in visual recognition the fundamental reality of taxonomies being an arbitrary slicing of reality for a very narrow context can be seen everywhere.

# Wallace CLI

A tool to analyse CSS from the terminal. Also interesting for complementary analysis: Specificity Visualizer and CSS Specificity Graph Generator

# Is there a better git workflow for context switching?

An article exploring a version-controlled workflow to reduce the friction of the single-task mindset that tooling like Git encourage.

Although the idea sounds interesting, I'm not convinced it is a real problem or that the proposed solution actually mitigates anything without the missing self-discipline that causes the original problem.

# Wezterm

A GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust with multiplex terminal panes, tabs and windows a-la tmux.

Wezterm is comparable to Kitty in terms of features. A compelling difference is the choice of using Lua for the configuration instead of a custom language.