🧬 How to Sequence Your DNA for Less Than $2K
A fascinating glimpse into DIY genomics and the growing accessibility of biotechnology tools. It captures both the excitement of innovation and the practical hurdles of data quality and precision in personal science.
Max Langenkamp documents his home experiment in sequencing his own genome using an Oxford Nanopore MinION device. With about $1,100 worth of gear, his team extracted DNA from blood and successfully sequenced around 13% of the genome, despite issues with noise and contamination. The piece traces the evolution of sequencing technologies and emphasizes how dramatically costs have dropped over time.
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🎨 Fast Distance Computation to Cubic Bézier Curves on the GPU
An elegant blend of computational geometry and shader engineering. Essential reading for anyone optimizing GPU-based rendering or font pipelines.
This deep technical guide explores how to calculate the distance from a point to a cubic Bézier curve—key for text and vector rendering. It details mathematical derivations, GLSL implementations, and multiple root-solving algorithms, comparing their stability and speed. The author concludes that the unrolled version of Yuksel’s algorithm provides the best balance of accuracy and GPU efficiency.
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🤖 The Design Space of AI Coding Tools
A sharp, well-structured overview of how AI-assisted coding has matured. Particularly relevant for designers and engineers shaping the next generation of developer tools.
Austin Z. Henley summarizes a UC San Diego study examining 90 AI coding assistants from academia and industry. The research outlines ten key design dimensions and traces how tools evolved from autocomplete systems to chat-based and autonomous agents. It also compares practical industry tools with more exploratory academic prototypes, providing a taxonomy of user personas and design trade-offs.
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📘 Scheme at Fifty: Where Do We Go From Here?
A nuanced meditation on how programming languages evolve—and how communities navigate standardization without losing vision.
This reflective essay traces fifty years of the Scheme programming language, examining its philosophical debates and evolution through successive reports. It explores tensions between minimalism and complexity, and between dynamic and static paradigms, arguing for unity under standards like R7RS to sustain the language’s future vitality.
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🧩 Using PEGs in Janet
A precise and insightful guide for developers exploring grammar-based parsing. It shows how PEGs can elegantly replace complex regex pipelines.
This tutorial demonstrates how to implement parser expression grammars (PEGs) in Janet, a Lisp-like language without native regex support. It walks through building a PEG grammar for parsing simplified HTML, showcasing recursive rules, captures, and performance optimizations that produce structured outputs.
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