The Weekly Weird - 2020-04-10

Skorgu

2020-04-10 14:00

Neural nets are roughly magic, I think we all agree on that. But they're introspectable magic.
Did you know that you can hike from the subway to a town just outside Albany? The Long Path, indeed.
Looking for a scifi idea to write? Genetically engineered yeast that emits hallucinogens escapes, turns sourdough bakers into drug dealers. You're welcome. Just slather a nice, thick coat of quantum biology all over and you're destined for the bestseller list.
We hear sirens much more frequently than we think about them, I suspect. There's the "annoying" wee-woo wee-woo and _BRRRRRR, the "quantity has a quality all its own", the "intellectually terrifying", and of course, the "intrinsically unsettling".
Ceph released their latest, shiniest version: octopus and its companion Rook release.
I'm thrilled to see folks writing more Kubernetes things in Rust:
- A Kubelet in Rust that runs WASM: krustlet
- Quality-of-life tooling to make dealing with multiple clusters easier: Kubie
- Horizontal pod autoscaling: Pangolin

The Weekly Weird - 2020-03-20

Skorgu

2020-03-20 14:00

"NASA FIXES MARS LANDER BY TELLING IT TO HIT ITSELF WITH A SHOVEL"
Now THIS is how you get Elon to build things in your backyard.
A truly, truly (wonderfully) hideous shebang to run rust scripts like bash.
Did you know that browsers have a standard mechanism to export observed network errors?
What if Titanic cut the most important element from the script?

The Weekly Weird - 2020-02-28

Skorgu

2020-02-28 14:00

Back to my roots, let's talk dumb crypto tricks:
- The Flash Crash writ small. Remember, kids: friends don't let friends send market orders (via Matt Levine).
- Ok, that's just "crypto re-learns lessons that everyone else already learned". This bZx hack on the other hand, man this is the beans. (also via Matt Levine).
Look, that T-Rex in Jurassic Park actually, literaly almost killed a guy.
Like lisp? Easily write Clojure from Bash
We don't need no stinking search engine, we have bash
Ahh French, like four-twenty-ten-nine wasn't hilarious enough, now you tell me that l'envers of l'envers is Verlan? HN comments with more fun linguistics.
Need a nice, readable, vaguely-retro font? How about "you know, the way they wrote on old blueprints"?
You know my feelings about Go. This fellow agrees. By the same author, an excellent exploration of how the @#$% strings work.
This is a neat feature: using eBPF to produce structured events from SSH sessions.
Good advice on rewriting/replacing large, complex systems.
I'm not an epidemiologist, nor are you, so you're probably not even remotely qualified to interpret this model of COVID19 spread. Why am I linking it anyway?
Want an order book? Here.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-02-14

Skorgu

2020-02-14 14:00

Sorry, locked the keys to the internet in this safe, we'll get them right out.
Why must systems be operated?
Honestly, I can't improve on Savage Memes and Lunar Dreams.
Double-take: an open-source Windows bootloader. Triple-take: "Install WinBtrfs"
Tired: Your laptop is more powerful than the Apollo landing computer. Wired: Your laptop's charger is more powerful, too.
I make fun of left-pad just as much as anyone else but really, C is not blameless either.
I kind of like this js framework that starts with HTML instead of pretending to be an application.
Boeing is just not having a good year, are they? "Numerous process escapes" is not a phrase you want to hear in your program review.
Just copyright all the music.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-02-07

Skorgu

2020-02-07 14:00

I'm usually cranky about yet another embedded database engine but this talk about sled has somewhat changed my mind.
Red Hat has completed the consumption of CoreOS, thankfully there's a fork.
The Lazarus Taxon would be a good cover band.
Dropbears eat your heart out.
Haven't watched this yet but this talk on Liquid Diamonds comes recommended. See also.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-01-31

Skorgu

2020-01-31 14:00

How much is high-frequency trading worth? About $5B
I would never have predicted that biological viruses were written in LISP and, as such, all end in ))))))))))))). Is CRISPR just the equialent of MOV then?
Semi-related, from the humans-gonna-human department: Millions watch live streaming of hospital construction in Wuhan.
Ars Technica summarizes how they function with no physical office. My personal take: all-remote is OK, all-in person is better (for the work), a mix is a goddamn disaster.
But is it "faster than C?"
I barely know the words in this article, much less enough of the subject matter to comment but 5nm and 3nm processes are coming.
Kind of depressing but also kind of fascinating look at the process of "viatication". Predicting the future is hard.
I could not love this more: It is a lovely day and you are a horrible digital goose.
From the Jepsen review of the most recent etcd: distributed locking is hard.
This is a tumblr page with screenshots of a twitter thread that made me laugh so loud I woke up three cats. It's about ceiling fans.
Calculating probability is straightforward but that usually doesn't generalize to useful intuitions in everyday life. Here's a nice collection of probability facts and some hn comments with more.
"Commercial space station" is a real headline. It's the future!

The Weekly Weird - 2020-01-24

Skorgu

2020-01-24 14:00

OK, you caught me. This mailing list is basically curl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unusual_articles | shuffle | head -n 1.
Now that is a zero-day.
How good are Rust's HTTP clients? Not quite as good as we'd like.
How to get hired (almost)!
What happens when Kubernetes gets cranky?
Roughly half the planet has more tastebuds than they thought they did.
The city that banned cars.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-01-10

Skorgu

2020-01-10 14:00

Nothing interesting happened over the last few weeks so OH WHO AM I KIDDING, How to flee justice with only a former Green Beret, a black roadie case, and two private jets. I wonder if they had to outbid the Venezualean gold shippers.
Why do we call it the "iron" age and not, say, the Flax Age?
Playing chess via text prediction.
My 19th century Cornish insults, let me show you them.
Stop reinventing spinlocks, just use Mutexes.
Antlers might be domesticated cancer.
The levity of the prose is a bit incongruous for the sadness of the subject but this 13-part piece on figuring out what happened to a German family in Death Valley was interesting.
I'm so glad we put all the data in the universe on a half-dozen providers and then made sure to rank them only by price. What could go wrong.
West of the Hajnal Line, ~10-20% of adults never married. East of it, nearly everyone married. There are lots of other things that line up suspiciously well with it, too.
Intel's new NUC is neat, socketable everything.
Computer acting up? It's hungry, give it snacks.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-12-13

Skorgu

2019-12-13 14:00

Big news! It turns out that being able to alter the voltage and clock rate of a CPU can let you violate security invariants. Ok, maybe it's not news exactly but it was in 2017.
I love this: a breaking-news site based on thirsty journalists' begging.
I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Please don't do anything that results in me being deposed. Coconut water is a reasonable blood plasma subsitute.
It remains unfathomably confusing that the MTA is ahead of at least one game.
FINALLY, an orbital bitcoin wallet.
"Bad" humanoid robots just paying attention to human performance may energize attentional control—as does human presence.
K-Syndrome and "Typhus".
When you're planning your heist, be properly equipped. Of course, first make sure your target hasn't seen you coming and prepared.
Math is so weird. We know of algorithms that are extremely Big-O efficient, even solving NP problems in polynomial time + a constant factor. The problem is that the constant factor is ... large. See also wikipedia and HN comments.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-12-04

Skorgu

2019-12-04 14:00

It is a red letter day.
The world is mad these days but we've made some improvements.
"ONE MILLION CANNIBAL ANTS TRAPPED IN SOVIET NUCLEAR BUNKER HAVE ESCAPED". So, uh, yeah.
Now this is the kind of robotics competition I want more of: HEBOCON: The Robot Contest for Dummies
Here's to the strange creatures. Specificaly, the crustacean-colored, extremophile lawn ornamants.
I have a soft spot for aerial firefighting so this puff piece about a privately-owned water-pickup site caught my eye.
Everyone knows pid 1 is special, here's a nice walkthrough to handling all the specialness yourself.
A bit afield from my normal content but music from Saharan cellphones fuckin' slaps. (As the kids say)