Once a system reaches a certain level of reliability, most major incidents will involve: Unexpected behavior of a subsystem whose primary purpose was to improve reliability.

— Lorin Hochstein

• If you attached your, um, personal devices (nsfw?) to the $GME stock price, you can at least be reassured that Rust means you don't have to worry about segmentation faults while you're faulting your segmentation. [h/t to John for the joke]
• At least people are learning about how charmingly rustic the US financial system is. How many people just learned what "DTCC" stands for in the last few weeks?
• Don't put magnets near your pacemaker. iPhone 12 has magnets. Yes, this combination might be as dangerous as it sounds.
• At least you don't (yet) have to worry about it spontaneously combusting, Snow Crash style, upon reading an evil barcode.
• From the never-gonna-happen department: sure, just tunnel under the Long Island Sound to build high speed rail
• Your existing abstractions might not be the right ones in a world of nonvolatile NVMe. What if your state machines were just persistent (pdf)?
• What do you do with trans-uranic radioactive waste? Turn it into nuclear batteries. Brb, changing my funeral plans.
• Open Source: literally saving the world.
• "To hide the true frequency at which the flux of positrons oscillates, the experiment runs on a clock that ticks not in real nanoseconds, but at an unknown frequency, chosen at random."
• RIP Itanic.

Whew, what a nice vacation where nothing eventful happened in the world. I feel so relaxed.

• Amuse yourself with dancing robots and read about how they got their groove.
• Is this the new "but will it run Doom?"
• ... but will this run Doom?
• GPT: Now providing hot and cold running Avocado armchairs.
• Is this the dumbest or greatest camera/lens combination?
• What's actually involved in restoring service to a CO when it, uh, breaks? NANOG has got you covered and there's tons more in this giant pdf.
• Reverse-engineering a CPU is easy, just X-ray it and replicate the layout. And check for fake transistors (more in this pdf).
• When we get more qubits to play with, look out for solving nonlinear systems.
• Videogames may or may not cause violence but they can certainly kill.
• Look up at the sky, my children, and gaze in rapt wonder at the seven six sisters.
• In the universe of Bad Signs, pride of place belongs to "TYPE B FISSILE RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL". Fortunately, they took care of it.
• If mRNA vaccines are more like software than biology, what can we learn from looking at the code?
• How do spacecraft keep their astronauts alive? This hour-long video will tell you all about it.
• Automation killing the ... dockhand industry? With vaccums.