The Weekly Weird - 2019-06-28

Skorgu

2019-06-28 14:00

Repeat after me: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
From the cryptonomicon-was-a-documentary department: When your enemy is making a mistake, don't interrupt him (h/t Ralph).
I didn't know what a Winograd Schema was until yesterday so don't take me too seriously but this sure sounds like human-level performance at a pretty nuanced language interpretation task. Clippy 2.0 is going to be nuts.
"Untethered flight of an insect-sized flapping-wing microscale aerial vehicle."
Weren't we supposed to have asteroid mining already? Maybe the next trip 'round the bubble coaster.
NSFWhale Lovers: The Cetacean League was no match for Soviet firepower.
Neat multi-device synchronized frontend framework.
Money laundering doesn't normally go in for world records or press releases.
The more obviously critical it is to have strong security around a process, the less effective the actual security is likely to be.
A minimal malloc implementation.
OpenZFS had a big release: 0.8.0. Long-awaited features aplenty and, perhaps more importantly, alignment on doing future development on ZoL first instead of illumos (RIP Solaris).
New Raspberry Pi website served on New Raspberry Pis. Real gigabit!
Things you wouldn't expect on github: plans for a nuclear reactor.
Guess what OS the MetroCard system runs on? Guess again.
Are black holes super-high-energy singularities, beyond the realm of experimentation? Or should you just get a fishtank and do some science?

The Weekly Weird - 2019-06-21

Skorgu

2019-06-21 14:00

FaceBux, ZuckerBucks, BoomerCoin, Scam Tokens, Even Dunning-er Krugerrands. Whatever, at least it's written in rust.
Semi-related: ["[T]the benefits of netting and risk margining [via the DTCC] enabled $326 billion in transactions to be financed with $8 billion in capital, meaning each dollar of capital from market participants secured $40 worth of gross transactions."](https://www.greenwich.com/steampunk-settlement-report-download) (via)
Lab grown meat? Lab grown milk.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-06-14

Skorgu

2019-06-14 14:00

All right-thinking, good-looking users of the Correct Editor should upgrade.
Beware Undefined Behavior. No, really, beware.
From the things-I-didn't-expect-to-make-a-comeback department: Phrenology (h/t Mike)
RIP Itanic.
Ever see those big watches with so many numbers on the outside? They're mostly just for show but occasionally they're slide rules.
Some rules are silly. Suprisingly, that does not make them useless.
Conversion from A and B blood to O may now be possible thanks to gut bacteria enzymes.
Everything sucks, airplane guidance edition.
Rust:

The Weekly Weird - 2019-06-07

Skorgu

2019-06-07 14:00

The NYC subway now has a modern-ish payment system! I particularly enjoyed the tidbit that it was the MTA pushing that led to the upswing in adoption for contactless and not, as you'd be forgiven for assuming, the MTA being The Worst as usual.
Build your own 4G network.
You know what the problem with most whisky is? Not enough sheep dung.
RIP Spruce Goose II.
Pop quiz, what's the name of the spikes on the Stegosaurus' tail? Yep.
I'll take Royal perverts for 100, Alex (sfw).
A little bit politics, a lot of practical endpoint security: Take a swing at the piñata of futility that is securing a political campaign.
Rust Tidbits:
- The Ferrous Systems folks are hard at work building lock-free ringbuffers and aiming to certify a subset of rust for safety-critical domains.
- Need a lazily-initialized value but don't want a macro? OnceCell to the rescue.
- Need to sort a list of floats but NaN got you down? NotNan to the rescue.
- A nice little wrapper to make semantic type aliases a bit more ergonomic: shrinkwraprs.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-05-24

Skorgu

2019-05-24 14:00

So many links!

Since I'm writing this from KubeCon in Barcelona, I thought it would be apropriate to start off with a relevant link. I couldn't find one because computers are boring now so here's one about the other kind of container and associated hundred-ton robots.
If you're ever in DUMBO, pay attention to the buildings with green-bordered windows. They were all Jeohvah's Witness' headquarters back in the day. Gothamist has a really wonderful deep-dive into some of the history and the tunnels that connected them before they were sold-off.
We talked about encoding neural nets into pneumatics, now how about encoding neural nets in free-space optical networks? Or (Ok, they don't actually encode a neural net in this one but math is math, right?) in styrofoam and microwaves.
Good, yes please build a neural net to wirehead monkeys, I'm sure that won't come back to bite us in the ass in any way.
A computer vision article completely unrelated to the subsequent link: Adversarial Patches.
A fashion article completely unrelated to the previous link: OLED screeens on your giant handbag.
Tired: hooking up a GPS to your NTP clock. Wired: building a standalone Pulse Per Second source.
Ceph lets you embed arbitrary C++ into the OSD processes to push computation down to where the data is. Computation like, for example, Postgres query processing.
Speaking of C++, you know what it desperately needed? A JIT compiler.
From the petrified-hot-grits department: Municipality to ditch M$ Windows and switch to LEE-NUX.
Those who haven't played Horizon Zero Dawn are doomed to ... build it in reality? (spoilers) Fuck.
Up-arrow notation not enough for you? Maybe you need some E-System in your life. Careful, don't overdo it or you'll end up under a bridge, begging for coins to get another hit of Tethracross-turreted-tethrapeton.
Two quick Posgres tidbits: Actual 1-to-1 indexes and multi-column indexes.
Want more details about my good pal Elon's new satellites? NASA is happy to oblige.
Moving your camera around gets you a bit more detail if you're clever but even more if you're moving it really, really, really, really fast.
Did you notice "786k day"? Some folks did.
Photos are an opinion of reality, not reality itself.
Pluto has an ocean! The Moon is geologically active!

The Weekly Weird - 2019-05-03

Skorgu

2019-05-03 14:00

It's no burrito but hey, delivering a kidney by drone is neat.
I feel like if you cost the government $700 million you should pay more than $46 million.
Nothing says "that was a non-story" quite like moving all your manufacturing out of China.
CPUs are fast, IO is slow, right? Wellllll. HN Comments.
Every piece of software should have a page like this: Don't Do This (in postgresql).
I loathe that I am not more surprised by this sentence: "an aquafresh brand-parody tumblr that was posting avengers spoilers was reportedly permabanned for hate speech, but it was actually because the account was tied to a toy story-themed community-led nazi purge"
Ever want to build your own Ethernet MAC on an FPGA? Here you go.
More AI dreaming: whole bodies.
This sounds like a fascinating job: Hedge fund PI.
Solar cells are just like me, they benefit from caffeine and wine.
Usually, the more nucleons you add to an isotope the more the result wants to explode out of pure bloody-mindedness. The same is true of Tantalum, at least until you get the atomic size to 180 at which point things get weird. Spins don't usually go to 9.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-04-19

Skorgu

2019-04-19 14:00

50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
Virtio 1.1 gets a whole mess of new standard devices including a gpu.
There appears to be some controvsery over the extent of the find described in this article but I enjoyed it. My favorite quote: The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust.
Fusion: now only 20 years away!
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes. Of course the store-and-forward model of interferometry only works for low-frequency astromony because 300 is a lot of terahertzes. For higher frequencies you need to let physics do the interfering which leads to the billion dollar diy selfie stick industry. Or just skip the stick entirely.
Did you know that NASA runs a competition to build mining robots for use on Mars? Or that it has been going for ten years? Or that the Alabama Astrobotics team has won every single year, most recently with a fully autonomous run? Next up: robotic tunnel rats.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-04-05

Skorgu

2019-04-05 14:00

Postgres is getting pluggable storage engines (pdf).
Imitation, flattery, 3,236 satellites, etc.
"In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?"
Bored? Avoiding work? Miss the numbers 640x480? Play the open-source version of Transport Tycoon in your browser. Or just read about how real train lines are optimized (good HN comments, too).
From the AAAAAAAAAAAAA department: The prospect of robotic tentacle monsters is unsettling enough even before building soft, pneumatic, EMP-proof brains for them. Why would you then jam the "squick factor" knob to 11 and tell me you could just index match the whole thing and have it be invisible under water?! I wonder how well ML models 3D print into fluidics...
Quick, distract the AI by teaching it to optimize agricultural flavor yield.
Or, you know, just a sticker will do, too. PDF paper with more details.
Look, don't make fun of MySpace for losing all their music in a server migration, computers are hard and the data loss elder gods have ironically long memories and feast upon hubris. Instead, cheer for the discovery that many of those songs were saved in a carefully-unspecified manner.
Do not put your ferret into a particle accelerator, Felicia is a highly trained specialist.
Why doesn't the US use the metric system? Pirates.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! YOU WILL BE AVENGED!

The Weekly Weird - 2019-03-29

Skorgu

2019-03-29 14:00

Did you love Into the Spider Verse? Trick question, of course you did. You might also enjoy these lovely little elements that went into making it so great.
Look, I'm just sharing this because of the name. Why wouldn't you invest in something called a Triple Lizard?!
I'm loving that there are "small businesses" in frickin space: cubesat launchers and orbital taxis.
Does this mean we can predict earthquakes now?
Finally, the new Ceph release (Nautilus) is out. Auto-scaling PG counts!
Is there a problem that only quantum computers can execute efficiently? Yes!
From the all-sf-comes-to-life department: finally, robotic ocean mining. Startling lack of "DSV" in the name puzzles onlookers.
This is a long, meandering article that's borderline politics and is depressing as hell. You're welcome. Market Failures in the Attention Economy.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-03-15

Skorgu

2019-03-15 14:00

NB: The GPS 'week number' will roll over on April 6. Any issues this causes will be silently slushed into the future by hidden, firmware-dependant pivot dates. Good luck!
NB Part Deux: starting in 2021 US citizens will require an explicit visa waiver to travel to the EU.
Silly me, I forgot one of last week's terrible headlines: octopus meat farms.
Experimental rejection of observer-dependence in the quantum world.
Sound waves have ... mass?!
And they say HTML isn't a programming language.
Ever wanted to play D&D but didn't bring your books? Not enough cursing in the standard materials? HERE IS SOME @#$% D&D.
If you hear your pilot meowing, don't be concerned.
I want this tattooed on my headstone: Mayo is not welcome on my plate.