The Weekly Weird - 2017-07-21

Skorgu

2017-07-21 11:00

If you have any money left after yet another ethereum heist and want to switch to something safer like Bitcoin, now you have to pick which Bitcoin. Watch at home: blockchain fork monitor.
You know how apes learned sign language? Nope.
I'm not entirely sure how this is supposed to work but I love the idea of embedding a bounty in likely-to-be-pirated media.
This does sound like something I'd do but I swear it wasn't me: upgrading ubuntu by by installing the operating system in memory, wiping the root disk and reinstalling the OS back on disk from RAM.
Remember when Pepsi (yes, the soda) had the 7th largest submarine fleet in the world?
Oh look, certificate authorities behaving badly. (h/t like six people)
Kind of neat: proving equality of SQL statements.
DO NOT USE BEACON GENERATED VALUES AS SECRET CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEYS.
Wireguard (an IPsec replacement), has been formally verified.
I ... don't know what this is. Football in future.
I've seen at least a half-dozen articles about 'ancient Roman concrete is magic' and I'm always suspicious. Turns out, yeah it's just that usually you want rebar more than you want long-life. If you do want long life, modern construction will be quite happy to sell you that.
wat
lol
Listen very carefully, I will write this down only once.

The Weekly Weird - 2017-07-14

Skorgu

2017-07-14 11:00

Ok, this is the most weekly-weird appropriate link in ages: biking to L4 via human-powered ion engines.
curl -s www.google.com -o /dev/null --libcurl >(gcc -x c - -lcurl) && ./a.out
I...have no words. Invite-only skyscraper-coloring mobile app.
If you're just baffled trying to figure out what to get me for Xmas, allow me to make a suggestion.
Worried about sea levels rising? Good. Worry more efficiently with this 64 page report on how Chronic Innundation Zones will change.
Thanks to a font, Pakistan could soon be sans-Sharif.
How many planets are in the habitable zone of a star? 0? 1? 418? ...more?
"The prosecution calls the patient's pacemaker to the stand."
Lavabit's new super-secure not-smtp email server thing exists now. I'll wait for some expert analysis before I take it too seriously.
Ever wonder how the IRS actually works? Wonder no more!
Buzzword recap: 'Event Sourcing'. Martin Fowler describes it in 2005, LinkedIn writes many words on logs as a central abstraction level, and a whole book on Versioning in an Event Sourced System. (via the HN thread about a not-great implementation).

The Weekly Weird - 2017-07-07

Skorgu

2017-07-07 11:00

In general, don't use your sql database as a queue. But if you must (and can control the load), get it right.
Attackers blindly scanning your web servers? Give 'em a surprise.
Run a container as a regular executable.
Put retro-futurist cool and post-work squick in a blender and you get self-driving automats in China.
My previous attempts to put a submarine datacenter equidistant between Europe and the US were not, I thought, given adequate attention but here's how you build a datacenter on a boat.
Geostationary orbit is pretty crowded and now one of the birds up there is in pieces.
I don't really know what to make of this article given my loathing of the trolly problem but What if Buddhist monks trained AIs? I'd like to read the actual thesis and my opinion of Harvard has taken a bit of a dip since they misspelled 'off' but it seems interesting.
Finally, a $1600 titanium smartphone.
I'm not sure how to feel about openbsd re-linking the kernel on every reboot. It's clever, no doubt but how often do openbsd machines reboot?

The Weekly Weird - 2017-06-30

Skorgu

2017-06-30 11:00

If you haven't learned the lesson of "don't use market orders", please allow Ethereum to teach it to you.
Now there's a tenth planet which is not planet X but is sometimes the ninth furthest away. Got all that?
Scariest sentence I've heard in a while: "The Chernobyl nuclear power plant has also had to monitor radiation levels manually after its Windows-based sensors were shut down".
A suspiciously-pat story about overfitting on your training data.
The iPhone killed chewing gum.
When you're aboveground and you want to cool something down, you just run some air over a coil and you're done. What do you do when you're underground, there's a city between you and fresh air and the clay around you has been absorbing heat for a hundred years?
I don't know much C++ but I still enjoyed this Rust view on "Effective Modern C++".
3,072 hours of manipulating global BGP routing tables later, the finest achievement of humanity (Pic in case the link doesn't work). Delve into the HN thread to learn that running traceroute -I -q 1 trh.milek7.pl demonstrates what you can do with all those exponents in the ipv6 address space. )
Robots are taking our jobs! Well, midnight toothpaste delivery jobs anyway.
"Dearest creature in creation / Studying English pronunciation, / I will teach you in my verse / Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse".
Here are some videos: Niko Matsakis talking about Rust (with a cameo by Simon Peyton-Jones), 50 years of computer architecture in 15 minutes (with a RISC-V focus). And a bonus PDF of Nvidia's reasoning behind using RISC-V in their GPUs.
"// Have you ever felt that integer literals like "4" don't convey the true size of the value they denote? If so, use an analog integer literal instead:" unsigned int b = I---------I;
I'm always entertained by new tax-avoidance strategies. This just call it insurance one is ok I guess.
Finally, turbolifts.

The Weekly Weird - 2017-06-23

Skorgu

2017-06-23 11:22

Digital-to-biological converter for on-demand production of biologics. Or, a desktop insulin printer (someday).
In more 'automating biology' news, a CT scan is a whole lot of data that is traditionally reviewed by humans to answer specific diagnostic questions. What if you feed it to a neural net instead? Answer: p < 0.00005 5-year mortality predictions. The authors dropped into a reddit thread on the paper and seem pretty confident that there's much more granular predictions to be had. Neural nets like a lot of data and CT scans are generated at a pretty good rate already so I'm excited to see what happens next.
Neural networks can also learn to negotiate with humans. Has anyone patented a chat bot that 'negotiates' your health insurance rates the day after your CT scan? No reason.
Did you notice the little blurb in there about how the bots ended up diverging from english into 'their own language'? No? Well, they did and balls have zero to me to me.
Why did Amazon buy Whole Foods? Scale.
There's ... way not enough information in this article but Army trainers successfully used cyber weapons and electronic warfare (EW) technology to thwart a simulated tank assault at a training exercise.
Scariest photo you'll see today: right here.
Markets are often awful but god this solar energy cost curve is a beautiful thing to see.
I've always thought that 'imperial' measures were silly in the abstract but actually pretty useful in real life. Here's a whole system of writing numbers that reinforces the sequential-quartering in syntax.
I don't know how much I trust the clickbait-y titles but the relationship between power and mental acuity is fascinating.
What's new with Apache 2.4? LOTS. Some nice commentary in the HN thread.
Bancor is flawed. Response: nuh uh.
ZFS (almost) has encryption! Looks pretty easy to use, too.
This little video is a startlingly effective Rorschach test on how you feel about go. It's basically official, too.
The Scaly-foot gastropod is just weird. It lives in the dark, makes armor out of metal and lives on nutrients from its symbiotic bacteria buddies.
If the flight attendant comes on and says there's not enough air to fly you'd be suspicious but that's literally what happened in Phoenix. Alternatively not enough colors.
Everything is a tree.