• Ever have the urge to play with a few thousand memristors? No? Huh. Well, now you can anyway.
• Got a tub full of shrimp on Mars? Grind 'em up and make biolith.
• Sorry Eve Online, you're old news. The new horrifying implausible nonfiction thriller generator is Blockchain and it's sequel, Son of Blockchain. Bonkers.
• Too serious for you? Prefer your post-modernist semi-fiction more Hunter S. Thompson and less Stephenson? Ask your doctor if Degens is right for you.
• ...which blends right into CSI-IRL: extracting a fingerprint from a photo.
• Why do New Yawkers tawk like that? Because I'm walkin here, that's why.
• Need to drive on some sand to escape the Golden Horde? Have some tips (on the sand part, I can't help with the Mongols.
• Finally, a Real Operating System on Linux.
• We all know how planes fly, right? The shape of the wing, Bernoulli, all that jazz? Nope.

• The big news is the recently discovered venereal infection. To learn more about Phosphine, ask a chemist of course. Getting to Venus is going to take a bit though it just so happens that the Europeans and Japanese are swinging by anyway so maybe they can peek in the windows. Bad news: there might be a territorial dispute.
• Not useful on Venus but potentially useful in the outer system: metallic glass gears.
• SuSE brings Ceph to Windows.
• Good news everybody! You don't need to use your MetroCard at all anymore! Oh.
• "Good work 47, the blame will fall on this 'ransomware' source and no-one will be the wiser."
• In other space news, you don't need to be Tom Cruise to visit the space station. You could also be a reality show winner!
• "Intercepting Zoom's Encrypted Data with BPF"
• Chicken chicken "Chicken.pdf"? Chicken chicken chicken "Chicken chicken chicken". Chicken chicken chicken.
• A deep exploration of nasal demons undefined behavior.

• From the read-the-room department: Yale scientists restore cellular function in 32 dead pig brains. (h/t Mike)
• The speed record for trains was broken in 2006. The previous record (206mph) stood since 1955.
• Factorio, the most popular second job for programmers, reaches 1.0.
• Surprisingly, a headline concerning 747s and floppy disks is not a throughput comparison.
• With websites regularly clocking in at double-digit megs, it's refreshing to see a functioning video streaming client running in 520 KiB.
• If you're planning a road trip to Wyoming, please allow me to add some stops to your itinerary.
• I feel like I've read a scifi story with a Tongue User Interface.

• "Big company gets screwed by ransomware" is an increasingly common headline but you don't often see 8-figure ransom negotiations happening in public chatrooms (h/t Vito).
• Who runs bartertown? Excel runs bartertown. (h/t Mike)
• If you are going to hack something big, verifying your Coinbase account with your driver's license to get your filthy lucre is decidedly suboptimal.
• Learn SQL by solving a murder mystery.
• Another of my favorite Itanic charts.
• I'm sure you've seen plenty of the ~1kt explosion in Beirut but a little asterisk in the story is the abandonment of the crew of the ship that was the source of the Ammonium Nitrate.
• An incredibly detailed look at switching from nginx to envoy.
• Get 13% better at distinguishing Mandarin tones by zapping your brain.
• If this leads to audiophile-level silliness in information security audits, I quit.
• I'm sure you watched the SpaceX Dragon capsule splashing down but the story of the plane behind the aerial footage is mildly interesting itself.
• Speaking of space, this grain silo took a jaunty little amble the other day. It's probably the silliest-looking thing to fly in a while but there have been some pretty gonzo designs in the past that make it look downright normal (hn comments).
• You wouldn't download a 10 meter tall wind turbine, would you?
• Ok, it's no snake jazz but how about kakapo saxophones?

• I guess we should talk about GPT-3, huh. Initial impressions were underwhelming and the most obvious things to apply a text prediction engine too like writing poetry were more 'whelming' but didn't generally burn the house down. Apply a generous coating of quarantine fiddling, though, and you get examples of a text prediction engine
  • Running a role playing game
  • Doing math
  • Programming
  • Designing products
  • Playing the Turing test (?!)
  • Lying?
• In an entirely unrelated note, now might be a good time to brush up on your Computational Philosophy, think about reinforcement learning under moral uncertainty, and see how this attempt at a consensus of what morality even is rubs you.
• Now might also be a good time to brush up on the market price of security in large tech companies.
• 20TB hard drives exist.
• Run seL4 on your RISC-V.

• Learn to write fast programs for modern CPUs: Programming Parallel Computers
• Play with simulations: loopy
• Design game mechanics: machinations
• Scaling a service on Linux involves thinking about the entire process, not just what happens after you connect
• Provision credentials that let you 'break glass' and get access to your servers even if your fancy auth system is broken: emergency access
  • Related, if you trust github, you can just synchronize your ssh fingerprints automatically
• Simulate the global energy economy: model.energy

• M'verygoodfriend Elon's new rockets sometimes go boom. You don't want to blow up your expensive rocket scienteists alongside your cheap stainless steel pressure vessel though so when they only go a little boom of course sending a $75k robot dog to sniff around makes perfect sense.
• The Space Force would prefer not to rely on such piddly low-tech chemical reactions for their rockets, though. Instead, they're banking on nuclear thermal propulsion. I wonder which of the various possible designs will end up being chosen? Nevermind, it'll be the one with the Turbo Boost.
• A cool language syntax feature? In javascript??! It's more likely than you think!
• Ok, I hate on js a lot but of course there's a place for it. I'm very gratified to see that others share my loathing of thick js web apps in favor of just sending some HTML plz. (h/t Vito) See also turbolinks, stimulus and json5.
• I don't see a future for mechanical verification of javascript though so rust is still cooler.
• Make the obvious way to do things the correct way. Or just return the wrong year sometimes. (h/t Vito)
• How worried should you be about solar storms or EMP? Um....at least some.
• Yeah, the CIA getting pwned is a very on-brand funny 2020 story but the HN comments point out that it might be literally impossible for them to have successfully defend such shiny jewels at all.
• Your time machine should have an interlock to prevent accidental travel to 536.
• Go home #5, you're drunk.
• If you pair a French wine with American escargot does the UN apply sanctions?

No weekly weird today. Spend Juneteenth making the world a better place.

• Can you mitigate/reduce/reverse aging just by flushing your old, dirty blood?
• Where did the phrase 'sharding' (of databases) originate? Ultima Online, of course (HN comments)
• One common complaint of scientific papers nowadays is reproducibility. The more data; the more iterations of gathering, processing, sanitizing, and analyzing it; and the more general tools used to do all those things the harder it is for an uninvolved party to reproduce all the little steps. If only we had a transparent automated setup for reproducible R workflows. Ah well.
• The optimal way to use MS-DOS.
• How long is a ruler? How do you know? Somewhere down the line, Bob or Bob's older brother was probably involved.
• How much carbon is on the moon? Count the ions and find more than you expected.
• Need to plot charts but only have a terminal? Unicode Plots has your back.
• Man, what a great spy thriller plot hook: Doppelganger passport photos.
• Bored with the modem pool from the other day? Build a modem! (for packet radio and not POTS lines but still)
• Do some very, very, very slow computations on encrypted data without decrypting it.
• Build your own 5G network. Nutjob arsonists sold separately.
• Write python? Use enums. It's still no rust but it helps.
• Finally, space tortillas.
• Each of these links is 100% sfw.
  • SEX WEASELS.
  • Hot, dense Structures.
  • The Knob.