• 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.

• Human-scale intuitions are not reliable estimators of global-scale events.
• "Now where did I plug that cable into?"
• I think it's fair to say that "constructing a language for your fiction" is rarefied air. Here's one for Ar tonelico that puts central emphasis on the emotions conveyed. Neat.
• Fastest sort? Tired. Smallest sort? Wired. (More in the HN comments).
• Do you miss the days of dialup? Why not run your own modem pool! Ok, fine, I'm only sharing this because the name Doge Microsystems makes me so happy.
• What are those beeps in old space program videos? Quindar tones.
• Which way do your wind turbines spin? It (surprisingly?) matters!
• You could use the new ELEVEN BILLION PERCENT SPEEDUP AT NATURAL LANGUAGE BLOCKCHAIN REINFORCEMENT ONE SHOT LEARNING BACKPROPAGATION MODEL ML. Or, just tune the old model and get the same performance.

• I love when scifi becomes mundane. Case in point: how much of a problem is dust spray when you land on the moon?
• Planting crops that mutually reinforce each other's strenghts and weaknesses: brilliant.
• How green is your electricity? What if you wanted it to be greener. How much more capacity do you have to build to just not care about the sun not shining or the wind not blowing? Four. And how much will all that extra cost you? Less and less every day.
• Java? We don't need no stinking Java.
• When writing work emails, please remember to apply the "Green Eggs and Ham Test".
• How many times can I make the "you got your X in my Y" joke? ONE MORE BUCKO.

• David Bowie: Musician, Actor, Iconoclast, Legend, Internet Service Provider, Fixed Income Product.
• Disc Jockeys of the World, the Library calls!
• Bored? Take a crack at 72 years of back issues of Physics Today
• What are those idle westerners in low cost of living countries doing all day? Drop-shipping.
• Look, we all know this is just a stealth demo for Portal 3.
• Humans are pretty conceited, why else would we just assume that aliens would breathe oxygen?
• So many words on that whole 'negative oil price' thing.

• It's taken long enough but it seems like the new generation of human space exploration is shaping up. From supplying a lunar space station to several different lunar landers. Sadly, none of these will need a Tire Assault Vehicle.
• Fill in the blank: Virtual rate cut forces ________ ______ into riskier assets (h/t Mike). If you get it right, I'll eat my shoe(no I won't).
• From the creators of Bonsai: Daisugi.
• I have to admit, my historical animosity towards Microsoft is softening a bit given their clear interest in using Rust for the right reasons. They seem to care about safety and are putting real horsepower behind making rust a first-class language for Windows.

• 'Contango' is my favorite word. 'SUPER CONTAGO' is so much better. That's peanuts compared to negative spot prices which are now doing a lovely job stress-testing exchanges, brokers, and ETFs. I believe the appropriate euphemism here is 'unsophisticated order flow'.
• How much of a savings is full autonomy for a trucking business? Perhaps not as much as you'd think.
• As a lover of BGP hijacks, I worry that Cloudflare's push for RPKI will put this newsletter out of business. Mind you, Cloudflare's opinion is not universally shared.
• Hard drive manufactureres submarining SMR drives without labeling. Classy.
• Disassembling a plane to ship it somewhere else would be silly. It's still silly when it's a drone but that's how it worked until just now
• Miss Clojure but don't want the JVM baggage? Clojure on Rust to the rescue!
• Don't accidentally charge your macbook on the wrong side.
• I'm eagerly watching the progress of Datafusion.
• New kernel interfaces more fasterer.
• Someone should make a modern Swiss Family Robinson where clever smartphone hacks take place in awesome treehouses.