The Weekly Weird - 2020-05-15

Skorgu

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.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-05-08

Skorgu

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.

Skorgu

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.

Skorgu

'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.

Skorgu

Skorgu

Neural nets are roughly magic, I think we all agree on that. But they're introspectable magic.
Did you know that you can hike from the subway to a town just outside Albany? The Long Path, indeed.
Looking for a scifi idea to write? Genetically engineered yeast that emits hallucinogens escapes, turns sourdough bakers into drug dealers. You're welcome. Just slather a nice, thick coat of quantum biology all over and you're destined for the bestseller list.
We hear sirens much more frequently than we think about them, I suspect. There's the "annoying" wee-woo wee-woo and _BRRRRRR, the "quantity has a quality all its own", the "intellectually terrifying", and of course, the "intrinsically unsettling".
Ceph released their latest, shiniest version: octopus and its companion Rook release.
I'm thrilled to see folks writing more Kubernetes things in Rust:
- A Kubelet in Rust that runs WASM: krustlet
- Quality-of-life tooling to make dealing with multiple clusters easier: Kubie
- Horizontal pod autoscaling: Pangolin

Skorgu

Skorgu

Back to my roots, let's talk dumb crypto tricks:
- The Flash Crash writ small. Remember, kids: friends don't let friends send market orders (via Matt Levine).
- Ok, that's just "crypto re-learns lessons that everyone else already learned". This bZx hack on the other hand, man this is the beans. (also via Matt Levine).
Look, that T-Rex in Jurassic Park actually, literaly almost killed a guy.
Like lisp? Easily write Clojure from Bash
We don't need no stinking search engine, we have bash
Ahh French, like four-twenty-ten-nine wasn't hilarious enough, now you tell me that l'envers of l'envers is Verlan? HN comments with more fun linguistics.
Need a nice, readable, vaguely-retro font? How about "you know, the way they wrote on old blueprints"?
You know my feelings about Go. This fellow agrees. By the same author, an excellent exploration of how the @#$% strings work.
This is a neat feature: using eBPF to produce structured events from SSH sessions.
Good advice on rewriting/replacing large, complex systems.
I'm not an epidemiologist, nor are you, so you're probably not even remotely qualified to interpret this model of COVID19 spread. Why am I linking it anyway?
Want an order book? Here.

Skorgu

Sorry, locked the keys to the internet in this safe, we'll get them right out.
Why must systems be operated?
Honestly, I can't improve on Savage Memes and Lunar Dreams.
Double-take: an open-source Windows bootloader. Triple-take: "Install WinBtrfs"
Tired: Your laptop is more powerful than the Apollo landing computer. Wired: Your laptop's charger is more powerful, too.
I make fun of left-pad just as much as anyone else but really, C is not blameless either.
I kind of like this js framework that starts with HTML instead of pretending to be an application.
Boeing is just not having a good year, are they? "Numerous process escapes" is not a phrase you want to hear in your program review.
Just copyright all the music.

Skorgu

I'm usually cranky about yet another embedded database engine but this talk about sled has somewhat changed my mind.
Red Hat has completed the consumption of CoreOS, thankfully there's a fork.
The Lazarus Taxon would be a good cover band.
Dropbears eat your heart out.
Haven't watched this yet but this talk on Liquid Diamonds comes recommended. See also.