The Weekly Weird - 2020-11-20

Skorgu

2020-11-20 14:00

RIP Aricebo. Very glad I got to see it before it went.
It's time for good news, bad news. Good news: No leap second this year! Bad news: NEGATIVE LEAP SECONDS.
A nifty cron/workflow scheduler built on Postgres: pg_timetable
The most popular curry in Japan is not named what you'd expect.
Want to build a flame deflector for your giant rocket? NASA has you covered (pdf).
From the everything-old-is-new-again department: Navy shoots down ICBM.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-11-06

Skorgu

2020-11-06 14:00

Ok, so maybe 'life on Venus' was a bit premature. But, something weird is going on with Titan so don't give up hope.
I've definitely been holding out a bit on getting a 3d printer since the resulting prints are so limited in their strength. I was not aware that the main limitation seems to have been printing at hotter temperatures.
I'm so very glad that we've moved on from inventing artisinal file formats and now everything is just a zipfile:
- Jar (and twelve different other similar formats)
- OpenOffice and OpenDocument
- Chrome Extensions
- Self-contained python executables
I guess having a satellite backbone does let you put little datacenters anywhere.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-10-23

Skorgu

2020-10-23 14:00

Good news everyone! Kessler syndrome has been delayed again.
Turns out there's a lot of 'smart home' devices that, despite using proprietary networks and backends, are just ESP8266 chips. You can flash those with whateer you want like this open firmware that supports MQTT and TLS.
Perception is hard.
On the "worth going to space to manufacture" list: Bulk Metallic Glass.
Fortunately, there's water in them there hills!
I'm shocked, shocked, that redditors failed a turing test.
Is there anywhere taking bets on whether a multinational decade-long project or a plucky startup saves the world first?
I believe that the 3310 can survive a metorite impact so this is the logical choice for building a cell network on the moon.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-09-25

Skorgu

2020-09-25 14:00

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 Weekly Weird - 2020-09-18

Skorgu

2020-09-18 14:00

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.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-08-28

Skorgu

2020-08-28 14:00

Welcome to this edition of the Weekly Weird for this, the 180th day of March, 2020.

I've definitely seen this movie: AI defeats fighter pilots.
I'm not sure this is ... ever useful but it's a neat example of optimizations available due to implementation details. In tar.
If I ever build another webapp again, it will absolutely use this interface.
Tired of relying on manufacturer's poorly secured out-of-band server management systems? Now you can build your own poorly-secured out of band server management system with a raspberry pi.
The nice thing about slide rules is you can always just make them bigger.
I feel like this should not be a surprise but if you own crypto but don't have the keys, it's not your crypto.
You know you can walk from Rockefeller Center to Times Square underground, right?
Also, delivering cargo to the Rusty Turtle involves an elevator and a giant turntable.
We all know there is no cabal.
Big bada boom
Is Rust coming to the linux kernel? Probably! video, PDF slides.
Speaking of kernel internals: finally, another out-of-tree latency-optimized scheduler.
It doesn't feel this way from the inside but Earth just launched a fleet towards Mars.
Honestly? I'm glad to hear the Culture TV series was canceled. I don't really trust anyone to get it right.
More speculation on what exactly Oumuamua is.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-08-14

Skorgu

2020-08-14 14:00

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.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-08-07

Skorgu

2020-08-07 14:00

"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?

The Weekly Weird - 2020-07-24

Skorgu

2020-07-24 14:00

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
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.

The Weekly Weird - 2020-07-17

Skorgu

2020-07-17 14:00

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