The Weekly Weird - 2018-05-11

Skorgu

2018-05-11 14:00

Rust 1.26 (feat. impl Trait) is now live!
If you don't want your rows hammered, just don't use networks. No problem.
Want to try out the New Shiny proof-of-stake ethereum thingie? You've got $1_000_000 in ETH, right?
M'lord, the Gong farmers are restless.
Hate when the feds crack your encryption via the USB port? An obvious solution presents itself: turn that sucker off.
I'll definitely be first in line to take one of Uber's flying cars. Just let me make sure "don't crash" is enabled.
I had never heard of Kong but it seems like it nicely wraps some nice api-gateway logic like rate limiting for you. Just plop it into kubernetes and you're done.
Using the power of userspace-provided runtime-compiled code running in the kernel (what could go wrong), here's yet another kubernetes overlay network.
Bitcoin mining iiiiiin spaaaaaace. I know how to power it.
I missed a "background news item in disaster movie" item last week: Sunspots Vanishing Faster than Expected.
this_is_fine.jpg

The Weekly Weird - 2018-05-04

Skorgu

2018-05-04 14:00

Ever want to write some Rust on a plane? Have ~20G? Install this then run "cargo run --bin download-all-crates".
I've always been annoyed that I can out-type most modern software. I'm thrilled that more people are starting to share this annoyance.
I for one welcome our adorable hexapod plant-cyborg overlords.
English doesn't borrow from other languages, it famously pursues other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. But what if we had stuck with Germanic a bit more thoroughly? (via)
I lost the page where I got this phrasing but the next big change might be the costs of custom manufacturing falling to meet the costs of bulk manufacturing. Like these custom ASICs for $100.
From the 'background-chyron-in-apocalyptic-movie' department:
- "BIOHACKER, CEO OF ASCENDENCE BIOMEDICAL AARON TRAYWICK FOUND DEAD IN DC". Intersection with grinders unclear.
- Chinese lasers injure US military pilots in Africa, Pentagon says.
- Icebergs could float to the rescue of Cape Town water crisis. Of course there are other options for water delivery.
It looks like ceph might be basing their disk daemons on seastar: rough notes.
Does it make more sense to spend more on a more efficient solar panel or just go for the cheapest? Depends on your install costs.
A youtube series on why the Hobbit movies were awful. 1/2, 2/2, 3/2.
More youtube on why Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the most amazing animated movie ever.
A very pretty NYC subway map.
Python wrappers to the ZFS subsystem.
I take it back, the most 2018 headline is Asteroid mining company considering own ICO.
Good news for Space-based nuclear power.
And in the meantime, a wonderfully detailed examination of how to refuel a methalox rocket on Mars: Part 1 and Part 2.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-04-27

Skorgu

2018-04-27 14:00

Hacking bgp to steal bitcoin is so 2014. Hacking bgp to redirect all of AWS' DNS resolution to steal bitcoin is the new hotness. HN comments, cloudflare's take.
I should coin a law: every product eventually evolves to be able to mine bitcoin.
At least we're getting great research on money laundering out of all these bitcoin heists.
Considering I just checked out of a hotel, this nearly-universal hotel room master key is concerning on an unusually personal level.
Mushroom leather.
AIs: detecting diabetes. Great, now when the robots take over it'll be to ban soda so they don't have to work as hard. Or mandate soda if we get the utility curve wrong I guess.
What an amazing visual: four planets.
The F-Zero soundtrack is amazing. Nintendo realized this and did the obvious thing: commissioned a jazz arrangement. It's amazing.
Every job not taken by a robot will be taken by an old person.
I'll be honest, I didn't get more than a few paragraphs into this article but it says go is bad so it must be right: Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-04-20

Skorgu

2018-04-20 14:00

From the ignore-folklore-at-your-peril department: Ancient legends say lightning makes mushrooms grow. Modern science agrees.
Here's a doozy: An (accidental!) cellphone photo of your finger is forensically useful.
How sure are you that Humans are the first civilization on Earth? How sure should you be?
You got your quantum optics in my chocolate!
TESS just launched with a super clever orbit.
Props to the hacker who stole this guy's ETH while he was doing a livestream, that's some A+ drama.
Super neat: paste some json and this page will emit Rust structs that can (de)serialize the implied format.
Human lives are individually priceless but statisticslly quite robustly valued.
FoundationDB is open source!
That VPN does not make you a l33t h4x0r
One silver lining to airplane-related incidents are fascinating ATC traffic.
I was gonna share these neat HUD glasses from Intel but they beat me to the punch by giving up on selling them, canceling the project and firing everyone involved. I... guess they weren't as cool as they seemed?
I, uh, yet again can't improve on the headline: Washington State Fusion Center accidentally releases records on remote mind control.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-04-13

Skorgu

2018-04-13 14:00

I've been writing a lot of Go lately. I hate it. This article sums up my experience so well it's almost what I would have written. I would have cursed so much more though.
Blah blah blah rust, blah blah webasm, blah blah ... webasm on bare metal?!
There are two! candidates for fancy shmancy functional datastructures in rust: im and rpds.
Wikipedia is happy to cater to your need for Russian political jokes.
1mm wide self-powering cameras. What could go wrong?
VAMPIRE DRONES. Ok, fine, blood can tolerate infinte G loads as long as the container doesn't break so it's a perfect candidate for cheap and easy air-dropping. I'm still calling them vampire drones though.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-04-06

Skorgu

2018-04-06 14:00

Why do our eyes face forward?
$200 Billion solar power plant! That's like 3% of the world electricity demand!
Ever wonder what an Ethanol plant is like? Wonder no more!
The NYC subway has been taking a beating and some have taken that opportunity to offer grand suggestions.
International politics. Intrigue. 60hz.
Humans are pretty good at finding out how to adhere to the letter of the rules and still go bananas on the sprit.
China is all in on facial recognition. Jaywalkers, minorities, chickens.
It's easy to make fun of blockchain insanity but it's just as easy to overlook the actual value in silly things. Even things as silly as blockchain traded kittens.
Buried lede of the year: "Lilja left The Offspring in the late 1980s to deliver offspring."
I'm sure there's more complexity here but when you're an information security professional and your two most recent jobs are Equifax and Panera, maybe you should rethink things?
What a lovely future when you can just download a realtime object tracking system from github.
If you take dog heartworm medication, your blood will become toxic to mosquitoes. Bwahahahahaha.
How to do python things in rust.
How to build a microserice in rust.