The Weekly Weird - 2019-01-11

Skorgu

2019-01-11 14:00

Now that Blockchain has revolutionized everything and we're sick of having so many Lamborghinis, running elections is the next frontier, obviously. What could go wrong.
A review of Red Ded Redemption 2 from an ... unexpected direction.. See also the hn thread.
The trains are slow because they slowed down the trains (Part 28,627,991).
All of exixtence is ~~a black hole~~ ~~a hologram~~ Cosmic RAID-5. (The HN thread might help if you're lost like I am).
How very Diamond Age: Cafe opens in Tokyo staffed by robots controlled by paralyzed people.
How very Snow Crash.
From the theres-always-something-to-optimize department: how fast can you look up kewords when parsing SQL?
Will the owner of the lost NMN Transporter please pick up a white courtesy phone.
Blah, blah, blah fusion breakthrough, blah blah.
I cannot overstate how much I love stories about Eve politics. They blew up a space station!
You know what a SAT/SMT solver is but if you've never used one it can be hard to get your head around it. Have no fear, a giant set of example problems and solutions is here!
Some Rust tidbits:

The Weekly Weird - 2019-01-04

Skorgu

2019-01-04 14:00

Slow webserver getting you down? Next time write it in raw x86_64 assembly, sucker.
Making drug deals is so much harder with congested sinuses. Take some of that meth and make sudafed with it instead.
There are a few different paths to formally proving Rust but the incremental annotations in this one seem like something I would actually use and not just an academic exercise: Leveraging rust types for modular specification and verification.
Super neat: trace a running kubernetes pod.
Outages suck. Outages that lead to 911 services failing suck more. If only you had fire alarms that directly reported via morse code.
I guess I need a hackers-print-the-new-flesh department: fake hands.
Two houses alike in dignity something something ancient grudge. (Operation Assertive Corvid is a great evil plan name).
Write nic drivers in all the languages.
A bit late but: ping an ipv6 address to change a pixel's color. This is what ipv6 was invented for and I could not possibly be more pleased.
Victorian Cannibal Sailors: totally legal until 1884.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-12-21

Skorgu

2018-12-21 14:00

Folks are starting to realize that you can shut down billions in air traffic with $1,000 of drones. Expect to hear similar stories a lot more.
And then there were two.
Sandboxes: coming to your parents' home pc just not in time for these holidays.
When the robots came for the cats, I included it in my newsletter because awww.
I feel like I've shared this before but I cba to search. Dirty coding tricks from game devs.
From the quick-quiz-hotshot department: What was autotune invented to do?
The Titanic was just fine except for that iceberg, right?
Finally, I can meaningfully divert power from structural integrity to engines
In the post-reality dystopia we all live in, this is probably the least horrifying use of the phrase "3D-printed head".
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Probably not the optimal sunken treasure to find but at least it's tasty.
Rust tidbits:
- Realtime for the masses.
- Un-generic your Impls with enum_dispatch.
- A rigorous approach to parsing floats.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-12-14

Skorgu

2018-12-14 14:00

Got a new mac with touch id? Use the secure enclave for your ssh keys.
Super weird to see a place I've eaten explode.
Enigma pocket watch.
50 years ago, Douglas Engelbart quietly gave what came to be known as mother of all demos. How has reality stacked up to the vision it implied? Not bad.
I'm working on building a tiny kubernetes cluster at home because I'm insane and I'm excited to try rook.
Would you like to know a lot of things about titanium? Silly question, I know.
If I ever become stupidly wealthy, please don't let me put $1 million bets on bitcoin futures.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-12-07

Skorgu

2018-12-07 14:00

Apologies for the impromptu hiatus, back to regularly scheduled weirdness.

First off, I cannot pick a pull quote from this bonkers article: Four Days Trapped at Sea With Cryptos Nouveau Riche.
Using your fingerprint to unlock things is neat but, it turns out, there's not as much entropy there as you might have thought.
I love these little bits of history exposed by geography: Hess' Triangle.
Not everyone is convinced that water cooling is the only way to keep up with the increasing march of TDP: just add more metal.
A plane with no moving parts: ion engines.
I've shared some of Deviant Ollam's videos before but here's This Key Is Your Key, This Key Is My Key.
I guess it's a bit semantics but did you know that energy is not conserved?
Remember when LED flashlights were new and shiny? No? Just me? Well. Now they're boring but there's a new wallet-draining technology: fricking lasers.
Nasal Demons are the best possible case for undefined behavior.
From the unusually-good-looks-at-rockets department: Soyuz going up and Falcon coming down with the spins.
A real self-driving truck in a limestone quarry.
"Diary of a Space Zucchini".
"Scientists keep finding Hawaiian monk seals with eels stuck in their noses".

The Weekly Weird - 2018-11-16

Skorgu

2018-11-16 14:00

This is a wonderful interview question: You're running IT in a hospital and after replacing an MRI machine, Apple devices newer than the iPhone 6 all start to fail. Older devices are fine and Androids, PCs, etc. are not affected. Try to guess before you read the answer.
In much the same way as LIGO spawned a whole new spectrum of radio astronomy, Spectre birthed an entire family tree of exciting future vulnerabilities
Sorry, we can't build this environment-saving technology. The name is far too twee. I mean come on, "floatovoltaics"?!
Vakyrie's flashback in Thor: Ragnarok is pretty neat. The guy who invented it was a regular IT guy until some dude from New Zealand put him in a film.
Store your cold bitcoins like the pros. Practice writing Smart Contracts(tm) like the pros. Where is the "hard fork like the pros" link? Oh I guess BCH is forking again, yawn.
Wildfires happen fast.
I'm not exactly sure why but a whole lot of LMDB stories cruised across HN at the same time: 1, 2, 3.
Reversible computing, necessary for humans to aestivate, attracts some academic attention.
How come LA gets hidden oil wells? NYC only has vents.
As we all know, the ability of current chromogenic technologies to regulate solar gain with the tunable extinction of phase-change materials is still far from optimum.
More small storage nodes, this time x86 and dual SATA: Odroid H2. No price yet :(
"Stop suing yourself! Stop suing yourself!"
Really enjoying the proliferation of folks trying to find the best merger of strong types and SQL. Now with macros!
RISC-V is either popular or unpopular in China.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-10-12

Skorgu

2018-10-12 14:00

Definitely weird: Bees don't fly during solar eclipses.
The most exciting words in science are, of course, 'Well this model doesn't make much sense'. If the tone of that article is a bit too breathless for you, give this excellent HN comment a shot instead. Exciting!
OT vs CRDT: fight!
Apparently, I'm Finnish.
Protobuffers are not universally loved.
It doesn't matter if the cops have your DNA you know, they will find you (source article).
It's been a rough week for state space agencies. Roscosmos had an oopsie which will not help the perception of their previous oopsie. NASA's kind of just hitting itself (but no earth-shattering kaboom so that's something).
Flying car? Flying car!
You can predict which side of the tracks is the 'bad' one: it's the side with all the smog.
Everything old is new again: A statically-compiled dialect of javascript.
Ok, this Bloomberg/Supermicro thing just makes no sense. So far, almost everyone mentioned in the story (Amazon, Apple, Homeland Security, The FBI...) has pretty much denied it, and not in fuzzy carefully-precise language either. Bloomberg though is not so much giving up as doubling down despite their named source not sounding so sure.
Finally, someone's rewriting a real operating system in rust.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-10-05

Skorgu

2018-10-05 14:00

I loathe linking twitter threads, they're just reader-hostile. But this one is worth it for the top-quality science.
I guess we gotta talk about the NSA bankrupting Supermicro via Bloomberg (Is that not what it's about?) Vaguely useless HN comments and an in-depth analysis of plausible (but unproven) attack vectors. Also, anyone want to translate this product page?
The only problem with state-sponsored hardware espionage is the lack of a catchy name. Not like iDRACula, which is killer.
"Building an organic computing device with multiple interconnected brains" (2015) leads to a slightly-less-invasive one-bit replication in humans.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-09-21

Skorgu

2018-09-21 14:00

Man did I pick the wrong RustConf 2018 talk to pull out the other week. Catherine West gave a great closing keynote about game development and how Rust leads/forces the programmer towards a good design by making some bad designs hard or impossible. A fairly well known game developer was sufficiently unimpressed by this talk to make his own video calling out this conclusion: "The borrow checker isn't beneficial here: you're avoiding it by using a pattern you'd use in C++ anyway.". Oh dear. This led to a veritable cornucopia of blog posts clarifying that you can't 'turn off' the borrow checker, trying to tease out what the disagreement actually was, digging a little deeper into the difference between an integer and a pointer, and of course, Catherine's own blog post digging much deeper into the proposed architecture.
Also in rust-land, Bryan Fucking Cantrill falls in love with rust. (This is pretty much the article I would have written except a thousand times better because Bryan is a genius). See also his videos of the Summer of Rust and the statemaps he talks about.
How many moves does it take to solve a Rubik's cube? 20. Unironically: what a great use of 35 CPU years!
Once you've built your giant orbiting rotating space station, how will you light it up? Geometry.
This is neat: Cloudflare now generically proxies IPFS hashes. That might be the impetus I need to publish this trash to SPACE-COMPATIBLE BITS.

The Weekly Weird - 2018-09-14

Skorgu

2018-09-14 14:00

Look how dedicated I am to you all, I still manage to get you your needed Weird through my horrid plague.

How anonymous is zcash anyway? It's complicated.
Timezones are dumb but even by that standard, this is ridiculous.
Guard your metadata. Steps can tell you about videogame releases in addition to the previously-noted secret military bases.
Ok, look. Can we just be a little less on the nose here? Don't introduce the aliens to the AI!
Compilers: apparently just getting started.
You rarely get to see a rocket launch from quite this angle.
You know how I feel about Go. Here are some extra-surprising bits.
Today's lesson, nothing is free. I could do without the breathless prose but hey, payment for order flow is a thing, even for Robin Hood.
From the surprisingly-old department: this boat and this fish. See also this delightful list.