The Weekly Weird - 2019-10-11

Skorgu

2019-10-11 14:00

So, uh, you can just give anyone an abitrarily large tax bill, huh? (h/t Matt Levine). Decentralized Denial of Service? Traffic Magnification via IRS? I love it.
What more appropriate measure of the zeitgeist could there be than an OS designed for global collapse?
Prohibited from wearing masks? Project your own! (technically SFW but...)
You know you can't treat floats like numbers, right?
If your password takes 29 years to crack, you're doing it right. Turns out those UNIX guys were pretty smart.
Yet another book on async in rust.
Usable tooling for automatic proof of specifications in Rust: pdf, code. The annotations look quite usable, really.
I paid for 4 2 wheels, make 'em all drive.
Look, this is basically an ad for the service mentioned but it might be useful if you want to set up multi-factor auth without re-learning what PAM stands for and locking yourself out.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-09-27

Skorgu

2019-09-27 14:00

I know the path there is fraught but man, I wish I were a tenured biologist so I could get paid to give octopuses drugs, watch them sleep, make up words like kleptogenesis, and phrases like "DIY gene therapy" (!!!!!).
Quantum physics is really weird.
perf is so powerful it's tempting to think we already have all the tools we need to make programs faster but any social scientist will tell you that imitating a longitudinal study with a cross-sectional one is ... hard. Social scientists will also tell you that getting IRB approval for sedating most of a rowing team to see who's not pulling their weight is even harder. One day there will be ethics on doing the same to computer programs but until then, let's enjoy causal profiling. Yes, you can (sort of) use it on rust code.
From the unevenly-distributed-future department: I recall at least two far-future scifi stories where being unable to call for help because of accidental unconsciousness were major plot points and now we've gone ahead and just blown that whole genre out of the water.
I miss screensavers. I do not miss any of the reasons we needed screensavers of course.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-09-20

Skorgu

2019-09-20 14:00

How does China feed itself? (h/t Mike)
Why are so many datacenters in a row? 19th century politics of course.
You might be a Cardinal, literally a Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae cardinalis and not know about it.
From the best subreddit (frequented by the CEO of ULA): I am building a meme satellite. No confirmation that it's the same as this satellite but come on.
When did the PDP10 (yes, that PDP10, the one cancelled in 1983) stop being used commercially? Nope. Nope. Still nope. Waaay more nope than you thought. You too can poke around. More and even more PDP10 miscellany.
If we don't build a space elevator somewhere in my lifetime I will be very disappointed. Cambridge and Columbia are on it. At least we're manufacuring something up there.
Aaaarrgghhh brains are so dumb. So dumb.
From the neo-lovecraftian-background-chyron department: Trampoline mirror may push laser pulse through fabric of the Universe. What could go wrong.
Scylla continues to impress: DynamoDB-compatible layer for their cassandra implementation.
How much should you charge for your niche product? A surprisingly deep analysis determines that the answer is probably "more".
Unicode is completely insane.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-09-06

Skorgu

2019-09-06 14:00

You know how you can't be forced to testify against your spouse? New Mexico disagrees.
With sufficient thrust, water towers fly just fine.
SPACE CRIME
From the disaster-movie-chyron-roll department: "Large Underwater Observatory Disappears Without a Trace, Baffling Scientists" (h/t Mike).
You are coiling your cables wrong
I don't have much to say about carbon nanotube processors but I wonder if being able to use a free ISA like RISC-V and run actual programs makes these kind of one-offs more appealing?
Laser welded ceramic are just cool words.
Rust in the kernel, Erlang in rust, wasm in Postgres, rust and wasm on the blockchain.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-08-16

Skorgu

2019-08-16 14:00

The ambient danger level of being on the internet at all is horrifying enough but nothing compared to being worth spending a 0-day on.
Fly the plane, not the technology.
Is this the first NSFW bluetooth vulnerability?
Planning on camping? These pretty graphs might help you decide when, where and how to do it.
Wouldn't it be nice if companies would just let you install a wifi sniffer inside their office buildings? Warshipping is the catchy new name for a not-new attack vector.
Look, all the good jokes have been taken. Your clever bobby tables license plate will just cause you grief. I can't guarantee that apparrel won't also come to a bad end but at least you'll be stylish.
Most of civilization (such as it is) relies on the asymmetric difficulty of analysis. As the cost to gather data goes to zero, so we discover that there is nowhere to hide and nothing is safe.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-08-02

Skorgu

2019-08-02 14:00

The thing about complexity is that the harder you pretend it doesn't exist, the more horrific it inevitably ends up when you have to bolt it back on.
Note also that avoiding Fully Featured Operating Systems for tiny, embedded ones just means the inevitable security vulnerabilities are harder to update.
From the too-good-to-be-true department: v.
Want to feel old?
You may not be aware that you can write whatever you want as the "city" on a letter without affecting deliverability. This is extremely obvious if you live in Queens.
The International Potato Center (yep) has determined that those delicious tubers will grow on Mars just fine.
"Gold, Anxiolytics and Myrrh" doesn't really have the right ring to it.
A planet so hot, iron vaporizes. Still preferable to the subway in August.
250 pages of How To Launch A Big F...alcon Rocket.
From the somehwo-not-actually-scifi department: Nuclear Bullets. They are exactly what they sound like.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-07-26

Skorgu

2019-07-26 14:00

A strong contender for the scariest pair of words in the English language has got to be "Bluetooth Pacemaker" (not that the previous stack was necessarily better). At least they're not plutonium powered anymore.
Back in the mists of time, when the Internet was dewy-eyed with optimism, 640k really was enough for everyone, we still thought that connecting people was good, and IP addresses flowed like water, a smidge of IP address space was set aside for amateur radio use. 44/8 was...not consistently made use of and its governance was always a bit fuzzy. Recently, folks noticed that some of those 16 million addresses had been split out. It turns out that Amazon made a deal. This has not been received with unmitigated positivity by the community.
Remember that the cloud is just other people's ransomware-locked computers.
Adversarial street signs and ... lumps?.
I guess the global game of sanctions-chicken has one positive outcome: RISC-V chips from China.
The best minds of our generation are bio-engineering hair farms.
Specifically mindful meditation is not better than sham meditation. However, even sham meditation generated 'significant increases in mindfulness dispositions and critical thinking scores'. I am not sure how to evaluate this information. (h/t Mike 1).
Something something anime catgirls (sfw, h/t Mike 2).
The PinebookPro ($200 Arm laptop) is up for preorder.
Major downside to commercial software: sudden dectoupling of license costs.
"Have you tried turning the plane off and then back on again?"

The Weekly Weird - 2019-07-19

Skorgu

2019-07-19 14:00

Need a Highly Available server? Can't tolerate restart delays? NonStop too exensive? Can't figure out how to plug your mainframe in? COLO to the rescue.
Paving the way for a movie villain to say "your heart betrays you" non metaphorically.
You may have heard that the EU's GPS has had some issues lately. In the meantime, why not poke at the signals and see what's what?
The rare actually-interesting programming language pitch: Deploy code in 50ms. My favorite is "Every state of incomplete code in Dark has a valid execution semantics".
In four states you can become a lawyer without going to law school.
How fast is WASM really?
Spooky Action in a JPG.
Mechanical Cuttlefish.
Goodby Spherical Aberration.
How does MIT spend its billions?

The Weekly Weird - 2019-06-28

Skorgu

2019-06-28 14:00

Repeat after me: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
From the cryptonomicon-was-a-documentary department: When your enemy is making a mistake, don't interrupt him (h/t Ralph).
I didn't know what a Winograd Schema was until yesterday so don't take me too seriously but this sure sounds like human-level performance at a pretty nuanced language interpretation task. Clippy 2.0 is going to be nuts.
"Untethered flight of an insect-sized flapping-wing microscale aerial vehicle."
Weren't we supposed to have asteroid mining already? Maybe the next trip 'round the bubble coaster.
NSFWhale Lovers: The Cetacean League was no match for Soviet firepower.
Neat multi-device synchronized frontend framework.
Money laundering doesn't normally go in for world records or press releases.
The more obviously critical it is to have strong security around a process, the less effective the actual security is likely to be.
A minimal malloc implementation.
OpenZFS had a big release: 0.8.0. Long-awaited features aplenty and, perhaps more importantly, alignment on doing future development on ZoL first instead of illumos (RIP Solaris).
New Raspberry Pi website served on New Raspberry Pis. Real gigabit!
Things you wouldn't expect on github: plans for a nuclear reactor.
Guess what OS the MetroCard system runs on? Guess again.
Are black holes super-high-energy singularities, beyond the realm of experimentation? Or should you just get a fishtank and do some science?

The Weekly Weird - 2019-06-21

Skorgu

2019-06-21 14:00

FaceBux, ZuckerBucks, BoomerCoin, Scam Tokens, Even Dunning-er Krugerrands. Whatever, at least it's written in rust.
Semi-related: ["[T]the benefits of netting and risk margining [via the DTCC] enabled $326 billion in transactions to be financed with $8 billion in capital, meaning each dollar of capital from market participants secured $40 worth of gross transactions."](https://www.greenwich.com/steampunk-settlement-report-download) (via)
Lab grown meat? Lab grown milk.