The Weekly Weird - 2019-02-15

Skorgu

2019-02-15 14:00

From the military-industrial-complex-makes-great-videos department: Downtown LA, no lights (via)
This is ... surprisingly compelling: Johnny Decimal.
The Hoover Dam is amazing for many reasons but it's also a 26,000 year clock and pretty much nobody noticed.
Worried that the quantums are going to eat your lunch? You should be! Watch this nice summary of the state of the art by Tanja Lange and the one and only djb (via). If you want to hack yourself: libpqcrypto.org is ready for you.
I cannot agree more: The problem isn't bad coders. (Sometimes it's bad silicon)
Pine64 announces just a bunch of stuff, including a nicer laptop and a network camera.
Based on my MD from the University of Wikipedia, I've always thought that attaching prosthetics to the bone seemed like the right long-term strategy. It appears Europe agrees with me.
You can use GPUs for much more important things than just being silly and going to Mars. For example, you can generate an infite variety of nonexistant people, whether they're real or um, less so.
What really happened to the X-33 VentureStar (besides the name).
RISC-V for $8.
If you're running Exchange, you have 99 ~~1,272,226~~ +1 problems.
Rustify your bash, protobufs, metrics, z-wave.

The Weekly Weird - 2019-02-01

Skorgu

2019-02-01 14:00

Store your bitcoins in cold storage! Just, perhaps, not quite this cold.
DO NOT GIVE THE AI A FUSION REACTOR. HAS SCIFI TAUGHT YOU NOTHING?!
Both these links are juuust on the border of NSFW but they produce band names that are just too good:
- Opiod Lap Dance
- Completely Unembarrassable
I vaguely recall reading about Clovis and Tang a few years ago but they've graduated to RHEL now. I wonder how much work it would be to back the server side with a small HSM...
Ever see a helicopter drag race a 737?
From the awesome-until-advertisers-discover-it department: laser acoustics.
How much ipv6 is in use in China? Little, then lots.
I miss the innocent, halcyon days when backdooring the telco was just for fun.
To write a cracking detective yarn, just follow these simple steps.
Rust Tidbits:
- Crossbeam in 2019
- auto_enums
- condvar
- gRPC on TiKV
- rust-on-{ios,android}
- Oauth2 reverse proxy: ooproxy
- Embed wasm in your rust application
- A generic actor model: riker
- binary heap plus
- Faster floating point printing
- Different floating point represenation
- Julia + Rust = <3

The Weekly Weird - 2019-01-25

Skorgu

2019-01-25 14:00

I was surprised to learn that about half the flights in Rwanda are drones delivering blood.
This newsletter contains at least fifteen (30) links. (via Matt Levine)
Don't use market orders. Just don't. (via Matt Levine...again)
Is Counterfit Agile getting you down? Use this Official DoD Agile Detector to keep your software development pure! (via MeFi)
You want a flying car? HERE'S YOUR @#$% FLYING CAR!
I don't understand any of the words in this article except donut.
from the things-younger-than-sharks department: Saturn's Rings.
That's not a ~~knife~~ collider, this is a collider
Finally, a Rust implementation of QUIC.
Finally, a Rust implementation of QUIC. Wait, what?

The Weekly Weird - 2019-01-18

Skorgu

2019-01-18 14:00

Do you write shell scripts? Do you wish you had an opinionated linter to validate that you were only on the expected amount of drugs? Shellcheck to the rescue.
I don't really know what to make of this concept: walking car thing?
From the life-in-bad-scifi department: bounty hunters tracking your phone.
#include <tired_old_hunter2_joke.h>
This is definitely the most useful thing about the Holland Tunnel: A Quantum(tm) doodad cable alongside the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
I'm late but we are now closer to y2k38 than to y2k. Fortunately, Linux at least is on it, even if some other widely used systems struggle with epochs. I'm sure it'll all be fine.
Sometimes you just want a read-only, heavily-cached, cryptographically-hashed distributed file system.
I feel that you are doing robbery wrong when you give the money back (not legal advice).
How loud does the payload get on a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg? Just check the user manual.
ScyllaDB ("Cassandra in C++"), releases 3.0.
Varlink is kind of cool, an IDL for local programs to communciate over FDs.

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.