The Weekly Weird - 2017-10-27

Ok, I'm down to 0 unread stories in my news reader so this week's Weird is a freaking novel. Sorry not sorry.

• I'm reliably informed that users of the wrong editor might find shell file mode useful. Freaks.
• Phrases I really, truly did not expect to read: Windows kernel-mode ZFS driver. HN comments.
• This is the future, get used to it: let's支付宝.
• Thanks to FOIA, the source code that NYC uses to forensically analyze DNA is now public. Reviews are ... not great.
• You never really think of it this way but a physical key is just an integer. Given that, is it really that surprising that a few lines of code let you compile an arbitrary key into plastic. Or a rocket engine in Inconel.
• Ok, superhuman AI is far off (though it's hard to tell how far), human AI is probably close to as far. But what about Bee-level AI?
• Bezos' rocket engine fired! ULA (which will use the BE-4) and troubled space hotel company Bigelow announce an inflatable moon-orbiting space station. Not to be confused with the other moon-orbiting space station.
• You know how much I love silly loopholes so: QSB stocks let you wait 5 years and not pay taxes on $10M. Another explanation.
• Going supersonic was boring for a while there (if only they had built the Concorde model 'B') but we're back to it being basically impossible for civilians (though people are trying, including some big names). I bet breaking mach 1 in a DC-8 was not boring.
• I can't improve on this title: The Renaissance Precursor to Rap Battles.
• The new trend of focusing on ease of use and programmer ergonomics as first-order principles is the best thing about this horrible timeline. Seeing a new crytpo lib marketed not as FIPS-compliant or blazing fast but misuse-resistant is excellent. Bonus positive commentary (though not quite an endorsement as-is) by tpacek in the HN thread.
• "To stop a war, two unlikely heroes must team up to do the impossible: steal a river.".
• You probably know all about the blockchain but have you written one? Here's a series of posts working through doing just that in Rust.
• Rust: typesafe actors with macros (video). The best? worst? named Mozilla project: HolyJit. The Case for Writing a Kernel in Rust.
• Rust not doing it for you? Did you know you can compile your QBasic to a native executable? Because of course you can.
• Ever wonder what those fancy HFT shops do to make things so fast? Let Optiver tell you what to do "when a Microsecond Is an Eternity" (pdf). Hoepfully they got better at naming things.
• How do you measure rain? Let it fall and measure the water, right? Pfft. Why not use hundreds of billions of dollars worth of telecommunications infrastructure instead?
• A nice survey of how you can do IO in Linux and which one ScyllaDB (Cassandra in C++) chose.
• Apparently Baidu is running CockroachDB in production.
• You should watch this ~1h keynote on things the security industry needs to stop doing, even if you're not in the security industry: Chris Eng, Veracode - Counterproductive Security Behaviors That Must End.
• I've said before that the LIGO didn't just discover a black hole merger as much as it opened up an entire new spectra to do astronomy in. The NS-NS merger is proof of that (and maybe disproves some dark matter theories to boot). Almost as fascinating is how much modern communication technology lets us observe the behind-the-scenes interactions of the scientists on the ground from slack to sms to email. (Via this twitter thread)