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Links for 2021-09-29

  • Partitioning GitHub’s relational databases to handle scale

    wow this is complex. Vitess playing a key part

    (tags: github mysql architecture database)

  • VR-based work setup

    “VR Productivity in (or above) a WFA world” —

    This week, I’ll spend 40–50 hours in Virtual Reality (Immersed), like I did last week and every (work) week for the last 2½ years. […] Yes, really: 8–10 hours a day strapped in.
    Basically, it’s using an Oculus Quest 2 to render multiple desktop displays from a laptop into a huge, full-visible-range virtual world:
    The resolution of these very large displays is surprisingly average—1080p (Reference, Communication) and 4k (Main). This makes the dot pitch unimpressive by the numbers, though still more than twenty-five times that of a roadside billboard display. Higher resolutions are available, but this is my calculated trade-off between pixel parity (more on that below), computer performance, and latency. Applications are tuned for readability and crispness, emphasizing information density over anti-aliasing or smoothness.
    The article sounds fairly solid, with good tips on how to make a VR headset suitable for constant daily use.

    (tags: oculus vr future work headsets display screens)

  • LEB128

    ‘a variable-length code compression used to store arbitrarily large integers in a small number of bytes.’

    (tags: encoding compression integers storage codes leb128)

  • Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election

    This is a staggering stat: “19 of Facebook’s top 20 pages for American Christians in 2019 were run by troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia, internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal […] funded by the Russian Internet Research Agency.” (via Charlie Stross)

    (tags: facebook politics russia disinfo kosovo macedonia us-politics manipulation)