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Year: 2022

Links for 2022-12-28

Published December 28, 2022

  • Bird.makeup

    A gateway bot from Twitter to Mastodon --

    One of the things I would miss here on Mastodon was all of the alerts from my local infrastructure and government twitter accounts. These will likely take a very long time to make the migration. With https://bird.makeup, you can create bot accounts that put those tweets in your Mastodon timeline.

    (tags: twitter mastodon gateways bots tweets)

Links for 2022-12-26

Published December 26, 2022

Links for 2022-12-20

Published December 20, 2022

Links for 2022-12-16

Published December 16, 2022

  • Digital scrapie

    "a hypothetical scenario in which a machine learning system trained on its own output becomes unable to function properly or make meaningful predictions"

    (tags: scrapie brains training ai ml feedback)

  • Clip retrieval

    Via ted byfield: "If you've wondered what AI-bots are ~thinking while they generate an image, here you go." Reverse-engineering the training samples which Stable Diffusion et al are combining for a given text query, in the laion5B or laion_400m datasets

    (tags: ai clips laion ml stable-diffusion text2image)

Links for 2022-12-15

Published December 15, 2022

Links for 2022-12-14

Published December 14, 2022

Links for 2022-12-13

Published December 13, 2022

  • The human cost of neurotechnology failure

    'This is your brain on capitalism'. A shitty cyberpunk future:

    What about when the [bricked] device is inside your body? Earlier this year, many people with Argus optical implants – which allow blind people to see – lost their vision when the manufacturer, Second Sight, went bust. Nano Precision Medical, the company's new owners, aren't interested in maintaining the implants, so that's the end of the road for everyone with one of Argus's "bionic" eyes. The $150,000 per eye that those people paid is gone, and they have failing hardware permanently wired into their nervous systems. Having a bricked eye implant doesn't just rob you of your sight – many Argus users experience crippling vertigo and other side effects of nonfunctional implants. The company has promised to "do our best to provide virtual support" to people whose Argus implants fail – but no more parts and no more patches."

    (tags: health implants cyberpunk future grim neurotechnology brain right-to-repair open-hardware open-source medicine capitalism ip ethics)

Links for 2022-12-09

Published December 9, 2022

Links for 2022-12-08

Published December 8, 2022

  • "A Brief History of InvSqrt"

    A 40-page Bachelor's degree thesis on the legendary bit-hacking Quake III Q_rsqrt() implementation (via redacted):

    This function, commonly called InvSqrt, approximates the inverse (or reciprocal) square root of a 32-bit floating point number very quickly. It can be found in many open source libraries and games on the Internet, such as the C source code for Quake III: Arena. This raises many questions. Why is it needed? Who wrote it? How does it work? How well does it work? Is it still useful with modern processors today? And finally, can it be improved to work better? This thesis will examine those questions and give a unique interpretation and optimization of the function itself.

    (tags: via:redacted sqrt maths quake-3 0x5f3759df)

  • sissbruecker/linkding: Self-hosted bookmark service

    an OSS clone of a Pinboard-style bookmark service. 'designed be to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up using Docker.' Bookmarking for emergency use only; if anything happens to Pinboard.in, I'll have this to fall back to. (via dahamsta)

    (tags: via:dahamsta bookmarks python oss links web)

Links for 2022-12-06

Published December 6, 2022

  • Home Assistant with a Solis Hybrid inverter

    good write-up on the process to get data out of the SolisCloud backend and into Home Assistant

    (tags: home-assistant home solar-power solis soliscloud)

  • @jm_links@botsin.space

    My Pinboard links feed is now on the Fediverse at botsin.space; I'll blog up the process shortly

    (tags: bots blog pinboard links mastodon)

  • WiFi calling blocked on Pixel phones

    what the hell? "Unless you're on an operator that sells Pixel phones directly, who basically comprise the "Google list" for these features, [wifi calling] won't work for any [directly-purchased] Pixel phone [in Ireland]. Same all over Europe. VoLTE won't work either when on a mobile network (data speeds will drop to 3G when on a voice call) [...] Your only option would be to root the phone to get it to work. There seem to have been some recent changes on this but seems like Eir still no go." I've been wondering why VoLTE and VoWifi have been unavailable on my phone for several months now, assuming it was an operator issue. Finally I was sent this link by a poster on another forum -- it's not an issue with the operator, it's a builtin limitation on the phone. All I can presume is that Google have done exclusivity deals with some providers in some regions, but is keeping this secret for some reason. If I'd known this in advance, I'd probably have bought a different phone; absolutely terrible decision. Reportedly it can be reversed via rooting the phone, at least.

    (tags: android google pixel wifi-calling vowifi volte lte mobile)

Links for 2022-12-05

Published December 5, 2022

  • AI-generated answers temporarily banned on Stack Overflow

    Ranked user-generated content sites like Stack Overflow are really going to have a problem with the incoming plausible-sounding bullshit flood:

    “The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce,” wrote the mods (emphasis theirs). “As such, we need the volume of these posts to reduce [...] So, for now, the use of ChatGPT to create posts here on Stack Overflow is not permitted. If a user is believed to have used ChatGPT after this temporary policy is posted, sanctions will be imposed to prevent users from continuing to post such content, even if the posts would otherwise be acceptable.”

    (tags: chatgpt ai autocomplete stack-overflow coding spam ugc)

  • Cory Doctorow Wants You to Know What Computers Can and Can’t Do

    "Do you think that the concern over A.I.’s expanding capabilities is misplaced? I do. I think that the problems of A.I. are not its ability to do things well but its ability to do things badly, and our reliance on it nevertheless. So the problem isn’t that A.I. is going to displace all of our truck drivers. The fact that we’re using A.I. decision-making at scale to do things like lending, and deciding who is picked for child-protective services, and deciding where police patrols go, and deciding whether or not to use a drone strike to kill someone, because we think they’re a probable terrorist based on a machine-learning algorithm—the fact that A.I. algorithms don’t work doesn’t make that not dangerous. In fact, it arguably makes it more dangerous. The reason we stick A.I. in there is not just to lower our wage bill so that, rather than having child-protective-services workers go out and check on all the children who are thought to be in danger, you lay them all off and replace them with an algorithm."

    (tags: ai ml cory-doctorow tech future capitalism)

Links for 2022-11-29

Published November 29, 2022

  • Sumana Harihareswara: "Pinboard brittleness"

    Worrying thread -- I didn't realise Pinboard was at risk of atrophy. This blog is built on it!

    (tags: pinboard software atrophy future via:mefi via:danny)

  • Pushwoosh and the Pincer Trojan

    yikes. "U.S. Govt. Apps Bundled Russian Code With Ties to Mobile Malware Developer":

    A recent scoop by Reuters revealed that mobile apps for the U.S. Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were integrating software that sends visitor data to a Russian company called Pushwoosh, which claims to be based in the United States. But that story omitted an important historical detail about Pushwoosh: In 2013, one of its developers admitted to authoring the Pincer Trojan, malware designed to surreptitiously intercept and forward text messages from Android mobile devices.

    (tags: trojans pushwoosh push-notifications apps mobile)

Links for 2022-11-22

Published November 22, 2022

Links for 2022-11-21

Published November 21, 2022

Links for 2022-11-18

Published November 18, 2022

  • Your EU consumer rights

    A little-known detail of the EU Consumer Rights Directive: you have a right to repair or replacement of faulty goods if they fail within 2 years of purchase. The nice thing about this is that so much hardware has built-in obsolescence after only 1 year... you may have to invoke the magic words "EU Consumer Rights Directive" to get this to happen, though. Worth noting that according to one account "the rights only apply in the country of purchase. I've had Apple refuse to replace a Magic trackpad that died after 14 months and they would not repair an Airpods case that died after 18 months. I had purchased both in the UK."

    (tags: built-in-obsolescence hardware rights consumer-rights eu right-to-repair repair faulty-goods)

  • Irish consumer law gives 6 years of repair/replacement rights

    Even better than the EU consumer rights directive!

    Under Irish consumer law, consumers are entitled to a free of charge repair or (depending on the circumstances) may be entitled to a replacement, discount or refund by the seller, of defective goods or goods which do not conform with the contract of sale. These rights expire six years from delivery of the goods.

    (tags: consumer-rights law ireland consumer rights repair)

Links for 2022-11-16

Published November 16, 2022

  • Dan Luu on the "cold boot" scenario

    Thought-provoking Mastodon thread about full-scale disaster recovery for large-scale modern software platforms. Here's a gem:

    When I was in Azure, I asked around about what the plan was if "the really big one" hit since deep expertise was nearly totally concentrated in Redmond and, at the time, Azure was guaranteed to have a global outage if a major earthquake incapacitated Redmond. Of course the plan was that there was no real plan and people expected that Azure would have a very extended global outage and an org that was on its way to becoming a $1T business unit would have its value basically wiped out.

    (tags: cold-boot software tech it ops disaster-recovery azure dan-luu)

  • The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next - The Verge

    Generative AI has had a very good year. Corporations like Microsoft, Adobe, and GitHub are integrating the tech into their products; startups are raising hundreds of millions to compete with them; and the software even has cultural clout, with text-to-image AI models spawning countless memes. But listen in on any industry discussion about generative AI, and you’ll hear, in the background, a question whispered by advocates and critics alike in increasingly concerned tones: is any of this actually legal?

    (tags: ai copyright ml law ip)

Links for 2022-11-15

Published November 15, 2022

  • Cloud Jewels

    Etsy: "Estimating kWh in the Cloud":

    We thought about how we might be able to estimate our energy consumption in Google Cloud using the data we do have: Google provides us with usage data that shows us how many virtual CPU (Central Processing Unit) seconds we used, how much memory we requested for our servers, how many terabytes of data we have stored for how long, and how much networking traffic we were responsible for. Our supposition was that if we could come up with general estimates for how many watt-hours (Wh) compute, storage and networking draw in a cloud environment, particularly based on public information, then we could apply those coefficients to our usage data to get at least a rough estimate of our cloud computing energy impact. We are calling this set of estimated conversion factors Cloud Jewels. Other cloud computing consumers can look at this and see how it might work with their own energy usage across providers and usage data. The goal is to help cloud users across the industry to help refine our estimates, and ultimately help us encourage cloud providers to empower their customers with more accurate cloud energy consumption data.
    This is a good interim step, but it's disappointing how inaccurate the CO2 data exposed by cloud providers is. IMO this needs to be fixed

    (tags: climate co2 google cloud aws etsy estimation cloud-jewels sustainability)

Links for 2022-11-14

Published November 14, 2022

  • The Fediverse From Home

    Interesting -- I didn't realise it was possible to connect to the Mastodon fediverse with such a low-impact service --

    A single-user instance with about 100 followers/followees uses somewhere between 50 to 100MB of RAM. CPU usage is only intensive when handling media or processing lots of federation requests.

    (tags: fediverse mastodon self-hosting hosting ops gotosocial)

  • ‘Immunity debt’

    A new form of COVID-19 misinformation has cropped up in Canada:

    The term “immunity debt” is circulating widely online as an explanation for a significant surge in respiratory illness in Canada [... This] hypothesis suggests people’s immune systems are weaker now, due to a lack of exposure to viruses while observing COVID-19 public health measures over the last two-and-a-half years. But this notion [...] is simply not true, says Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist and assistant professor in the faculty of information at the University of Toronto. “That is, in my estimation, and any immunologist will tell you this, nonsense,” he said. Dr. Samira Jeimy, an allergist and clinical immunologist at St Joseph’s Health Care London, agrees, saying the idea that one’s immune system can be weakened due to lack of exposure to illness “shows a basic lack of understanding of how the immune system works.” “There’s almost like an old wives tale, that you need to get sick to develop a healthy immune system. That’s actually not true.”

    (tags: immunity immunology covid-19 rsv viruses health medicine immunity-debt misinformation)

Links for 2022-10-25

Published October 25, 2022

Links for 2022-10-21

Published October 21, 2022

  • RIAA Flags ‘Artificial Intelligence’ Music Mixer as Emerging Copyright Threat

    They would, naturally....

    “There are online services that, purportedly using artificial intelligence (AI), extract, or rather, copy, the vocals, instrumentals, or some portion of the instrumentals from a sound recording, and/or generate, master or remix a recording to be very similar to or almost as good as reference tracks by selected, well known sound recording artists [...] To the extent these services, or their partners, are training their AI models using our members’ music, that use is unauthorized and infringes our members’ rights by making unauthorized copies of our members works. In any event, the files these services disseminate are either unauthorized copies or unauthorized derivative works of our members’ music"

    (tags: ai music riaa ml copyright)

Links for 2022-10-20

Published October 20, 2022

  • Liz Fong-Jones talks about Google's history of loadbalancers

    "Okay, the time has come, it's been an entire decade, let's talk about loadbalancing techniques and how they evolved at Google in response to various practical failure modes, from 2008 to 2012." This thread is great. A solid history of Google's use of various load balancing techniques, ranging from N+1 service duplication with implicit failover rules, modern-service-mesh-style proxying, client-side builtin load balancing libs, followed by local sidecars which downloaded routing assignment configs periodically and operated mainly offline.

    (tags: load-balancing history google ops liz-fong-jones service-meshes sidecars proxies)

Links for 2022-10-19

Published October 19, 2022

  • Latest Long Covid estimates

    tl;dr: 6.2% average rate, more women than men, 15% continued to suffer after 12 months.

    A total of 1.2 million individuals who had symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection were included (mean age, 4-66 years; males, 26%-88%). In the modeled estimates, 6.2% (95% uncertainty interval [UI], 2.4%-13.3%) of individuals who had symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection experienced at least 1 of the 3 Long COVID symptom clusters in 2020 and 2021, including 3.2% (95% UI, 0.6%-10.0%) for persistent fatigue with bodily pain or mood swings, 3.7% (95% UI, 0.9%-9.6%) for ongoing respiratory problems, and 2.2% (95% UI, 0.3%-7.6%) for cognitive problems after adjusting for health status before COVID-19, comprising an estimated 51.0% (95% UI, 16.9%-92.4%), 60.4% (95% UI, 18.9%-89.1%), and 35.4% (95% UI, 9.4%-75.1%), respectively, of Long COVID cases. The Long COVID symptom clusters were more common in women aged 20 years or older (10.6% [95% UI, 4.3%-22.2%]) 3 months after symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection than in men aged 20 years or older (5.4% [95% UI, 2.2%-11.7%]). Both sexes younger than 20 years of age were estimated to be affected in 2.8% (95% UI, 0.9%-7.0%) of symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. The estimated mean Long COVID symptom cluster duration was 9.0 months (95% UI, 7.0-12.0 months) among hospitalized individuals and 4.0 months (95% UI, 3.6-4.6 months) among nonhospitalized individuals. Among individuals with Long COVID symptoms 3 months after symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, an estimated 15.1% (95% UI, 10.3%-21.1%) continued to experience symptoms at 12 months.

    (tags: long-covid statistics disease covid-19 papers jama disability)

Links for 2022-10-14

Published October 14, 2022

  • The hygiene hypothesis doesn't apply to viruses

    Fascinating interview with Dr. Marsha Wills-Karp, an expert on the environmental determinants of immune diseases:

    Almost no virus is protective against allergic disease or other immune diseases. In fact, infections with viruses mostly either contribute to the development of those diseases or worsen them. The opposite is true of bacteria.
    Pets are good, though:
    We've also noticed that people who live on farms have fewer of these diseases because they're exposed to -- for lack of a better term -- the fecal material of animals. And what we have found is that it's due to these commensal bacteria. That is one of the components that helps us keep a healthy immune system. Most of us will probably not adopt farm life. But we can have a pet, we can have a dog.

    (tags: pets viruses bacteria hygiene hygiene-hypothesis health immune-system allergies farms)

Links for 2022-10-07

Published October 7, 2022

  • Estimating SARS-CoV-2 transmission in educational settings: A retrospective cohort study

    The staggeringly obvious, confirmed: 'We analyzed transmission patterns associated with 976 SARS-CoV-2 exposure events, involving 460 positive individuals, as identified in early 2021 through routine surveillance and an extensive screening conducted on students, school personnel, and their household members in a small Italian municipality. [...] From the analysis of 152 clear infection episodes and 584 exposure events identified by epidemiological investigations, we estimated that approximately 50%, 21%, and 29% of SARS-CoV-2 transmission was associated with household, school, and community contacts, respectively. [...] A higher proportion of infected individuals causing onward transmission was found among students (46.2% vs. 25%, on average), who also caused a markedly higher number of secondary cases' Ah, remember 2020, 2021, and indeed 2022, when the Irish department of education and HSE were vehement that COVID-19 didn't spread in schools....

    (tags: covid-19 schools education transmission pandemics disease papers)

Links for 2022-10-05

Published October 5, 2022

  • America Is Choosing to Stay Vulnerable to Pandemics - The Atlantic

    So many good lines in this article from Ed Yong -- "calling the pandemic “over” is like calling a fight “finished” because your opponent is punching you in the ribs instead of the face".

    "The allure of biomedical panaceas is still strong. For more than a year, the Biden administration and its advisers have reassured Americans that, with vaccines and antivirals, “we have the tools” to control the pandemic. These tools are indeed effective, but their efficacy is limited if people can’t access them or don’t want to, and if the government doesn’t create policies that shift that dynamic." "Technological solutions also tend to rise into society’s penthouses, while epidemics seep into its cracks. Cures, vaccines, and diagnostics first go to people with power, wealth, and education, who then move on, leaving the communities most affected by diseases to continue shouldering their burden." "America has little chance of effectively countering the inevitable pandemics of the future; it cannot even focus on the one that’s ongoing."

    (tags: coronavirus covid-19 pandemics future america ed-yong healthcare)

  • foreigners of dublin, where in dublin can you get the best and most authentic food from your home country?

    Some top notch Reddit suggestions here

    (tags: dublin ireland food restaurants eating nightlife)

Links for 2022-09-30

Published September 30, 2022

Links for 2022-09-26

Published September 26, 2022

  • Google Photos corrupting images

    Is Google experimenting with a new (and broken) compression algorithm?

    Over the weekend, people began noticing that their years-old photos (over five years, approximately) have lines and deep cracks running through them, as well as other blurry or distorted areas. White dots are also a common occurrence. Some images are more damaged than others with seemingly no pattern to what’s impacted or the severity. It’s weirdly somewhat analogous to physical water damage, with reports across Google Photos for Android, iOS, and the web. According to those affected, the corruption persists when downloading the image. This apparently applies to both individual downloads and when using Google Takeout. The original copies of pictures do not appear to be impacted, but the edited ones are what appear in the Google Photos apps. 

    (tags: google google-photos images compression fail artifacts)

Links for 2022-09-23

Published September 23, 2022

  • ‘I'm Dropping My COVID Hubris,’ Vows a Top Immunologist

    Commentary on the study led by Ziyad Al-Aly at the Washington University School of Medicine from an Aussie immunologist --

    the researchers found that the risk of heart, brain, kidney and blood complications all increased with each subsequent infection. As Goodnow has noted about the findings, “The risk of cardiovascular disease, for example, increased after one infection, but doubled in people who had two infections, and tripled in those who had been infected thrice.” Similar risks were found for heart disease, blood clotting problems, brain decline and diabetes. Nor did vaccines seem to help in preventing these problems, which most frequently occur up to six months after infection. “Every time you dip your bucket in that COVID well, you’ve got the same chance of a whole lot of bad things happening,” explained Goodnow, who considers the veterans study “really important real-world data.” His takeaway: “COVID-19 is not just a cold, and having it before doesn’t ‘get it over with.’”

    (tags: covid-19 long-covid health illness)

  • Long covid—an update for primary care

    The British Medical Journal's set of guidelines for GPs and primary care providers on how to help long covid sufferers -- gives a good idea of the current state of affairs for this tricky syndrome.

    What you need to know: Long covid (prolonged symptoms following covid-19 infection) is common; The mainstay of management is supportive, holistic care, symptom control, and detection of treatable complications; Many patients can be supported effectively in primary care by a GP with a special interest.

    (tags: bmj long-covid covid-19 care)

Links for 2022-09-22

Published September 22, 2022

  • Long-term neurologic outcomes of COVID-19

    Our results show that in the postacute phase of COVID-19, there was increased risk of an array of incident neurologic sequelae including ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke, cognition and memory disorders, peripheral nervous system disorders, episodic disorders (for example, migraine and seizures), extrapyramidal and movement disorders, mental health disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, sensory disorders, Guillain–Barré syndrome, and encephalitis or encephalopathy. We estimated that the hazard ratio of any neurologic sequela was 1.42 (95% confidence intervals 1.38, 1.47) and burden 70.69 (95% confidence intervals 63.54, 78.01) per 1,000 persons at 12 months. The risks and burdens were elevated even in people who did not require hospitalization during acute COVID-19.

    (tags: covid-19 veterans papers via:eric-topol neurology health medicine disease long-covid)

Links for 2022-09-21

Published September 21, 2022

  • Cache stampede

    Nice terminology -- similar to the "thundering herd" problem seen in distributed systems. "A type of cascading failure that can occur when massively parallel computing systems with caching mechanisms come under very high load. This behaviour is sometimes also called dog-piling"

    (tags: caching distcomp caches cache-stampedes thundering-herd dogpiling failures cascading-failures load)

  • To boost or not to boost - by Eric Topol

    Where we are with COVID boosters:

    There’s ample evidence that a 3rd shot or 4th shot (1st or 2nd booster) will help provide important protection, and that is especially vital for people age 50+, with ample support for the recommendation for all age 12 and older to get boosters. The right question is about the 5th booster, for which there are no clinical data yet, but will likely extend a high level of protection against severe Covid. But 4 or 6 months isn’t going to cut it as a public health protection policy, as there will be further attrition of interest and uptake for boosters as we go forward. Fortunately, we’re declining in cases and will likely experience a fairly quiescent phase (further descent, no surge) with respect to infections and hospitalizations for the next couple of months until BA.2.75.2 gets legs (or an alternative BA.2 derivative). Now is the time to stop chasing SARS-CoV-2 and start mounting an aggressive get- ahead strategy. There’s the intertwined triad to contend with: more immune escape, more evidence of imprinting, and the inevitability of new variants that are already laying a foundation for spread. Enough of the booster after booster, shot-centric approach; it has been formidable, lifesaving, sickness-avoiding, and essential as a bootstrap, temporizing measure. Now we need to press on with innovation for more durable, palatable, and effective solutions. They are in our reach.

    (tags: covid-19 boosters vaccination omicron immunity)

Links for 2022-09-14

Published September 14, 2022

Links for 2022-09-11

Published September 11, 2022

  • Online Art Communities Begin Banning AI-Generated Images

    'As AI-generated art platforms like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion explode in popularity, online communities devoted to sharing human-generated art are forced to make a decision: should AI art be allowed?' This makes sense, IMO -- or at least sideline them to their own parts of the forum... (via Waxy)

    (tags: ai art via:waxy stable-diffusion dall-e midjourney)

  • Loab

    "I discovered this woman, who I call Loab, in April. The AI reproduced her more easily than most celebrities. Her presence is persistent, and she haunts every image she touches. CW: Take a seat. This is a true horror story, and veers sharply macabre." Top-notch creepypasta, and/or real-world creepiness; either a ghost in the codec as Hari Kunzru would put it, or -- let's face it -- AI's haunted

    (tags: ai horror latent-space cryptids hauntings ghosts creepypasta)

Links for 2022-09-08

Published September 8, 2022

  • Facebook Engineers Don’t Know Where They Keep Your Data

    LOL, this is madness. Move fast and forget everything:

    In the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine. [...] The fundamental problem, according to the engineers in the hearing, is that [...] the company never bothered to cultivate institutional knowledge of how each of these component systems works, what they do, or who’s using them.

    (tags: data engineering facebook meta privacy fail culture work)

Links for 2022-09-07

Published September 7, 2022

  • Serverless Messaging: Latency Compared

    Various AWS queueing/messaging services' latencies compared in eu-west-1: 'When latency matters, there are a few obvious winners. SQS Standard can deliver a message to a consumer in as fast as 14 ms and is seldomly slower than 100 ms, assuming low batch sizes. Kinesis with Enhanced Fan-Out is only slightly slower and allows for multiple consumers and a long history of events. SNS falls in the low latency category too, although the SNS FIFO option includes more moving parts and thus a larger latency spread, up to half a second. Step Functions and DynamoDB Streams take up the middle section, with P50 latencies up to about 200 ms. The highest latency is introduced by EventBridge and Kinesis Data Streams without Enhanced Fan-Out. These services add at least a few hundred milliseconds to your integrations, but can easily run up to a second or more.'

    (tags: aws latency messaging queues architecture ops sqs sns kinesis)

  • Energy Monitoring: 2022 Edition

    home energy monitoring using HomeAssistant, MQTT, and a set of power-monitoring smart plugs preflashed with the open Tasmota firmware. This is all very practical, and the power-socket-based approach means no rewiring is necessary. I think this is the best UI I've seen so far for a home energy optimization system

    (tags: home energy monitoring tasmota plugs electricity homeassistant)

  • Lithium-Ion Batteries: Charging Guide for Maximum Endurance

    tl;dr: "Lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries should be kept at charge levels between 30% and 70% at all times. Full charge/discharge cycles should be avoided if possible. Exceptions to this can be made occasionally to readjust the charge controller and battery capacity meter. Modern batteries do not have to be conditioned, and are at peak capacity out of the box. If you need to store batteries for long time periods you should charge them to roughly half their capacity and put them in the fridge. Very high and very low temperatures should be avoided, particularly while charging. When choosing a charger quality is key, and high quality chargers are by and large interchangeable."

    (tags: batteries lifetime lithium-ion charging chargers)

Links for 2022-09-06

Published September 6, 2022

  • What is Fog Data Science?

    EFF post on a data broker being misused by US police for warrantless "dragnet" surveillance:

    Fog claims that their product is made of [location] data willingly given by people. But people did not hand their geolocation data over to Fog or the police, willingly or even knowingly. Rather, they gave it over, for example, to a weather app so that they could see if it will rain in their town today. When they downloaded the app, they may have clicked a box purporting to grant various so-called “consents,” but no reasonable person expects this will result in the app tracking all their movements, the app developer selling this sensitive information to a data broker, and police ultimately buying it.
    and this is why the GDPR is so valuable.

    (tags: fog police surveillance gdpr privacy data-privacy location)

  • How a tool to map computer viruses came to power biology research

    This is some fantastic symmetry! Years ago, I took the BLAST bioinformatics algorithm, normally used to spot correlations between DNA/RNA sequences, and applied it to correlate and detect spam. And now here's UMAP, an algorithm used to correlate and detect malware and viruses, going in the opposite direction!

    When mathematicians Leland McInnes and John Healy walked into their work’s annual “Big Dig” — a sort of classified hackathon for Canada’s version of the National Security Agency — in 2017, they were not thinking about biology at all. They wanted to find a way to quickly spot the differences between computer viruses. They ended up creating a tool to simplify datasets and visualize the data points in them: an algorithm they named Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection, or UMAP. They published a paper on it in 2018. To their great surprise, in fewer than five years, it has become one of the most ubiquitous tools in modern biology research. UMAP has now been used to study everything from forecasting rain in the Alps to identifying the many-hued pigments in a Gauguin artwork to modeling how Covid-19 tweets are disseminated. And, of course, scientists have applied UMAP to studying the actual virus itself. The technique is now the method of choice for most computational biologists who want to see what, exactly, is going on in a dataset.

    (tags: dna rna sequences matching correlation spam antispam malware umap blast algorithms)

Links for 2022-09-05

Published September 5, 2022

  • don't use JVM Flight Recorder profiling

    Solid tip from Nitsan Wakart on Twitter:

    If you are profiling for a CPU bottleneck [in java], DO NOT RELY ON JVM FLIGHT RECORDER METHOD PROFILING. Not even a little bit. Use `async-profiler` for profiling(`-e cpu,lock,alloc`), with `--jfrsync default/profile` for extra JVM/JDK events.

    (tags: profiling java performance optimization jvm async-profiler via:twitter)

  • The Ice-Cold Alchemy of Beer Slushies - Imbibe Magazine

    I had no idea that the beer slushy had been so perfected in Japan:

    In March 2012, Kirin pushed beer even closer to Arctic climes with the Ichiban Shibori Frozen Draft: a draft beer topped with a multi-inch-thick angelic swirl of marshmallow fluff-like frozen foam. At that time, ice-cold beer was booming in Japan, says Tsuneo Mitsudomi, president of Kirin Brewery of America, and Kirin sought its own take on the trend that also served a practical purpose. Inspired by a frozen smoothie machine found in Italy, Kirin lab techs developed technology capable of whipping up beer—yes, 100 percent beer—into a froyo-like state. “We focused on the function which can keep beer cold, and magical looks,” Mitsudomi says. Kirin spent roughly five years perfecting the texture and temperature (23 degrees Fahrenheit) of its frozen foam. An unorthodox lid, the layer of frozen foam not only prevents carbonation from quickly escaping, but also insulates the glass for 30 minutes, more time than it takes to polish off the average pint.
    Also "jelly beer", excellent tech from Thailand:
    At Uncle Boons, the beer slushy takes the form of bia wun, or jelly beer. Unlike other beer slushies, jelly beer is shaped and served in the bottle. A motorized barrel sourced from Thailand is filled with ice, water and salt, the bottles placed within. The whole apparatus gently rocks back and forth with the enthusiasm of a small dingy to agitate its contents. The salted water drops to 27 degrees, while the pressure inside the bottle keeps the beer from freezing over and exploding. Once the beer is removed from the barrel, the bottle is given a shake, then a sharp tap, and ice crystals begin to form within. As the cap is removed, the beer starts to froth and foam, freezing over in a molecular equation most often described as magic.

    (tags: beer bia-wun jelly-beer slushies drinks cocktails beer-slushies thailand japan kirin beer-ice-cream)

Links for 2022-09-01

Published September 1, 2022

  • How Google Cloud and AWS Approach Customer Carbon Emissions - Last Week in AWS Blog

    Google wins:

    On a larger scale, Google Cloud is already at 100% carbon neutrality, apparently via offsets and a few other accounting approaches, with a goal to move to 100% renewable energy for all cloud regions by 2030. Meanwhile, AWS’s carbon footprint tool is an embarrassment to AWS and its stated goal of reaching 100% renewable energy usage by 2025. The bottom line: One of these carbon neutrality approaches is indicative of a thoughtful approach to partnering with customers to lead to a better climate story around cloud usage. The other appears to have been phoned in by clowns the night before it was due.

    (tags: aws google carbon climate-change co2 hosting)

  • Calling Bullshit

    The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit. We're sick of it. It's time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people. So, the aim of this course is to help students navigate the bullshit-rich modern environment by identifying bullshit, seeing through it, and combating it with effective analysis and argument.

    (tags: learning science teaching tutorial courses bullshit scepticism facts)

  • Pyroscope

    "Open Source Continuous Profiling Platform" -- continuous profiling, as has been used in companies like Twitter for a while. This looks pretty practical though, due to some key features:

    Lightning Fast - Doesn't matter if you're looking at 10 seconds or 10 months of profiling data — the queries are always fast thanks to our custom designed storage engine. Minimum Overhead - Pyroscope doesn't affect performance of your applications, thanks to the use of sampling profiling technology. Cost-Effective - Pyroscope uses a custom data storage engine and stores profiling data very efficiently, making it economically viable to store profiling data from all of your apps for years.

    (tags: monitoring observability profiling pyroscope continuous-profiling performance)

Links for 2022-08-31

Published August 31, 2022

Links for 2022-08-30

Published August 30, 2022

  • Exploring 12 Million of the Images Used to Train Stable Diffusion’s Image Generator

    Interesting dive into the training set:

    Stable Diffusion’s initial training was on low-resolution 256×256 images from LAION-2B-EN, a set of 2.3 billion English-captioned images from LAION-5B‘s full collection of 5.85 million image-text pairs, as well as LAION-High-Resolution, another subset of LAION-5B with 170 million images greater than 1024×1024 resolution (downsampled to 512×512). Its last three checkpoints were on LAION-Aesthetics v2 5+, a 600 million image subset of LAION-2B-EN with a predicted aesthetics score of 5 or higher, with low-resolution and likely watermarked images filtered out. For our data explorer, we originally wanted to show the full dataset, but it’s a challenge to host a 600 million record database in an affordable, performant way. So we decided to use the smaller LAION-Aesthetics v2 6+, which includes 12 million image-text pairs with a predicted aesthetic score of 6 or higher, instead of the 600 million rated 5 or higher used in Stable Diffusion’s training.

    (tags: laion training-data stable-diffusion images ai ml via:waxy)

Links for 2022-08-29

Published August 29, 2022

  • AWS EC2 Carbon Footprint Dataset - Google Sheets

    '"This spreadsheet provides a way for AWS cloud users to estimate the carbon footprint of their EC2 based workloads. Two estimations are available: - Carbon emissions related to running the instance, including the datacenter PUE - Carbon emissions related to manufacturing the underlying hardware.' Courtesy of French online ad company Teads

    (tags: aws carbon emissions ec2 hosting)

  • “Our online lives can never truly be our own”: Marie Le Conte on the generation that broke the internet - New Statesman

    “There were 15 years on the internet that were unlike anything else, and that I don’t think you’ll be able to really get unless you were there,” Le Conte tells me. The world she outlines was one inhabited by loners and misfits, where awkward teenagers could go to find themselves, reach out to people across the world with shared interests, create their own communities, forge new identities – anonymously and without adult supervision. It was dangerous, yes – she admits that young people probably should never have been given that much freedom – but also liberating and, above all, fun. So much fun, in fact, that soon it wasn’t just the weird kids who wanted to be part of it. She compares what happened next to a group of children building a treehouse to play in. “And then all their parents joined in and were like, ‘Hello, we hear you have a treehouse. We live here as well now.’”

    (tags: marie-le-conte internet web history online)

Links for 2022-08-26

Published August 26, 2022

  • The Clean Hydrogen Ladder

    'my attempt to put use cases for clean hydrogen - whether it be green, blue, pink, turquoise or whatever - into some sort of merit order, because not all are equally likely to succeed. [...] Clean hydrogen will have to win its way into the economy, use case by use case. It could do so on its merits, or it could do so because of supportive policy (including carbon prices). But it will have to do so in competition with every other clean technology that could solve the same problem. And that is where the dreams of the hydrogen economy hit reality: in almost all use cases there is a good reason why hydrogen is not currently used - because other solutions are cheaper, simpler, safer or more convenient.' (via Chris Adams)

    (tags: hydrogen renewables power future h2 green-hydrogen)

Links for 2022-08-23

Published August 23, 2022

Links for 2022-08-15

Published August 15, 2022

  • Some Light on Long Covid

    Eric Topol on some recent research publications regarding Long Covid:

    I’m going to briefly review here the new reports on (1) prevalence; (2) mechanisms and biomarkers; and (3) potential treatments [...] Much new information for Long Covid was reported in a matter of days. It would be great to keep up this momentum, now that we are pushing onto 3 years of the pandemic. I have many colleagues who have been severely affected, and have seen multiple patients in my clinic in recent weeks who are debilitated. I wish I had something to offer them, but hopefully over time we’ll build on this recent spurt of knowledge. While we have no treatment or biomarker, the CDC relaxation of Covid guidelines is totally unhelpful— staying Covid cautious is the right move, and we desperately need better tools to block infections and transmission. There’s some hope that the first completed 4,000 participant nasal vaccine randomized trial could be the start of patching up the leak of vaccines against the Omicron subvariants (currently BA.5). Prof Iwasaki and I have called for an urgent Operation Nasal Vaccine initiative. There’s only one surefire way to prevent Long Covid: not to get Covid.

    (tags: long-covid covid-19 treatments health medicine research)

  • The Junkyard Datacenter

    I love this idea -- repurpose ancient phones as a DC for energy efficiency:

    It requires significant energy to manufacture and deploy computational devices. Traditional discussions of the energy-efficiency of compute measure operational energy, i.e. how many FLOPS in a 50MW datacenter. However, if we consider the true lifetime energy use of modern devices, the majority actually comes not from runtime use but from manufacture and deployment. In this paper, then, we suggest that perhaps the most climate-impactful action we can take is to extend the service lifetime of existing compute. We design two new metrics to measure how to balance continued service of older devices with the superlinear runtime improvements of newer machines. The first looks at carbon per raw compute, amortized across the operation and manufacture of devices. The second considers use of components beyond compute, such as batteries or radios in smartphone platforms. We use these metrics to redefine device service lifetime in terms of carbon efficiency. We then realize a real-world ``junkyard datacenter'' made up of Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 phones, which are nearly a decade past their official end-of-life dates. This new-old datacenter is able to nearly match and occasionally exceed modern cloud compute offerings.
    (via the Environment Variables podcast)

    (tags: climate datacenters hardware phones nexus emissions)

Links for 2022-08-14

Published August 14, 2022

Links for 2022-08-12

Published August 12, 2022

  • How to travel from Dublin to London by ferry and rail

    This is way more complicated than it should be, compared to the easy option of a quick flight :(

    (tags: dublin london travel rail ferry sailing)

  • Glutamate build-up is associated with mental weariness

    Thinking hard for several hours can leave us feeling mentally tired – and now we may know why. Prolonged concentration leads to the build-up of a compound called glutamate in regions at the front of the brain. This may provide an explanation as to why we avoid difficult tasks when mentally fatigued: the glutamate overload makes further mental work difficult. Too much glutamate is potentially harmful, says Antonius Wiehler at the Paris Brain Institute in France, who led the research. “The brain wants to avoid this, so it is trying to reduce activity.” Many of us have experienced mental weariness after a hard day of thinking, but until now, we didn’t know why. The brain doesn’t seem to run out of energy after working hard and even when we aren’t deliberately thinking about anything specific, some brain regions, called the “default mode network”, are as active as ever. To learn more, Wiehler and his team used a technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), which measures levels of various chemicals in living tissue harmlessly. They focused on a region towards the front and sides of the brain called the lateral prefrontal cortex [...] Levels of eight different brain chemicals were measured, including glutamate, which is the main signalling chemical between neurons. After completing the memory tasks for 6 hours, those doing the harder version had raised levels of glutamate in their lateral prefrontal cortex compared with the start of the experiment. In those doing the easier task, levels stayed about the same. Across all participants, there was no rise in the other seven brain chemicals that were measured. Among the participants doing the harder tasks, their glutamate level rise tallied with dilation of the pupils in their eyes, another broad measure of fatigue. Those doing the simpler task reported feeling tired, but had no glutamate rise or pupil dilation.

    (tags: glutamate neurochemistry brain weariness tiredness sleep thinking)

  • What the Science on Gender-Affirming Care for Transgender Kids Really Shows - Scientific American

    Data from more than a dozen studies of more than 30,000 transgender and gender-diverse young people consistently show that access to gender-affirming care is associated with better mental health outcomes—and that lack of access to such care is associated with higher rates of suicidality, depression and self-harming behavior. (Gender diversity refers to the extent to which a person’s gendered behaviors, appearance and identities are culturally incongruent with the sex they were assigned at birth. Gender-diverse people can identify along the transgender spectrum, but not all do.) Major medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Endocrine Society, the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association, have published policy statements and guidelines on how to provide age-appropriate gender-affirming care. All of those medical societies find such care to be evidence-based and medically necessary.

    (tags: trans gender science biology transgender)

Links for 2022-08-11

Published August 11, 2022

Links for 2022-08-10

Published August 10, 2022

Links for 2022-08-08

Published August 8, 2022

Links for 2022-08-04

Published August 4, 2022

  • Researchers Discover What Attracts Mosquitoes to Humans

    It's the sebum!

    The researcher found that mosquitoes that smelled a blend of decanal, which activates the human-specific glomerulus, and 1-hexanol, which activates the human-and-animals glomerulus, would fly upwind in search of the source. “Importantly, they also show that these components are behaviorally relevant to the mosquitoes—mosquitoes will track the binary blend of synthetic odorants in the same way that they respond to whole human odor,” notes Duvall.  The decanal and undecanal are probably derived from sebum, an oily substance that—unlike sweat—is secreted from hair follicles regardless of physical activity. Finding a role for sebum in mosquito attraction is novel, Matthew DeGennaro, a researcher in vector-borne diseases at Florida International University who was not involved in the study, writes in an email. “Previously, most the of the focus has been on human sweat components such as lactic acid or on how the human skin microbiome processes sweat and sebum into our distinct odor.” 

    (tags: sebum sweat mosquitos decanal undecanal skin pests smell)

Links for 2022-08-03

Published August 3, 2022

Links for 2022-08-02

Published August 2, 2022

  • Widely Mocked Anti-Piracy Ads Made People Pirate More, Study Finds

    Another problem is what the study identifies as “the social proof lever.” [...] Anti-piracy campaigns make piracy seem like the social norm. If everyone is doing it, the logic goes, it probably isn’t that bad. “Informing directly or indirectly individuals that many people pirate is counterproductive and encourages piracy by driving the targeted individuals to behave similarly,” the study said. “These messages provide to the would-be pirates the needed rationalization by emphasizing that ‘everyone is doing it.” The study had one last piece of advice for movie studios: stop airing anti-piracy ads in the theater. “These messages are frequently edited out by pirates before being redistributed through the internet, the study said. “Consequently, individuals who see the message are paying users [...] displaying descriptive information about how widespread piracy is to paying users is ill-advised.”

    (tags: piracy ads you-wouldnt-steal-a-car advertising fail social-norms)

Links for 2022-07-29

Published July 29, 2022

  • Sectoral Budgets must align with legal requirements | An Taisce

    An Taisce, the National Trust for Ireland, responds to the government's new sectoral ceilings for carbon emissions:

    “By agreeing to these sectoral ceilings the Government is potentially signing up to something which is not aligned with the Climate Act from the very get go. Where has the 2025 budget gone? Why does it only add up to 43% when the law itself requires 51%? It seems like they’re making it up as they go along, but this whole process has to be aligned to the legal requirements of the Climate Act, you can’t simply fudge it. This is a truly chaotic way to budget for the future” 
    Well said.

    (tags: an-taisce climate-change co2 ireland)

Links for 2022-07-27

Published July 27, 2022

Links for 2022-07-25

Published July 25, 2022

  • Range Extenders for Nissan Leafs

    Installing Muxsan power pack extension kits in Ireland, to add 11kWh, 22kWh and 33kWh extensions giving an additional range of +75km, +140km and +210km on top of the basic 24/30/40kWh Leaf battery packs. Very tempted!

    (tags: nissan leaf cars driving ireland evs range muxsan)

  • The Oral History Of The Poop Emoji (Or, How Google Brought Poop To America)

    "Darren: I thought it was a joke that they were pushing for the [poop emoji] to be in the first cut, but I quickly learned that it was not a joke at all. It’s basically like having all of the letters in the English alphabet, but getting rid of random ones. Like, “Let’s take out ‘B’ because ‘B’ kind of offends me.” In Japanese, emoji are more like characters than random animated emoticons, so we pushed back really hard. We said, “We can’t launch emoji without the poop.” Not only is it extremely popular in Japan—like extremely popular—you can’t just arbitrarily take letters out of the alphabet."

    (tags: emoji gmail history google poop shit funny japan)

Links for 2022-07-14

Published July 14, 2022

  • DynamoDB's metastable cache load workaround

    Marc Brooker on the latest DynamoDB USENIX paper -- good paper and commentary. He picks out this very interesting tidbit:

    'When a router received a request for a table it had not seen before, it downloaded the routing information for the entire table and cached it locally. Since the configuration information about partition replicas rarely changes, the cache hit rate was approximately 99.75 percent.' What's not to love about a 99.75% cache hit rate? The failure modes! 'The downside is that caching introduces bimodal behavior. In the case of a cold start where request routers have empty caches, every DynamoDB request would result in a metadata lookup, and so the service had to scale to serve requests at the same rate as DynamoDB' So this metadata table needs to scale from handling 0.25% of requests, to handling 100% of requests. A 400x potential increase in traffic! Designing and maintaining something that can handle rare 400x increases in traffic is super hard. To address this, the DynamoDB team introduced a distributed cache called MemDS. 'A new partition map cache was deployed on each request router host to avoid the bi-modality of the original request router caches.' Which leads to more background work, but less amplification in the failure cases. The constant traffic to the MemDS fleet increases the load on the metadata fleet compared to the conventional caches where the traffic to the backend is determined by cache hit ratio, but prevents cascading failures to other parts of the system when the caches become ineffective.

    (tags: aws dynamodb metastability caching caches production failure outages load memds marc-brooker papers usenix)

Links for 2022-07-11

Published July 11, 2022

  • Fairphone Open

    Very impressed by Fairphone, the greener mobile option. Here's more info on their open source commitments -- "On every smartphone we produce and sell – we publish as much source code as we legally can. And we share all of this information publicly with our users and community on our Fairphone Code website."

    (tags: fairphone open-source phones mobile android)

  • SleepHQ

    Via Nelson; webapp to analyze CPAP machine data logs

    (tags: cpap sleep-apnea health sleep medicine)

  • Pandemic Communication Without Argumentative Strategy in the Digital Age: A Cautionary Tale and a Call to Arms

    "argumentation theory" is an interesting idea in the age of weaponised memes:

    The Covid-19 pandemic has offered some notable examples of how public communication may backfire, in spite of the best intentions of the actors involved, and what role poor argumentative design plays in such failures, in the context of the current digital media ecology. In this chapter, I offer some preliminary considerations on the ongoing struggle to make sense of the new communication technologies in our media reality, analyze a concrete example of argumentative failure in anti-Covid vaccine communication in the European Union, and leverage this case study to issue a call to arms to argumentation scholars: argumentative competence is sorely needed for an effective response to the pandemic, yet argumentation theory will need to join forces with other areas of expertise to realize its societal impact. When it comes to arguments, self-isolation is not a viable strategy to fight Covid-19.

    (tags: memes social-media medicine public-health argumentation communication covid-19 society)

Links for 2022-06-27

Published June 27, 2022

Links for 2022-06-24

Published June 24, 2022

  • DALL-E mini has a mysterious obsession with women in saris

    “What we might be seeing is a weird side effect of [...] filtering or pre-processing, where images of Indian women, for example, are less likely to get filtered by the ban list, or the text describing the images is removed and they’re added to the dataset with no labels attached.” For instance, if the captions were in Hindi or another language, it’s possible that text might get muddled in processing the data, resulting in the image having no caption.

    (tags: saris india dall-e-mini pictures images ai ml preprocessing training input)

  • The stages of COVID-19 infection

    _The Importance of Understanding the Stages of COVID-19 In Treatment And Trials_, as covered regularly by Dr. Daniel Griffin on TWiV -- COVID-19 infection can progress through several defined phases; "three periods: pre-exposure, incubation, and detectable viral replication; and five phases: the viral symptom phase, the early inflammatory phase, the secondary infection phase, the multi-system inflammatory phase, and the tail phase."

    (tags: covid-19 disease infection daniel-griffin papers twiv)

Links for 2022-06-23

Published June 23, 2022

Links for 2022-06-20

Published June 20, 2022

  • What causes Long Covid? Here are the three leading theories | Science | AAAS

    Good state-of-the-art writeup on where science is with Long Covid at the moment.

    Increasingly, researchers want to fine-tune how they classify people with Long Covid, differentiating subsets based on symptoms, biology, or both. In a way, “the biggest obstacle that we are facing is we gave it one name, we gave it the name of Long Covid, which implies that it is one disease,” says Chahinda Ghossein, a physician and heart disease researcher at Maastricht University and co-leader of a 15,000-patient Long Covid study in the Netherlands. “All the studies being performed show us that it is not.”

    (tags: covid-19 long-covid health medicine disability)

Links for 2022-06-13

Published June 13, 2022

Links for 2022-06-10

Published June 10, 2022

  • "Taking the Win over COVID-19"

    Here's why the US government have decided that "Covid is over" -- a PR firm did some market research and decided that the public were bored of it:

    Recognize that people are "worn out" and feeling real harm from the years- long restrictions and take their side. Most Americans have personally moved out of crisis mode. Twice as many voters are now more concerned about COVID's effect on the economy (49%) than about someone in their family or someone they know becoming infected with the coronavirus (24%). [...] Don't set "COVID zero" as the victory condition. Americans also don't think victory is COVID Zero. They think the virus is here to stay, and 83% say the pandemic will be over when it's a mild illness like the flu rather than COVID being completely gone, and 55% prefer that COVID should be treated as an endemic disease. [...] Americans also assume they will get COVID: 77% agree that "it is inevitable that most people in the US will eventually get COVID-19", and 61% of Americans who have never tested positive think they are likely to be infected over the next year. [...]
    As jwz says -- "In other words: facts don't matter, only feelings matter, and what's the point in saving lives if you're just going to lose the midterms anyway?"

    (tags: america covid-19 us-politics pandemics diseases public-opinion market-research)

  • SARS-CoV-2 infection in hamsters and humans results in lasting and unique systemic perturbations post recovery

    It's not just a flu (in hamsters):

    The host response to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection can result in prolonged pathologies collectively referred to as post-acute sequalae of COVID-19 (PASC) or long COVID. To better understand the mechanism underlying long COVID biology, we compared the short- and long-term systemic responses in the golden hamster following either SARS-CoV-2 or influenza A virus (IAV) infection. Results demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 exceeded IAV in its capacity to cause permanent injury to the lung and kidney and uniquely impacted the olfactory bulb (OB) and epithelium (OE). Despite a lack of detectable infectious virus, the OB and OE demonstrated myeloid and T cell activation, proinflammatory cytokine production, and an interferon response that correlated with behavioral changes extending a month post viral clearance. These sustained transcriptional changes could also be corroborated from tissue isolated from individuals who recovered from COVID-19. These data highlight a molecular mechanism for persistent COVID-19 symptomology and provide a small animal model to explore future therapeutics.

    (tags: hamsters long-covid covid-19 papers pasc)

Links for 2022-06-07

Published June 7, 2022

Links for 2022-06-04

Published June 4, 2022

  • A quick rage-thread about credentials

    Great Twitter thread from Colm MacCarthaigh about security credentials, keeping them safe, and why time-based key expiry sucks: "When security auditors just say things like "Critical credentials need to be rotated every 90 days" you need to fire them into the sun with urgency. Here's what you actually need ... First rule of credential management: Rotation does nothing. It's revocation that matters. You always need a well-tested mechanism to make sure that you can remove or invalidate a credential that has been compromised. Second rule of credential management: Have closed loops. Deactivated credentials are a common source of outages. When introducing a new credential you see it everywhere it needs to be before using it. When you remove one, you need to see it gone from use before deactivating. Though you can't make that last part impossible to over-ride, because you do need to be able to lock out an attacker. Which brings up the next rule ... Third rule of credential management: logging and detective controls are key. You need to be able to see when and where a credential is being used. This is important for operational safety and security. How would you even detect a stolen credential without this? Fourth rule of credential management: be INCREDIBLY wary of time-based expiry. Use only when there is no other option (e.g. public SSL certificates). There's really no way to win with time-based expiry. If your expiry time is something like a year, you don't get much security. Are you ok with an attacker using that cred for a year? So you still need revocation. If your expiry time is very short, like hours, are you *always* going to beat that renewal deadline? got good clocks? Super short ephemeral credentials can be done, we do it at AWS, but it takes a *lot* of resources and diligence that most organizations don't have. Even we prefer to use real closed loops where we can. Fifth rule about credentials: Store credentials only where they are needed. This seems obvious but is rarely done. In particular it's common to see "treasure trove" secret-distribution control-planes that know all of the credentials. Distribution planes for secrets could use one or more of end-to-end, multi-party, or threshold encryption, so that those systems themselves don't know the secrets. We do this in places, but it's not a common pattern in industry that I've seen. Sixth rule of credentials: if there is no reason to suspect credential disclosure or mis-use, leave it alone. Replacing credentials usually exposes them to more systems, at least temporarily. How do you know that's not more risky? Seventh rule of credentials: asymmetric cryptography when you can, if not then choose between either memory-hard compute-hard hashing or derived-key symmetric auth depending on what fits your use-case. Avoid storing valuable secrets server side. Eight rule of credentials: keep credentials inside one-way enclaves like TPMs, TEEs, HSMs, when you can. Best line of defense is to keep credentials inaccessible. Ninth rule of credentials: If you can't write down a common password comparison side-channel from memory, do not implement your own authentication. Yes this is gatekeeping. Sorry, but no. Tenth rule of credentials: Check for all-zeroes creds, and repeated values. You can do this with hashing, you don't need to record the secrets. Coding errors, failures of entropy systems, and erasure mistakes are common enough to make this check worth doing. I'll stop there for now, maybe add more later. These are just some of the points I go through in reviews. Would love to hear from others about their own lessons and learnings. CYA-culture shallow audits drive my crazy, I hate to see customers trapped by them."

    (tags: security credentials authentication tls expiry ssl expiration keys key-rotation key-revocation colmmacc)

  • How fast are Linux pipes anyway?

    Very enjoyable Linux hyper-optimization through splice and huge pages

    (tags: kernel linux performance pipes vmsplice splice optimization syscalls unix)

  • Vectorized and performance-portable Quicksort

    This is a super-cool building block from Google Open Source: "We've created the first vectorized Quicksort: - Sorts arrays of numbers ~10x as fast as C++ std:sort - Outperforms state-of-the-art specific algorithms - Is portable across all modern CPU architectures We are interested to see what new applications and capabilities will be unlocked by being able to sort at 1 GB/s on a single CPU core." Part of their Highway library of vectorized code, https://github.com/google/highway , "a C++ library that provides portable SIMD/vector intrinsics." Low-level, hyperoptimized libs like this will be very important to ameliorate climate change impact of datacenter usage, so it's a great idea.

    (tags: algorithms sorting quicksort vectorization simd avx512 avx2)

Links for 2022-06-02

Published June 2, 2022

  • Two million people in UK living with long Covid

    Prof Danny Altmann, an immunologist and expert on long Covid at Imperial College London, described the latest figures as alarming:

    “They put to rest any vestige of hope that long Covid would somehow be just a thing of the early waves, would diminish in times of vaccination or ‘milder’ variants, or would just trail off. We’ve now created a far larger cohort of the chronically unwell and disabled than we previously had, say, within the entire national burden of rheumatoid arthritis, its healthcare costs, associated loss to quality of life and to the workplace. This couldn’t be further from ‘living with Covid’. It does necessitate some policy discussions, nationally and internationally.”
    Sadly, I think the same applies here in Ireland too.

    (tags: epidemic health medicine covid-19 sars-cov-2 long-covid disability)

Links for 2022-06-01

Published June 1, 2022

  • Intrahost evolution and forward transmission of a novel SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.1 subvariant

    This is an incredible pre-print -- "We describe a persistent SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.1 infection in an immuno-compromised individual during a 12-week period, and document the accumulation of eight additional amino acid substitutions in the already antigenically-distinct Omicron BA.1 spike protein." A SARS-CoV-2 variant evolving in a single person in real time!

    Persistent SARS-CoV-2 infections have been reported in immune-compromised individuals and people undergoing immune-modulatory treatments. It has been speculated that the emergence of antigenically diverse SARS-CoV-2 variants such as the Omicron variant may be the result of intra-host viral evolution driven by suboptimal immune responses, which must be followed by forward transmission. However, while intrahost evolution has been documented, to our knowledge no direct evidence of subsequent forward transmission is available to date. Here we describe the emergence of an Omicron BA.1 sub-lineage with 8 additional amino acid substitutions within the spike (E96D, L167T, R346T, L455W, K458M, A484V, H681R, A688V) in an immune-compromised host along with evidence of 5 forward transmission cases. Our findings show that the Omicron BA.1 lineage can further diverge from its exceptionally mutated genome during prolonged SARS-CoV-2 infection; highlighting an urgent need to employ therapeutic strategies to limit duration of infection and spread in vulnerable patients.

    (tags: variants sars-cov-2 covid-19 evolution papers preprints immunocompromise viruses omicron)

  • Docker build cache sharing on multi-hosts with BuildKit and buildx

    decent speed improvements by sharing a layer cache between hosts

    (tags: docker building compilation ci tweaks containers)

Links for 2022-05-31

Published May 31, 2022

Links for 2022-05-26

Published May 26, 2022

  • Vaccines provide poor protection against Long Covid

    Well, this is some worrying news: based on this study of 13 million people in Nature Medicine, COVID-19 vaccines only reduce Long Covid risk by 15%, with the largest risk reduction in blood clots and pulmonary sequelae, but less protection of other organ systems. Also, post-vaccination, immunocompromised people have a higher risk of Long Covid than others. As the author says: "Now that we know that vaccines are not sufficient as a sole line of defense, we need to urgently develop and deploy additional layers of protection to reduce risk of Long Covid. These may include vaccines specifically designed to reduce risk of Long Covid, and therapeutics that could be taken in the acute phase to reduce risk. Paxlovid and other antivirals must be urgently tested in trials for Long Covid." (via Akiko Iwasaki)

    (tags: long-covid covid-19 vaccines risks disease paxlovid papers)

  • Interferon autoantibodies implicated in COVID-19 risk

    New PNAS paper, discussed in this week's TWiV episode -- _The risk of COVID-19 death is much greater and age dependent with type I IFN autoantibodies_:

    There is growing evidence that pre-existing autoantibodies neutralizing type I interferons (IFNs) are strong determinants of life-threatening COVID-19 pneumonia. It is important to estimate their quantitative impact on COVID-19 mortality upon SARS-CoV-2 infection, by age and sex, as both the prevalence of these autoantibodies and the risk of COVID-19 death increase with age and are higher in men. Using an unvaccinated sample of 1,261 deceased patients and 34,159 individuals from the general population, we found that autoantibodies against type I IFNs strongly increased the SARS-CoV-2 infection fatality rate at all ages, in both men and women. Autoantibodies against type I IFNs are strong and common predictors of life-threatening COVID-19. Testing for these autoantibodies should be considered in the general population.
    I would have thought that type I interferons are a fairly critical part of the immune system, and the idea that people are happily walking about with autoantibodies to them is pretty crazy, but that seems to be the implication here.

    (tags: autoantibodies interferon health medicine disease covid-19 papers ifns interferons sars-cov-2)

Links for 2022-05-23

Published May 23, 2022

  • Predatory community and affinity fraud in crypto

    Groups that operate under the guise of inclusion, regardless of their intentions, are serving the greater goal of crypto that keeps the whole thing afloat: finding ever more fools to buy in so that the early investors can take their profits. And it is those latecomers who are left holding the bag in the end. With projects that seek to provide services and opportunities to members of marginalized groups who have previously not had access, but on bad terms that ultimately disadvantaged them, we see predatory inclusion. With projects that seek to create new communities of marginalized people to draw them in to risky speculative markets rife with scams and fraud, we are now seeing predatory community.

    (tags: blockchain capitalism fraud community crypto web3 communities diversity greater-fool-theory bitcoin)

Links for 2022-05-21

Published May 21, 2022

Links for 2022-05-16

Published May 16, 2022

Links for 2022-05-13

Published May 13, 2022

  • Researchers Pinpoint Reason Infants Die From SIDS

    This is a great breakthrough for such a tragic disease, and one which has led to terrible miscarriages of justice.

    SIDS refers to the unexplained deaths of infants under a year old, and it usually occurs while the child is sleeping. According to Mayo Clinic, many in the medical community suspected this phenomenon could be caused by a defect in the part of the brain that controls arousal from sleep and breathing. The theory was that if the infant stopped breathing during sleep, the defect would keep the child from startling or waking up.  The Sydney researchers were able to confirm this theory by analyzing dried blood samples taken from newborns who died from SIDS and other unknown causes. Each SIDS sample was then compared with blood taken from healthy babies. They found the activity of the enzyme butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) was significantly lower in babies who died of SIDS compared to living infants and other non-SIDS infant deaths. BChE plays a major role in the brain’s arousal pathway, explaining why SIDS typically occurs during sleep.  Previously, parents were told SIDS could be prevented if they took proper precautions: laying babies on their backs, not letting them overheat and keeping all toys and blankets out of the crib were a few of the most important preventative steps. While safe sleep practices are still important for protecting infants, many children whose parents took every precaution still died from SIDS. These parents were left with immense guilt, wondering if they could have prevented their baby’s death. Dr. Carmel Harrington, the lead researcher for the study, was one of these parents. Her son unexpectedly and suddenly died as an infant 29 years ago. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Harrington explained what she was told about the cause of her child’s death.  "Nobody could tell me. They just said it's a tragedy. But it was a tragedy that didn't sit well with my scientific brain.”  Since then, she’s worked to find the cause of SIDS, both for herself and for the medical community as a whole. She went on to explain why this discovery is so important for parents whose babies suffered from SIDS.  "These families can now live with the knowledge that this was not their fault," she said.
    (via Damien)

    (tags: healthcare medicine parenting science via:damienmulley sids diseases neurochemistry)

  • CeP Heating System | EcoVolt - Innovation in Energy

    Interesting green retrofitting product -- it's a large, wall-sized electric heating panel that mounts seamlessly in plasterboard and can be painted -- so like a large, invisible radiator which can run off solar PV.

    (tags: solar pv retrofitting heating home radiators ecovolt)

  • Chat Control

    "The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence":

    The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. The result: Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time messaging and chat control and the end of secrecy of digital correspondence. Other consequences of the proposal are ineffective network blocking, screening of person cloud storage including private photos, mandatory age verification leading to the end of anonymous communication, censorship in Appstores and the paternalism and exclusion of minors in the digital world.

    (tags: surveillance censorship chat-control eu laws messaging apps privacy data-privacy)

  • Thought-terminating cliché

    A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance. Its function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, ending the debate with a cliché rather than a point.
    Examples: "it is what it is", "it's in God's hands", "YOLO", or the Irish favourite: "we all partied"

    (tags: cliches semantics logic cognitive-dissonance arguing arguments via:mltshp)

  • CarTrawler

    the un-skinned booking site for car hire

    (tags: cars car-hire holidays vacation)

Links for 2022-05-10

Published May 10, 2022

  • "Hypercoagulation" as a potential long COVID sign

    Interesting Twitter thread discussing a potential treatment for long COVID -- no interest in providing even the relevant _tests_ in the UK, so a British kid was brought to Germany to receive the treatment, and is now responding well. Here's details on the specific biosigns:

    Her fluorescent microscopy showed very hyperactivated sticky platelets. Mine are on the right for comparison. She also had microclots and evidence of endothelial damage (but latter not severe). I believe she was the first UK child under 12 to have these tests done. The platelets and microclots show that her blood is 'hypercoaguable' - too sticky. These may be blocking up the very small blood vessels that allow oxygen into muscles and nerves, which could explain some of her symptoms.

    (tags: platelets microclots long-covid treatments hypercoagulation covid-19)

  • "The first Starlink war"

    Very interesting thread from Trent Telenko on how a Ukrainian GIS app, combined with Starlink internet access, has created 21st century artillery warfare and outflanked the Russia military:

    Ukraine's 'GIS Art for Artillery' app combined with Starlink actually gives the Ukrainian military measurably better than US Military standard artillery command and control. The Ukraine War is the first Starlink War & the side with Starlink is beating the side without.
    This is pretty nuts. On the other hand, though, Starlink's operational security is now critically important, and doubtless being heavily targeted by Russian hackers, and Ukraine's tactics are reliant on the vagaries of Elon Musk... Source twitter thread: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1523791050313433088

    (tags: starlink artillery internet gis elon-musk warfare tech gis-art)

  • Trino | Project Tardigrade delivers ETL at Trino speeds to early users

    This looks fantastic -- Trino (nee Presto) adds some significant improvements for long-running and heavyweight query support.

    When your long-running queries experience a failure, they don’t have to start from scratch. When queries require more memory than currently available in the cluster they are still able to succeed. When multiple queries are submitted concurrently they are able to share resources in a fair way, and make steady progress.

    (tags: trino presto sql storage querying etl batch scheduling)

  • metabolically-led post-exertional symptoms in Long COVID

    Interesting thread from a Mount Sinai-based lab discussing the side effects of possible mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress:

    Our cells use a very specific fuel source called ATP that is produced in a part of the cell called the mitochondria. Unfortunately, ATP also fuels the cellular activities of viruses. As such, when a virus enters our cells it quickly hijacks our mitochondria to fuel viral replication and other viral activities. In other words when you are infected by a virus like #COVID19, you are infected by a little energy thief: taking your hard-earned ATP and using it for its own purposes. Not only does this mean that the virus is proliferating on stolen energy (rude!) but it also means that your cells must perform their regular functions with far less energy. So this is where things get cyclical: we have hijacked mitochondria resulting in inefficient, “stressed“ cells. Our cells are producing energy “for two” now, but barely managing to function, leading to the overproduction of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which we can think of as the “exhaust fumes” of our mitochondria. ROS are bad characters - systemically, they can trigger inflammation and hypocapnia. Unfortunately, once the body is experiencing oxidative stress, the mere act of producing more energy starts to damage the mitochondria.

    (tags: mitochondria oxidative-stress long-covid covid-19 dysautonomia mcas inflammation)

  • SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant is as Deadly as Previous Waves After Adjusting for Vaccinations, Demographics, and Comorbidities

    The numbers are in; omicron was as severe as previous variants, it was just that people had been vaccinated. (preprint)

    (tags: omicron covid-19 severity vaccination diseases epidemiology)

Links for 2022-05-04

Published May 4, 2022

Links for 2022-05-03

Published May 3, 2022

Links for 2022-05-02

Published May 2, 2022

  • “Living with COVID” has been a lie

    This is a fantastic thread from Luca Ferretti:

    “Living with COVID” has been a lie. Not because it isn’t possible, or because it isn’t the right goal. But in practice it has clearly morphed into "let's stop talking about COVID, and the problem will disappear by itself". A dangerous and irresponsible bet. Most of the political & health authorities have implicitly chosen to rely mainly on vaccination to control COVID. A reasonable choice... if only the vaccination campaign would have aimed at protecting the entire population with sterilising vaccines adapted to the new variants. Instead, despite hundreds of vaccines in the pipeline, there are no next-generation or sterilising vaccines on the horizon... little large-scale clinical trials (apart from Israel)... and few updated vaccines against variants (Moderna's Omicron-Delta booster and little else). Of course, protection for children has been repeatedly delayed (English kids between 5-11 were vaccinated only last month) and kids under 5 are still unprotected worldwide, with the laudable exception of Cuba. Everybody’s waiting for the US FDA, whose intentions are unclear. It is truly depressing to see so little and slow concrete progress on what is meant to be "the ultimate weapon" against SARSCoV2. It seems to suggest that we don't really rely so much on it, and that we're satisfied with postponing the problems until the next not-so-mild variant. Simple precautionary public hygiene measures - face masks and ventilation - are mostly ignored. Testing and surveillance, downsized or limited. And the growing stress on the healthcare system is being swept under the carpet, even as we risk paying the price for it for years. This is not the product of any large conspiracy. It is simply the result of a combination of neglect, inertia, bureaucracy, selfishness, careerism, lack of long-term perspective and so on, among some (though not all!) politicians, doctors, academics, bureaucrats and others...

    (tags: covid-19 sars-cov-2 public-health medicine healthcare pandemics vaccination)

Links for 2022-04-25

Published April 25, 2022

  • CoVariants

    Ireland is included:

    These graphs show [COVID-19] cases per million for selected countries, coloured by the estimated frequency of variants. Only a small percentage of cases are sequenced in most countries, therefore these graphs show the reported case numbers coloured by the frequency of variants detected by sequences in these countries - which may represent <5% of cases.

    (tags: sars-cov-2 covid-19 cases variants charts graphs)

  • Bringing emulation into the 21st century

    Well executed satire:

    An 8080 microprocessor utilising a modern, containerised, microservices-based architecture running on Kubernetes with frontends for a CP/M test harness and a full implementation of the original Space Invaders arcade machine. The full project can be found as a github organisation https://github.com/21st-century-emulation which contains ~60 individual repositories each implementing an individual microservice or providing the infrastructure.
    Needless to say this monster runs at approximately 1KHz, instead of the required 2MHz. A good demo of how some deliberately obtuse and inappropriate architectural decisions can really make a mess of things.

    (tags: emulation kubernetes satire k8s containers microservices yikes)

Links for 2022-04-21

Published April 21, 2022

  • GitHub has wiped out open source history by "suspending" Russian users

    This sounds like a pretty crappy way to go about things:

    It is unclear to me what GitHub’s intended result was with these account suspensions, but it appears to be incredibly destructive for any open source project that has interacted with a now-suspended account. On a service like Twitter, you can visit the placeholder profile of a suspended account and see a message communicating that the account is suspended, and other users’ @mentions of the account still link to the suspended account’s profile. On GitHub, that’s not how it works at all. Apparently, “suspending an account” on GitHub actually means deleting all activity for a user — which results in (1) every pull request from the suspended account being deleted, (2) every issue opened by the suspended account being deleted, (3) every comment or discussion from the suspended account being deleted. In effect, the user’s entire activity and history is evaporated. All of this valuable data is lost. The only thing left intact is the raw Git commit history. It’s as if the user never existed.

    (tags: github fail russia sanctions git pull-requests suspensions accounts)