JSON originally had comments. They were removed
Oh christ. This is some terrible logic from Douglas Crockford:
Comments in JSON (Apr 30, 2012) I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability. I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad, but it shouldn’t. Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files, which you would like to annotate. Go ahead and insert all the comments you like. Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser.
I’ve never even _heard_ of JSMin. Meanwhile various tools which chose to use JSON as a configuration file format work around this crappy decision with messy hacks.(tags: hacks json bad-decisions design apis configuration file-formats javascript douglas-crockford fail jsmin parsing comments)
Category: Uncategorized
How To Use The Bridgefy Offline Messaging App
Decent offline messaging system for smartphones — uses Bluetooth to connect p2p, without requiring working internet
(tags: apps mobile offline networking bluetooth chat emergency)
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The Krakatoa explosion registered 172 decibels at 100 miles from the source. This is so astonishingly loud, that it’s inching up against the limits of what we mean by “sound.” When you hum a note or speak a word, you’re wiggling air molecules back and forth dozens or hundreds of times per second, causing the air pressure to be low in some places and high in other places. The louder the sound, the more intense these wiggles, and the larger the fluctuations in air pressure. But there’s a limit to how loud a sound can get. At some point, the fluctuations in air pressure are so large that the low pressure regions hit zero pressure—a vacuum—and you can’t get any lower than that. This limit happens to be about 194 decibels for a sound in Earth’s atmosphere. Any louder, and the sound is no longer just passing through the air, it’s actually pushing the air along with it, creating a pressurized burst of moving air known as a shock wave.[…] Amazingly, for as many as 5 days after the explosion, weather stations in 50 cities around the globe observed this unprecedented spike in pressure re-occuring like clockwork, approximately every 34 hours. That is roughly how long it takes sound to travel around the entire planet.
(tags: sound shockwaves earth krakatoa disasters volcanos eruptions noise decibels)
Implementing graceful-close in Haskell network library
One of the nice bits about HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 was the strong connection direction semantics, avoiding the classic TCP deadlock scenarios seen in bidirectional protocols. But now HTTP/2 supports bidirectionality, so HTTP/2 servers need to be more careful about how they close connections, as this blog post describes — tl;dr: shutdown(SHUT_WR) .
(tags: http networking protocols http2 bidirectional-protocols tcp ip)
Scott Aaronson on Google’s quantum supremacy leaked paper
It seems a paper between Google and NASA accidentally leaked a couple of days ago, saying that a group at Google has now achieved quantum computational supremacy with a 53-qubit superconducting device. According to Scott Aaronson, a noted quantum-computation expert, this is a Big Deal and a significant moment in scientific progress:
It’s like, have a little respect for the immensity of what we’re talking about here, and for the terrifying engineering that’s needed to make it reality. Before quantum supremacy, by definition, the QC skeptics can all laugh to each other that, for all the billions of dollars spent over 20+ years, still no quantum computer has even once been used to solve any problem faster than your laptop could solve it, or at least not in any way that depended on its being a quantum computer. In a post-quantum-supremacy world, that’s no longer the case. A superposition involving 250 or 260 complex numbers has been computationally harnessed, using time and space resources that are minuscule compared to 250 or 260. I keep bringing up the Wright Flyer only because the chasm between what we’re talking about, and the dismissiveness I’m seeing in some corners of the Internet, is kind of breathtaking to me. It’s like, if you believed that useful air travel was fundamentally impossible, then seeing a dinky wooden propeller plane keep itself aloft wouldn’t refute your belief … but it sure as hell shouldn’t reassure you either.
(tags: google programming quantum-computing qubits future science qc history research)
Isolating workloads with Systemd slices
Systemd supports docker-like cgroups isolation, it seems, and ScyllaDB can take advantage of that
(tags: systemd cgroups process-isolation linux containerisation scylladb ops)
GNOME Foundation facing lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging
Software patents are a cancer. ‘The GNOME Foundation has been made aware of a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC over patent 9,936,086. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes this patent. Neil McGovern, Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation says “We have retained legal counsel and intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit.”’
(tags: software-patents swpats shotwell gnome linux open-source patents)
IPCC Report: Oceans Face ‘Unprecedented Conditions’
The IPCC report on the ocean is full of utterly disastrous science. One example:
The dangerous changes to the ocean don’t even begin to address the impacts of rising seas. Under all climate change scenarios, coastal areas will see what the report euphemistically calls “extreme sea level events”—that would be floods to you and me—that were once once-in-a-century will become annual occurrences by century’s end. But devastating effects will impact unnumbered people far sooner. “Many low-lying megacities and small islands (including SIDS) are projected to experience historical centennial events at least annually by 2050,” the report authors wrote.
Bottom line: ‘The world has shown little appetite to take a collaborative approach to these types of adaptation projects let alone drawing down emissions to-date, but the tide will have to turn if humanity is to have any chance of staying above water.’(tags: climate-change climate oceans sea-level disasters future 2050)
Green New Deal critics are missing the bigger picture
This Vox article absolutely nails what we are facing, and why there’s no longer any room to _not_ implement a Green New Deal world wide.
New EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler recently dismissed the latest IPCC report as being based on a “worst-case scenario,” which is darkly ironic, since the report is all about the dangers that lie between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming. But 2 degrees is not the worst-case scenario. It is among the best-case scenarios. The UN thinks we’re headed for somewhere around 4 degrees by 2100. Believing that we can limit temperature rise to 2 degrees — a level of warming scientists view as catastrophic — now counts as wild-haired optimism. […] Two degrees would be terrible, but it’s better than three, at which point Southern Europe would be in permanent drought, African droughts would last five years on average, and the areas burned annually by wildfires in the United States could quadruple, or worse, from last year’s million-plus acres. And three degrees is much better than four, at which point six natural disasters could strike a single community simultaneously; the number of climate refugees, already in the millions, could grow tenfold, or 20-fold, or more; and, globally, damages from warming could reach $600?trillion — about double all the wealth that exists in the world today. The worst-case scenario, which, contra Wheeler, is virtually never discussed in polite political circles in the US, is, as Wallace-Wells quotes famed naturalist David Attenborough saying, “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world.” That is alarming and, if you must, “alarmist,” but as Wallace-Wells says, “being alarmed is not a sign of being hysterical; when it comes to climate change, being alarmed is what the facts demand.” […] Choosing to continue down our present path is madness. Nihilism. It is not “moderation.”
(tags: activism climate-change climate green-new-deal green future ipcc david-attenborough nihilism politics)
Neurosexism: the myth that men and women have different brains
The history of sex-difference research is rife with innumeracy, misinterpretation, publication bias, weak statistical power, inadequate controls and worse. Rippon, a leading voice against the bad neuroscience of sex differences, uncovers so many examples in this ambitious book that she uses a whack-a-mole metaphor to evoke the eternal cycle. A brain study purports to discover a difference between men and women; it is publicized as, ‘At last, the truth!’, taunting political correctness; other researchers expose some hyped extrapolation or fatal design flaw; and, with luck, the faulty claim fades away — until the next post hoc analysis produces another ‘Aha!’ moment and the cycle repeats. As Rippon shows, this hunt for brain differences “has been vigorously pursued down the ages with all the techniques that science could muster”. And it has exploded in the past three decades, since MRI research joined the fray. Yet, as ‘The Gendered Brain’ reveals, conclusive findings about sex-linked brain differences have failed to materialize.
(tags: brain men nature women gender sexism neurology neurosexism myths debunking)
AIB makes a mess of security upgrade, locking out thousands of customers
Ireland’s largest bank, and they’ve really made a mess of this. Lots of false positives on the “rooted device” detection code it seems. It seems detecting “rooted” devices is a part of the PSD2 spec, and you have to wonder why…
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‘This is a neat example of how eminently resolvable challenges around the clean power transition are framed by deniers and ideologues as incurable curses, while actual scientists and engineers just get on with fixing them.’ As Aoife McLysaght notes: ‘This is a great, informative thread. Yes SF6 is has a warming effect, but it’s released v little, is a feature of all switches (not only wind turbines as implied), and alternatives are in the works. Wind turbines aren’t zero emissions but they are v low.’
(tags: sf6 emissions wind electricity global-warming climate-change bbc bias science)
Crash Course | The New Republic
Boeing’s MCAS disaster as a parable of late-stage capitalism:
[Boeing] engineers devised a software fix called MCAS, which pushed the nose down in response to an obscure set of circumstances in conjunction with the “speed trim system,” which Boeing had devised in the 1980s to smooth takeoffs. Once the 737 MAX materialized as a real-life plane about four years later, however, test pilots discovered new realms in which the plane was more stall-prone than its predecessors. So Boeing modified MCAS to turn down the nose of the plane whenever an angle-of-attack (AOA) sensor detected a stall, regardless of the speed. That involved giving the system more power and removing a safeguard, but not, in any formal or genuine way, running its modifications by the FAA, which might have had reservations with two critical traits of the revamped system: Firstly, that there are two AOA sensors on a 737, but only one, fatefully, was programmed to trigger MCAS. The former Boeing engineer Ludtke and an anonymous whistle-blower interviewed by 60 Minutes Australia both have a simple explanation for this: Any program coded to take data from both sensors would have had to account for the possibility the sensors might disagree with each other and devise a contingency for reconciling the mixed signals. Whatever that contingency, it would have involved some kind of cockpit alert, which would in turn have required additional training—probably not level-D training, but no one wanted to risk that. So the system was programmed to turn the nose down at the feedback of a single (and somewhat flimsy) sensor. And, for still unknown and truly mysterious reasons, it was programmed to nosedive again five seconds later, and again five seconds after that, over and over ad literal nauseam.? And then, just for good measure, a Boeing technical pilot emailed the FAA and casually asked that the reference to the software be deleted from the pilot manual.? So no more than a handful of people in the world knew MCAS even existed before it became infamous. Here, a generation after Boeing’s initial lurch into financialization, was the entirely predictable outcome of the byzantine process by which investment capital becomes completely abstracted from basic protocols of production and oversight: a flight-correction system that was essentially jerry-built to crash a plane. “If you’re looking for an example of late stage capitalism or whatever you want to call it,” said longtime aerospace consultant Richard Aboulafia, “it’s a pretty good one.”?
(tags: boeing business capitalism engineering management fail disasters automation cost-control stock-market fly-by-wire)
Here’s a quick tip for people using Huawei or Honor phones.
Huawei recently released EMUI version 9.1.0.326 as an OTA update, which I applied once it was offered as an upgrade option.
Once I installed that OS upgrade, however, I noticed that whenever I listened to music or podcasts using a Bluetooth headset or stereo speakers, there was a new and very noticeable ‘echoing’ effect on the audio.
It appears this was due to the addition of Huawei Histen, a 3D audio/equaliser feature, which apparently will add 3D audio effects when listening on wired headphones of various varieties — however this is supposed to be disabled on Bluetooth devices.
I spent several days fruitlessly googling how to disable Histen, but with no luck. Eventually, through trial and error, I discovered a workaround — simply plug in a pair of wired headphones, go into Settings -> Sounds -> Huawei Histen sound effects, and choose "Natural sound". Hey presto, next time you use Bluetooth headphones, it should no longer have the echo.
Why hard disks are/were called Winchester
some ancient history. I’d forgotten about this nomenclature
(tags: winchester history ibm disks hard-disks hardware)
Use of an opaque binary class in a public iOS API causes problems
“Apple changing the behavior of `NSData -description` in iOS 13 could break push notification registration for thousands of apps. Beyond the immediate concern for existing apps, this is an interesting case study in how to handle long-standing, widespread misuse of an API.” This is messy. Not a good API design decision from Apple
(tags: apple ios push-notifications apis api coding interoperability i14y)
The Problem With Sugar-Daddy Science – The Atlantic
The pursuit of money from wealthy donors distorts the research process—and yields flashy projects that don’t help and don’t work.
(tags: science funding millionaires donors research ai mit jeff-epstein media-lab)
Replacing Eir’s FTTH WiFi router with a NetGear Orbi
Great writeup from Padraig Brady. sounds like solid hardware — I’d get one if I needed to replace my current setup based on this
Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On – danah boyd – Medium
“Move fast and break things” is an abomination if your goal is to create a healthy society. Taking short-cuts may be financially profitable in the short-term, but the cost to society is too great to be justified. In a healthy society, we accommodate differently abled people through accessibility standards, not because it’s financially prudent but because it’s the right thing to do. In a healthy society, we make certain that the vulnerable amongst us are not harassed into silence because that is not the value behind free speech. In a healthy society, we strategically design to increase social cohesion because binaries are machine logic not human logic.
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‘We tear down the modular Fairphone 3 with a giant grin on our faces! It’s not perfect, but this is just about all we can ask for from a smartphone in 2019.’ Quite nice — modular, reminiscent of the Samsung S5 a little. specs are not stellar, but the ethical construction is a major win IMO. I think this (or the next model if it’s out by then) might be my next phone.
(tags: repair mobile hardware phones fairphone ethics fairtrade)
Paul Vixie’s answer to “was DNS intentionally designed to be insecure?”
no. nor ip itself, or ncp which preceded it, or tcp, or udp, or icmp, or smtp, ot http. it was insecure because it evolved in a safe, germ free academic bubble. absolutely none of it was designed with billions of people in mind, or the full cross section of humanity which would include criminals and national intelligence services. the world of the internet in 2019 would have been seen as a total freak show by the community who deployed dns in the 1980’s. nothing that can be abused won’t be. you may or may not believe this; it’s considered controversial, and there are arguments being had about it today. but noone considered that now-controversial near-truism at all when the core internet protocols were first designed and implemented. the idea of abuse was considered novel in the 1990’s when commercialization and privatization brought abuse into the internet world and burst the academic bubble. a lot of old timers blamed AOL and MSN and even Usenet for the problems, but in actuality, it’s what humans _always_ do at scale. putting the full spectrum of human culture atop a technology platform designed for academic and professional culture should have been understood to be a recipe for disaster.
(tags: ietf computers abuse internet security dns paul-vixie history scale culture)
Project Alternator · scylladb/scylla Wiki
an open-source project for an Amazon DynamoDB-compatible API. Alternator runs within Scylla. Enabling it is as simple as editing the yaml configuration. Existing DynamoDB clients would simply be pointed at the Scylla cluster. No other client coding is required.
Millennium Challenge 2002 – Wikipedia
omg I never knew about this. Post 9/11, the Bush administration ran a war game scenario which resulted in a massive fail for the US forces, and had to be re-run to ensure they won: ‘At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue’s ships were “re-floated”, and the rules of engagement were changed; this was later justified by General Peter Pace as follows: “You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days’ worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?”[1] After the reset, both sides were ordered to follow predetermined plans of action. After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and was not allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore.[3] Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed.[4]’
ericflo/mediasummon: Summon your photos and videos back to you
Mediasummon is an open source application that fetches a copy of all your photos and videos, and keeps them continuously backed up into one organized directory either on your computer or on a cloud storage provider.
Currently supports reading from Instagram, Google Photos, and Facebook, and writing to Dropbox, GDrive or S3. Go, MIT Licensed.(tags: open-source apps photos sync google-photos facebook instagram backups s3 dropbox)
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UK-based vendor for electric vehicle charger driven off PV solar panels
(tags: solar-power solar charging evs cars)
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The incumbent solar-power-driven EV charger, also UK based
The history of Tetris randomizers
Fantastic writeup of the PRNGs used in various Tetris implementations — for playability reasons, these are more “pseudo” than most PRNGs
(tags: tetris algorithms coding games prng random randomness)
TIL: bananas contain the primary compound in the honeybee’s “alarm” pheromone
Science helps us explain the phenomena. Turns out bananas contain a compound called isoamyl acetate (also known as isopentyl acetate) – the very same as that which is in honeybees’ alarm pheromone. Pure banana oil (used in emollients, perfumes, and to broaden the flavored milk range) is nothing but this colorless liquid ester, occasionally mixed with other chemicals. While bees’ alarm pheromone isn’t just isoamyl acetate – in fact there are over 40 compounds in the cocktail – it is the main active component. Guard bees, who patrol the entrance, and stinger bees, who comprise the militia, are the two castes within the hive most likely to release the pheromone. Both of these are worker bees (i.e. female) around 2-3 weeks old – the time it takes for their endocrine system to reach its prime. The scent – excreted from the Koschevnikov gland and other glands around the sting shaft – is released either when the bee pops out its stinger (like a cat retracting its claws), or goes full kamikaze and harpoons the mouse, robber bee or luckless human, rear-end first (inevitably dying in the assault). Having volatile properties, the ester evaporates and disperses rapidly from the origin point of the bee’s butt, making it suitable as a swift communication carrier. Once registered, it alerts the colony to the presence of an intruder or threat, lifting their aggro, and effectively coordinating an en masse defensive response. Any stray, lingering waft of a banana about you, then, will trigger a similar reaction (if slightly less intense). Don’t put too much faith in your smoker to avail you either.
(tags: bees honeybees science pheromones fruit bananas factoids)
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via the Tironian notes, a Roman shorthand syntax which originated the ‘Tironian et’ (?), Pompeii, and the Book of Kells (via Code Points)
(tags: ampersand characters via:codepoints history writing shorthand tironian-notes ciphers)
Google release an open-source differential-privacy lib
Differentially-private data analysis is a principled approach that enables organizations to learn from the majority of their data while simultaneously ensuring that those results do not allow any individual’s data to be distinguished or re-identified. This type of analysis can be implemented in a wide variety of ways and for many different purposes. For example, if you are a health researcher, you may want to compare the average amount of time patients remain admitted across various hospitals in order to determine if there are differences in care. Differential privacy is a high-assurance, analytic means of ensuring that use cases like this are addressed in a privacy-preserving manner. Currently, we provide algorithms to compute the following: Count Sum Mean Variance Standard deviation Order statistics (including min, max, and median)
(tags: analytics google ml privacy differential-privacy aggregation statistics obfuscation approximation algorithms)
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how Google do code reviews. pretty basic stuff but it’s good to have it written down from an authoritative source
(tags: google code-review prs pull-requests best-practices coding collaboration)
TERFs: the rise of “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” explained – Vox
Good long-read on TERFism, its history, and its ties to conservatism
(tags: terfs transgender politics identity gender uk feminism)
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hee hee:
Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from [coronary artery bypass graft surgery], but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.
(tags: prayer religion funny papers science research health medicine surgery)
Minecraft now publishing deobfuscation maps
About time too.
In an effort to help make modding the game easier, we have decided to publish our game obfuscation maps with all future releases of the game, starting today. This means that anyone who is interested may deobfuscate the game and find their way around the code without needing to spend a few months figuring out what’s what. It is our hope that mod authors and mod framework authors use these files to augment their updating processes that they have today. These mappings will always be available, instantly and immediately as part of every newly released version. This does not, however, change the existing restrictions on what you may or may not do with our game code or assets. The links to the obfuscation mappings are included as part of the version manifest json, and may be automatically pulled for any given version.
(tags: minecraft obfuscation microsoft mods modding community coding games)
Vox Hiberionacum explains the Loch Ness Monster’s apocryphal origins
The clue is the origin story, fuckos… And it’s just that. A hagiographical motif in a story. In the original Life of Columba, by Adomnán, which is a string of stories drowning in Christian metaphor, it’s refered to as Aquatilis Bestiae, a ‘water beast’. But its not the point of the story. If you read [the] actual episode, point is that blue arsed pagan pictish feckers who witness Columba scaring the bejaysis out of the waterbeast (away from a devout follower, bravely swimming in river, full of faith, despite the danger) are impressed. In other words. It’s some class of a metaphor. Now hold that thought, and go look up Leviathan motif in Hebrew Bible, or Beast from the Sea in Revelation, and/or other water beast appearances in medieval hagiography… Revelation 13:1-10 (ESV) The First Beast – And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. [….] In other words: Modern day Nessie Bolloxology, Tourist Trap Tat and Snake Oil ‘Scientists’ looking for funding, are all entirely based on actual seventh century insular Irish imagination and religious metaphor. The end.
(tags: loch-ness sea-monsters picts history columba columbanus metaphor myth legends)
cable internet is IP over MPEG
DOCSIS sends downstream data in MPEG frames because that’s what the cable networks are optimized for and what all the switching equipment understood when cable broadband took off.
:facepalm: (via:jwz)(tags: history hysterical-raisins docsis protocols bizarre mpeg via:jwz)
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This is one heartbreaking blog post:
Eight years ago, during the same month, I had twin boys and co-founded Cloudability. About three months ago Cloudability was acquired. About three weeks ago we lost one of our boys.
(tags: death kids horror probabilities epilepsy health life chance)
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a cross-border initiative working to establish young native trees across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. We run an annual tree planting event where landowners across the 32 counties turn out to plant their trees on a selected Saturday in February. Our next planting day is Saturday 15th February 2020. We provide simple schemes for landowners to access quality native tree mixes each season. We work with farmers, smallholders, community groups, councils, schools, colleges and many other landowners to coordinate sites to accommodate trees. Our vision is to establish tree cover and woodland in rural and urban areas that will grow for many years and provide valuable resources, beneficial ecosystem services and a lasting legacy for future generations.
(tags: trees nature ireland woods green climate-change regreening rewilding)
Shape the future: 3D Printing a Sustainable World
our planet needs bright ideas and new ways of thinking, consuming and living. Pitch your idea and I-Form, the SFI Research Centre for Advanced Manufacturing, will turn the winning idea for sustainability into 3D printed reality.
(tags: 3d-printing future sustainability design ireland sfi)
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‘A list of post-event summaries from major service events that impacted AWS service availability’
(tags: postmortems post-mortems aws ops outages availability)
The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet
“The proposed data collection goes beyond absurdity when they mention the desire to collect FitBit data,” Annas told Gizmodo. “I am unaware of any study linking walking too much and committing mass murder. As for the other technologies, what are these people expecting? ‘Alexa, tell me the best way to kill a lot of people really quickly’? Really?” [….] Fridel said that “literally any risk factor identified for mass shooters will result in millions of false positives,” adding that the most reliable risk factor is gender, and that most mass murderers are male. “Should we create a list of all men in the United States and keep tabs on them?” she said. “Although it would be absurd and highly unethical, doing so would be more effective than keeping a list of persons with mental illness.”
(tags: dystopia technology grim-meathook-future data-protection data-privacy fitbit harpa)
The Irish Native Woodland Trust are fundraising
“We’re raising funds to help to plant trees on our reserves [in Ireland] and to create more woodland nature reserves like the 11 we already manage, from Donegal to Waterford”
(tags: trees wildlife nature carbon climate-change rewilding ireland)
The Secret History of Dune – Los Angeles Review of Books
The Sabres of Paradise (1960) served as one of those sources, a half-forgotten masterpiece of narrative history recounting a mid-19th century Islamic holy war against Russian imperialism in the Caucasus. […] Anyone who has obsessed over the mythology of Dune will immediately recognize the language Herbert borrowed from Blanch’s work. Chakobsa, a Caucasian hunting language, becomes the language of a galactic diaspora in Herbert’s universe. Kanly, from a word for blood feud among the Islamic tribes of the Caucasus, signifies a vendetta between Dune’s great spacefaring dynasties. Kindjal, the personal weapon of the region’s Islamic warriors, becomes a knife favored by Herbert’s techno-aristocrats. As Blanch writes, “No Caucasian man was properly dressed without his kindjal.”
(tags: books dune frank-herbert lesley-blanch caucasus scifi)
Does Kafka really guarantee the order of messages? – SoftwareMill Tech Blog
tl;dr: nope —
It is worth to know that default configuration can lead to producing messages in the wrong order when a failure happens, and if message order is important for your application you can have a lot of trouble because someone told you about the guarantees that as you can see are not always true.
(tags: messaging kafka streaming ordering exactly-once distcomp events)
Solid advice on what to do in case the government shuts down the internet
….as is feared will happen right now in Hong Kong.
Dear Hong Kong friends: as people are worried about an internet shutdown, do not be afraid to make plans now. Find a VPN that you like and test it out. If Telegram is unusable, use Signal or WhatsApp (both are safe). If LIHGK is not usable, use Reddit or Facebook groups. Above all, please remember that one of the biggest enemies you face are rumors. These will get worse if Internet access is curtailed; be careful about unverified news. As a general rule, you are best served by using a very big site (like Facebook or Google) than something small. The very big sites are harder to shut down and to attack. They also have security teams that make it harder for people to interfere with them. Whatever backup plan you have, test it while things are still working, so you don’t have to learn it when under lots of stress. Twitter is another good choice for sharing information quickly. Google is also a safe option for chat/messages. All of these companies have experience fighting Chinese interference and will fight for you in case there is an effort to limit internet access in Hong Kong. My biggest piece of advice: do not forget to look at cat pictures once in a while to reduce anxiety and stress!
VPN recommendations, via Zeynep Tufekci: ‘the three I heard most about were: @getcloak (now encrypt.me), @theTunnelBear (PAID) and @FreedomeVPN. Don’t use free ones.’(tags: security privacy internet shutdown via:pinboard via:zeynep hong-kong)
Well Networked Self-Driving Cars Become A Surveillance Nightmare?
It’s time to establish precedents that the fleets of advanced cars on the road do not become a giant surveillance apparatus. That it should be illegal for police to request that car fleets perform surveillance for them. That companies operating fleets resist such requests when they come, in the courts if they have to.
(tags: cars driving future surveillance cctv anpr alpr police privacy)
How googly eyes solved one of today’s trickiest UX problems
‘A little robot at a library in Helsinki went from reviled to beloved, all because it got a new pair of plastic eyes.’ AWWWW
Irish firm’s device to detect IBS triggers praised by researchers
The FoodMarble device is quite cool:
Aire uses breath analysis to enable users to measure how well they absorb different types of foods, so they can identify what foods they can eat without discomfort. Researchers from the University of Auckland found that FoodMarble’s device successfully detected malabsorption of lactose and milk when put to the test against gold-standard clinical machines. The research was published in peer-reviewed journal, Nutrients.
(tags: foodmarble aire food fodmaps ireland ibs lactose-intolerance nutrition)
Roadside Picnic: Artifacts left by Visitors in the Zones
Rattling napkins, so-sos, empties and Dick The Tramp
(tags: roadside-picnic sf strugatsky-brothers the-zones stalker fiction)
Daring Fireball: Siri, Privacy, and Trust
My reading of this is that until last week, if you used Siri in any way, your recordings might be used in this “grading” process. If I graded Apple on the privacy and trust implications of this, I’d give them an F.
(tags: siri grading privacy data voice ml training fail apple)
Common ground: Holly Herndon in conversation with James Bridle
long read, but I am looking forward to it
(tags: cognition intelligence ai art holly-herndon james-bridle future)
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Kim Stanley Robinson calling for fully automated luxury communism
(tags: ksr kim-stanley-robinson future dystopia writing utopia scifi)
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proclamations of looming dystopia in the form of a mass climate-caused global refugee crisis put well-intentioned environmentalists on some shared ground with fear-mongering nativists, even as they’re attempting to convey a useful urgency about the future of the planet and the disproportionate impacts of climate crisis on the developing world. “Not to say there won’t be climate-related migration, but I think that portrayal of migrants as climate change refugees, especially these mass movements of people, feeds into the anti-immigrant environmental worldview,” said Hartmann. “Alarmist hyperbole and stereotypes around climate conflict and even climate mass refugee dislocation is based on kind of old, racially and colonially charged stereotypes of poor people of color being more prone to violence in times of scarcity.” A worsening climate crisis could easily become a cudgel for anti-immigration activists looking to use ecological preservation as an excuse to close borders, a means of gesturing toward doing something about climate crisis that aligns with the right’s other political goals. “As it becomes more difficult for Republicans to deny that climate change is a thing, this is a really likely next move for the right in climate politics,” said Hultgren.
(tags: environment racism politics climate-change future dystopia refugees immigration)
“Trees in early Ireland” – Augustine Henry Memorial Lecture, Royal Dublin Society
‘In this article an attempt is made to identify all the twenty-eight trees and shrubs which are listed in Old Irish law-text of about the eight century AD. There is also an account of trees which are mentioned in early Irish poetry and proverbs, as well as brief description of woods and woodland management in pre-Norman Ireland. The article concludes with a discussion of tree-references in early English, Scottish and Welsh sources.’ Particularly noteworthy are the 7 “lords of the wood” (airig fedo): 1. Dair ‘oak’ (Quercus robur, Quercus petraea) 2. Coil ‘hazel’ (Corylus avellana) 3. Cuilenn ‘holly’ (Ilex aquifolium) 4. Ibar ‘yew’ (Taxus baccata) 5. Uinnius ‘ash’ (Fraxinus excelsior) 6. Ochtach ‘Scots pine’ (Pinus sylvestris) 7. Aball ‘wild apple-tree’ (Malus pumila) (via Valen)
(tags: lords-of-the-wood woods forestry forest history ireland trees shrubs woodland rewilding via:valen)
Irish State told to delete ‘unlawful’ data on 3.2m citizens
This is amazing:
The State has been told it must delete data held on 3.2 million citizens, which was gathered as part of the roll-out of the Public Services Card, as there is no lawful basis for retaining it. In a highly critical report on its investigation into the card, the Data Protection Commission found there was no legal reason to make individuals obtain the card in order to access State services such as renewing a driving licence or applying for a college grant. […] Helen Dixon, the Data Protection Commissioner, told The Irish Times that forcing people to obtain such a card for services other than those provided by the department was “unlawful from a data-processing point of view”.
(tags: psc ireland politics data-privacy privacy data-collection dpo dpc)
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direct-to-consumer sales for carbon-sequestration tech — effectively crowdfunding CCS with a monthly subscription
(tags: co2 climate carbon-sequestration ccs crowdfunding)
What the Heck Is Crab Rangoon Anyway? – Gastro Obscura
this is great. Crab Rangoon (which I’ve never heard of on this side of the pond!) is a wholly concocted “preposterous dish”:
Crab rangoon is a pure distillation of tiki fusion weirdness. There was a strange, circular movement between tiki food and American Chinese food. Trader Vic’s created tiki food by making American Chinese food seem more tropical; American Chinese restaurants took his dishes right back and made them more American Chinese. The American Chinese version tends toward cheaper imitation crab, which is made, usually, of pollock blended with starch and other binders, crab flavoring, and red food coloring. Imitation crab simply wasn’t available to Trader Vic—it started being produced in 1975—and it’s also neither Polynesian nor Chinese, but Japanese. American Chinese crab rangoon is a 1940s crab-and-cream-cheese dip stuffed into a wonton and deep-fried—a pure distillation of tiki fusion weirdness. Crab rangoon is, after all, a preposterous dish. Many of the responses I got in my survey were sheepish, or seemed overly proud, as if to mask the problem of loving a dish that is utterly uncool, wildly outdated, and not even in the same ballpark as authenticity.
(tags: tiki kitsch food gastro crab crab-rangoon trader-vics usa history)
How YouTube Radicalized Brazil
YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil. A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life. Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors. Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates. And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation. YouTube’s recommendation system is engineered to maximize watchtime, among other factors, the company says, but not to favor any political ideology. The system suggests what to watch next, often playing the videos automatically, in a never-ending quest to keep us glued to our screens.
(tags: youtube politics brazil future grim engagement machine-learning google zika)
security-bulletins/2019-002.md at master · Netflix/security-bulletins
A variety of DOS attacks against HTTP/2 server-side implementations
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scraping data from publicly available sources is so much of an industry standard that it’s taught as a foundational skill (sans ethics) in most data science and machine-learning training. […] this story highlights the need for the tech industry to adapt its cultural norms and standard practices to keep pace with the rapid evolution of the technology itself, as well as the public’s awareness of how their data is used.
(tags: scraping privacy data ai big-data data-privacy flickr photos machine-learning)
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The patterns on the goods in this shop are designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their locations.
(tags: anpr alpr adversarial-classification privacy)
Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo – VICE
“During one conversation with my new manager in which I reiterated an early leave and upcoming bedrest, she told me that she had just listened to an NPR segment that debunked the benefits of bedrest,” she wrote. “She also shared that her doctor had ordered her to take bedrest, but that she ignored the order and worked up until the day before she delivered her son via cesarean section. My manager then emphasized in this same meeting that a management role was no longer guaranteed upon my return from maternity leave, and that she supported my interviewing for other roles at Google.”
(tags: pregnancy life hr work google peopleops leaks bedrest maternity-leave career)
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for AWS I/O optimized instance types. This is vital info to understand how I/O performance on AWS will degrade and what it’ll drop down to, for production workloads
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“Cracking down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted,” Berger said. “There’s going to be controversy here that we didn’t see with ISIS, because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”
(tags: gop corruption twitter politics filtering ai fascism republicans)
The White House is reportedly drafting an order to stop social media ‘bias’ – The Verge
One shooting was apparently an act of far-right terrorism, based on an anti-immigrant screed posted online. There was a fine line between its rhetoric and the views of major conservative figures like Tucker Carlson or Trump himself. Preemptively flagging the shooter — or one of several far-right killers before him — could have looked like egregious anti-conservative bias. And since predictive AI has sky-high error rates, it would probably catch a lot of non-violent conservative accounts (alongside those of non-conservatives) purely by accident. That’s already a recipe for a PR disaster, and it gets even dicier if Trump adds new legal punishments.
(via JK)(tags: filtering ai terrorism far-right fascism nazis trump twitter social-media)
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(via ITC)
(tags: bike-cameras cameras safety cycling)
Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer – Last Week in AWS
Amazon have filed a non-compete case against one of their sales execs who left and moved to Google. ouch
(tags: aws amazing noncompetes jobs work legal non-competes)
We Already Have the World’s Most Efficient Carbon Capture Technology
it’s the empress tree, which can absorb 10x to 100x the quantity of CO2-per-acre vs other tree species
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Wow, this is a great answer. As he notes, the Scrum-style process is flawed for big backend projects: “This style of short-term planning, direct customer contact, and continuous iteration is well suited to software with a simple core and lots of customer visible features that are incrementally useful. It is not so well suited to software which has a very simple interface and tons of hidden internal complexity, software which isn’t useful until it’s fairly complete, or leapfrog solutions the customer can’t imagine.” And he goes on to come up with something which works better for Google-style projects:
Our highest priority is to increase customer (and programmer) productivity and access to information. Work on the biggest, most frequently used problems you can find, and create the largest net impact. Don’t give the customer what they ask for; understand them, and revolutionize their world. Developers should create a Google Design Document (a fairly minimal, but structured design doc), explaining the project, what goals it hopes to achieve, and explains why it can’t be done in other ways. This document should be circulated with stakeholders, to get early feedback before the project gets underway. The written record is essential, as it assures there is a clear and agreed understanding of when the project is a success and how it aims to get there. At all phases of the project, critical design elements for larger components should be concisely explained and captured in a design document. Innovate in leapfrogs. It’s more important to finish and deploy a leapfrog than to attempt perfection. There is no perfection. Instead be flexible, and plan to constantly reinvent at every level of the stack. Deliver working software as soon as is reasonably possible, and no sooner. “Dogfood” projects internally before they are shipped externally. Make sure products meet high quality standards before shipping. The quality of the product is more important than the time it takes to achieve it.
(tags: agile architecture google scrum development coding projects project-management design)
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CarbonKit provides all the data and models necessary for calculating various greenhouse gas emissions in categories such as car, train and air transport, types of fuel or country-specific grid electricity, electrical appliances, agricultural and industrial processes and building materials.
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The goal is to take standard applications and JIT them to their AVX-512 equivalent such that we can fuzz 16 VMs at a time per thread. The net result of this work allows for high performance fuzzing (approx 40 billion to 120 billion instructions per second [the 2 trillion clickbait number is theoretical maximum]) depending on the target, while gathering differential coverage on code, register, and memory state. By gathering more than just code coverage we are able to track state of code deeper than just code coverage itself, allowing us to fuzz through things like memcmp() without any hooks or static analysis of the target at all. Further since we’re running emulated code we are able to run a soft MMU implementation which has byte-level permissions. This gives us stronger-than-ASAN memory protections, making bugs fail faster and cleaner.
(tags: fuzzing hardware performance programming virtualization avx-512 avx)
Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste – Scientific American
I didn’t know this:
At issue is coal’s content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or “whole,” coal that they aren’t a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels. Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a “stack shadow”—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant’s smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas.
(via Jamie McCarthy)(tags: via:jamiemccarthy coal environment nuclear pollution fly-ash coal-ash safety health)
Fast and flexible observability with canonical log lines
Interesting — basically crossing the line between service metrics and logging, with a simple, readable structured logging format, and a well-defined structure
(tags: stripe logging metrics canonical-logs structured-logs ops operability observability)
How To Talk To Older People In Your Life About Fake News
Caulfield said it’s common for older people to unwittingly share things that have extremist messages or iconography. “It’s very hard to see people posting stuff that may come from a kind of a dark place that they don’t realize is dark,” Caulfield said. “What do you do when your parents go from posting Minions to posting hard-right memes about cement milkshakes?”
this is where we’re at. (Thankfully not with _my_ parents, though)(tags: family fake-news propaganda facebook memes alt-right fascism)
AWS S3 Event Notifications have “probably once” delivery
you get the following Messages that are delivered once; Messages that are delivered multiple times; Messages that are not delivered This is in fact equivalent to “no guarantees at all” but the phrase “probably once” has a certain appeal to it. In my case I have an application that writes files to S3 at a regular interval. These files are processed by a lambda so they can be loaded into a database. This database is ultimately used in a customer facing application, so any duplicates gets noticed very quickly. Somehow I needed to come up with a way to deal with this pecuilar behavior of S3 Event Notifications.
Christ, what a mess. Sounds like S3 Event Notifications are best ignored for production use. Disappointing :((tags: aws s3 event-notifications consistency durability reliability ops)
Loss of Arctic’s Reflective Sea Ice Will Advance Global Warming by 25 Years
“Losing the reflective power of Arctic sea ice will lead to warming equivalent to one trillion tons of CO2 and advance the 2ºC threshold by 25 years. Any rational policy would make preventing this a top climate priority for world leaders,” said Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at Scripps. [….] Computer forecast models are actually underestimating the extent of this trend. “We analyzed 40 climate models from modeling centers around the world,” said Eisenman, a professor of climate, atmospheric science, and physical oceanography at Scripps. “Not a single one of the models simulated as much Arctic sea ice retreat per degree of global warming as has been observed during recent decades.”
(tags: arctic climate-change climate global-warming fear ice earth)
Latacora – How (not) to sign a JSON object
good notes on authentication of API consumers using a HMAC. colmmacc also noted that using a constant-time comparison function of the expected and sent values, is important to avoid timing attacks. “A standard strcmp/memcmp isn’t secure and I still see this error in 2019 :(“
(tags: hmac mac authentication crypto security json apis api coding signing)
twitter thread on how same-sex romance was added to The Sims back in 1998
Phil Salvador on Twitter: “Sims developer Don Hopkins released a bunch of design documents from The Sims, including this one from August 1998 with his notes about romance: […] It’s incredible to see the internal discussion about romance in The Sims written out so strongly like this.”
(tags: don-hopkins games history the-sims design romance 1990s)
Data isn’t the new oil, it’s the new CO2
great point.
We should not endlessly be defending arguments along the lines that “people choose to willingly give up their freedom in exchange for free stuff online”. The argument is flawed for two reasons. First the reason that is usually given – people have no choice but to consent in order to access the service, so consent is manufactured. We are not exercising choice in providing data but rather resigned to the fact that they have no choice in the matter. The second, less well known but just as powerful, argument is that we are not only bound by other people’s data; we are bound by other people’s consent. In an era of machine learning-driven group profiling, this effectively renders my denial of consent meaningless. Even if I withhold consent, say I refuse to use Facebook or Twitter or Amazon, the fact that everyone around me has joined means there are just as many data points about me to target and surveil. The issue is systemic, it is not one where a lone individual can make a choice and opt out of the system. We perpetuate this myth by talking about data as our own individual “oil”, ready to sell to the highest bidder. In reality I have little control over this supposed resource which acts more like an atmospheric pollutant, impacting me and others in myriads of indirect ways. There are more relations – direct and indirect – between data related to me, data about me, data inferred about me via others than I can possibly imagine, let alone control with the tools we have at our disposal today.
(tags: data ethics data-privacy privacy surveillance surveillance-capitalism co2 future profiling consent gdpr)
Ikea Symfonisk review: affordable, fun Sonos speakers – The Verge
looks like they’ve done a decent job on getting Sonos into IKEA furniture
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Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model.
ouch.(tags: deanonymization deidentification anonymization anonymisation gdpr privacy data-privacy papers)
Aurora Postgres – Disastrous experience : aws
wow. absolute car crash of a thread regarding Postgres-on-Aurora
“Let’s talk about peeing in space.”
Great Twitter thread by @MaryRobinette on the intricacies of bodily functions in zero-G
(tags: space zero-g gravity peeing bodily-functions funny shit)
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Deep learning techniques have become the method of choice for researchers working on algorithmic aspects of recommender systems. With the strongly increased interest in machine learning in general, it has, as a result, become difficult to keep track of what represents the state-of-the-art at the moment, e.g., for top-n recommendation tasks. At the same time, several recent publications point out problems in today’s research practice in applied machine learning, e.g., in terms of the reproducibility of the results or the choice of the baselines when proposing new models. In this work, we report the results of a systematic analysis of algorithmic proposals for top-n recommendation tasks. Specifically, we considered 18 algorithms that were presented at top-level research conferences in the last years. Only 7 of them could be reproduced with reasonable effort. For these methods, it however turned out that 6 of them can often be outperformed with comparably simple heuristic methods, e.g., based on nearest-neighbor or graph-based techniques. The remaining one clearly outperformed the baselines but did not consistently outperform a well-tuned non-neural linear ranking method. Overall, our work sheds light on a number of potential problems in today’s machine learning scholarship and calls for improved scientific practices in this area.
(via Halvar Flake)(tags: via:halvarflake deep-learning machine-learning ml papers algorithms top-n heuristics)
Bulgarian tax authority hacked, majority of population’s tax details leaked
Well this is pretty much the worst-case scenario for a tax authority:
A 20-year-old man was arrested in Sofia, Bulgaria, on Tuesday afternoon and charged with an unprecedented hack of the country’s tax authority, ending with the theft of sensitive personal records from nearly every adult in Bulgaria, according to local reports. The suspect, whose name is Kristiyan Boykov, according to Bulgarian media, faces up to eight years in prison. Police say others may have been involved. The country’s officials have spent the week revealing and apologizing for the pillaging of Bulgaria’s National Revenue Agency (NRA) in June, Reuters reported. Personal and financial data for millions of taxpayers was leaked by email to local journalists. The data leak includes names, addresses, income and earnings information, and personal identification numbers, totaling 21 gigabytes and extending back over a decade.
Margaret Hamilton interviewed by The Guardian
good interview with the software engineering pioneer
(tags: margaret-hamilton tech software the-guardian interviews history apollo)