At wit’s end with my preschooler : Parenting
This /r/parenting thread has some good advice on dealing with kids’ meltdowns. I wish I had this a few years ago
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‘Best practices for successfully managing memory for Apache Spark applications on Amazon EMR’, on the AWS Big Data blog. ‘In this blog post, I detailed the possible out-of-memory errors, their causes, and a list of best practices to prevent these errors when submitting a Spark application on Amazon EMR. My colleagues and I formed these best practices after thorough research and understanding of various Spark configuration properties and testing multiple Spark applications. These best practices apply to most of out-of-memory scenarios, though there might be some rare scenarios where they don’t apply. However, we believe that this blog post provides all the details needed so you can tweak parameters and successfully run a Spark application.’
Category: Uncategorized
Serverless for data scientists
good write-up of Zappa, a helper lib for running serverless Python web apps on Lambda and API Gateway
(tags: zappa talks presentations python data-science serverless lambda api-gateway aws)
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Your regular reminder that lobbying by tax-preparation agencies has ensured that US taxation is an overcomplex mess which requires you pay a third party to operate:
Intuit and H&R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues. Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block in the last two election cycles.
(tags: intuit hr-block taxes us-politics lobbying sleaze irs)
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This is really useful data. As expected the c5ns win, but good to validate that!
I used this to benchmark S3’s performance from all 155 EC2 instance types in existence. I put all the data in an interactive spreadsheet. […] Below is the max throughput I got from each instance type, but the spreadsheet shows you what object sizes and thread counts you need to get that performance.
(tags: ec2 instances instance-types hardware cloud s3 performance benchmarks ops)
ankane/strong_migrations: Catch unsafe Rails migrations at dev time
Strong Migrations detects potentially dangerous operations in [Rails database] migrations, prevents them from running by default, and provides instructions on safer ways to do what you want.
(tags: database migrations rails releases ops databases mysql ruby gems)
Claremont Court, Crescent and Close; Clareville Court and Grove; Claremont Lawns
A nice bit of local history
(tags: slutsend west-farm claremont clareville glasnevin history dublin d11)
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super-cheap ancient Thinkpads etc., ideal for low cost linux laptop usage
(tags: cheap thinkpads laptops linux via:markdennehy hardware)
How Gudetama, a lazy egg yolk with a butt, became an unstoppable cultural phenomenon – Vox
Gudetama isn’t so much about relaxation as about the unbearableness of the world around it. Gudetama, in its golden nakedness, questions the meaning of life. If idleness is true bliss, Gudetama asks, then isn’t anything more than that painful?
(tags: characters culture japan gudetama eggs odd ass yolks idleness laziness)
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Paper from Amy Orben, Andrew K. Przybylski, of the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, and the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford:
The notion that digital-screen engagement decreases adolescent well-being has become a recurring feature in public, political, and scientific conversation. The current level of psychological evidence, however, is far removed from the certainty voiced by many commentators. There is little clear-cut evidence that screen time decreases adolescent well-being, and most psychological results are based on single-country, exploratory studies that rely on inaccurate but popular self-report measures of digital-screen engagement. In this study, which encompassed three nationally representative large-scale data sets from Ireland, the United States, and the United Kingdom (N = 17,247 after data exclusions) and included time-use-diary measures of digital-screen engagement, we used both exploratory and confirmatory study designs to introduce methodological and analytical improvements to a growing psychological research area. We found little evidence for substantial negative associations between digital-screen engagement — measured throughout the day or particularly before bedtime — and adolescent well-being.
(tags: screens screen-time teens mental-health psychology papers research)
Waterford Distillery on Whisky “Finishing”
Here’s an inexpensive illusion for a whisky brand to acquire more shelf presence. Purchase three barrels of whisky from a generic pool of ex-bourbon matured stocks. Re-rack a couple of these barrels into new barrels – a sherry cask, or maybe you’d like the name of a French chateau to add more gravitas to a label and pull another rabbit out of the hat? Give it a few weeks, then bottle each of them in turn. Instead of one bottle on the shelf, you have three. You’ll more easily catch the eye of the whisky consumer as they walk by, pondering the nature of what ‘finishing’ actually means. These days, the shelves of retailers and at airports are rammed up with all sorts of fancy ‘finishes’ – which is to say a whisky that has been re-racked into another barrel and left to mature for a period of time; perhaps up to a couple of years, but usually just a few brief months.
Well said. I’m looking forward to their whisky…(tags: whiskey whisky waterford-distillery booze finishing distilling barrels)
Formal GDPR complaint against IAB Europe’s “cookie wall” and GDPR consent guidance
Fantastic :) A formal complaint has been filed with the Irish Data Protection Commission against IAB Europe, the tracking industry’s primary lobbying organization:
Tracking and cookie walls: Visitors to IAB Europe’s website, www.iabeurope.eu, are confronted with a “cookie wall” that forces them to accept tracking by Google, Facebook, and others, which may then monitor them. Dr. Ryan has complained to the Irish Data Protection Commission that this is a breach of the GDPR, which protects people in Europe from being forced to accept processing for their data for any purpose other than the provision of the requested service. “One should not be forced to accept web-wide profiling by unknown companies as a condition of access to a website”, said Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave. “This would be like Facebook preventing you from accessing the Newsfeed until you have clicked a button permitting it to share your data with Cambridge Analytica.” Simon McGarr of McGarr Solicitors, who has worked on data protection cases for Digital Rights Ireland, represents Dr Ryan in his complaint. Mr McGarr said “Where companies rely on consent to process people’s data it is critical that this is more than a box ticking exercise. For consent to be valid, it must be freely given, informed, specific and unambiguous. There’s nothing intrinsically good or bad in cookie technology – what matters is ensuring it’s applied in a way which respects individuals’ rights.” Challenging IAB Europe’s industry guidance on the GDPR: The complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commission will also test IAB Europe’s GDPR guidance to the online advertising industry. IAB Europe has put itself forward as a primary designer of the online tracking industry’s data protection notices. It has told major media organizations, tracking companies, and advertising technology companies that they can sidestep the GDPR, and rely instead on the ePrivacy Directive, which IAB Europe has interpreted as more lax in protecting personal data. IAB Europe has widely promoted the notion that access to a website or app can be made conditional on consent for data processing that is not necessary for the requested service to be delivered, despite the clear requirements of the GDPR, and statements from several national data protection authorities, that say otherwise. “This complaint will make it plain that the media and advertising industry should not rely on IAB Europe for GDPR guidance”, said Dr Ryan.
(tags: dpc ireland brave iab-europe iab cookies tracking gdpr law eu)
The 9 Categories of Reply Guys
“#WomeninSTEM get a lot of “Reply Guys” who repeat the same unhelpful comments. @shrewshrew and I (a woman & a man in science) have attempted to catalog those replies, to save us all the trouble of writing new responses every time. presenting THE NINE TYPES OF REPLY GUYS”
(tags: twitter thread humor mansplaining sexism misogyny reply-guys funny)
YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Let Toxic Videos Run Rampant – Bloomberg
As of 2017, YouTube’s policy for how content moderators handle conspiracy theories didn’t exist, according to a former moderator who specialized in foreign-language content. At the end of the year, fewer than twenty people were on the staff for “trust and safety,” the unit overseeing content policies, according to a former staffer. The team had to “fight tooth and nail” for more resources from the tech giant, this person said. A YouTube spokeswoman said that the division has grown “significantly” since but declined to share exact numbers. In February of 2018, the video calling the Parkland shooting victims “crisis actors” went viral on YouTube’s trending page. Policy staff suggested soon after limiting recommendations on the page to vetted news sources. YouTube management rejected the proposal, according to a person with knowledge of the event. The person didn’t know the reasoning behind the rejection, but noted that YouTube was then intent on accelerating its viewing time for videos related to news.
(tags: youtube google alphabet moderation conspiracy-theories news virality engagement)
April Fool’s Day is upon us – What’s your best prank given to or received by your kids? : Parenting
heh heh. revenge next year will be sweet
(tags: pranks april-fools kids parenting)
Tesla lane-recognition autopilot fooled by three small stickers
‘Tesla autopilot module’s lane recognition function has a good robustness in an ordinary external environment (no strong light, rain, snow, sand and dust interference), but it still doesn’t handle the situation correctly in our test scenario. This kind of attack is simple to deploy, and the materials are easy to obtain. As we talked in the previous introduction of Tesla’s lane recognition function, Tesla uses a pure computer vision solution for lane recognition, and we found in this attack experiment that the vehicle driving decision is only based on computer vision lane recognition results. Our experiments proved that this architecture has security risks and reverse lane recognition is one of the necessary functions for autonomous driving in non-closed roads. In the scene we build, if the vehicle knows that the fake lane is pointing to the reverse [oncoming traffic] lane, it should ignore this fake lane and then it could avoid a traffic accident.’
(tags: adversarial-classification cars ml machine-learning tesla driving self-driving-cars)
We Built A Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground.
The promise of the internet was that it was going to give voice to the voiceless, visibility to the invisible, and power to the powerless. That’s what originally excited me about it. That’s what originally excited a ton of people about it. It was supposed to be an engine of equality. Suddenly, everyone could tell their story. Suddenly, everyone could sing their song. Suddenly, that one weird kid in Helena, Montana, could find another weird kid just like them in Bakersfield, California, and they could talk and know they weren’t alone. Suddenly, we didn’t need anybody’s permission to publish. We put our stories and songs and messages and artwork where the world could find them. For a while it was beautiful, it was messy, and it was punk as fuck. We all rolled up our sleeves and helped to build it. We were the ones who were supposed to guide it there, and we failed. We failed because we were naive enough to believe everyone had the same goals we did. We failed because we underestimated greed. We failed because we didn’t pay attention to history. We failed because our definition of we wasn’t big enough. We designed and built platforms that undermined democracy across the world. We designed and built technology that is used to round up immigrants and refugees and put them in cages. We designed and built platforms that young, stupid, hateful men use to demean and shame women. We designed and built an entire industry that exploits the poor in order to make old rich men even richer.
Announcing Lucet: Fastly’s native WebAssembly compiler and runtime
Lucet is designed to take WebAssembly beyond the browser, and build a platform for faster, safer execution on Fastly’s edge cloud. WebAssembly is already supported by many languages including Rust, TypeScript, C, and C++, and many more have WebAssembly support in development. We want to enable our customers to go beyond Fastly VCL and move even more logic to the edge, and use any language they choose. Lucet is the engine behind Terrarium, our experimental platform for edge computation using WebAssembly. Soon, we will make it available on Fastly’s edge cloud as well. A major design requirement for Lucet was to be able to execute on every single request that Fastly handles. That means creating a WebAssembly instance for each of the tens of thousands of requests per second in a single process, which requires a dramatically lower runtime footprint than possible with a browser JavaScript engine. Lucet can instantiate WebAssembly modules in under 50 microseconds, with just a few kilobytes of memory overhead. By comparison, Chromium’s V8 engine takes about 5 milliseconds, and tens of megabytes of memory overhead, to instantiate JavaScript or WebAssembly programs. With Lucet, Fastly’s edge cloud can execute tens of thousands of WebAssembly programs simultaneously, in the same process, without compromising security. The Lucet compiler and runtime work together to ensure each WebAssembly program is allowed access to only its own resources. This means that Fastly’s customers will be able to write and run programs in more common, general-purpose languages, without compromising the security and safety we’ve always offered.
(tags: lucet cdn edge-computing wasm webassembly fastly rust c c++ typescript)
What is cultural Marxism? The alt-right meme in Suella Braverman’s speech in Westminster
Cultural Marxism is a theory that started in the early 20th century, which was popularised in the aftermath of the socialist revolution (this great piece in the Guardian explains it in depth). The idea was that Marxism should extend beyond class and into cultural equality and that, through major institutions like schools and the media, cultural values could progressively be changed. The theory was later adopted by the philosophers at the Frankfurt School who posited that the only way to destroy capitalism was to destroy it in all walks of life; where, not just classes, but all genders, races, and religions could live in society equally. While this may seem unimportant, the Frankfurt School’s adoption of – and modifications to – cultural Marxism is where the conspiracy theory truly begins. The Frankfurt School’s predominantly Jewish members of the school were forced to flee to America by the Nazis in the 1940s, where many went on to teach, write, and commentate in mainstream institutions. This, conspiracy theorists claim, is when cultural Marxists began to poison the West – and when cultural Marxists began their attempts to undermine its values. Cultural Marxism’s move from political theory to full memeification was fast-tracked when it was used by mass murderer Anders Breivik. Breivik was the sole perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks in which 77 people died across several sites. Before committing his attacks, much like the Christchurch shooter, Breivik sent an enormous personal manifesto to a group of friends and family which outlined his anti-multiculturalist, racist, and misogynist ideals. In the manifesto, he spends huge chunks of time crediting the writers who pushed cultural Marxist conspiracy theories into the mainstream. The 1,000-page document references “cultural Marxism” and “cultural Marxists” nearly 650 times. For the growing audience of anti-Semitic, alt-right white supremacists online, his musings have turned him into an icon – and “cultural Marxism” has become a foundational alt-right belief. It became an easy label for those white supremacists looking for an umbrella term to describe the people at which their anger about diversity, feminism, and religious freedom was directed. Cultural Marxist soon became a signal to mean anyone vaguely left-leaning – in some cases, even if this simply meant those who didn’t agree with white supremacy.
(tags: antisemitism alt-right suella-braverman marxism nazis fascism history memes dogwhistles)
Why Is AI Art Copyright So Complicated?
Claims that AI is creating art on its own and that machines are somehow entitled to copyright for this art are simply naive or overblown, and they cloud real concerns about authorship disputes between humans. The introduction of machine learning as an art tool is ironically increasing human involvement, not decreasing it. Specifically, the number of people who can potentially be credited as coauthors of an artwork has skyrocketed. This is because machine learning tools are typically built on a stack of software solutions, each layer having been designed by individual persons or groups of people, all of whom are potential candidates for authorial credit.
Pilots had 40 seconds to fix error in tests of Boeing 737 Max flight
During flight simulations recreating the problems with the doomed Lion Air plane, pilots discovered that they had less than 40 seconds to override an automated system on Boeing’s new jets and avert disaster. The pilots tested a crisis situation similar to what investigators suspect went wrong in the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last fall. In the tests, a single sensor failed, triggering software designed to help prevent a stall. Once that happened, the pilots had just moments to disengage the system and avoid an unrecoverable nose dive of the Boeing 737 Max, according to two people involved in the testing in recent days.
lucagrulla/cw: The best way to tail AWS CloudWatch Logs from your terminal
It even supports “tail -f”. Genius
(tags: tail logs cloudwatch aws ops)
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You have got to be joking.
a group of left-leaning Swedish MEPs have revealed that they pressed the wrong button, and have asked to have the record corrected. They have issued a statement saying they’d intended to open a debate on amendments to the Directive so they could help vote down Articles 11 and 13. We lost on a technicality, and there is no recourse. This is the most significant piece of internet regulation ever undertaken by a democratic government (that is, excluding Russian and Chinese internet regulations). It will do untold damage to the whole internet. And it’s because someone pushed the wrong button.
(tags: sweden meps fail voting evoting censorship article-13 eu europe)
“Baba Is You” is Turing-complete
‘This video demonstrates my design for a mechanism in #BabaIsYou which implements Cellular Automaton Rule 110, which suffices to prove the game is Turing-Complete!’ The write-up is here: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sqrh1m
(tags: baba-is-you games turing-completeness computing)
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Yukio-Pegio Gunji and Yuta Nishiyama from Kobe University, along with Andrew Adamatzky from the aptly named Unconventional Computing Centre at the University of the West of England decided they needed a new way to build logic gates using crabs [….] The colonies of soldier crabs that inhabit the lagoons of Pacific atolls display a unique swarming behavior in their native habitat. When in a swarm of hundreds of individuals, the front of the swarm is driven by random turbulence in the group, while the back end of the swarm simply follows the leaders. Somehow, this is a successful evolutionary strategy, but it can also be exploited to build logic gates using only crabs. The team constructed a Y-shaped maze for a pair of crabs to act as an OR gate. When two soldier crabs are placed at the top of the ‘Y’, they move forward until they meet and exit the maze through the output. This idea can be expanded to a slightly more complex AND gate, functionally identical to the electron-powered AND gate in a 7408 logic chip.
(tags: logic-gates logic soldier-crabs crabs computing hardware swarming nature animals via:theophite)
What causes Ruby memory bloat? – Joyful Bikeshedding
Another likely suspect is the memory allocator. After all, Nate Berkopec and Heroku remarked that fiddling with the memory allocator (either replacing it altogether with jemalloc, or setting the magical environment variable MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2) drastically lowers [Ruby] memory usage.
Fix glibc’s MALLOC_ARENA_MAX variable
It seems that recent versions of glibc (up to glibc 2.25 at least) have some dysfunctional behaviour around malloc’s arenas on multi-CPU systems, massively inflating the number of arenas allocated, which inflate reported VM sizes and (for multi-threaded Ruby services in particular) fragmenting memory badly. See also https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/testing-cedar-14-memory-use Presto issue reported with glibc malloc arena-per-thread behaviour resulting in Presto OOMs: https://github.com/prestodb/presto/issues/8993 Hadoop affected by the inflated VM sizes reported as a side effect: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-7154 Good detailed writeup from IBM’s WebSphere blog: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/kevgrig/entry/linux_glibc_2_10_rhel_6_malloc_may_show_excessive_virtual_memory_usage
(tags: ops ruby memory malloc allocation arenas tuning fragmentation)
The end of open: BBC blocks its podcasts on Google
Talking to Podnews, a BBC spokesperson said that Google is required to sign a licence to link to their podcasts; and that the Distribution Policy also requires Google to supply user data to the BBC. There has been a “consultation with Google”, and the BBC “has no choice but to stop Google from making podcasts available via Google products.”
‘A Swiss cheese-like material’ that can solve equations | Penn Today
This is incredibly cool.
“For example,” Engheta says, “if you were trying to plan the acoustics of a concert hall, you could write an integral equation where the inputs represent the sources of the sound, such as the position of speakers or instruments, as well as how loudly they play. Other parts of the equation would represent the geometry of the room and the material its walls are made of. Solving that equation would give you the volume at different points in the concert hall.” In the integral equation that describes the relationship between sound sources, room shape and the volume at specific locations, the features of the room — the shape and material properties of its walls — can be represented by the equation’s kernel. This is the part the Penn Engineering researchers are able to represent in a physical way, through the precise arrangement of air holes in their metamaterial Swiss cheese. “Our system allows you to change the inputs that represent the locations of the sound sources by changing the properties of the wave you send into the system,” Engheta says, “but if you want to change the shape of the room, for example, you will have to make a new kernel.”
(tags: computing analog computers hardware papers swiss-cheese equations)
Cloud Shell – Google Cloud Platform
I had no idea about this — every google user has instant in-browser shell access to a Linux VM with 1.7GB of RAM
Troubleshooting Problems With Native (Off-Heap) Memory in Java Applications
quite good advice on dealing with memory problems caused by off-heap DirectByteBuffers in java 8. ‘Furthermore, the JDK caches one or more DirectByteBuffers per thread, and by default, there is no limit on the number or size of these buffers. As a result, if a Java app creates many threads that perform I/O using HeapByteBuffers, and/or these buffers are big, the JVM process may end up using a lot of additional native memory that looks like a leak’. ‘java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Direct buffer memory’ is the indicative error message.
(tags: java off-heap buffers memory memory-leaks gc jdk ops)
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The Fake Disease That Saved Lives:
On October 1943, the Nazis raided a Jewish ghetto in Rome, and many Jews fled to Fatebenefratelli, where Borromeo admitted them as “patients”. The refugees were given a new [fake] fatal disease—Syndrome K—in order to identify them from the actual patients.
(tags: wwii syndrome-k fakes diseases rome giovanni-borromeo hospitals jews resistance)
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The Go implementation of the Common Expression Language (CEL). CEL is a non-Turing complete language designed to be portable and fast. It is well suited to embedded applications expression evaluation with familiar syntax and features, protocol buffer support, and not needing the sandboxing needed for a runtime like JavaScript or Lua.
(tags: scripting golang go cel languages coding configuration config embedded)
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‘a cross-over inspired by many other great hash algorithms, which proves substantially faster than existing variants of xxHash, across basically all dimensions.’
(tags: hashing algorithms xxhash xxh3 checksums performance)
2-hour-long meetings can impair cognitive functioning
‘Study shoes three people in a conference room over 2 hours can result in a Co2 level that can impair cognitive functioning. Ie. If you’re making decisions at the end of the meeting, you’re mentally less qualified to do so.’ Well, I’d say that fatigue could also result in this, but it’s interesting to see how unhealthy the typical office environment can be. (via Jeff Dean)
(tags: via:jeffdean meetings work offices brain co2 cognition)
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Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, this report provides a snapshot of an industry [news media] caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology. After reviewing common methods of “information laundering” of radical and racist messages through the press, Phillips uses journalists’ own words to propose a set of editorial “better practices” intended to reduce manipulation and harm. As social and digital media are leveraged to reconfigure the information landscape, Phillips argues that this new domain requires journalists to take what they know about abuses of power and media manipulation in traditional information ecosystems; and apply and adapt that knowledge to networked actors, such as white nationalist networks online.
(tags: media news harassment nazis fascism overton-window journalism racism press)
Ash Sarkar on how to counter the new right
‘a) Acknowledge that the fascist threat has changed. It’s political operations are far more nebulous and diffuse; it works in political institutions and dark corners of the internet; it will adopt and distort liberal tropes and talking points. b) Deal with the fact that traditional forms of policing will be of little effectiveness in countering it. Those with the most power to inhibit the dissemination of far-right and racist ideology are the digital platforms they rely on: reddit, Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. c) Transform current affairs media. For too long, producers and editors have taken the alt-right at their word, and framed issues as free speech/limits of offensive humour. That must change. Unless you’re willing to do rigorous research first, don’t commission the debate. d) Overhaul the teaching of PSHE & Citizenship in education to prepare young people for the desensitising and extreme content they will see online. Create space for healthy debate and discussion in respectful environments. Don’t let groomers take advantage of their curiousity. e) Get a very big bin, and put Melanie Phillips, Rod Liddle, and Douglas Murray in it. Then fire the bin into outer space.’
(tags: alt-right fascism media politics internet social-media twitter reddit ash-sarkar)
Why Do so Many Egyptian Statues Have Broken Noses? – Artsy
wow, TIL. ‘The ancient Egyptians, it’s important to note, ascribed important powers to images of the human form. They believed that the essence of a deity could inhabit an image of that deity, or, in the case of mere mortals, part of that deceased human being’s soul could inhabit a statue inscribed for that particular person. These campaigns of vandalism were therefore intended to “deactivate an image’s strength,” as Bleiberg put it.’
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‘one captain calling the flight manual “inadequate and almost criminally insufficient”‘ ‘The disclosures found by The News reference problems during Boeing 737 Max 8 flights with an autopilot system, and they were all during takeoff and nose-down situations while trying to gain altitude.’
(tags: boeing planes safety autopilots 737max)
What (And Why) I’m Stockpiling For Brexit
Jack Monroe’s shopping list. may be coming in handy soon, unfortunately
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Hardin’s paper starts with a history of the English Commons — publicly held lands that were collectively owned and managed — and the claim that commons routinely fell prey to the selfish human impulse to overgraze your livestock on public land (and that even non-selfish people would overgraze their animals because they knew that their more-selfish neighbors would do so even if they didn’t). But this isn’t what actually happened to the Commons: they were stable and well-managed until other factors (e.g. rich people trying to acquire even more land) destabilized them. Hardin wasn’t just inventing false histories out of a vacuum. He was, personally, a nasty piece of work: a white supremacist and eugenicist, and the Tragedy of the Commons paper is shot through with this vile ideology, arguing that poor people should not be given charity lest they breed beyond their means (Hardin also campaigned against food aid). Hardin was a director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the white nationalist Social Contract Press, and co-founded anti-immigrant groups like Californians for Population Stabilization and The Environmental Fund.
(tags: commons capitalism racism garrett-hardin tragedy-of-the-commons politics privatization public-ownership)
How Theranos used the USPTO to defraud investors and patients
When legendary grifter Elizabeth Holmes was 19 years old, she conceived of a medical device that could perform extensive diagnostics in an eyeblink from only a single drop of blood; she had no idea how such a device would work or whether it was even possible, but that didn’t stop her from drawing up a patent application for her “invention” and repeatedly submitting to the patent office until, eventually, she was awarded a patent for what amounted to a piece of uninspiring design fiction. For Holmes, the patent was key to convincing investors, partners, and patients that her massive, years-long fraud (a company called “Theranos” bilked investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars) was legit; the USPTO helped her out by trumpeting the importance of patents to “inventors” like Holmes, comparing her to Benjamin Franklin in their public communications. Patents are only supposed to be issued for devices with “utility” — that is, they have to actually work before you can get a patent for them. But it’s been decades since the USPTO has paid meaningful attention to this criterion when evaluating applications, handing out patents for imaginary “inventions” to con artists, delusional hucksters, and other “inventors” who are willing to pay the filing fees that keep the lights on at the Patent Office. And since most people only have a vague idea of the rigor used in patent examination, these patents for design fiction can be used as impressive “proof” when crooks set out to deceive their marks. [….] ‘More than a decade after Holmes’ first patent application, Theranos had still not managed to build a reliable blood-testing device. By then the USPTO had granted it hundreds of patents. Holmes had been constructing a fantasy world from the minute she started writing her first application, and the agency was perfectly happy to play along.’
(tags: fraud patents uspto theranos inventions boing-boing)
National Climate Assessment: How to deal with despair over climate change – Vox
The dominant narrative around climate change tells us that it’s our fault. We left the lights on too long, didn’t close the refrigerator door, and didn’t recycle our paper. I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. … Don’t give in to that shame. It’s not yours. The oil and gas industry is gaslighting you. That same IPCC report revealed that a mere 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global climate emissions. These people are locking you and everything you love into a tomb. You have every right to be pissed all the way off. And we have to make them hear about it.
(tags: climate climate-change anger capitalism ipcc fossil-fuels future)
camelcamelcamel, a free Amazon price tracker
‘Our free Amazon price tracker monitors millions of products and alerts you when prices drop, helping you decide when to buy.’ Supports amazon.co.uk, handily
Why do remote meetings suck so much?
Unstructured, “caucus”-style meetings suck particularly badly for remote workers.
When audio/visual delays exacerbate the caucus problem for people who always get the floor in meetings, it looks to them like a new problem. It’s not new; it’s just normally experienced by people in meetings with lower caucus scores. Leadership doesn’t notice because people in leadership positions tend to have higher caucus scores, and being in a position of leadership also tends to boost your caucus score (basically because people interrupt you less). But that’s a weakness of the way we identify decision-makers: good ideas come from everywhere, and especially from people who do a lot of thinking and observing before they say anything. Making meetings more accessible to remote employees doesn’t just make meetings more accessible to remote employees; it makes meetings more accessible to everyone.
(tags: team meetings remote communication management caucus-score remote-work)
Why did Sumerians use the sexagesimal system?
TIL that 60 is countable using the fingers of both hands, and this ancient Mesopotamian counting technique is still used in India, Pakistan, Indochina, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria and Egypt apparently
(tags: sexagesimal 12 60 counting fingers history sumerian mesopotamia)
Algorithms aren’t racist. Your skin is just too dark.
More than a few observers have recommended that instead of pointing out failures, I should simply make sure I use additional lighting. Silence is not the answer. The suggestion to get more lights to increase illumination in an already lit room is a stop gap solution. Suggesting people with dark skin keep extra lights around to better illuminate themselves misses the point. Should we change ourselves to fit technology or make technology that fits us?
(tags: ethics racism ai algorithms cameras melanin skin video videoconferencing)
“Understanding Real-World Concurrency Bugs in Go” (paper)
‘Go advocates for the usage of message passing as the means of inter-thread communication and provides several new concurrency mechanisms and libraries to ease multi-threading programming. It is important to understand the implication of these new proposals and the comparison of message passing and shared memory synchronization in terms of program errors, or bugs. Unfortunately, as far as we know, there has been no study on Go’s concurrency bugs. In this paper, we perform the first systematic study on concurrency bugs in real Go programs. We studied six popular Go software including Docker, Kubernetes, and gRPC. We analyzed 171 concurrency bugs in total, with more than half of them caused by non-traditional, Go-specific problems. Apart from root causes of these bugs, we also studied their fixes, performed experiments to reproduce them, and evaluated them with two publicly-available Go bug detectors. Overall, our study provides a better understanding on Go’s concurrency models and can guide future researchers and practitioners in writing better, more reliable Go software and in developing debugging and diagnosis tools for Go.’ (via Bill de hOra)
(tags: via:dehora golang go concurrency bugs lint synchronization threading threads bug-detection)
Paper: Hyperscan: A Fast Multi-pattern Regex Matcher for Modern CPUs
a software based, large-scale regex matcher designed to match multiple patterns at once (up to tens of thousands of patterns at once) and to ‘stream‘ (that is, match patterns across many different ‘stream writes’ without holding on to all the data you’ve ever seen). To my knowledge this makes it unique. RE2 is software based but doesn’t scale to large numbers of patterns; nor does it stream (although it could). It occupies a fundamentally different niche to Hyperscan; we compared the performance of RE2::Set (the RE2 multiple pattern interface) to Hyperscan a while back. Most back-tracking matchers (such as libpcre) are one pattern at a time and are inherently incapable of streaming, due to their requirement to backtrack into arbitrary amounts of old input.
(tags: regex regular-expressions algorithms hyperscan sensory-networks regexps simd nfa)
Thought-provoking thread on Facebook/YouTube content moderation
Extremely thought-provoking thread on the horrors of Facebook/YouTube content moderation, from Andrew Strait:
My time doing this work convinced me there is no ultimate mitigation measure for the mental harm it causes. Automation is not a silver bullet – it requires massive labeled data sets by moderators on a continuing basis to ensure accuracy and proper model fit. There are steps to make this process less worse, but IMO it all comes back to a basic question – what technologies are worth the incredible human suffering and cost that moderators will inevitably experience? Is image search worth it? Is YouTube? Is Facebook? I don’t have an answer. But these platforms create the need for this kind of horrific work and that must be considered at the forefront of design and deployment of any platform, not as an afterthought.
(tags: horror moderation youtube facebook video content mental-health andrew-strait image-search images labelling google)
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Nice new workflow system built on Kubernetes and Docker
(tags: k8s kubernetes docker containers workflow pipelines architecture batch nightly-jobs ops)
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interesting, a synchronization daemon from Databricks which they use to synch up dev repos with a remote “devbox” in EC2 for heavyweight compilation
(tags: remote-compiles compiling devbox databricks coding tools dev ec2)
The Woolsey fire started at the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory
‘The speculative and non-credible have now happened. A fire burned through most of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a site contaminated with radioactivity and toxic chemicals allowed by decades of shoddy environmental controls.’ This site is legendary as a place where dangerous, toxic and radioactive chemicals were experimented with – indeed it was where the 1959 sodium reactor partial meltdown occurred. I wouldn’t want to have been downwind of this fire…
(tags: health santa-susana-field-laboratory nuclear fast-breeders atomic-energy meltdowns history toxic-waste california woolsey-fire wildfires)
‘digital health will lead to forms of enslavement we can barely imagine’
Author and Consultant Gastroenterologist Dr. Seamus O’Mahony:
Perhaps most alarming of all is his analysis of the future of the world of digital health – “Anyone with a smartphone will be monitoring themselves, or – more likely – will be monitored by some external agency. Health and life insurance companies will offer financial inducements to people to be monitored, and big corporations will undoubtedly make the wearing of health-tracking devices mandatory. The danger of all of this is that in countries where health care is paid for by insurance, a new underclass of uninsured people will emerge. Digital health,” he points out, “is presented as something empowering, but the reality is that it will lead to forms of enslavement that we can barely imagine. Facebook and Google have shown how easily people hand over their privacy and personal data in return for a few shiny trinkets. They have also shown how this personal data can be monetised.”
(tags: health medicine tracking privacy insurance surveillance data)
Cocktail similarity by Levenshtein distance
Love it. ‘I was recently figuring out a minimum-viable bar setup for making cocktails at home, and a system for memorizing & recording recipes. When I started writing down the first basic ingredients, I started noticing that cocktails are very close to each other – if you ignore fruit rinds and ice and such, an Americano is a Negroni with soda water instead of gin. An Old Fashioned is a Manhattan with sugar instead of vermouth. So I wondered – what’s a cocktail edit distance?’
(tags: edit-distance levenshtein-distance algorithms visualization cocktails d3 recipes booze)
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The phenomenon on display in the Facebook search result screenshots is known in technology circles as a “data void”, after a paper by the Data & Society founder and researcher danah boyd. For certain search terms, boyd explains, “the available relevant data is limited, non-existent, or deeply problematic”. In the case of vaccines, the fact that scientists and doctors are not producing a steady stream of new digital content about settled science has left a void for conspiracy theorists and fraudsters to fill with fear-mongering propaganda and misinformation. […] Pinterest has responded by building a “blacklist” of “polluted” search terms. “We are doing our best to remove bad content, but we know that there is bad content that we haven’t gotten to yet,” explained Ifeoma Ozoma, a public policy and social impact manager at Pinterest. “We don’t want to surface that with search terms like ‘cancer cure’ or ‘suicide’. We’re hoping that we can move from breaking the site to surfacing only good content. Until then, this is preferable.”
(tags: data-voids danah-boyd pinterest antivax vaccination misinformation disinfo vaccines truth blacklisting)
The log/event processing pipeline you can’t have – apenwarr
So good. Apenwarr knows how to design a system.
Simple things don’t break. Our friends on the “let’s use structured events to make metrics” team streamed those events straight into a database, and it broke all the time, because databases have configuration options and you inevitably set those options wrong, and it’ll fall over under heavy load, and you won’t find out until you’re right in the middle of an emergency and you really want to see those logs. Or events.
(tags: logging scalability klog kernel log-processing events embedded ops)
[1902.04023] Computing Extremely Accurate Quantiles Using t-Digests
‘We present on-line algorithms for computing approximations of rank-based statistics that give high accuracy, particularly near the tails of a distribution, with very small sketches. Notably, the method allows a quantile q to be computed with an accuracy relative to max(q,1?q) rather than absolute accuracy as with most other methods. This new algorithm is robust with respect to skewed distributions or ordered datasets and allows separately computed summaries to be combined with no loss in accuracy. An open-source Java implementation of this algorithm is available from the author. Independent implementations in Go and Python are also available.’ (via Tony Finch)
(tags: java go python open-source quantiles percentiles approximation statistics sketching algorithms via:fanf)
81 Megapixel image of the moon
I took nearly 50,000 images of the night sky to make an 81 Megapixel image of Tuesday’s moon. Uncompressed image linked in the comments. [OC]
via Elliot(tags: via:elliot art moon astronomy photography hd)
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‘Colourise your black and white photos – A deep learning colouriser prototype specifically for old Singaporean photos.’
(tags: color colour photography ai deep-learning ml colouriser colourisation singapore history black-and-white photos)
The Soothing Promise of Our Own Artisanal Internet | WIRED
“Eat independent sites, mostly not Facebook” as Anil Dash puts it. This is pretty much how I use Mastodon fwiw
(tags: facebook twitter internet web social-media mastodon fediverse anil-dash)
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Now this is clever. A “smart lock” which doesn’t require access to the internet; uses crypto to allow generation of transient time-limited access codes which you can give to other people, and a TOTP-style algorithm to generate one-time access codes. (via threeze)
(tags: via:threeze smart-locks locks iot crypto igloohome homes)
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nifty subreddit for useful 3D print models
(tags: 3d-printing 3d printing gadgets maker)
The curious case of disappearing buses
Nice investigation into some dodgy pseudo-real-time bus location data in the Bristol real time passenger information system (via Tony Finch)
So what have we learned? One thing we are sure is that data of different qualities – genuinely real-time, pseudo real-time (Type 2 and Type 1), and non-real-time (scheduled) data – all present in the data stream. Among these the most interesting are Type 2 pseudo real-time data. They appear to be the root cause of the phenomenon of disappearing buses. Type 2 pseudo-real-time data are not totally bogus. One possible explanation of their existence can be this. The bus company has limited but not full tracking information on some of their buses. For example, it may know the location of a bus only when the bus leaves the bus terminal. Instead of not showing any data at all about the bus, the bus company uses interpolation to predict the locations of the bus, and reports these as if those are real-time data.
(tags: via:fanf bristol buses public-transport rtpi estimation open-data)
Blockchain: What’s Not To Like?
‘We’re in a period when blockchain or “Distributed Ledger Technology” is the Solution to Everything™, so it is inevitable that it will be proposed as the solution to the problems of academic communication and digital preservation. These proposals typically assume, despite the evidence, that real-world blockchain implementations actually deliver the theoretical attributes of decentralization, immutability, anonymity, security, scalability, sustainability, lack of trust, etc. The proposers appear to believe that Satoshi Nakamoto revealed the infallible Bitcoin protocol to the world on golden tablets; they typically don’t appreciate or cite the nearly three decades of research and implementation that led up to it. This talk will discuss the mis-match between theory and practice in blockchain technology, and how it applies to various proposed applications of interest to the CNI audience.’
Quite a collection of dunks on blockchain, Bitcoin, ICOs, the DAO, Ethereum, etc.Attack of the week: searchable encryption and the ever-expanding leakage function
In all seriousness: database encryption has been a controversial subject in our field. I wish I could say that there’s been an actual debate, but it’s more that different researchers have fallen into different camps, and nobody has really had the data to make their position in a compelling way. There have actually been some very personal arguments made about it. The schools of thought are as follows: The first holds that any kind of database encryption is better than storing records in plaintext and we should stop demanding things be perfect, when the alternative is a world of constant data breaches and sadness. To me this is a supportable position, given that the current attack model for plaintext databases is something like “copy the database files, or just run a local SELECT * query”, and the threat model for an encrypted database is “gain persistence on the server and run sophisticated statistical attacks.” Most attackers are pretty lazy, so even a weak system is probably better than nothing. The countervailing school of thought has two points: sometimes the good is much worse than the perfect, particularly if it gives application developers an outsized degree of confidence of the security that their encryption system is going to provide them. If even the best encryption protocol is only throwing a tiny roadblock in the attacker’s way, why risk this at all? Just let the database community come up with some kind of ROT13 encryption that everyone knows to be crap and stop throwing good research time into a problem that has no good solution. I don’t really know who is right in this debate. I’m just glad to see we’re getting closer to having it.
(via Jerry Connolly)(tags: cryptography attacks encryption database crypto security storage ppi gdpr search databases via:ecksor)
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Google’s new live transcription app — ‘see instant captions anywhere. Whether you’re ordering a coffee or meeting someone new, Live Transcribe helps you communicate in the moment.’ If this works, it’d be fantastic for the deaf and hard of hearing… nifty!
(tags: android google deaf hearing transcription accessibility)
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Good advice from Marc Brooker on using leases as a way to handle leader election in a distributed system: ‘Leases are a nice primitive because they are easy to understand, easy (if subtle) to implement correctly, require very little co-ordination, optimistic, and don’t require much load on the strongly consistent service.’
(tags: leases primitives distributed-systems distcomp networking coding marc-brooker algorithms)
using BGP to compute best paths across the London Underground
this is deeply silly, but also very impressive (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf bgp networking internet routing london-underground trains)
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a PDP-1 implementation in FPGA:
DEC PDP-1 is a computer designed and produced in 1959. Considering the pace of change in computing, that might seem like the prehistoric age. However, it is also surprisingly modern and proves a point that the basic concepts still withstand the test of time. This project is trying to re-create this computer in FPGA and enable running the first real computer game, SpaceWar!, on a modern display and gamepad. It is designed to run on the MiSTer platform, a retro gaming system based on the Terasic DE10-Nano FPGA board. The implementation is done in Verilog, a hardware description language specifying the structure and behavior of digital logic circuits. This is not a software emulation because there is no CPU executing it. Since this is my first Verilog project ever and its purpose was to teach myself about FPGA, don’t expect too much. Beginners often make mistakes or break best practice. Please keep this in mind. Advice and suggestions are welcome!
(tags: pdp1 history computers spacewar fpga hardware verilog)
Revealed: The dark-money Brexit ads flooding social media | openDemocracy
Oh god, here we go again. Facebook ads need to be regulated.
Over the last four months, the People’s Vote and Best for Britain campaigns spent £266,369 and £183,943, respectively. Neither of these anti-Brexit groups is fully transparent either: both publish some details about themselves, such as addresses, but do not publish full details of all funders and donors. During the same time period, Britain’s Future [which does not declare its funders and has no published address] has spent more than £200,000 on Facebook ads. While anti-Brexit spending has slowed down in recent weeks, however, adverts pushing a ‘no deal’ Brexit have spiked. Britain’s Future has spent more than £110,000 on Facebook ads since mid-January. It is not clear where the money for this huge ad push has come from.
(tags: facebook advertising transparency brexit ads political-ads uk)
An In-Depth Guide to Nginx Metrics
decent list of what nginx offers in terms of instrumentation
Google Hired Gig Economy Workers for Project Maven
Other tech giants are reportedly interested in engaging the military as it continues to deploy artificial intelligence technology. Much larger machine-learning projects may require vastly new engagement from gig economy workers, who may unknowingly engage in the work. “Workers absolutely should have the right to know what they are working on, and especially when moral or politically controversial activities are involved,” said Juliet Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College, in an email to The Intercept. “It’s a basic dimension of democracy, which should not stop at either the factory or the platform ‘door.’ For too long, the country has tolerated erosion of basic civil rights in the workplace, as corporations assume ever-more control over their workforces. It’s time to win them back.”
(tags: google project-maven ai training labelling work ethics military)
Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split
omg. /usr/bin came about because Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie ran out of disk space on the root volume. Mind = blown
You know how Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix on a PDP-7 in 1969? Well around 1971 they upgraded to a PDP-11 with a pair of RK05 disk packs (1.5 megabytes each) for storage. When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp…) and wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!).
(tags: filesystem unix history ken-thompson dennis-ritchie disk-space usr)
NYC cops now using Chinese “Sky Net” video surveillance systems
This is absolutely scary. Systematic surveillance:
The surveillance tools are identical to those used in Sky Net in China, the largest video surveillance system on Earth, Chinese government research institutes and a company involved in the project said. At a time when China and the United States are locked in a rivalry on several fronts including trade and technology, Hikvision – the world’s largest surveillance technology company, which is state-owned and based in Hangzhou in eastern China – has supplied the equipment and software used by an American force that polices a population of about 8.6 million people. It has been claimed that Hikvision’s system can accurately identify faces regardless of race, whereas some Western-developed technology had previously been more accurate for white people than for black citizens – although the NYPD has not discussed its reasons for using the Chinese technology. The Sky Net programme, now renamed Pingan Chengshi, or Safe Cities, claimed to have connected 170 million cameras across China last year. By 2020, another 400 million units will be installed, it said, casting a watchful eye on every two citizens. Beijing plans to be able to identify anyone, anytime, anywhere in China within three seconds.
(tags: surveillance new-york nyc skynet china cctv hikvision)
Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration. – kentcdodds
Nice short summary of Kent Dodds’ approach to testing, which I mostly agree with :)
(tags: integration coding testing unit-tests integration-tests system-tests)
One Of The Biggest At-Home DNA Testing Companies Is Working With The FBI
Family Tree reveal that they are providing access to customer-submitted DNA records:
“We are nearing a de-facto national DNA database,” Natalie Ram, an assistant law professor at the University of Baltimore who specializes in bioethics and criminal justice, told BuzzFeed News. “We don’t choose our genetic relatives, and I cannot sever my genetic relation to them. There’s nothing voluntary about that.” Others aired similar concerns. “I would be very against Family Tree DNA allowing law enforcement to have open access to their DNA database,” Debbie Kennett, a British genealogy enthusiast and honorary research associate at University College London said. “I don’t think it’s right for law enforcement to use a database without the informed consent of the consumer.”
(via Antonio Regalado)(tags: biometrics privacy dna family-tree via:antonio-regalado genealogy data-protection fbi us)
remote AC control for a Nissan Leaf using a Google Home
‘OK Google, heat up the car’ – nifty
(tags: ok-google google google-home nissan-leaf cars heating gadgets home)
The right-wing history of the urban models which inspired SimCity
Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve. In place of Great Society-style welfare programs, Forrester argued that cities should take a less interventionist approach to the problems of urban poverty and blight, and instead encourage revitalization indirectly through incentives for businesses and for the professional class. Forrester’s message proved popular among conservative and libertarian writers, Nixon Administration officials, and other critics of the Great Society for its hands-off approach to urban policy. This outlook, supposedly backed up by computer models, remains highly influential among establishment pundits and policymakers today.
(tags: simulation cities society politics history simcity games jay-forrester will-wright sociology)