The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight at the Hoover Dam
This is amazing! I wish I’d noticed it when I visited Hoover Dam.
The center of the circle traced by the axial precession is actually the massive flag pole in the center of the plaza. This axial circle is prominently marked around the pole, and the angle of Polaris was depicted as precisely as possible to show where it would have been on the date of the dam’s opening. Hansen used the rest of the plaza floor to show the location of the planets visible that evening, and many of the bright stars that appear in the night sky at that location. By combining planet locations with the angle of precession, we are able to pinpoint the time of the dam’s completion down to within a day. We are now designing a similar system?—?though with moving parts?—?in the dials of the 10,000 Year Clock. It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now. Hopefully the Clock will still be ticking and Hansen’s terrazzo floor will still be there, even if it continues to baffle visitors.
(Via Tony Finch)(tags: hoover-dam history precession astronomy long-now polaris vega thuban stars clocks)
Facial Recognition Is the Perfect Tool for Oppression
‘We believe facial recognition technology is the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented. It’s the missing piece in an already dangerous surveillance infrastructure, built because that infrastructure benefits both the government and private sectors. And when technologies become so dangerous, and the harm-to-benefit ratio becomes so imbalanced, categorical bans are worth considering. The law already prohibits certain kinds of dangerous digital technologies, like spyware. Facial recognition technology is far more dangerous. It’s worth singling out, with a specific prohibition on top of a robust, holistic, value-based, and largely technology-neutral regulatory framework. Such a layered system will help avoid regulatory whack-a-mole where lawmakers are always chasing tech trends. Surveillance conducted with facial recognition systems is intrinsically oppressive. The mere existence of facial recognition systems, which are often invisible, harms civil liberties, because people will act differently if they suspect they’re being surveilled. Even legislation that holds out the promise of stringent protective procedures won’t prevent chill from impeding crucial opportunities for human flourishing by dampening expressive and religious conduct.’
(tags: tech surveillance facial-recognition faces oppression future chilling-effects)
Category: Uncategorized
Amendment-apocalypse: Spineless MPs just voted against reality
… in a way, it was typical May tactics. She prioritised vague promises over content. She sabotaged something – anything – in order to fight another day. She made promises she could not keep on issues she knew to be false. Once again, she said anything, anything at all, to survive just a little longer. […] it has significant medium-term implications too. Firstly, it shows why the backstop was needed in the first place. This country has become an unreliable negotiating partner. It will demand something one day then seek to detonate it the next. The events in the Commons today actually had the ironic effect of reaffirming to the EU the need for the backstop insurance policy. On a broader level, we are about to go around the world asking for trade deals. But we’re seen, by everyone, on the largest stage imaginable, to be fundamentally politically insane. We’ve gone mad and everyone is looking. This is as bleak a day as we have had in the entire Brexit process. All roads now seem blocked. MPs won’t back an extension to Article 50. They won’t back May’s deal. And they won’t back no-deal. They’ve opted for fairy tales over action. Things are looking very bad indeed.
Security Things to Consider When Your Apartment Goes ‘Smart’
Good advice, and I’d be pretty unhappy about this if it happened to me too.
If you’re a tenant in the US, it’s very likely that a management-provided smart home system is headed your way in the near future. Carefully evaluate your family’s personal threat model, and consider the plausible digital ways which these systems could be exploited. Spend some time reading into the vendor. Respectfully and courteously encourage your property management company and their smart system vendor to adopt industry best practices in securing smart hubs physically and digitally, the networks they are connected to, and and resident data at rest and in transit in their infrastructure. Request your property managers clearly and decisively address privacy concerns such as data ownership and resale in writing. If solid answers in writing don’t assuage legitimate concerns, consider politely seeking an option to opt-out – and make your threat model clear to them, if you’re in a sensitive situation.
(tags: locks iot security internetofshit tenancy renting smart-hubs smart-homes smart-locks)
Daniel Edward Heffernan’s Map of Dublin, 1861
These maps are really remarkable work:
Heffernan’s map of Dublin, published 1 May 1861, is both highly unusual and very fine. No other map of the time gives such a bird’s eye, almost axonometric, view of the city’s edifices. It shows in exceptional elevational detail both a number of the city’s principal public buildings, but also its less vaunted institutions; prisons, hospitals, workhouses etc., all within the municipal boundary set by the two canals.
(tags: daniel-heffernan history 19th-century dublin ireland maps)
In praise of the sci-fi corridor
A lovely appraisal of classic 1970s SF set design
We may finally know what causes Alzheimer’s – and how to stop it
This is amazing:
If you bled when you brushed your teeth this morning, you might want to get that seen to. We may finally have found the long-elusive cause of Alzheimer’s disease: Porphyromonas gingivalis, the key bacteria in chronic gum disease. That’s bad, as gum disease affects around a third of all people. But the good news is that a drug that blocks the main toxins of P. gingivalis is entering major clinical trials this year, and research published today shows it might stop and even reverse Alzheimer’s. There could even be a vaccine.
(via John Looney)(tags: via:johnlooney gingivitis alzheimers brain health medicine teeth)
Brexit: debunking “trading on WTO terms”
a favourite brexiteer talking point demolished
research!rsc: Our Software Dependency Problem
The kind of critical examination of specific dependencies that I outlined in this article is a significant amount of work and remains the exception rather than the rule. But I doubt there are any developers who actually make the effort to do this for every possible new dependency. I have only done a subset of them for a subset of my own dependencies. Most of the time the entirety of the decision is “let’s see what happens.” Too often, anything more than that seems like too much effort. But the Copay and Equifax attacks are clear warnings of real problems in the way we consume software dependencies today. We should not ignore the warnings. I offer three broad recommendations. * Recognize the problem. If nothing else, I hope this article has convinced you that there is a problem here worth addressing. We need many people to focus significant effort on solving it. * Establish best practices for today. We need to establish best practices for managing dependencies using what’s available today. This means working out processes that evaluate, reduce, and track risk, from the original adoption decision through to production use. In fact, just as some engineers specialize in testing, it may be that we need engineers who specialize in managing dependencies. * Develop better dependency technology for tomorrow. Dependency managers have essentially eliminated the cost of downloading and installing a dependency. Future development effort should focus on reducing the cost of the kind of evaluation and maintenance necessary to use a dependency. For example, package discovery sites might work to find more ways to allow developers to share their findings. Build tools should, at the least, make it easy to run a package’s own tests. More aggressively, build tools and package management systems could also work together to allow package authors to test new changes against all public clients of their APIs. Languages should also provide easy ways to isolate a suspect package.
(tags: dependencies software coding work)
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‘Do you want to find out information about an unknown caller?’ — reputation service for random callers in Ireland. Very useful to find out if others have received scammy calls from a given number
(tags: reputation phone telephone callers scams phishing ireland)
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The anti-Soros campaign was entirely artificial, as a means to elect Orban in Hungary:
Orbán was busy creating a new, more dramatic story of the nation. Hungary, which had collaborated with the Nazis, was painted as a victim, surrounded by external enemies, under perpetual siege, first from the Ottomans, then the Nazis, and later the Communists. Hungary’s mission was clear: to defend against its enemies, and to preserve Christianity against encroaching Islam and secular forces. Against this backdrop, Finkelstein had an epiphany. What if the veil of the conspiracy were to be lifted and a shadowy figure appear, controlling everything? The puppet master. Someone who not only controlled the “big capital” but embodied it. A real person. A Hungarian. Strange, yet familiar. That person was Soros, Finkelstein told Birnbaum. Birnbaum was mesmerized: Soros was the perfect enemy. [….] Despite everything that followed, Birnbaum is proud of the campaign against Soros: “Soros was a perfect enemy. It was so obvious. It was the simplest of all products, you just had to pack it and market it.” The product was so good, it sold itself and went global. In 2017, Italians started talking about Soros-financed immigrant boats arriving on the shores. In the US, some people suspected Soros was behind the migrant caravan entering from Central America. A Polish member of parliament called Soros the “most dangerous man in the world.” Putin referred dismissively to Soros during a press conference with Trump in Helsinki. Trump even claimed that the demonstrations against Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh were sponsored by Soros. Today Finkelstein and Birnbaum’s work in Hungary has echoes everywhere. Birnbaum denied the suggestion that he had run anti-Soros campaigns outside of Hungary. But perhaps he didn’t have to. Anyone could pick up the ideas and run with them. Finkelstein and Birnbaum had turned Soros into a meme. Right-wing sites like Breitbart, or the Kremlin-controlled Russia Today, could simply adopt the Hungarian campaign, translate it into other languages, and feed it with local arguments. If right-wing movements want to campaign today, they can source Soros material from the internet. Anti-Soros material is a globalized, freely available, and adaptable open-source weapon. Birnbaum said it was the common denominator of the nationalist movement.
(tags: george-soros conspiracies george-birnbaum antisemitism hungary arthur-finkelstein politics campaigning)
Stack Overflow: How We Do Monitoring – 2018 Edition
interesting to see how the other half lives, as Stack Overflow is a .NET shop
(tags: logging monitoring stack-overflow dotnet ops metrics)
‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.” While the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al has been known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship to situate them in a wider context. She points out that while most of us think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users.
(tags: advertising technology surveillance facebook google adtech capitalism business)
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Nicely done EC2 instance price comparison site, with spot instance and reserved pricing discounts taken into account; possibly better than ec2instances.info
(tags: ec2 instances aws pricing hosts spot-instances money)
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Super-basic HTML-only view of Facebook — ugly but blisteringly fast with no HTML5 crapola
(tags: light facebook basic html javascript)
Opinion | The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class – The New York Times
Pankaj Mishra wastes no time getting the boot into the ineptitude of the ruling-class Brexiteers. it’s glorious
Politicians and journalists in Ireland are understandably aghast over the aggressive ignorance of English Brexiteers. Business people everywhere are outraged by their cavalier disregard for the economic consequences of new borders. But none of this would surprise anyone who knows of the unconscionable breeziness with which the British ruling class first drew lines through Asia and Africa and then doomed the people living across them to endless suffering.
(tags: britain india brexit ireland pakistan asia partition history colonialism pankaj-mishra)
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One of the more novel differences between Aurora and other relational databases is how it pushes redo processing to a multi-tenant scale-out storage service, purpose-built for Aurora. Doing so reduces networking traffic, avoids checkpoints and crash recovery, enables failovers to replicas without loss of data, and enables fault-tolerant storage that heals without database involvement. Traditional implementations that leverage distributed storage would use distributed consensus algorithms for commits, reads, replication, and membership changes and amplify cost of underlying storage. In this paper, we describe how Aurora avoids distributed consensus under most circumstances by establishing invariants and leveraging local transient state. Doing so improves performance, reduces variability, and lowers costs.
(tags: papers toread aurora amazon aws pdf scalability distcomp state sql mysql postgresql distributed-consensus)
On the association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use
Lies, damn lies, and statistics. ‘if we believe screens are destroying a generation [of kids] that would mean that so are potatoes, having asthma, not drinking milk, going to movies, music, religion, being tall, biking, and wearing glasses’ […] ‘The take home from this new study is the evidence that smart phones are destroying a generation is not any stronger than potatoes and eyeglasses are destroying a generation. The moral panic surrounding the fear of screens is simply not supported by good science.’
(tags: potatoes funny glasses asthma milk movies music religion cycling screens screentime kids teenagers wellbeing mental-health)
Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back – Speaker Deck
So much agreement with this slide deck, particularly the list of limitations of current FaaS: 15 min lifetimes; I/O bottlenecks; no inbound network comms; no specialized hardware; and the general horribleness of using DynamoDB or S3 state as a platform for distributed computing protocols.
(tags: faas lambda serverless fail slides architecture aws dynamodb s3 cloud)
Some facts on immigration to Ireland
Handy to have to hand next time right-wing talking points emerge:
Let’s summarise: Ireland has a relatively high level of non-citizens in its population. But this is down to the high level of UK citizens and citizens from other English-speaking countries (US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand). Ireland has significantly fewer non-citizens from outside the English-speaking world than high-income EU countries. The proportion of non-citizens has remained stable over the last 10 years (i.e. there is no ‘surge’). Non-citizens in Ireland are more integrated into the labour market than any other high-income EU country – that is, there is lower unemployment among non-citizens. So much for the ‘sponging-off-the-state’ argument. We have had far fewer asylum-seekers and we grant asylum to far fewer than most other high-income EU countries. The claims of the Far Right and their allies collapse when we look to reality.
(tags: immigration facts statistics ireland asylum-seekers)
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an exploration into using historic gold embroidery materials and knowledge to craft a programmable 8 bit computer. Solely built from a variety of metal threads, magnetic, glass and metal beads, and being inspired by traditional crafting routines and patterns, the piece questions the appearance of current digital and electronic technologies surrounding us, as well as our interaction with them. Technically, the piece consists of (textile) relays, similar to early computers before the invention of semiconductors. Visually, the gold materials, here used for their conductive properties, arranged into specific patterns to fulfil electronic functions, dominate the work. Traditionally purely decorative, their pattern here defines they function. They lay bare core digital routines usually hidden in black boxes. Users are invited to interact with the piece in programming the textile to compute for them.
(tags: electronics computers computing art embroidery craft gold 8-bit)
Crunching The Numbers: How Much Will Your Electric Car Really Cost? | CleanTechnica
some good real-world measurements from Germany. Ireland’s residential electricity costs are roughly comparable to the Netherlands I think in price/kWh
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Coming to presto soon apparently….
Iceberg tracks individual data files in a table instead of directories. This allows writers to create data files in-place and only adds files to the table in an explicit commit. Table state is maintained in metadata files. All changes to table state create a new metadata file and replace the old metadata with an atomic operation. The table metadata file tracks the table schema, partitioning config, other properties, and snapshots of the table contents. The atomic transitions from one table metadata file to the next provide snapshot isolation. Readers use the latest table state (snapshot) that was current when they load the table metadata and are not affected by changes until they refresh and pick up a new metadata location.
excellent — this will let me obsolete so much of our own code :)(tags: presto storage s3 hive iceberg apache asf data architecture)
certain Irish surnames inherited ‘the cure’
This is quite an odd superstition — the belief that people with a certain surname could cure a specific ailment.
Wicklow-born reader Mattie Lennon reminds me that certain Irish families used to hold monopolies over the treatment of individual disorders, based solely on their surnames. Mattie knows this from experience. As a child in the 1950s, he contracted shingles. And it was an article of faith then that anyone by the name of Keogh could cure that painful condition. There were no mysterious herbal concoctions involved: the power resided in their veins, literally. Thus a man named Darby Keogh was called, “bled his fingers, mixed the blood with holy water, and applied it”. Scoff all you like readers, but “it cured my shingles”, says Mattie,
(tags: health history superstitions ireland wicklow quackery the-cure)
PRNG-predicting bot ascends in Nethack in 7 minutes 15 seconds
This is a really amazing hack!
So, we could now go from starting inventory to RNG-seed in no time, but we still had to ascend. While we could write a simple “wish”-bot, get +127 Magicbane and then ascend by hand from there, achieving both fastest realtime and lowest turn count in the same game would not be easy. First idea was to start a NAO game, fetch the seed, then saving and perfecting the seed offline. It was quickly ruled out though as the game is reseeded each time it is started (i.e. when you load your game). Loooong story short, we wrote a bot. You had to play the first turns (offline) and move her to a non-magic fountain located next to a wall. If you died, no big deal, just retry on the same seed. This is why SWAGGINZZZ stood still for 6 minutes, we had absolutely horrible RNG when trying to get the specific fountain needed on dlvl2. The fountain is required for wishes. The wall is required to be able to offset the random state without advancing the game state – every time the character attempts to walk into a wall, it calls random() without wasting any in-game time. From the fountain, the bot ascends completely on her own.
glibc changed their UTF-8 character collation ordering across versions, breaking postgres
This is terrifying:
Streaming replicas—and by extension, base backups—can become dangerously broken when the source and target machines run slightly different versions of glibc. Particularly, differences in strcoll and strcoll_l leave “corrupt” indexes on the slave. These indexes are sorted out of order with respect to the strcoll running on the slave. Because postgres is unaware of the discrepancy is uses these “corrupt” indexes to perform merge joins; merges rely heavily on the assumption that the indexes are sorted and this causes all the results of the join past the first poison pill entry to not be returned. Additionally, if the slave becomes master, the “corrupt” indexes will in cases be unable to enforce uniqueness, but quietly allow duplicate values.
Moral of the story — keep your libc versions in sync across storage replication sets!(tags: postgresql scary ops glibc collation utf-8 characters indexing sorting replicas postgres)
A UK police force is dropping tricky cases on advice of an algorithm
Wow, this is a terrible idea. It will definitely launder existing human bias into its decisions.
However, because the technology bases its predictions on past investigations, any biases contained in those decisions may be reinforced by the algorithm. For example, if there are areas that don’t have CCTV and police frequently decided not to pursue cases there, people in those places could be disadvantaged. “When we train algorithms on the data on historical arrests or reports of crime, any biases in that data will go into the algorithm and it will learn those biases and then reinforce them,” says Joshua Loftus at Stanford University in California. […] Police forces only ever know about crimes they detect or have reported to them, but plenty of crime goes unreported, especially in communities that have less trust in the police. This means the algorithms are making predictions based on a partial picture. While this sort of bias is hard to avoid, baking it into an algorithm may make its decisions harder to hold to account compared with an officer’s. John Phillips, superintendent at Kent Police, says that for the types of crimes that EBIT is being used for, under-reporting isn’t an issue and so shouldn’t affect the tool’s effectiveness.
….well, I guess that’s OK then? I would have assumed under-reporting would be a massive source of bias alright….(tags: bias machine-learning ml ai cctv police uk kent policing)
How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation
That realization recast my recent struggles: Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.
(tags: burnout life work workaholism millenials anxiety)
White Matter Integrity in Obstructive Sleep Apnea before and after Treatment
Sleep Apnea causes physical damage to the brain, particularly in white matter fibre integrity. Thankfully, it is reversible.
Results in pre-treatment OSA patients showed impairments in most cognitive areas, mood and sleepiness that were associated with diffuse reduction of WM fiber integrity reflected by diminished fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) in multiple brain areas. After 3 months of CPAP, only limited changes of WM were found. However, over the course of 12 months CPAP treatment, an almost complete reversal of WM abnormalities in all the affected regions was observed in patients who were compliant with treatment. Significant improvements involving memory, attention, and executive-functioning paralleled WM changes after treatment.
(tags: brain brain-damage sleep sleep-apnea snoring medicine papers)
“Cracking the Coding Interview” handouts
amazing handouts for interviewees looking to do well in technical interviews; there are 3, coding, PM, and soft-skills-oriented. I’m on the other side of the table these days but these are fantastic
(tags: interviews coding career interviewing hiring)
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The goal of this page is to high-light the lack of coverage AWS provides for its services across different security factors. These limitations are not well-understood by many. Further, the “Y” fields are meant to indicate that this service has any capability for the relevant factor. In many cases, this is not full coverage for the service, or there are exceptions or special cases.
Trek10 | From relational DB to single DynamoDB table: a step-by-step exploration
tl;dr:
Is modeling my relational database in a single DynamoDB table really a good idea? About a year ago, I wrote a fairly popular article called “Why DynamoDB isn’t for everyone”. Many of the technical criticisms of DynamoDB I put forth at that time (lack of operational controls such as backup/restore; a persistent problem with hot keys) have since been partially or fully resolved due to a truly awe-inspiring run of feature releases from the DynamoDB team. However, the central argument of that article remains valid: DynamoDB is a powerful tool when used properly, but if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s a deceptively user-friendly guide into madness. And the further you stray into esoteric applications like relational modeling, the more sure you’d better be that you know what you’re getting into. Especially with SQL-friendly “serverless” databases like Amazon Aurora hitting their stride, you have a lot of fully-managed options with a smaller learning curve.
(tags: dynamodb databases storage nosql sql relational aws relations)
Give Up the Ghost: A Backdoor by Another Name | Just Security
Now that GCHQ have asked for this, I suspect plenty of other government bodies around the world will be looking for similar.
They’re talking about adding a “feature” that would require the user’s device to selectively lie about whether it’s even employing end-to-end encryption, or whether it’s leaking the conversation content to a third (secret) party. Is the security code displayed by your device a mathematical representation of the two keys involved, or is it a straight-up lie? Furthermore, what’s to guarantee that the method used by governments to insert the “ghost” key into a conversation without alerting the users won’t be exploited by bad actors? Despite the GCHQ authors’ claim, the ghost will require vendors to disable the very features that give our communications systems their security guarantees in a way that fundamentally changes the trust relationship between a service provider and its users. Software and hardware companies will never be able to convincingly claim that they are being honest about what their applications and tools are doing, and users will have no good reason to believe them if they try. And, as we’ve seen already seen, GCHQ will not be the only agency in the world demanding such extraordinary access to billions of users’ software. Australia was quick to follow the UK’s lead, and we can expect to see similar demands, from Brazil and the European Union to Russia and China. (Note that this proposal would be unconstitutional were it proposed in the United States, which has strong protections against governments forcing actors to speak or lie on its behalf.) We must reject GCHQ’s newest “ghost” proposal for what it is: a mandated encryption backdoor that weakens the security properties of encrypted messaging systems and fundamentally compromises user trust.
FFmpeg, SOX, Pandoc and RSVG for AWS Lambda
OK-ish way to add dependencies to your Lambda containers:
The basic AWS Lambda container is quite constrained, and until recently it was relatively difficult to include additional binaries into Lambda functions. Lambda Layers make that easy. A Layer is a common piece of code that is attached to your Lambda runtime in the /opt directory. You can reuse it in many functions, and deploy it only once. Individual functions do not need to include the layer code in their deployment packages, which means that the resulting functions are smaller and deploy faster. For example, at MindMup, we use Pandoc to convert markdown files into Word documents. The actual lambda function code is only a few dozen lines of JavaScript, but before layers, each deployment of the function had to include the whole Pandoc binary, larger than 100 MB. With a layer, we can publish Pandoc only once, so we use significantly less overall space for Lambda function versions. Each code change now requires just a quick redeployment.
(tags: serverless lambda dependencies deployment packaging ops)
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Decent new Dublin food blog — reviews and news. Like a Harbo-free version of Lovin’ Dublin
(tags: dublin food eating restaurants reviews)
We’ll Never Know Whether Monorepos Are Better
This makes sense to me where the monorepo-vs-polyrepo argument is concerned — it’s another religious war:
About six months after the project was declared “done” (but there was always more to do, more improvements to make to our homegrown dependency management solution), we had a retrospective meeting. The same engineers who had taken sides, for and against the project, were again assembled to discuss how it went. One of the main opponents went first. “Thank goodness we’re finally having this retrospective,” he said. “I think we can all see that this experiment has been a colossal failure and that it’s time for us to change course and roll back to monorepo.” “What do you mean?” one of the main multirepo advocates replied. “This was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made!” This really shocked me. We had access to all of the data you could possibly want to evaluate the decision. The same engineers working with the same codebase had seen what it was like in the monorepo model and the multirepo model. We knew exactly how much it had actually cost to switch. We had lived with the advantages and disadvantages of both models. But still we couldn’t come to an agreement. That retrospective taught me to be humble in my ambitions to “improve” engineering productivity. There’s no way to measure productivity in software, so there’s no way to know whether controversial, expensive “productivity enhancing” projects actually deliver on their promise, even in hindsight.
(tags: monorepo productivity dev engineering coding polyrepo)
I Accidentally Made Myself Lactose Intolerant With Whole30
A few years back, I had a nasty bout of food poisoning while travelling, which made me lactose-intolerant for several years. Sounds like this may be more common than you’d think, based on this article:
If you haven’t heard of Whole30, some information: It’s a month-long eating plan that aims to help followers hit “the reset button with your health, habits, and relationship with food.” For 30 days, you cut out soy, legumes, grains, sugars, alcohol, and, of course, dairy. [….] When you reach the end of the Whole30, you’re supposed to add the forbidden food groups back into your diet one at a time. The goal is to figure out which foods are making you feel sluggish, bloated, or just generally not great, so you can ostensibly keep on avoiding them forever. I didn’t do that part. I just jumped right back into eating what I wanted — but suddenly nothing was the same. That first bowl of ice cream I’d been looking forward to for weeks was quickly followed by sharp stomach pains and what can best be described (grossly, but accurately) as bubble gut. [….] The good news, according to gastrointestinal specialist Kim Barrett, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, is that I’m not crazy. The bad news is that dairy no longer agrees with my body’s biology. Turns out, it is possible to suddenly make yourself lactose intolerant. “To some extent, our ability to handle lactose is a use-it-or-lose-it phenomenon,” Barrett says. The body digests lactose — a disaccharide — by using lactase, an enzyme in the small intestine, to break it down into the monosaccharides glucose and galactose, which can then be absorbed. “If you don’t have the [lactose] substrate in the diet, you start to reduce the synthesis of the lactase enzyme to digest it,” Barrett explains. “After a period of completely excluding lactose from the diet, you may not have any of those digestive enzymes present.”
(tags: diet food lactose lactase intolerance whole30 milk cheese)
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The need to have a massive and costly buildout of [hydrogen refuelling] infrastructure remains one of the most glaring problems of a supposed transition to a hydrogen economy. The cost of a single hydrogen fueling station is likely to be over $2 million. This is in contrast to the relatively modest $50,000 cost of deploying a high-speed battery-electric car charging station. Another factor here is the reality of putting into place an all-new infrastructure from scratch versus building off of an already existing electrical infrastructure that exists in every developed nation. The fact that every building, garage, and lamp post in the US is already electrified means we simply have to add one final component to the existing and established network.
(tags: hydrogen green driving cars fuel fossil-fuels decarbonisation)
Don’t buy a 5G smartphone—at least, not for a while | Ars Technica
wow, 5G sounds like it’s going to be terrible
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Using a saliva-based assay, we found that students (n = 1495) who tested IgG positive for Toxoplasma gondii exposure were 1.4× more likely to major in business and 1.7× more likely to have an emphasis in ‘management and entrepreneurship’ over other business-related emphases. Among professionals attending entrepreneurship events, T. gondii-positive individuals were 1.8× more likely to have started their own business compared with other attendees (n = 197). Finally, after synthesizing and combining country-level databases on T. gondii infection from the past 25 years with the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor of entrepreneurial activity, we found that infection prevalence was a consistent, positive predictor of entrepreneurial activity and intentions at the national scale, regardless of whether previously identified economic covariates were included. Nations with higher infection also had a lower fraction of respondents citing ‘fear of failure’ in inhibiting new business ventures. While correlational, these results highlight the linkage between parasitic infection and complex human behaviours, including those relevant to business, entrepreneurship and economic productivity.
(tags: science biology infection toxoplasmosis parasites humans behaviour entrepreneurs business brains economics)
“Thread on climate change & Irish agri lobbyists”
‘The massive levy income raised on beef & dairy gives the IFA a financial incentive to promote beef & dairy expansion and a disincentive to support any fundamental changes to Ireland’s agricultural model, regardless the public interest.’
(tags: dairy beef ireland farming climate-change climate lobbying government)
slides from “Distributed Log-Processing Design Workshop”, SRECon Americas 2018
Fantastic presentation discussing the kinds of design criteria used when architecting a large-scale data processing and storage service. Interesting to see some Google terminology, e.g. “dimensioning” — ballparking the expected scalability numbers, bandwidth, qps, and limits.
(tags: distributed-systems coding design architecture google photon logs log-storage slides srecon)
Zstandard: How Facebook increased compression speed – Facebook Code
very cool; particularly the high level of support for external-dictionary compression
(tags: facebook compression zstd zstandard dictionary-compression)
The Holiday Drink of 2018: Cognac Punch
Looks tasty, albeit pricey and strong:
London Punch House Punch By David Wondrich Ingredients: 4 Lemons 6 oz (3/4 cup) White sugar 20 oz Hennessy Privilege VSOP Cognac 6 oz Jamaican rum 1 quart (4 cups) Cold water Glass: Punch cup Garnish: Freshly grated nutmeg Directions: The day before you serve the punch, fill a quart container with water and put it in the freezer. Peel 4 lemons in long spirals and put the peels into a mason jar with 6 oz (3/4 cup) of white sugar. Seal the jar, shake it and let sit overnight. Two hours before you serve the punch, unseal the mason jar, add 6 oz (3/4) cup fresh-squeezed, strained lemon juice, reseal and shake until all the sugar has dissolved. Refrigerate. To assemble the punch, unmold the ice block and place it in a 1-gallon punch bowl. Shake the contents of the mason jar and pour it into the punch bowl unstrained, peels and all. Add 20 oz (2-and-a-half cups) Hennessy Privilege VSOP Cognac and 6 oz (3/4 cup) Jamaican rum. Stir. Add 1 quart (4 cups) cold water. Stir again and grate nutmeg on top. Using a punch ladle, drape a few ends of the spiral lemon peels over the rim of the bowl. Grate nutmeg over the top.
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at PayPal (via Carlos Baquero)
(tags: via:xmal crdts distributed-systems distcomp prod coding data-structures)
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A fully automated background-removal tool. Nicely done
(tags: images editing tools background graphics)
Google used a Baidu front-end to scrape user searches without consent
The engineers used the data they pulled from [acquired Baidu front-end site] 265.com to learn about the kinds of things that people located in mainland China routinely search for in Mandarin. This helped them to build a prototype of Dragonfly. The engineers used the sample queries from 265.com, for instance, to review lists of websites Chinese people would see if they typed the same word or phrase into Google. They then used a tool they called “BeaconTower” to check whether any websites in the Google search results would be blocked by China’s internet censorship system, known as the Great Firewall. Through this process, the engineers compiled a list of thousands of banned websites, which they integrated into the Dragonfly search platform so that it would purge links to websites prohibited in China, such as those of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and British news broadcaster BBC. Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source.
(tags: china search tech google privacy baidu interception censorship great-firewall dragonfly)
awslabs/amazon-kinesis-scaling-utils
The Kinesis Scaling Utility is designed to give you the ability to scale Amazon Kinesis Streams in the same way that you scale EC2 Auto Scaling groups – up or down by a count or as a percentage of the total fleet. You can also simply scale to an exact number of Shards. There is no requirement for you to manage the allocation of the keyspace to Shards when using this API, as it is done automatically. You can also deploy the Web Archive to a Java Application Server, and allow Scaling Utils to automatically manage the number of Shards in the Stream based on the observed PUT or GET rate of the stream.
The “Bart” — sudden hundreds-of-Bitcoin pumps or dumps, to burn the margin traders
Finance journalists need to stop treating crypto as an efficient market that responds to concerns. It’s a thinly-traded unregulated playground for whales, out to wreck the margin traders. A $400 dip in fifteen minutes is not a “market signal” — it’s a deliberate dump to manipulate the price. Though there’s still downward pressure on the price — all the suckers from the bubble have gone home, so they’re not buying … but the miners still have to sell coins for actual money to pay for their electricity. And even more so now that the price of mining one bitcoin is at — or above — what you could get for selling that bitcoin. So one minute you’ll see a sudden $100 increase in the price that cost 130 BTC of dollars — and those are actual dollars going in — followed the next minute by a matching $100 drop that came from selling only 30 BTC. It’s much easier to drop the price than raise it.
(tags: investing bitcoin via:harikunzru cryptocurrency pump-and-dump barts finance margin-traders currencies fraud)
GDPR Subject Access Request helper for Dublin Bus vs bike incidents
‘A new tool has been created to assist people who want to request video footage of incidents involving Dublin Bus under GDPR rules.’
(tags: dublin-bus bus bike cycling dublin cameras gdpr sars)
8 Myths of Abortion in Ireland
from the Abortion Rights Campaign’s “8 Days – 8 Reasons to Repeal the 8th” myth-busting series in 2014.
(tags: arc abortion ireland politics mythbusters repealthe8th)
Notebookcheck’s Top 10 Tablets under 250 Euros
a decent list of low-end tablets, given the season
A primer on privacy as “contextual integrity”
A primer on privacy as “contextual integrity” and why privacy notices on mobile platforms (both Android and iOS) are insufficient for attaining informed consent. If your doctor asked for permission to collect your medical history, you would probably say yes. However, if that doctor asked to collect your medical history to give to marketers for advertising purposes, you would probably decline. The difference is, in the first case, you’re making assumptions about how the data will be used based on who is making the request. Knowing just the type of data requested and the requester are insufficient to make an informed decision: people also consider the purpose and other constraints (e.g., will data be resold, stored securely, etc.), which are equally important factors.
(via Karlin)(tags: privacy context understanding mobile data-protection permission opt-in)
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Uber’s Fast, Reliable Docker Image Builder for Apache Mesos and Kubernetes.
we built our own image building tool, Makisu, a solution that allows for more flexible, faster container image building at scale. Specifically, Makisu: requires no elevated privileges, making the build process portable. uses a distributed layer cache to improve performance across a build cluster. provides flexible layer generation, preventing unnecessary files in images. is Docker-compatible, supporting multi-stage builds and common build commands.
(tags: makisu docker containers ops build mesos kubernetes building)
Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change
That’s largely because there is no “free market” incentive to prevent disaster. An economic environment where a company is only considered viable if it’s constantly expanding and increasing its production can’t be expected to pump its own brakes over something as trivial as pending global catastrophe. Instead, market logic dictates that rather than take the financial hit that comes with cutting profits, it’s more reasonable to find a way to make money off the boiling ocean. Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the burgeoning climate-change investment industry. According to Bloomberg, investors are looking to make money off of everything from revamped food production to hotels for people fleeing increasingly hurricane-ravaged areas. A top JP Morgan Asset investment strategist advised clients that sea-level rise was so inevitable that there was likely a lot of opportunity for investing in sea-wall construction.
(tags: capitalism environment politics future climate-change doom)
Irish agricultural CO2 emissions actually INCREASED by 2.9% last year
Irish EPA: agriculture greenhouse gas emissions increased by 2.9% in 2017 “The most significant drivers are higher dairy cow numbers (+3.1%) which reflects national plans to expand milk production”
Feck’s sake.(tags: epa ireland co2 greenhouse-gases emissions green farming agriculture)
“Bring home the bacon” debate is a case study in how stupid we’ve all become
Well said, that Carl Kinsella.
How are we supposed to focus on the things that matter when media organisations refuse to? Ivan Yates and Matt Cooper ran a segment on whether or not we’ve reached political correctness. Niall Boylan had a discussion about whether or not it’s okay to ban phrases that nobody really wants to ban [as PETA has suggested]. As a matter of pure coincidence, other reports from outlets like the Daily Mail and Today FM reported that the HSE was going to ban its employees from using phrases like “love,” “pet” or “dear.” That wasn’t true either. Again, it was one line in a huge report that asked the question as to whether or not it was the best course of action to use such terms. It wasn’t mentioned again. Unlike phrases about meat, this actually matters. This is the kind of thing that could actually change how people are treated in hospital. But again, it wasn’t true. The public – which has lost its capacity to verify what is true and what is not — was being lied to by the media. That’s how it works now.
(tags: media clickbait fake-news news today-fm daily-mail hse niall-boylan peta controversy political-correctness ivan-yates matt-cooper)
Rudy Giuliani doesn’t understand how links work
As waxy noted: ‘this might be funny if he wasn’t Trump’s cybersecurity advisor’.
Twitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message. The same thing-period no space-occurred later and it didn’t happen. Don’t tell me they are not committed cardcarrying anti-Trumpers. Time Magazine also may fit that description. FAIRNESS PLEASE
Giuliani composed a tweet with no spaces after full stops, and a broken regexp at Twitter auto-linkified “G-20.In”. An internet prankster registered this domain and Giuliani lost his shit in a spectacular display of incompetence. The best bit? Here’s a thread with the original devs: https://twitter.com/hoverbird/status/1070142045140877312 — ‘Hey @tw and @bcherry, remember all the debates we had about the linkifying regex around edge cases like this?’ (via Waxy and pretty much everyone on twitter)(tags: edge-cases bugs twitter regexps regular-expressions links urls us-politics trump rudy-giuliani security funny)
3D models by DH_Age Sheela-na-Gig3D Project (@DH_Age) – Sketchfab
These are fantastic — 3D scans of Sheela-na-Gig carvings around Ireland from 3D Sheela, an Irish based research initiative ‘focusing on the digital documentation and analysis of Ireland’s Sheela-na-Gig catalogue’ (NSFW)
(tags: 3d sheela-na-gigs history carving nsfw models photogrammetry)
Chester Beatty Digital Collections
‘Explore online access to our remarkable treasures, through this searchable database of digitised artworks and manuscripts’, from the Chester Beatty museum’s collection. Licensing isn’t fully open though — ‘Images and PDF’s are provided for personal research and scholarship.’
(tags: chester-beatty museums history archaeology artifacts art manuscripts)
Convert an RSS feed to ActivityPub
for autoposting to Mastodon or similar. Via Nelson
(tags: via:nelson mastodon rss blogging scripts)
A Serverless Journey: AWS Lambda Under the Hood (SRV409-R1) – AWS re:…
Marc Brooker on Lambda internals
(tags: lambda aws marc-brooker ops slides)
Nice heatmap visualisation of mortality ratios between men and women
‘Age and period specific mortality ratios of females and males (a “Lexis-surface” in demographers parlance)’ (via apenwarr)
(tags: via:apenwarr mortality heatmaps dataviz visualisation colouring lexis-surfaces)
House Democrats Sent A New Letter To Jeff Bezos About Amazon’s Facial Recognition Tool
The House Democrats’ questions focus largely on possible embedded bias in Amazon Rekognition, including how the tool’s accuracy breaks down by race, gender, ethnicity, and age. Also of particular concern is whether Amazon will build privacy protections into its facial recognition system and how it will ensure it is not abused for secret government surveillance. [….] Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos has yet to address mounting criticism of Amazon’s Rekognition technology by Amazon employees, shareholders, and civil rights groups. In November, Amazon executives defended the company’s controversial facial recognition technology at an all-hands staff meeting after employees raised civil rights concerns about the tech’s potential misuse. “It’s hard to trust that harm and abuse can be prevented if it is only post-mortem and through the Terms of Service,” an Amazon employee who requested anonymity told BuzzFeed News at the time.
(tags: rekognition aws privacy data-protection surveillance amazon us-politics civil-rights)
Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
I looked up the patent application and luckily, this time the patent application was still being reviewed by the patent examiner. It had not issued! The provisional was filed August 29, 2014, months after my first interview and visit back in March 2014. Two of the inventors listed were the same people who had interviewed me.
This is frankly appalling behaviour from Google — total abuse of the patent system. If Joi Ito hadn’t been around to mediate this patent probably would have issued and this researcher’s life’s work stolen from her through IP dirty tricks. (Also, patents need to die)(tags: patents software-patents google dirty-tricks interviewing ip mit medialab paper jie-qi)
Crowdfunding Backer Patented My Project
I had thought thought all along that if we published everything openly, it wouldn’t be possible for someone else to patent stuff that’s already all over the web. But I was wrong. Despite tons of prior art out on the web, in academic research papers and even for sale that are LED stickers, the patent examiner missed it and deemed the LED sticker patent “new” and “non-obvious.” How could that happen? The sad truth is that patents are approved all that time that probably shouldn’t be. […] Can’t you invalidate the patent? Unfortunately, once a patent gets issued things get much more complicated and expensive. The cheapest option would be for us to go to the USPTO with our prior art list and invalidate the patent though a process called an inter partes review (IPR). But such a process typically costs between $300,000 and $600,000 to file due to legal fees. In fact, it’s much more than the cost of getting the patent in the first place! So for now, we’ve decided not to go down this route.
The US patent system is broken. This is appalling(tags: patents led-stickers uspto prior-art invention crowdfunding)
PRDD – Performance-Review Driven Development
‘If the way to get promoted is to launch a shiny new product, then your most senior people will be the best at finding shiny new products to launch, even if that’s not the right technical decision to make.’ (from a newsy thread about Twitter’s latest messaging system switch)
(tags: newsy messaging infrastructure twitter kafka pubsub ops architecture prdd performance-reviews)
Presto Performance for Ad Hoc Workloads on AWS Instance Types
good benchmark/review of instance types from Qubole
(tags: qubole presto performance benchmarks ops aws instances ec2)
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Enter an image URL and it’ll generate an animated GIF of the party parrot version
(tags: party-parrot gifs funny slack emojis)
event-stream vulnerability explained – Zach Schneider
This was an incredibly clever attack, very reminiscent of this blog post from January about how a similar attack might work. The attacker covered their tracks well — the code and commit log on GitHub all tell an innocuous and fairly common story (a new maintainer joins a project, adds a feature, and then tweaks the implementation of their feature a bit). Other than the warning signs about flatmap-stream (new package, no contributors or download activity), the attack was virtually undetectable. And indeed, it wasn’t discovered for over two months — it was only found because the attacker made a tiny mistake and used the deprecated crypto.createDecipher rather than crypto.createDecipheriv, which raised a suspicious deprecation warning in another library that consumes event-stream. Unfortunately, this genre of attack isn’t going away anytime soon. JavaScript is the most popular language right now and it’s not really close, meaning it will continue to be an attractive target for hackers. JavaScript also has relatively few standard-library convenience features compared to other languages, which encourages developers to import them from npm packages instead — this, along with other cultural factors, means that JavaScript projects tend to have massive dependency trees.
(via Nelson)(tags: npm malware bitcoin security javascript event-stream flatmap-stream hacks)
Leeroy Jenkins was taking the piss
I had no idea!
“We didn’t think anyone would believe it was real, we thought it was so obviously satire.”
(tags: leeroy-jenkins warcraft gaming memes satire videos at-least-i-have-chicken)
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A way to handle immutable blockchains and GDPR: “have an encryption key for each user (stored outside of this ledger) and encrypt all PII with that key. Throw away the key if the user wants you to delete their data.”
(tags: pii gdpr privacy data-protection crypto cryptoshredding deletion coding)
flatmap-stream NPM package backdoor incident
Good twitter thread with background on the incident. 2,000,000 downloads per week, used by many other core libs. It appears the attacker persuaded the (overloaded) legit maintainer to hand over ownership then backdoored the package in order to attack copay-dash, a cryptocurrency wallet app.
(tags: cryptocurrency npm packages open-source twitter flatmap-stream packaging security backdoors)
Antoin O Lachtnain on Twitter regarding GDPR and DNA kits
‘It provides legal protections. But the problem is that those protections may not be practically effective. The other problem is the effect that you, as a consenting adult may have on other people who are related to you but who haven’t consented.’ — useful thread
(tags: gdpr privacy data-protection dna)
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Declarative Airflow Workflows in YAML, from Etsy
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The 2.0 release of Linkerd brings two very significant changes. First, we’ve completely rewritten Linkerd to be orders of magnitude faster and smaller than Linkerd 1.x. Linkerd 2.0’s data plane is comprised of ultralight Rust proxies which consume around 10mb of RSS and have a p99 latency of <1ms. Linkerd’s minimalist control plane (written in Go) is similarly designed for speed and low resource footprint. Second, with the 2.0 release, Linkerd moves beyond the service mesh model to be something not more, but less: Linkerd 2.0 at its core is a service sidecar, running on a single service without requiring cluster-wide installation. This means that if you’re a developer or service owner who doesn’t have access to the whole Kubernetes cluster, you can run Linkerd on your service and get: Instant Grafana dashboards of your service’s success rates, latencies, and throughput; A topology graph of incoming and outgoing dependencies; A live view of requests being made to your service; Improved, latency-aware load balancing; … and much more.
(tags: linkerd mesh networking services architecture sidecars)
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the act of having a small portion of your cremated remains fired in a Brickof Mu. MuMufied is what you will be after the act of MuMufication has been carried out. What you get in the here and now is a Brick of Mu and a signed and stamped Certificate of MuMufication. What you get after you die is 23 grams of yours cremated remains fired in your Brick of Mu, which will then be laid to rest on The People’s Pyramid come the following Toxteth Day of the Dead on 23rd of November.
(tags: klf mu mumufication 23 eris discordianism religion death toxteth liverpool cremation pyramids)
Introducing Predictive Scaling for Amazon EC2 in AWS Auto Scaling
Predictive Scaling predicts future traffic based on daily and weekly trends, including regularly-occurring spikes, and provisions the right number of EC2 instances in advance of anticipated changes. Provisioning the capacity just in time for an impending load change makes Auto Scaling faster than ever before. Predictive Scaling’s machine learning algorithms detect changes in daily and weekly patterns, automatically adjusting their forecasts. This removes the need for manual adjustment of Auto Scaling parameters over time, making Auto Scaling simpler to configure and consume. Auto Scaling enhanced with Predictive Scaling delivers faster, simpler, and more accurate capacity provisioning to our customers.
Fantastic! More heavy lifting taken care of.(tags: aws amazon scaling autoscaling predictive-scaling ml ec2 asg)
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Artificial intelligence in its current state is unfair, easily susceptible to attacks and notoriously difficult to control. Nevertheless, more and more concerning uses of AI technology are appearing in the wild. This list aims to track all of them. We hope that Awful AI can be a platform to spur discussion for the development of possible contestational technology (to fight back!).
(tags: ai algorithms ethics technology machine-learning)
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Robert Graham from ErrataSec on QUIC aka HTTP/3: ‘Google (pbuh) has both the most popular web browser (Chrome) and the two most popular websites (#1 Google.com #2 Youtube.com). Therefore, they are in control of future web protocol development.’ Faster connection setup and latency; better bandwidth negotiation when using multiplexing; user-mode stacks by building on UDP and using recvmmsg(); and better mobile support for roaming IPs.
Traditional Chinese medicine origins: Mao invented it but didn’t believe in it
Mikulski and the rest of the Senate may be surprised to learn that they were repeating 60-year-old justifications of Chinese medicine put forward by Chairman Mao. Unlike Mikulski, however, Mao was under no illusion that Chinese medicine—a key component of naturopathic education—actually worked. In The Private Life of Chairman Mao, Li Zhisui, one of Mao’s personal physicians, recounts a conversation they had on the subject. Trained as an M.D. in Western medicine, Li admitted to being baffled by ancient Chinese medical books, especially their theories relating to the five elements. It turns out his employer also found them implausible.
via Dr. Jen Gunter
Java’s ByteBuffer native memory “leak”
Well this is suboptimal:
The Java NIO APIs use ByteBuffers as the source and destination of I/O calls, and come in two flavours. Heap ByteBuffers wrap a byte[] array, allocated in the garbage collected Java heap. Direct ByteBuffers wrap memory allocated outside the Java heap using malloc. Only “native” memory can be passed to operating system calls, so it won’t be moved by the garbage collector. This means that when you use a heap ByteBuffer for I/O, it is copied into a temporary direct ByteBuffer. The JDK caches one temporary buffer per thread, without any memory limits. As a result, if you call I/O methods with large heap ByteBuffers from multiple threads, your process can use a huge amount of additional native memory, which looks like a native memory leak. This can cause your process to unexpectedly run into memory limits and get killed.
(tags: jvm performance java memory leaks bytebuffers netty threads coding bugs)
The Time Our Provider Screwed Us
Good talk (with transcript) from Paul Biggar about what happened when CircleCI had a massive security incident, and how Jesse Robbins helped them do incident response correctly. ‘On the left, Jesse pointed out that we needed an incident commander. That’s me, Paul. And this is very good, because I was a big proponent, I think lots of were around the 2013 mark, of flat organizational structures, and so I hadn’t really got a handle of this whole being in charge thing. The fact that someone else came in and said, “No, no, no, you are in charge”: extremely useful. And he also laid out the order of our priorities. Number one priority; safety of customers. Number two priority: communicate with customers. Number three priority: recovery of service. I think a reasonable person could have put those in a different order, especially under the pressure and time constraints of the potential company-ending situation. So I was very happy to have those in order. If this is ever going to happen to you, I’d memorize them, maybe put it on an index card in your pocket, in case this ever happens. The last thing he said is to make sure that we log everything, that we go slow, and that we code review and communicate. His point there is that if we’re going to bring our site back up, if we’re going to do all the things that we need to do in order to save our business and do the right thing for our customers and all that, we can’t be making quick, bad decisions. You can’t just upload whatever code is on your computer now, because I have to do this now, I have to fix it. So we set up a Slack channel … This was pre-Slack; it was a HipChat channel, where all of our communications went. Every single communication that we had about this went in that chatroom. Which came in extremely useful the next day, when I had to write a blog post that detailed exactly what had happened and all the steps that we did to fix it and remediate this, and I had an exact time stamps of all the things that had happened.’
(tags: incidents incident-response paul-biggar circleci security communication outages)
Deep learning can “discover” new knowledge from scans/images
Amazing paper:
Here, we show that deep learning can extract new knowledge from retinal fundus images. Using deep-learning models trained on data from 284,335 patients and validated on two independent datasets of 12,026 and 999 patients, we predicted cardiovascular risk factors not previously thought to be present or quantifiable in retinal images, such as age (mean absolute error within 3.26 years), gender (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC)?=?0.97), smoking status (AUC?=?0.71), systolic blood pressure (mean absolute error within 11.23?mmHg) and major adverse cardiac events (AUC?=?0.70). We also show that the trained deep-learning models used anatomical features, such as the optic disc or blood vessels, to generate each prediction.
(tags: deep-learning data analysis ml machine-learning health medicine papers)
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‘a next-generation, no-compromise automation system’.
Uses: Web-scale configuration management of all Linux/Unix systems; Application deployment; Immutable systems build definition; Maintaining stateful services such as database and messaging platforms; Automating one-off tasks & processes; Deployment and management of the undercloud. Features: Python 3 DSL; Declarative resource model with imperative capabilities; Type / Provider plugin seperation; Implicit ordering (with handler notification); Formalized “Plan” vs “Apply” evaluation stages; Early validation prior to runtime; Programatically scoped variables; Strong object-orientation
(tags: opsmop ops configuration-management deployment build)
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Later JDK versions have made it far easier to run a JVM application in a Linux container. The memory support means that if you relied on JVM ergonomics before than you can do the same inside a container where as previously you had to override all memory related settings. The CPU support for containers needs to be carefully evaluated for your application and environment. If you’ve previously set low cpu_shares in environments like Kubernetes to increase utilisation while relying on using up unused cycles then you might get a shock.
(tags: jvm docker kubernetes linux containers ops)
This Week’s Giza Pyramid Discovery Was Already Built Into Assassin’s Creed Origins
As a kid, I was Egypt-obsessed — this game is hitting the spot
(tags: assassins-creed egypt history pyramids architecture)