Category: Uncategorized

• Snowboy Hotword Detection

  Open-source, Apache-license hotword detection library for homebrew IoT: 'Snowboy is an highly customizable hotword detection engine that is embedded real-time and is always listening (even when off-line) compatible with Raspberry Pi, (Ubuntu) Linux, and Mac OS X. Currently, Snowboy supports: all versions of Raspberry Pi (with Raspbian based on Debian Jessie 8.0) 64bit Mac OS X 64bit Ubuntu (12.04 and 14.04) iOS Android with ARMv7 CPUs Pine 64 with Debian Jessie 8.5 (3.10.102) Intel Edison with Ubilinux (Debian Wheezy 7.8)'

  (tags: audio iot hardware hotwords speech-recognition speech devices)

• Facebook Ad Library Showed Just How Unreliable Facebook’s Security System For Elections Is

  On Dec. 10, just two days before the United Kingdom went to the polls, some 74,000 political advertisements vanished from Facebook’s Ad Library, a website that serves as an archive of political and issue ads run on the platform. [....] Facebook has said it will not fact-check political ads or restrict the ability for campaigns to target people. Instead, it said it will provide transparency with tools like the Ad Library, the Ad Library report, and the Ad Library API, so the public, researchers, and journalists can monitor how elections play out on the platform. But that only works to the degree that those tools operate properly. It was only the news media’s reporting that brought the issue out into the open. “The fact that they could have an outage like this that went up to the day before an election, and they didn’t really publicly communicate,” Laura Edelson, a computer scientist at NYU whose work involves using the API, told BuzzFeed News, “that’s just not how you treat a security system. That’s what this is — this is a security system for elections.”

  (tags: facebook ads politics uk-politics transparency microtargeting social-media)

• How is computer programming different today than 20 years ago?

  Some good answers:

  A desktop software now means a web page bundled with a browser. You are not officially considered a programmer anymore until you attend a $2K conference and share a selfie from there. Code must run behind at least three levels of virtualization now. Code that runs on bare metal is unnecessarily performant. Running your code locally is something you rarely do. A tutorial isn’t really helpful if it’s not a video recording that takes orders of magnitude longer to understand than its text. Mobile devices can now show regular web pages, so no need to create a separate WAP page on a separate subdomain anymore. We create mobile pages on separate subdomains instead. We run programs on graphics cards now. Since we have much faster CPUs now, numerical calculations are done in Python which is much slower than Fortran. So numerical calculations basically take the same amount of time as they did 20 years ago. Storing passwords in plaintext is now frowned upon, but we do it anyway.

  There's also some serious answers, but I prefer these ones.

  (tags: evolution dev programming humour coding lols fortran history)

• Record/Replay testing in Sorbet

  I do like record/replay tests. +1

  (tags: sorbet testing record-replay-testing unit-tests tests)

• The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’

  The center of British politics has become a smoldering pit. The country is now being governed by a hard-right government placed in power by its oldest citizens, in the face of the active hatred of its increasingly socialist-inclined youth. It’s fairly clear that for the Johnson team, Brexit was never anything but an electoral strategy, and that they don’t have the slightest idea how to translate it into economic prosperity. (It is an unacknowledged irony of the current situation that the people most likely to profit from the Brexit process are, precisely, lawyers—and, probably secondarily, accountants. For everyone else, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where they will improve their current situation, and quite easy to imagine Johnson being remembered as one of the most disastrous prime ministers in British history.)

  (tags: labour brexit uk politics tories boris-johnson jeremy-corbyn centrism)

• Scary twitter thread on the new US fascist/"radical catholic" crossover movement

  The Groyper movement, "Deus Vult", Nick Fuentes, and "America First": "two weeks ago [...] employees at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Dover, Delaware, watched stunned as protesters who usually gather outside the clinic performed the Nazi salute as patients were going in." grim.

  (tags: groyper fascism america us-politics catholicism religion nazis)

• ecotrip

  Figure out how to get from A to B with estimates of CO2 emissions involved -- 'Ecotrip is a platform that offers a solution to planes’ large CO2 emission by showing routes from user’s origin point to their desired destination, suggesting alternative means of transport ordered by their level of sustainability.' works great! Pity it's almost impossible to get anywhere from Ireland without flying :(

  (tags: travel green climate-change co2 emissions maps sustainability via:cat)

• How to Run Your ESP8266 for Years on a Battery

  Using the hardware's deepSleep feature. neato

  (tags: arduino esp8266 nodemcu power batteries)

• The “Smoky Cokey” cocktail tastes exactly how it sounds, and that’s a good thing

  Via Ben -- here's a bunch of critics going nuts about a fecking whiskey and coke. 'The 'Smoky Cokey' [...] is a Coca-Cola that tastes smoky thanks to the addition of peaty scotch. Specifically, the drink as it was explained to me requires Lagavulin 16, a scotch that sells for around $75 a bottle in the United States. My god the critics go overboard with this: 'the rich smoke and intensity of Lagavulin is beautifully countered by the sweet vanilla and gentle spices of the cola' 'I actually like to make mine with Mexican Coke when I have one handy, because I find the extra sweetness works even better with the fairly aggressive peatiness of something like a Lagavulin' 'There’s something about the sherry notes present in the Lagavulin that makes it really sing when drowned in high fructose corn syrup' My theory is that this is a marketing wheeze devised by Diageo PR to garner a bit of clickbait....

  (tags: diageo marketing morkeshing smoky-cokey cocktails trolls whiskey coke lagavulin)

• "One of our office chairs turns off monitors"

  Crappy unshielded display cables are prone to electrostatic discharges from gas-lift office chairs... "we have also seen this issue connected to gas lift office chairs. When people stand or sit on gas lift chairs, they can generate an EMI spike which is picked up on the video cables, causing a loss of sync. If you have users complaining about displays randomly flickering it could actually be connected to people sitting on gas lift chairs. Again swapping video cables, especially for ones with magnetic ferrite ring on the cable, can eliminate this problem."

  (tags: chairs furniture funny hardware emi esd monitors twitter video)

• Disinformation For Hire: How A New Breed Of PR Firms Is Selling Lies Online

  If disinformation in 2016 was characterized by Macedonian spammers pushing pro-Trump fake news and Russian trolls running rampant on platforms, 2020 is shaping up to be the year communications pros for hire provide sophisticated online propaganda operations to anyone willing to pay. Around the globe, politicians, parties, governments, and other clients hire what is known in the industry as “black PR” firms to spread lies and manipulate online discourse. A BuzzFeed News review — which looked at account takedowns by platforms that deactivated and investigations by security and research firms — found that since 2011, at least 27 online information operations have been partially or wholly attributed to PR or marketing firms. Of those, 19 occurred in 2019 alone.

  (tags: disinformation china propaganda pr disinfo social-media marketing)

• How to monitor Golden signals in Kubernetes

  Most of this doc is Kubernetes specific, but this "golden signals" idea is interesting; basically, the four metrics of requests per second, average request latency, CPU usage on service fleet, errors per second. I would modify by adding the P99 or P99.9 request latency, and representing errors per second as a proportion of that period's request-per-second figure.

  (tags: kubernetes monitoring sysdig golden-data k8s golden-signals metrics latency errors)

• Serving 100µs reads with 100% availability · Segment Blog

  Distributing read-only snapshotted SQLite databases to shared volumes works! nifty hack

  (tags: architecture databases performance sqlite segment ops docker)

• Ironies of automation

  Wow, this is a great paper recommendation from Adrian Colyer - 'Ironies of automation', Bainbridge, Automatica, Vol. 19, No. 6, 1983.

  In an automated system, two roles are left to humans: monitoring that the automated system is operating correctly, and taking over control if it isn’t. An operator that doesn’t routinely operate the system will have atrophied skills if ever called on to take over. Unfortunately, physical skills deteriorate when they are not used, particularly the refinements of gain and timing. This means that a formerly experienced operator who has been monitoring an automated process may now be an inexeperienced one. Not only are the operator’s skills declining, but the situations when the operator will be called upon are by their very nature the most demanding ones where something is deemed to be going wrong. Thus what we really need in such a situation is a more, not a lesser skilled operator! To generate successful strategies for unusual situtations, an operator also needs good understanding of the process under control, and the current state of the system. The former understanding develops most effectively through use and feedback (which the operator may no longer be getting the regular opportunity for), the latter takes some time to assimilate.

  (via John Allspaw)

  (tags: via:allspaw automation software reliability debugging ops design failsafe failure human-interfaces ui ux outages)

• Bellingcat's Online Investigation Toolkit - Google Docs

  'Welcome to Bellingcat’s freely available online open source investigation toolkit [...] The list includes satellite and mapping services, tools for verifying photos and videos, websites to archive web pages, and much more. The list is long, and may seem daunting. There are guides at the end of the document, highlighting the methods and use of these tools in further detail.' (via Damien)

  (tags: bellingcat osint mapping archival search image-search geo-search web fact-checking)

• Modin: Speed up your Pandas workflows by changing a single line of code

  The modin.pandas DataFrame is an extremely light-weight parallel DataFrame. Modin transparently distributes the data and computation so that all you need to do is continue using the pandas API as you were before installing Modin. Unlike other parallel DataFrame systems, Modin is an extremely light-weight, robust DataFrame. Because it is so light-weight, Modin provides speed-ups of up to 4x on a laptop with 4 physical cores. We have focused heavily on bridging the solutions between DataFrames for small data (e.g. pandas) and large data. Often data scientists require different tools for doing the same thing on different sizes of data. The DataFrame solutions that exist for 1KB do not scale to 1TB+, and the overheads of the solutions for 1TB+ are too costly for datasets in the 1KB range. With Modin, because of its light-weight, robust, and scalable nature, you get a fast DataFrame at small and large data. With preliminary cluster and out of core support, Modin is a DataFrame library with great single-node performance and high scalability in a cluster.

  (tags: data parallel python pandas dataframes modin data-science)

• IAmA: Reddit's Own Vacuum Repair Tech

  some top tips on what to look for in a vacuum cleaner. Bottom line: bagless and stick vacuums are not the best

  (tags: reddit vacuum-cleaners shopping tips ama hoovers)

• Buckle Up Twitter

  Listen up bitches, it’s time to learn incorrect things about someone you’ve never heard of:

  I am thinking of the response to February’s “Beau Brummell invented toxic masculinity” episode, in which the 19th-century English fancy man Beau Brummell, as infamous a dandy as one can be, was “taken down” in a grueling thread which neatly encapsulated all the worst qualities of Buckle Up Twitter: bewilderingly irate, laden with a combination of baroque linguistic flourishes and performatively subversive swearing, assumption of complete ignorance on the part of the audience, fondness for the word “gaslighting,” a powerful youth pastor-like eagerness to “meet people where they are,” high likelihood that it will be retweeted by people who refer to themselves as “Scolds” in their twitter bios, strong urge to lay the blame for the ills of the 21st century firmly at the foot of a basically random actor or event, total erasure of most things that have ever happened.

  (tags: twitter threads bores social-media funny)

• Facial recognition for the public: Yandex

  not such much via, as from, Nelson:

  You can use Yandex Image Search right now as a pretty good facial recognition system for anyone who has labelled photos on the Web. I believe this is the first generally accessible facial recognition system with a large database. Yandex isn’t designed for this purpose. The trick is to upload photos cropped to a face and it’ll work more or less to find similar faces.

  this is really odd. Definitely seems like they designed the image similarity engine to support faces as a special case.

  (tags: privacy face-recognition yandex search similarity images web)

• How "special register groups" invaded computer dictionaries for decades

  For some reason, a 1960 definition of [a computer's] "central processing unit" included "special register groups", an obscure feature from the Honeywell 800 mainframe. This definition was copied and changed for decades, even though it doesn't make sense. It appears that once something appears in an authoritative glossary, people will reuse it for decades, and obsolete terms may never die out.

  Additionally, the "main frame" was a Honeywell term for the large physical frame which held the CPU. History!

  (tags: computer computing language history etymology mainframe honeywell cpu dictionaries)

• massive Travelex outage

  The holiday money exchange site has been offline for the past 7 days, reportedly due to a ransomware infection, with 5GB of PII data exfiltrated

  (tags: travelex fail security exploits ransomware malware outages)

• SHA-1 is a Shambles - First Chosen-Prefix Collision on SHA-1 and Application to the PGP Web of Trust

  Abstract: The SHA-1 hash function was designed in 1995 and has been widely used during two decades. A theoretical collision attack was first proposed in 2004 [WYY05], but due to its high complexity it was only implemented in practice in 2017, using a large GPU cluster [SBK+17]. More recently, an almost practical chosen-prefix collision attack against SHA-1 has been proposed [LP19]. This more powerful attack allows to build colliding messages with two arbitrary prefixes, which is much more threatening for real protocols. In this paper, we report the first practical implementation of this attack, and its impact on real-world security with a PGP/GnuPG impersonation attack. We managed to significantly reduce the complexity of collisions attack against SHA-1: on an Nvidia GTX 970, identical-prefix collisions can now be computed with a complexity of 261.2261.2 rather than 264.7264.7, and chosen-prefix collisions with a complexity of 263.4263.4 rather than 267.1267.1. When renting cheap GPUs, this translates to a cost of 11k US\$ for a collision, and 45k US\$ for a chosen-prefix collision, within the means of academic researchers. Our actual attack required two months of computations using 900 Nvidia GTX 1060 GPUs (we paid 75k US\$ because GPU prices were higher, and we wasted some time preparing the attack). Therefore, the same attacks that have been practical on MD5 since 2009 are now practical on SHA-1. In particular, chosen-prefix collisions can break signature schemes and handshake security in secure channel protocols (TLS, SSH). We strongly advise to remove SHA-1 from those type of applications as soon as possible. We exemplify our cryptanalysis by creating a pair of PGP/GnuPG keys with different identities, but colliding SHA-1 certificates. A SHA-1 certification of the first key can therefore be transferred to the second key, leading to a forgery. This proves that SHA-1 signatures now offers virtually no security in practice. The legacy branch of GnuPG still uses SHA-1 by default for identity certifications, but after notifying the authors, the modern branch now rejects SHA-1 signatures (the issue is tracked as CVE-2019-14855).

  (Via Tony Finch)

  (tags: via:fanf security sha sha-1 crypto hashes hashing pgp gpg collisions)

• Algorithms interviews: theory vs. practice

  Good critique of the current practice of using algorithm questions during tech interviews from Dan Luu

  At this point, we've gone through a few decades of programming interview fads, each one of which looks ridiculous in retrospect. Either we've finally found the real secret to interviewing effectively and have reasoned our way past whatever roadblocks were causing everybody in the past to use obviously bogus fad interview techniques, or we're in the middle of another fad, one which will seem equally ridiculous to people looking back a decade or two from now. Without knowing anything about the effectiveness of interviews, at a meta level, since the way people get interview techniques is the same (crib the high-level technique from the most prestigious company around), I think it would be pretty surprising if this wasn't a fad. I would be less surprised to discover that current techniques were not a fad if people were doing or referring to empirical research or had independently discovered what works.

  (tags: interviews interviewing hiring tech software jobs fads algorithms dan-luu)

• Testing in Production: How we combined tests with monitoring

  The Guardian Digital team's write-up on their "test in prod" setup -- post-release monitoring through running integration test suites. We do the same in Swrve, calling our suites the "canary tests", and it works really well for us.

  (tags: testing monitoring ops devops the-guardian prod production releases)

• Power Line Adapter noise interference

  oh dear, I use this model....

  About 3 weeks ago our neighbour installed power line adapters. The PLAs in question were branded TP-Link [....] How did I know that my neighbour had installed these? Well, the 50MHz band was immediately submerged under a wall of radio noise. Much tinkering with the Noise Blanker settings on the Icom IC-7300 allowed me to separate out two distinct types of noise - 1st a sound like a chicken clucking which was there 24 hours per day and - 2nd a wideband swoosh of white noise of varying strength which happened at certain times.

  (tags: noise rf wifi powerline networking home hardware radio)

• City maps from tourists' feelings

  This is fascinating, and potentially quite useful -- although the great loft I stayed in in Antwerp is marked in a decidedly yellowish region :) (via Nelson)

  The aim of this project is to map tourists’ perceptions of different urban areas through data retrieved from vacation rental platform Airbnb. After their stay, Airbnb guests score their feeling about the neighbourhood using a star-based rating system. The aggregated rating of each Airbnb listing is publicly accessible, and given the widespread expansion of this platform, a large amount of data is available for the most visited cities. When overlaid on a map of the city, the data reveals interesting geographic patterns and exposes subjective perceptions on safety, upkeep or convenience. -- Beñat Arregi

  (tags: airbnb dataviz maps mapping via:nelson data tourism europe vacations holidays)

• Home Automation Bargain Alerts thread at boards.ie

  in case I need to fill my house with IOT tat

  (tags: iot tat home-automation home gadgets bargains boards)

• New Left Review - Mike Davis: Who Will Build the Ark?

  Mike Davis' 2010 essay predicting a failure of climate change mitigation - then rebutting himself in the second half

  (tags: mike-davis climate-change climate politics)

• Prof John Byrne: the man who turned Ireland into a tech world power

  TK Whitaker may be known as the man who made modern Ireland, but the highly respected civil servant wasn’t the only person who helped make the State what it is today. For those who wonder how Ireland came to excel both at luring the biggest and best tech companies to set up here and at producing a good few homegrown tech heroes, a great deal of credit must go to Prof John Byrne, the man who helped kickstart a revolution.

  (tags: tcd software ireland work history computer-science)

• Alice Goldfuss clarifies JK Rowling's "dress however you please" anti-trans comments

  This was a really educational thread for me -- demonstrating how these phrases are a symptom, not support

  JK Rowling hates trans people, but I want to talk a little bit about the *way* she hates them so you can recognize it in the wild. She says “Dress however you please” and “Call yourself whatever you like” At first glance it sounds supportive, but it isn’t It’s disengaging She is taking a very real and concrete issue (the acceptance of trans people as humans with full rights and respect in society), minimizing it to some surface level features (appearance and names), and then abdicating any responsibility She is purposefully mischaracterizing trans people as adults playing dress-up and then claiming to be fine with that...at a distance The language she uses is similar to language used to minimize gay people “You can kiss whoever you want behind closed doors!” It’s also similar to the old favorite “I don’t care if you’re black, white, or purple!” Purple people don’t exist, but now they’ve minimized the issue of racism and swept it away while claiming to be supportive All of these phrases add up to the same message: “I support you, as long as you don’t change my experiences or inconvenience me in any way.” And that’s not actual support

  (tags: trans rights jk-rowling gender acceptance racism)

• Xor Filters: Faster and Smaller Than Bloom Filters

  A new immutable probabilistic set data structure, derived from Bloomier Filters, by Daniel Lemire and Thomas Mueller Graf. Lots of sample implementations, looks very useful!

  (tags: algorithms coding performance bloom-filters xor-filters data-structures)

• Room to Breathe: My Quest to Clean Up My Home's Filthy Air

  The air quality in your home is probably terrible, if this is anything to go by :O

  (tags: air air-quality particulates pm2.5 pm10 health paranoia homes)

• J.K. Rowling’s transphobia is a product of British culture

  Good explainer on why the UK is so TERFy these days:

  Trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) ideology has been helped along in the UK by media under the leadership of Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London for years. Any vague opposition to gender-critical thought in the UK brings accusations of “silencing women” and a splashy feature or op-ed in a British national newspaper. Australian radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys went before the UK Parliament in March 2018 and declared that trans women are “parasites,” language that sounds an awful lot like Donald Trump speaking about immigrants. According to Heron Greenesmith, who studies the modern gender-critical movement as a senior research associate at the social-justice think tank Political Research Associates, gender-critical feminism in the UK grew out of a toxic mix of historical imperialism and the influence of the broader skeptical movement in the early aughts — which was hyperfocused on debunking “junk science” and any idea that considered sociological and historical influence and not just biology. Those who rose to prominence in the movement did so through a lot of “non-tolerant calling-out and attacking people,” Greenesmith said, much like gender-critical feminism. “Anti-trans feminists think they have science on their side. It is bananas how ascientific their rhetoric is, and yet literally they say, ‘Biology isn’t bigotry.’ In fact, biology has been used as bigotry as long as biology has been a thing.”

  (tags: feminism politics terfs trans-rights gender biology uk jk-rowling transphobia)

• Eco Worriers: Saving the Planet, One Unoptimized Website at a Time

  Web sustainability performance checking

  (tags: sustainability green web http optimization performance ad-blocking gwf)

• The #1 bug predictor is not technical, it's organizational complexity (August Lilleaas' blog)

  Organizational Complexity. Measures number of developers working on the module, number of ex-developers that used to work on the module but no longer does, how big a fraction of the organization as a whole that works or has worked on the module, the distance in the organization between the developer and the decision maker, etc.

  (tags: culture management programming organisations bureaucracy bugs quality)

• Opinion | Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy - The New York Times

  'We identified people at political rallies and protests, in one case from 2016 we saw a Seattle-based Microsoft employee take a day off and visit Amazon's campus...when we found him on LinkedIn in 2019 he was an Amazon employee. Turns out his phone had given away his job interview. In recent months we’ve spoken with people we’ve found in the data. Their reaction is surprising — a blend of contradictory emotions like outrage and apathy. We don't have the language to talk about this stuff. And part of the reason is...we adopted this tech so fast. A big takeaway from my experience with this reporting: This is the decade we were brainwashed into surveilling ourselves. In just over 10 years we were sold a future of personalization and convenience and paid for it with little pieces of ourselves that we can never get back.'

  (tags: technology privacy surveillance phones mobile location location-tracking tracking geo)

• Ex-US healthcare industry insider spills the beans on false "choice"

  The truth, of course, is you have little "choice" in healthcare now. Most can’t keep their plan as long as they want, or visit any doctor or hospital. Some reforms, like Medicare For All, *would* let you. In other words, M4A actually offers more choice than the status quo. So if a politician tells you they oppose reforming the current healthcare system because they want to preserve "choice," either they don't know what they're talking about - or they're willfully ignoring the truth. I assure you, the insurance industry is delighted either way.

  (via Nelson.)

  (tags: via:nelson health healthcare lies us-politics usa medicine choice)

• Freeload -- "The Ocean Loader"

  a fantastic wee shrine to the Ocean Software fast-loader routine, used in many Commodore 64 games back in the day, written by Paul Hughes and released into the public domain. I spent many an hour of my misspent youth reverse engineering this code!

  (tags: freeload c=64 via:mikko history commodore-64 microcomputing reverse-engineering piracy)

• Hacked-Up Days

  'In ancient Rome, we’re all slaves to the sundial.'

  (tags: sundial time technology history ancient-rome rome poetry)

• interesting reverse image search tricks

  @AricToler: 'Brief walk-through on how to geolocate this photo from Rudy Giuliani's spokeswoman (subject of this @politico piece https://politico.com/news/2019/12/10/christianne-allen-giuliani-079762) without using any mapping services' In summary, by careful blurring of the unimportant parts of the image, it becomes possible to search for "background" details. Neat trick (via Hazel_ok)

  (tags: images image-search search yandex google bing tricks)

• In The 2010s, We All Became Alienated By Technology

  Looking back from the shaky edge of a new decade, it’s clear that the past 10 years saw many Americans snap out of this dream, shaken awake by a brutal series of shocks and dislocations from the very changes that were supposed to "create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.” When they opened their eyes, they did indeed see that the Digital Nation had been born. Only it hadn’t set them free. They were being ruled by it. It hadn’t tamed politics. It sent them berserk. And it hadn’t brought people closer together. It had alienated them.

  (tags: alienation wired future 2010s america tech silicon-valley internet history digital cyberspace)

• simonw/datasette: A tool for exploring and publishing data

  Datasette is a tool for exploring and publishing data. It helps people take data of any shape or size and publish that as an interactive, explorable website and accompanying API. Datasette is aimed at data journalists, museum curators, archivists, local governments and anyone else who has data that they wish to share with the world.

  (tags: database api json python sqlite data exploring csv tsv)

• surveillance technology marketing

  'I had a look at some marketing websites for Chinese surveillance technology, and they're pretty much what you'd expect: deeply unsettling.' -- sure are. This is the state of the art for mass-marketed panopticons

  (tags: panopticon china surveillance grim-meathook-future facial-recognition camera cctv)

• The Amazon Premium

  good list of low-cost "elastic" VM hosting options similar to AWS

  (tags: aws google cloud hosting digitalocean linode ovh ops)

• Low-Cost VPS Testing

  more VPS hosting options from Rasmus Lerdorf

  (tags: cloud hosting vps ops)

• How Uber Engineering Evaluated JSON Encoding and Compression Algorithms to Put the Squeeze on Trip Data

  Key conclusions: Simply compressing JSON with zlib would yield a reasonable tradeoff in size and speed. The result would be just a little bigger, but execution was much faster than using BZ2 on JSON. Going with IDL-based protocols, Thrift and Protocol Buffers compressed with zlib or Snappy would give us the best gain in size and/or speed.

  (tags: compression json performance python serialization protobuf zlib snappy cbor messagepack thrift bz2)

• AI Now 2019 report

  'Despite the growth of ethical frameworks, AI systems continue to be deployed rapidly across domains of considerable social significance—in healthcare, education, employment, criminal justice, and many others—without appropriate safeguards or accountability structures in place. Many urgent concerns remain, and the agenda of issues to be addressed continues to grow: the environmental harms caused by AI systems are considerable, from extraction of materials from our earth to the extraction of labor from our communities. In healthcare, increasing dependence on AI systems will have life-or-death consequences. New research also highlights how AI systems are particularly prone to security vulnerabilities and how the companies building these systems are inciting fundamental changes to the landscape of our communities, resulting in geographic displacement. Yet the movements of the past year give reason to hope, marked by a groundswell of pushback from both expected and unexpected places, from regulators and researchers to community organizers and activists to workers and advocates. Together, they are building new coalitions upon legacies of older ones, and forging new bonds of solidarity. If the past year has shown us anything, it is that our future will not be determined by the inevitable progress of AI, nor are we doomed to a dystopic future. The implications of AI will be determined by us—and there is much work ahead to ensure that the future looks bright.'

  (tags: ai reports 2019 machine-learning society future)

• COP-25 Report from Prof. John Sweeney of An Taisce

  Very negative review from COP-25. This is depressing:

  There is no doubt but that the failure of COP25 is symptomatic of a world failing to advance the multilateralism ideals many of us grew up with. International cooperation in economics, politics and in solving environmental problems, such as ozone depletion, have now given way to narrow national and populist ideologies. What is most worrying about current developments in tackling climate change is however the disconnect between the power brokers and society at large. The advice of the scientists and the pleas of the young were ignored in Madrid. Indeed some 200 young people were summarily ejected from the conference after a protest, and the eloquent arguments presented by the young Irish activists at several side events fell on deaf ears. Attempts by some world leaders and some media commentators to direct personal vitriol against young activists even surfaced.

  (tags: cop25 world future climate-change economics politics fail)

• The secret-sharer: evaluating and testing unintended memorization in neural networks

  Take a system trained to make predictions on a language (word or character) model – an example you’re probably familiar with is Google Smart Compose. Now feed it a prefix such as “My social security number is “. Can you guess what happens next?

  (tags: neural-networks ai machine-learning secrets differential-privacy training google papers security)

• COP25 Ended in Failure. What’s the Way Forward?

  over the last few months, I’ve found myself thinking a lot more about the model offered by the nuclear nonproliferation agreements forged between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s — the planet’s two superpowers reaching a kind of consensus about a global existential threat, taking significant (if not complete) steps to mitigate that risk, and then more or less bullying the rest of the world to follow suit. Climate change is a very different challenge, but policy negotiations to address it may nevertheless benefit from reducing the number of sides involved in a game-theory calculus from 186 (the number of nations party to the Paris accords) to just two (in this case, the U.S. and China). Of course, this would require not just a complete change of perspective on climate in Washington but some shift almost as complete in Beijing, where commitments made in 2019 to open new coal plants are sufficient on their own to eliminate the entire planet’s chances of staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

  (tags: nonproliferation history agreements international us-politics usa china treaties climate-change)

• How the Tories won the online election: pick a line, ignore the facts and repeat | Alex Hern | Opinion | The Guardian

  The internet wasn’t the place for smart campaigning. The Labour party put out slick video after slick video, outspent the Tories on Snapchat and Facebook, and handed Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account to someone who understands memes extremely well for the entirety of election day. The Conservatives simply sat down and spent six weeks being wilfully stupid, and it worked. In fact, one of the few changes in strategy we saw in the online election was the Conservatives doubling down on simple and stupid. The opening of the campaign was marked by a “shitposting strategy”, with the Tory party sharing low-effort, banally funny campaign messages in the clear hope that they would get as much distribution from opponents as supporters. But, as the election went on, that approach was dropped in favour of a brutally simple one: pick three lines, whether or not they’re true, and just repeat them, for ever, on every platform, without shame or variation. Invent some Labour policies, make up a price-tag for them, and tweet it out as the cost of Labour. Make up a taxation strategy to pay for it, and tweet that out as the party’s tax bombshell. Endlessly, humourlessly, robotically come back to “get Brexit done”. There are lessons here for other political parties, but they aren’t pretty.

  (tags: uk politics shitposting brexit labour tories)

• re:Invent 2019: From CAPCOM to Deliveroo – My pick of the sessions

  some actually-good sessions from this year's Re:Invent

  (tags: reinvent aws talks youtube videos architecture coding amazon)

• Queensland school runs out of water as commercial bottlers harvest local supplies | Environment | The Guardian

  'Water miners' are now a thing....

  The Tamborine Mountain state school has run out of water, even as water miners in the Gold Coast hinterland are sending millions of litres to commercial bottling operations. Trucks sent by the Queensland government carrying emergency supplies to the school, including Mount Tamborine bottled water, have been passing trucks heading in the opposite direction taking local water to bottling plants for beverage giants such as Coca-Cola. Water miners in the Mount Tamborine area supply roughly 130m litres of water each year to commercial bottling operations. Now the local bores are running dry.

  (tags: grim-meathook-future water water-mining mining resources future climate-change queensland australia)

• F5 getting a copyright shakedown over NGINX?

  This twitter thread seems to allege that Rambler, a Russian ISP, is filing copyright claim over the NGINX source code -- nearly 18 years after it started development

  (tags: nginx copyright open-source rambler f5)

• Elon Musk, SpaceX Unveil Latest Starlink Plans, Creating An Astronomical Emergency

  The Starlink light-pollution shitfest continues to get worse:

  A responsible entity would address the problems they're actively creating and exacerbating before accelerating their launch schedule. A responsible entity would ask for the approval of all affected parties before proceeding further. A responsible entity would honestly and accurately address the real issues at hand, and would demonstrate that they've listened to communities beyond their own through their actions. On the other hand, an exploitative entity would pay lip service to the communities they affect while continuing to actively harm them. They would ramp up their launch schedule. They would continue to send up offensive, unaltered satellites while putting minimal effort into solving problems that have been raised. They would invite consultants, but would squash any objectionable voices. They would distort the truth about concerns that have been raised. They would put their business interests — such as lucrative potential government contracts — ahead of any human interests. And they would deflect criticism by running PR campaigns that draw attention away from the real issues.

  (tags: starlink elon-musk light pollution astronomy science space)

• Tensorflow whinge

  "Built to do really fancy cutting-edge stuff and also to make common workflows look very easy, but without a middle ground, so either you are doing something very ordinary and your code is 2 lines that magically work, or you’re lost in cryptic error messages coming from mysterious middleware objects that, you learn 5 hours later, exist so the code can run on a steam-powered deep-sea quantum computer cluster or something"

  This seems to be a bit of a Google trait. (via Alison Parrish)

  (tags: tensorflow api open-source snark whinges)

• Spain Might Be The World’s Most Important Climate Test | HuffPost UK

  Can Spain get a Green New Deal enacted in the EU?

  the Sánchez administration was forced to call another snap election last month. The Socialists again eked out a slim win, and this time agreed to form a coalition with Unidos Podemos, a party to its left. If Sánchez’s center-left vision of a Green New Deal could be criticized for not being ambitious enough, the inclusion of the anti-austerity Podemos could make the country the first to seriously attempt the kind of Green New Deal progressives elsewhere have laid out to curb soaring economic inequality and planet-heating emissions.  Green New Dealers on both sides of the Atlantic argue that addressing both crises at once is key to staving off a resurgent neo-fascist right wing. Vox, a far-right party openly nostalgic for Franco-era Spanish authoritarianism, surged from zero to 24 parliamentary seats last April. November’s election brought that total to 52, making it the third-largest party in Spain.  But, even with a new left flank in the governing coalition, experts say the chances of making transformative changes are slim, thanks to the European Union’s rules on spending and public ownership. It’ll be a test for how much effectively the Green New Deal can beat back the far right while still confined by what one researcher called the “straitjacket of austerity.” 

  (tags: green-new-deal green gnd climate-change spain left-wing eu)

• Denmark adopts climate law to cut emissions 70% by 2030

  Denmark’s parliament adopted a new climate law on Friday, committing to reach 70% below its 1990 emissions in the next eleven years. The law targets carbon neutrality by 2050 and includes a robust monitoring system. New legally-binding targets will be set every five years, with a ten-year perspective. The first of these will be set in 2020. In what the government claims is a first for a national legislature, the new law also has a commitment to climate engagement internationally. This includes an ongoing obligation to deliver on international agreements, including climate finance to developing countries.

  (tags: denmark green climate-change 2030 eu)

• How to Build a Smart Home Where Everything Might Actually Work

  lol

  (tags: smart-home home iot gadgets homekit google amazon alexa)

• Internal FAA review envisaged one fatal crash every 2-3 years with 737-MAX

  U.S. regulators decided to allow the [Boeing] 737 MAX jet to keep flying after its first fatal crash last fall, despite their own analysis [...] The November 2018 internal Federal Aviation Administration analysis, expected to be released during a House committee hearing Wednesday, reveals that without agency intervention, the MAX could have averaged one fatal crash about every two or three years, according to industry officials and regulators.

  (tags: faa fail regulation us-politics boeing safety 737max flying accidents)

• The Decade the Internet Lost Its Joy

  on a systemic level, it’s impossible to ignore the immense effect of capitalistic forces on how we experience the internet today. The pockets of fun will continue to erode until we are all flattened into a single pancake of behavioral data. To rediscover joy on the internet will mean reforming it entirely. When Deadspin was shuttered by its private equity-instilled bosses earlier this year, I blogged that instead of looking backward, we needed to imagine something entirely different. The same goes for the internet as a whole — we need a digital world that is built to take care of us instead of profit from us.

  (tags: culture internet future capitalism web nostalgia joy fun silicon-valley)

• Now Any Government Can Buy China’s Tools for Censoring the Internet

  Well, this is grim:

  “Autocracy as a service” lets countries buy or rent the technology and expertise they need, as they need it. It gets around the problem that being able to censor and surveil the internet isn’t just a technology challenge, but a management and human resource one. China offers a full-stack of options up and down the layers of the internet, including policies and laws, communications service providers with full internet shutdown options pre-installed, technical standards, satellites, cables, and infrastructure. This is possible because China has developed its own indigenous internet stack, sometimes copying the foreign technology it sought to replace. China even offers training in governance and strategy, consulting on writing a national strategy, and help building smart cities with its own full surveillance stack, euphemistically called “safe cities.”

  (tags: grim-meathook-future china censorship future internet surveillance autocracy repression)

• “Quite Divorced From Reality”: Climate Scientist, Activists Call Out Shell Exec at UN Conference - In These Times

  “This is quite divorced from reality, what you are all discussing,” Simon Lewis, a climate science professor at University College London, told the oil executives during a Q+A. Lewis went on to explain to the audience that even if polluters invested in every nature conservation, sustainability agriculture or other “natural climate solution” in the world, those projects would only offset about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions; the vast majority of cuts would still have to come about through actual reductions in fossil fuel use. Given this, Lewis asked them to explain how the initiative was any different from other corporate schemes put forth in past decades—good PR that doesn’t actually tackle the problem. In addition, carbon offset trading—which has been going on at smaller scales for decades—is no silver bullet. It has had mixed results to date, including failed projects, outright fraud, and human rights abuses against rural, indigenous and other vulnerable communities, prompting fierce opposition from grassroots climate organizations against including carbon trading in the Paris Accord. The carbon trading question is one of the remaining thorny issues country negotiators are supposed to iron out during this two-week climate conference, which ends December 13. The rules for such “market-based solutions” (included in what is technically known as Article 6 of Paris Agreement) were supposed to be decided at last year’s meeting, but countries remain far apart; in fact, some observers wonder if it won’t be punted off again until next year. Meanwhile, the oil majors have yet to unveil a plan for reducing their own company emissions in line with the Paris Agreement, which calls for dramatically reducing fossil fuel use to prevent climate catastrophe.

  (tags: shell offsets climate-change climate simon-lewis)

• The Amazon Builders' Library

  Some really good dist-sys/reliability advice from AWS principal engineers, including our team's old principal Jacob Gabrielson and fellow Dub Colm MacCarthaigh

  (tags: guides library howto advice principal-engineers aws amazon principals)

• Not able to configure more than 3 PS Move controllers on a Macbook Pro Retina 13 inch, Early 2015 :: Sportsfriends General Discussions

  How to get 7 PS Move controllers working on recent Mac hardware -- use an external Bluetooth dongle. Vital to be able to play Johann Sebastian Joust

  (tags: joust sportsfriends games bluetooth tips osx macos)

• What China's Surveillance Means for the Rest of the World | Time

  Bakitali Nur, 47, a fruit and vegetable exporter in the Xinjiang town of Khorgos, was arrested after authorities became suspicious of his frequent business trips abroad. The father of three says he spent a year in a single room with seven other inmates, all clad in blue jumpsuits, forced to sit still on plastic stools for 17 hours straight as four HikVision cameras recorded every move. “Anyone caught talking or moving was forced into stress positions for hours at a time,” he says. Bakitali was released only after he developed a chronic illness. But his surveillance hell continued over five months of virtual house arrest, which is common for former detainees. He was forbidden from traveling outside his village without permission, and a CCTV camera was installed opposite his home. Every time he approached the front door, a policeman would call to ask where he was going. He had to report to the local government office every day to undergo “political education” and write a self-criticism detailing his previous day’s activities. Unable to travel for work, former detainees like Bakitali are often obliged to toil at government factories for wages as miserly as 35¢ per day, according to former workers interviewed by TIME. “The entire system is designed to suppress us,” Bakitali says in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he escaped in May. The result is dystopian. When every aspect of life is under constant scrutiny, it’s not just “bad” behavior that must be avoided. Muslims in Xinjiang are under constant pressure to act in a manner that the CCP would approve. While posting controversial material online is clearly reckless, not using social media at all could also be considered suspicious, so Muslims share glowing news about the country and party as a means of defense.

  (tags: uighurs china dystopia surveillance xinjiang authoritarianism grim)

• En-ROADS

  An excellent global climate simulation tool, to roughly model climate change management strategies and their impacts. (It's not good news.)

  (tags: climate-change climate simulations tools web future)

• China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From the West - The New York Times

  China continues to break new ground in grim meathook future dystopia:

  The Chinese government is building “essentially technologies used for hunting people,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who tracks Chinese interest in the technology. In the world of science, Dr. Munsterhjelm said, “there’s a kind of culture of complacency that has now given way to complicity.”

  (tags: grim-meathook-future china racism science surveillance dna phenotypes)

• Climate models have been correct for literally 40 years

  Well well well. Climate deniers have been making it up all along.

  According to the research published today, almost every peer-reviewed climate model of human-caused global temperature rise dating back to 1970 lines up with the warming we see today. “In scientific terms, we'd say there's no bias,” the paper’s co-author Henri Drake, a PhD candidate at MIT, told me over the phone. “Once we accounted for the differences in CO2 emissions, 14 of the 17 models we analyzed were consistent with current observations.” “Taken together,” he added, “these climate models have always been quantitatively accurate.”

  (tags: climate-change climate modelling simulation science history co2 ghgs)

• Algorithmic art theft

  This is amazing. It seems that bots are searching twitter for "I want this on a shirt!" comments, and printing t-shirts on demand using whatever image was in the replied-to tweet -- regardless of artist permission or credit. Cue hi-jinks

  (tags: funny art theft bots twitter tee-shirts)

• Low Carbon Kubernetes Scheduler

  'A demand side management solution that consumes electricity in low grid carbon intensity areas':

  To justify Kubernetes’ ability or globally distributed deployments the researchers chose to optimize placement to regions with the greatest degree of solar irradiance termed a Heliotropic Scheduler. This scheduler is termed ‘heliotropic’ in order to differentiate it from a ‘follow-the-sun’ application management policy that relates to meeting customer demand around the world by placing staff and resources in proximity to those locations (thereby making them available to clients at lower latency and at a suitable time of day). A ‘heliotropic’ policy, on the other hand, goes to where sunlight, and by extension solar irradiance, is abundant. They further evaluated the Heliotropic Scheduler implementation by running BOINC jobs on Kubernetes.

  (tags: carbon climate co2 kubernetes heliotropic-scheduling energy)

• John Barnett on Why He Won’t Fly on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner

  An ex-quality manager at Boeing for 35 years says:

  “When I worked on the 747, the 767, the 777 in Everett, those are beautiful planes. And the people there fully understood what it took to build a safe and airworthy aircraft. I hate to throw the entire label over the whole product line. But as far as the 787, I would change flights before I would fly a 787. I’ve told my family — please don’t fly a 787. Fly something else. Try to get a different ticket. I want the people to know what they are riding on.”

  (tags: business flight flying safety boeing danger 787 john-barnett whistleblowers)

• Dexcom T1 diabetes glucose monitoring devices suffer major outage

  This is really shocking ineptitude. The level of incident response would have been poor for a gaming company, never mind one selling vital healthcare appliances on which peoples' lives depend.

  (tags: healthcare incident-response outages fail dexcom diabetes hardware iot devices internet-of-shit grim-meathook-future)

• CMIP6 increases estimated effects of climate change

  The RCP8.5 "business as usual" scenario is now up to an estimated average of 5.5 degrees C, which would be arguably civilization-ending IMO

  (tags: rcp8.5 climate-change climate estimates future cmip6)

• Home Automation Without The Cloud

  some recommendations from Aaron Parecki, via Nelson

  (tags: via:nelson house home automation iot cloud-free)

• Treeware

  'You're free to use this package, but if it makes it to your production environment I would highly appreciate you buying the world a tree. It’s now common knowledge that one of the best tools to tackle the climate crisis and keep our temperatures from rising above 1.5C is to plant trees. If you contribute to my forest you’ll be creating employment for local families and restoring wildlife habitats.'

  Using offset.earth.

  (tags: treeware open-source shareware software offsetting carbon-capture trees)

• Computer Architecture Lecture 6b: Computation in Memory I

  Lecture notes from Prof. Onur Mutlu, ETH Zurich: 'Energy Waste in Mobile Devices: 62.7% of total system energy is spent on data movement [ie. memory fetches]' Moving data processing closer to the data storage will improve energy efficiency.

  (tags: compsci papers notes pdf memory onur-mutlu sustainability power hardware processors)

• "Let Kids Be Kids"

  Worrying Twitter thread on a new self-declared "grassroots" campaign group campaigning against sex ed in Irish schools, which seems to have local far right involvement

  (tags: far-right ireland lkbk kids sex-education education schools campaigns)

• UV-Treated Outdoor CAT6 Cables

  from Freetv.ie

  (tags: tv cables cabling home wiring cat6 garden shed)

• Climate emergency: world 'may already have crossed several tipping points’

  The world may already have crossed a series of climate tipping points, according to a stark warning from scientists. This risk is “an existential threat to civilisation”, they say, meaning “we are in a state of planetary emergency”. Tipping points are reached when particular impacts of global heating become unstoppable, such as the runaway loss of ice sheets or forests. In the past, extreme heating of 5C was thought necessary to pass tipping points, but the latest evidence suggests this could happen between 1C and 2C. The planet has already heated by 1C and the temperature is certain to rise further, due to past emissions and because greenhouse gas levels are still rising. The scientists further warn that one tipping point, such as the release of methane from thawing permafrost, may fuel others, leading to a cascade.

  (tags: climate-change climate tipping-points nature)

• Want To Make Money? Build A Business On A Bike Lane

  “Local stores next to the protected bike lane have seen a 49% increase in sales, compared to an average of 3% for Manhattan as a whole.”

  (tags: numbers statistics cycling bike-lanes shops)

• China’s Operating Manuals for Mass Internment and Arrest by Algorithm - ICIJ

  “The Chinese have bought into a model of policing where they believe that through the collection of large-scale data run through artificial intelligence and machine learning that they can, in fact, predict ahead of time where possible incidents might take place, as well as identify possible populations that have the propensity to engage in anti-state anti-regime action,” said Mulvenon, the SOS International document expert and director of intelligence integration. “And then they are preemptively going after those people using that data.” Mulvenon said IJOP is more than a “pre-crime” platform, but a “machine-learning, artificial intelligence, command and control” platform that substitutes artificial intelligence for human judgment. He described it as a “cybernetic brain” central to China’s most advanced police and military strategies. Such a system “infantilizes” those tasked with implementing it, said Mulvenon, creating the conditions for policies that could spin out of control with catastrophic results. The program collects and interprets data without regard to privacy, and flags ordinary people for investigation based on seemingly innocuous criteria, such as daily prayer, travel abroad, or frequently using the back door of their home. Perhaps even more significant than the actual data collected are the grinding psychological effects of living under such a system.  With batteries of facial-recognition cameras on street corners, endless checkpoints and webs of informants, IJOP generates a sense of an omniscient, omnipresent state that can peer into the most intimate aspects of daily life.  As neighbors disappear based on the workings of unknown algorithms, Xinjiang lives in a perpetual state of terror. The seeming randomness of investigations resulting from IJOP isn’t a bug but a feature, said Samantha Hoffman, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute whose research focuses on China’s use of data collection for social control. “That’s how state terror works,” Hoffman said. “Part of the fear that this instills is that you don’t know when you’re not OK.”

  (tags: terror dystopia china algorithms ijop future policing grim-meathook-future privacy data-privacy uighurs)

• Sacha Baron Cohen Uses ADL Speech to Tear Apart Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook

  “if Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem,’” he said. “So here’s a good standard and practice: Facebook, start fact-checking political ads before you run them, stop micro-targeted lies immediately, and when the ads are false, give back the money and don’t publish them.” [...] “if we prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference and experts over ignoramuses” then “maybe, just maybe, we can stop the greatest propaganda machine in history, we can save democracy, we can still have a place for free speech and free expression, and, most importantly, my jokes will still work.”

  (tags: adl sacha-baron-cohen racism facts fact-checking facebook social-media propaganda truth)

• Turning Photos into 2.5 Parallax Animations with Machine Learning

  This is superb. nice work with the Colab notebook

  (tags: imaging effects photos animation zoom machine-learning)

• Home automation with Home Assistant on an Odroid XU4

  this looks great, I may need to do some hacking with my Odroid

  (tags: odroid hacks home-automation home-assistant home)

• New Google political ad policy

  'If the new Google policy was applied by Facebook, nearly every ad running on that platform for #GE2019 [the upcoming UK general election] would have to be pulled (most use custom, lookalike and/or interest-based audience targeting).'

  (tags: targeting google facebook ads politics uk)

• Horace Goes Copyright Striking / Boing Boing

  aka “Horace Goes To The Job Centre Because His IP Holder Took A Shit On Literally The Only People Who Give A Fuck About The Character”.

  As of November 14, [Octav1us'] social media channels are deactivated, reportedly to avoid the continuing abuse she receives from anonymous users. For a young woman appropriating the obscure personas of 8-bit British game history, hostility comes in forms both legal and personal. But the message is always the same: stay off the slopes.

  (tags: horace skiing copyright ip subvert youtube history 80s)

• (PDF) Carbon sequestration in the trees, products and soils of forest plantations: An analysis using UK examples

  A carbon-flow model for managed forest plantations was used to estimate carbon storage in UK plantations differing in Yield Class (growth rate), thinning regime and species characteristics. If the objective is to store carbon rapidly in the short term and achieve high carbon storage in the long term, Populus plantations growing on fertile land (2.7 m spacing, 26-yr rotations, Yield Class 12) were the best option examined. If the objective is to achieve high carbon storage in the medium term (50 yr) without regard to the initial rate of storage, then plantations of conifers of any species with above-average Yield Classes would suffice. In the long term (100 yr), broadleaved plantations of oak and beech store as much carbon as conifer plantations.

  Via Mark Dennehy

  (tags: via:markdennehy trees co2 carbon-sequestration climate-change woodland forests)

• Using solar power and carbon capture to make carbon-neutral liquid hydrocarbons

  David Keith: 'Cheap intermittent solar power can make carbon-neutral hydrocarbons: high-energy fuels that are easy to store and use. My 12 min talk at Royal Society #CodexTalks describes a low-risk fast path to industrial-scale solar-fuels.'

  (tags: carbon carbon-sequestration carbon-capture royal-society co2 hydrocarbons fuel solar climate-change)

• everyone is a badass until there’s a knock at the door | MetaFilter

  scary things happening to Naomi Wu. I'm deeply unimpressed by Sarah Jeong and Hasan Minhaj so irresponsibly putting someone in an authoritarian society in danger

  (tags: china lgbt metafilter shenzen naomi-wu via:nelson)

• "Brushing"

  An interesting Amazon scam:

  The end game here in many cases is for the seller to be able to pose as a verified purchaser and write a glowing review of their own product. Gaming the review system in this way pushes their products up higher in Amazon search results — regardless of whether the product is actually “good” or not. Amazon told CBS News that it investigates all customer reports of unsolicited packages like those made by the Gallivans. The company will shut down the accounts of vendors or reviewers found abusing the review system.

  (tags: reviews brushing scams amazon crime ecommerce)

• KIAM defaults result in massive latencies on AWS API calls

  KIAM [a Kubernetes IAM API helper] happens to provide short-lived credentials to Pods, which makes sense as it’s fair to assume that the average lifetime of a Pod is shorter than EC2 instances. The default is precisely 15 min. But if you put both defaults together, you have a problem. Each certificate provided to the application has a 15 min expiration time. The AWS Java SDK will force refreshing any certificate with less than 15 min expiration time left. The result is that every request will be forced to refresh the temporary certificate, which requires two calls to the AWS API that add a huge latency penalty to each request. We later found a feature request in the AWS Java SDK that mentions this same issue. The fix was easy. We reconfigured KIAM to request credentials with a longer expiration period. Once this change was applied, requests started being served without involving the AWS Metadata service and returned to an even lower latency than in EC2.

  (tags: kubernetes kiam defaults aws latency performance ec2)

• BBC podcast's attempt to define 'shitposting' leaves viewers baffled

  Laura Keunssberg, the Beeb's inept political editor, manages to make an utter mess of explaining "shitposting", claiming it's analogous to "boomer memes". Inadvertently this introduces the concept of a “skunked term” -- 'a word that becomes difficult to use because it is in the middle of transitioning from one common meaning to another'.

  (tags: bbc shitposting internet fail bbclaurak boomer-memes memes shitposts)

• Thomas Talhelm's DIY air purifier

  Simply strap a HEPA air filter to a desk fan for $30:

  I tested it over and over—hundreds of days, with a control room, with a stronger fan, against the big brand purifiers that I borrowed from my rich friends. Eventually, I saw enough data that I was convinced. This $30 DIY purifier was removing significant amounts of tiny particulate from my Beijing bedroom. I wanted to tell the world that those $1,000 purifiers were ripoffs. I made all the data and testing methods open source. I wrote up the instructions for how to make one.

  (tags: air air-quality beijing hepa filters filtering diy hacks)

• ServiceTalk

  a JVM network application framework with APIs tailored to specific protocols (e.g. HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2.x, etc…?) and supports multiple programming paradigms. It is built on Netty and is designed to provide most of the performance/scalability benefits of Netty for common networking protocols used in service to service communication. ServiceTalk provides server support and "smart client" like features such as client-side load balancing and service discovery integration.

  Open source from Apple.

  (tags: apple servicetalk netty libraries java jvm coding http async)

• k?j?-moe

  “factory infatuation” -- 'an enthusiasm that has taken root among young urbanites whose lives are increasingly remote from Japan’s manufacturing base. Apparently influenced by the popularity of glossy factory photography books published in the past decade, tourists and day-trippers now flock to appreciate the aesthetic charms of industrial installations – especially at night, when lights and flares add to their appeal.'

  (tags: factories industrial kojo-moe via:Urbanopolis japan photography)

• Spleeter

  The engineering team behind streaming music service Deezer just open-sourced Spleeter, their audio separation library built on Python and TensorFlow that uses machine learning to quickly and freely separate music into stems.

  The results, just using the pretrained models, are frankly incredible. Gonna be a lot of random mashups and remixes using this....

  (tags: audio music spleeter deezer tensorflow python cool hacks machine-learning)

• using a Raspberry Pi 4 as a USB-C Gadget

  'This allows them to be powered and accessed via one of the micro USB sockets and it shows up as both a CD-Drive and a ethernet device.' (via Tony Finch)

  (tags: via:fanf usb dev raspberry-pi hardware usb-c gadgets)

• incredible stats on drivers speeding on Irish roads

  Via the Dublin Cycling Campaign:

  52% of car drivers on Irish urban roads are speeding. 58% of rigid truck drivers on urban roads are speeding. 72% of articulated truck drivers on urban roads are speeding. 98% (!!) of drivers in 30kph urban zones are speeding

  (tags: driving speeding enforcement law ireland roads cycling safety)

• luftdaten.info

  Citizen science -- measuring air quality, PM2.5 and PM10 particulates and uploading them to produce an air quality map throughout Europe, with a standardized DIY Arduino build

  (tags: air-quality metrics pm2.5 pm10 particulates europe citizen-science science measurement)

• An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage

  by apenwarr. Excellent stuff -- most of what we do in Swrve for scheduling is included here

  (tags: agile management software programming scheduling triage bugs backlogs jira)

• UK Tories pioneering 'government through shitposting'

  In the Australian election earlier this year, Scott Morrison’s Liberals did surprisingly well and "boomer memes" - as this style of message is called - were partially credited with the campaign’s online success, according to Latika Bourke who is a London-based journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald. The consultants who ran it – Topham Guerin – are now working for the Tories. So expect more dodgy memes.

  (tags: shitposting bad memes cynicism uk conservatives topham-guerin boomer-memes)

• SummitRoute/aws_breaking_changes

  'List of changes announced for AWS that may break existing code.' e.g. Lambda will no longer support Node.js 8.10 on Jan 6 2020, etc.

  (tags: coding ops cloud aws api breakage)

• 80×25

  An extremely deep dive into the history of a UNIX terminal's dimensions, and how they got that way

  (tags: terminals unix history computing computers vt100 dec punch-cards)

• trevorndodds/dd-wrt-grafana

  Send DD-WRT router metrics to a graphite server, and a nice Grafana dashboard for same. Needs JFFS enabled on the router

  (tags: dd-wrt wrt routers networking grafana graphite metrics)

• DD-WRT Network Stats Graphics using Grafana and InfluxDB

  A slightly hackier approach to DD-WRT grafana metrics, but with a workaround when JFFS isn't an option

  (tags: grafana networking metrics dd-wrt routers jffs influxdb)

• Climate friendly investing when you’re using passive ETFs and tracker funds

  Passive ETFs and tracker funds have become common way to achieve a low-cost diversified portfolio across global indices. The proportion to which the biggest greenhouse gas emitters feature in these indices, and correspondingly in my own passive investments bothered me, so I wanted to see what options I had to tackle it.

  (tags: investment investing climate-change climate etfs tracker-funds money)

• Collapse OS

  'Bootstrap post-collapse technology' -- quite a pessimistic view on the future, but an interesting thought experiment I guess. 'An operating system designed to run on ad-hoc machines built from scavenged parts. Its development is going well and the main roadblocks are out of the way: it self-replicates on very, very low specs (for example, on a Sega Genesis which has 8K of RAM for its z80 processor).'

  (tags: software operating-systems collapse grim-meathook-future z80)

• Examining how AWS builds their own serverless apps

  interesting for reverse engineering, but still sounds massively complex and bringing total AWS lock-in

  (tags: serverless lambda aws architecture coding)

• Excellent Twitter thread on Facebook in Myanmar

  Thought provoking -- as argued here, possibly Facebook should not have expanded into Myanmar or Sri Lanka at scale, until it had built out the content moderation and abuse handling teams for those areas and languages, and they should have researched and foreseen the political issues that would exploit their platform to perpetrate hate crimes

  (tags: facebook whatsapp genocide politics hate-crimes india myanmar sri-lanka abuse moderation)

• The average lifetime of a Lambda run-time between AWS support for it to EOL is 2 years and 23 days

  That is miserable.

  (tags: aws lambda support ops platforms)

• thegreenwebfoundation/datasets

  'Open datasets & methodologies for carbon emissions from different activities. Forked from OpenAMEE, and npm installable' This is very impressive -- lots of carbon emissions estimation code.

  (tags: co2 carbon emissions estimation npm javascript open-source)

• Oftel use a Yahoo! group to manage UK phone number assignments

  Yes, really.

  Today it was announced that Yahoo! Groups is shutting down, and taking with it a piece of critical national infrastructure: the Oftel Yahoo Group which is used for managing UK phone number assignments.

  (tags: funny history oftel fail phones phone-numbers yahoo yahoo-groups email)

• How a new class of startups are working to solve the grid storage puzzle - MIT Technology Review

  A rake of energy storage startups, from giant batteries to molten salt to cranes and barrels

  (tags: energy energy-storage startups future climate-change technology batteries)

• How A Massive Facebook Scam Siphoned Millions Of Dollars From Unsuspecting Boomers

  Since 2015, Ads Inc. has made money — lots of it — by executing one of the internet’s most persistent, lucrative, and sophisticated scams: the subscription trap. The subscription trap works by tricking people into buying what they think is a single free trial of a celebrity-endorsed product. Although the customers would receive the product — which in most cases was not made by Ads Inc. itself — in reality, the celebrity has nothing to do with the offer. And in purchasing the free trial, the customer unwittingly commits to a pricey monthly subscription designed to be hard to cancel. As for the products, a current employee described the diet and male enhancement offerings as, “the worst of the worst … China-made sawdust in a capsule.” But the subscription trap was just one part of Ads Inc.’s shady business practices. Burke’s genius was in fusing the scam with a boiler room–style operation that relied on convincing thousands of average people to rent their personal Facebook accounts to the company, which Ads Inc. then used to place ads for its deceptive free trial offers. That strategy enabled his company to run a huge volume of misleading Facebook ads, targeting consumers all around the world in a lucrative and sophisticated enterprise, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found.

  (tags: facebook scams ads-inc subscriptions account-rental scammers social-media)

• Computer says no: the people trapped in universal credit's 'black hole'

  This is some horrifically dystopian shit from the UK:

  Tears filled the eyes of Danny Brice, 47, in London when he showed the Guardian how difficult he has found negotiating the UC programme with learning disabilities and dyslexia. “I call it the black hole,” he said. “I feel shaky. I get stressed about it. This is the worst system in my lifetime. They assess you as a number not a person. Talking is the way forward, not a bloody computer. I feel like the computer is controlling me instead of a person. It’s terrifying.” Nine million people in the UK are functionally illiterate and 5 million adults have either never used the internet or last used it more than three months ago. And yet many of these people rely on a “digital by default” welfare system.

  (tags: poverty ai algorithms uk politics universal-credit dystopia bureaucracy dwp benefits grim-meathook-future)

• Unpopular opinions on solar power

  from Jenny "@solar_chase" Chase. Lots of interesting solar-power factoids, like: 12. A lot of current household PV systems are designed suboptimally and may not make economic sense or even perform well. Also, most countries will move to paying a pittance for solar exports, so self-consumption rate is becoming the most important financial parameter. 13. To financially assess a proposed rooftop solar system, you will need at least a year’s data on hourly electricity consumption to estimate selfconsumption. Also, get it built when you have scaffolding up for something else, scaffolding is expensive.

  (tags: solar solar-power power electricity generation renewables future factoids twitter)

• thoughts on rms and gnu -- wingolog

  I can hear you saying it. RMS started GNU so RMS decides what it is and what it can be. But I don't accept that. GNU is about practical software freedom, not about RMS. GNU has long outgrown any individual contributor. I don't think RMS has the legitimacy to tell this group of largely volunteers what we should build or how we should organize ourselves. Or rather, he can say what he thinks, but he has no dominion over GNU; he does not have majority sweat equity in the project. If RMS actually wants the project to outlive him -- something that by his actions is not clear -- the best thing that he could do for GNU is to stop pretending to run things, to instead declare victory and retire to an emeritus role. Note, however, that my personal perspective here is not a consensus position of the GNU project. There are many (most?) GNU developers that still consider RMS to be GNU's rightful leader. I think they are mistaken, but I do not repudiate them for this reason; we can work together while differing on this and other matters. I simply state that I, personally, do not serve RMS.

  (tags: rms gnu leadership open-source foss free-software organisations emeritus)

• UK launched passport photo checker it knew would fail with dark skin | New Scientist

  “User research was carried out with a wide range of ethnic groups and did identify that people with very light or very dark skin found it difficult to provide an acceptable passport photograph,” the department wrote in a document released in response to a freedom of information (FOI) request. “However; the overall performance was judged sufficient to deploy.” Samir Jeraj at the Race Equality Foundation says: “It’s outrageous. It clearly shows it wasn’t a priority for them that it would work for people with black skin.” Jeraj called on the government to be clearer and more robust about what improvements it will make, and by when. In the meantime, he adds it would not cost the passport office anything to put a note on its website acknowledging the issue.

  And it took a fecking FOI to discover this! Terrible.

  (tags: passports racism uk photos biometrics data-quality home-office equality)

• Origins of the Party Parrot

  ... just this week, I got an email from a Florida man claiming to be the person I had been looking for. What's more, he says he made the original emoji in December 2009 and uploaded it to Something Awful, a website popular in the 2000s for its comedic blog posts and forums. He had no idea his work had turned into a meme until he read my story on Tuesday. 

  (tags: something-awful memes history party-parrot emoticons internet)

• libeatmydata

  'a small LD_PRELOAD library designed to (transparently) disable fsync (and friends, like open(O_SYNC)). This has two side-effects: making software that writes data safely to disk a lot quicker and making this software no longer crash safe.' Good for tests....

  (tags: fsync linux performance mysql testing)

• THE HISTORY OF GAMING MAGAZINES: A GALLERY - DIGITISER

  this is incredible

  (tags: gaming magazines funny retrogaming arcade-games games parody digitiser)

• Gen A

  Most of those under the age of around forty will live lives defined by the anthropocene: by the immense challenges contained in mounting climate chaos and ecological collapse. As these twin calamities evolve, there will be no meaningful way to distinguish between those young generations delineated by marketing agencies: Gen Z and Millennials, the two big generations still under forty. Instead, they will likely become a single transition generation overseeing our move from the old world to a new one. Their shared experiences will be grafted together by the wildfires they’ll weather together, their shared values moulded and alloyed by the acts of violence that have always trailed ecological collapse. The existential crisis inherent to this transition is so dire and so unique that our usual way of demarcating generational cohorts needs revamping, and the generation experiencing it needs a new designation. Welcome Generation Anthropocene, or Gen A, to the social scene.

  (tags: gen-a generations future youth anthropocene climate-change)

• 150 successful machine learning models: 6 lessons learned at Booking.com

  Good tips for real-world production ML/classification adoption.

  One tactic Booking.com have successfully deployed in these situations with respect to binary classifiers is to look at the distribution of responses generated by the model. “Smooth bimodal distributions with one clear stable point are signs of a model that successfully distinguishes two classes.” Other shapes (see figure below) can be indicative of a model that is struggling.

  Also very interesting to note that people found an over-accurate prediction engine to be "creepy" and an example of the "uncanny valley" effect.

  (tags: learning ml ai machine-learning production booking.com)

• A quarter of UK mammals and nearly half of birds are at risk of extinction

  A quarter of UK mammals and nearly half of the birds assessed are at risk of extinction, according to the report, which was produced by a coalition of more than 70 wildlife organisations and government conservation agencies. When plants, insects and fungi are added, one in seven of the 8,400 UK species assessed are at risk of being completely lost, with 133 already gone since 1500.

  (tags: xr news horrifying extinction uk wildlife future climate-change)

• Revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions

  The top 20 companies on the list have contributed to 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane worldwide, totalling 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) since 1965. Those identified range from investor-owned firms – household names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell – to state-owned companies including Saudi Aramco and Gazprom. Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965.

  (tags: coal emissions business gas oil fossil-fuels climate-change co2 carbon chevron exxon bp shell)

• The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

  the biggest and most successful lie it tells is this: that the first great extermination is a matter of consumer choice. In response to the Guardian’s questions, some of the oil companies argued that they are not responsible for our decisions to use their products. But we are embedded in a system of their creation – a political, economic and physical infrastructure that creates an illusion of choice while, in reality, closing it down. We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism. It has been crafted with the help of skilful advertisers and marketers, by corporate celebrity culture, and by a media that casts us as the recipients of goods and services rather than the creators of political reality. It is locked in by transport, town planning and energy systems that make good choices all but impossible. It spreads like a stain through political systems, which have been systematically captured by lobbying and campaign finance, until political leaders cease to represent us, and work instead for the pollutocrats who fund them. In such a system, individual choices are lost in the noise. [...] This individuation of responsibility, intrinsic to consumerism, blinds us to the real drivers of destruction.

  (tags: capitalism consumerism fossil-fuels climate-change plastic-straws keep-cups)

• Scylla compression benchmarks

  ScyllaDB tested out LZ4, Snappy, DEFLATE, and ZStandard at several different levels on a decently real-world-ish workload. tl;dr:

  Use compression. Unless you are using a really (but REALLY) fast hard drive, using the default compression settings will be even faster than disabling compression, and the space savings are huge. When running a data warehouse where data is mostly being read and only rarely updated, consider using DEFLATE. It provides very good compression ratios while maintaining high decompression speeds; compression can be slower, but that might be unimportant for your workload. If your workload is write-heavy but you really care about saving disk space, consider using ZStandard on level 1. It provides a good middle-ground between LZ4/Snappy and DEFLATE in terms of compression ratios and keeps compression speeds close to LZ4 and Snappy. Be careful however: if you often want to read cold data (from the SSTables on disk, not currently stored in memory, so for example data that was inserted a long time ago), the slower decompression might become a problem.

  (tags: compression scylladb storage deflate zstd zstandard lz4 snappy gzip benchmarks tests performance)

• Financial supports to growing forests on farmland in Ireland

  Rather than focusing on the production of a commercial conifer (or broadleaf) timber crop, you can also choose to establish a new native woodland. Not only will an ecologically rich, biodiverse woodland be created, but it also presents opportunities for planting in various environmentally sensitive areas such as Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and Special Protection Areas (SPAs). Establishing a native woodland will provide you with higher annual payments of €665-€680/ha/yr for 15 years.

  (tags: farming forestry trees growing rewilding ireland funds)

• electricityMap

  This is fascinating! 'a live visualization of where your electricity comes from and how much CO2 was emitted to produce it.' (via ClimateAction.tech)

  (tags: electricity statistics graphs data energy climate renewables carbon co2)

• Project Drawdown

  'The objective of the solutions list is to be inclusive, presenting an extensive array of impactful measures already in existence. The list is comprised primarily of “no regrets” solutions—actions that make sense to take regardless of their climate impact since they have intrinsic benefits to communities and economies. These initiatives improve lives, create jobs, restore the environment, enhance security, generate resilience, and advance human health.' A little over-optimistic IMO, but a good resource nonetheless

  (tags: climate-change society environment climate drawdown future)

• "See bike, say bike"

  This is useful advice, on how to avoid the SMIDSY, or "Sorry mate, I didn't see you", accident type.

  When we looked at what predicts whether you do remember the motorbike, it's not whether you looked at it, or how long you looked at it for, it's what you do afterwards. So the more things you look at after the motorbike, the more likely you are to forget it. Now that looks like forgetting, not a failure to attend to it in the first place. [...] it looks as though this error is a limitation in short term memory. Now what we do know about short term memory, and we've known since the 1960s, is that you've got two types of short term memory that are essentially independent systems. You've got visuospatial working memory, for the things you look at and you've got phonological short term memory. That's a verbal form of store for things you say. The two are separate. So I've suggested that if you're at a junction and you see a motorbike or a pedal cycle coming, you just say aloud or under your breath, “bike”, that will automatically encode it in phonological working memory. That gives you extra capacity, essentially doubling the amount of stuff you can remember. See bike, say bike could be a simple intervention that might make a big difference.

  (tags: memory cycling safety roads driving smidsy accidents attention brain)

• Operating Apache Kafka Clusters 24/7 Without A Global Ops Team

  Lyft built an autoremediation system and apparently it works :) Good to get a detailed writeup on such an elusive beast

  (tags: autoremediation failures ops kafka scalability automation)

• The Shitkansen

  this may be the best Aussie neologism. "Shitkansen" refers to the shitty Newcastle-Sydney suburban rail line, as opposed to the gleaming, zoomy japanese "shinkansen" bullet trains

  (tags: trains via:johnb78 shitkansen australia sydney funny neologisms nicknames shinkansen bullet-trains rail-travel)

• Updating and Backing Up Docker Containers With Version Control

  Version controlling Docker-based service upgrades; assuming all the service state is in a /config or /data app-data directory, this is a nice approach. Linuxserver.IO are impressive in how well they have thought out the use of Docker containers as a server deployment system for small-scale, home use

  (tags: docker home ops services upgrades docker-compose version-control)

• JSON originally had comments. They were removed

  Oh christ. This is some terrible logic from Douglas Crockford:

  Comments in JSON (Apr 30, 2012) I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability. I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad, but it shouldn't. Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files, which you would like to annotate. Go ahead and insert all the comments you like. Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser.

  I've never even _heard_ of JSMin. Meanwhile various tools which chose to use JSON as a configuration file format work around this crappy decision with messy hacks.

  (tags: hacks json bad-decisions design apis configuration file-formats javascript douglas-crockford fail jsmin parsing comments)

• How To Use The Bridgefy Offline Messaging App

  Decent offline messaging system for smartphones -- uses Bluetooth to connect p2p, without requiring working internet

  (tags: apps mobile offline networking bluetooth chat emergency)

• The Loudest Sound Ever Heard

  The Krakatoa explosion registered 172 decibels at 100 miles from the source. This is so astonishingly loud, that it’s inching up against the limits of what we mean by “sound.” When you hum a note or speak a word, you’re wiggling air molecules back and forth dozens or hundreds of times per second, causing the air pressure to be low in some places and high in other places. The louder the sound, the more intense these wiggles, and the larger the fluctuations in air pressure. But there’s a limit to how loud a sound can get. At some point, the fluctuations in air pressure are so large that the low pressure regions hit zero pressure—a vacuum—and you can’t get any lower than that. This limit happens to be about 194 decibels for a sound in Earth’s atmosphere. Any louder, and the sound is no longer just passing through the air, it’s actually pushing the air along with it, creating a pressurized burst of moving air known as a shock wave.[...] Amazingly, for as many as 5 days after the explosion, weather stations in 50 cities around the globe observed this unprecedented spike in pressure re-occuring like clockwork, approximately every 34 hours. That is roughly how long it takes sound to travel around the entire planet.

  (tags: sound shockwaves earth krakatoa disasters volcanos eruptions noise decibels)

• Implementing graceful-close in Haskell network library

  One of the nice bits about HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 was the strong connection direction semantics, avoiding the classic TCP deadlock scenarios seen in bidirectional protocols. But now HTTP/2 supports bidirectionality, so HTTP/2 servers need to be more careful about how they close connections, as this blog post describes -- tl;dr: shutdown(SHUT_WR) .

  (tags: http networking protocols http2 bidirectional-protocols tcp ip)

• Scott Aaronson on Google's quantum supremacy leaked paper

  It seems a paper between Google and NASA accidentally leaked a couple of days ago, saying that a group at Google has now achieved quantum computational supremacy with a 53-qubit superconducting device. According to Scott Aaronson, a noted quantum-computation expert, this is a Big Deal and a significant moment in scientific progress:

  It’s like, have a little respect for the immensity of what we’re talking about here, and for the terrifying engineering that’s needed to make it reality. Before quantum supremacy, by definition, the QC skeptics can all laugh to each other that, for all the billions of dollars spent over 20+ years, still no quantum computer has even once been used to solve any problem faster than your laptop could solve it, or at least not in any way that depended on its being a quantum computer. In a post-quantum-supremacy world, that’s no longer the case. A superposition involving 250 or 260 complex numbers has been computationally harnessed, using time and space resources that are minuscule compared to 250 or 260. I keep bringing up the Wright Flyer only because the chasm between what we’re talking about, and the dismissiveness I’m seeing in some corners of the Internet, is kind of breathtaking to me. It’s like, if you believed that useful air travel was fundamentally impossible, then seeing a dinky wooden propeller plane keep itself aloft wouldn’t refute your belief … but it sure as hell shouldn’t reassure you either.

  (tags: google programming quantum-computing qubits future science qc history research)

• Isolating workloads with Systemd slices

  Systemd supports docker-like cgroups isolation, it seems, and ScyllaDB can take advantage of that

  (tags: systemd cgroups process-isolation linux containerisation scylladb ops)

• GNOME Foundation facing lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging

  Software patents are a cancer. 'The GNOME Foundation has been made aware of a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC over patent 9,936,086. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes this patent. Neil McGovern, Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation says “We have retained legal counsel and intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit.”'

  (tags: software-patents swpats shotwell gnome linux open-source patents)

• IPCC Report: Oceans Face 'Unprecedented Conditions'

  The IPCC report on the ocean is full of utterly disastrous science. One example:

  The dangerous changes to the ocean don’t even begin to address the impacts of rising seas. Under all climate change scenarios, coastal areas will see what the report euphemistically calls “extreme sea level events”—that would be floods to you and me—that were once once-in-a-century will become annual occurrences by century’s end. But devastating effects will impact unnumbered people far sooner. “Many low-lying megacities and small islands (including SIDS) are projected to experience historical centennial events at least annually by 2050,” the report authors wrote.

  Bottom line: 'The world has shown little appetite to take a collaborative approach to these types of adaptation projects let alone drawing down emissions to-date, but the tide will have to turn if humanity is to have any chance of staying above water.'

  (tags: climate-change climate oceans sea-level disasters future 2050)

• Green New Deal critics are missing the bigger picture

  This Vox article absolutely nails what we are facing, and why there's no longer any room to _not_ implement a Green New Deal world wide.

  New EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler recently dismissed the latest IPCC report as being based on a “worst-case scenario,” which is darkly ironic, since the report is all about the dangers that lie between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming. But 2 degrees is not the worst-case scenario. It is among the best-case scenarios. The UN thinks we’re headed for somewhere around 4 degrees by 2100. Believing that we can limit temperature rise to 2 degrees — a level of warming scientists view as catastrophic — now counts as wild-haired optimism. [...] Two degrees would be terrible, but it’s better than three, at which point Southern Europe would be in permanent drought, African droughts would last five years on average, and the areas burned annually by wildfires in the United States could quadruple, or worse, from last year’s million-plus acres. And three degrees is much better than four, at which point six natural disasters could strike a single community simultaneously; the number of climate refugees, already in the millions, could grow tenfold, or 20-fold, or more; and, globally, damages from warming could reach $600?trillion — about double all the wealth that exists in the world today. The worst-case scenario, which, contra Wheeler, is virtually never discussed in polite political circles in the US, is, as Wallace-Wells quotes famed naturalist David Attenborough saying, “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world.” That is alarming and, if you must, “alarmist,” but as Wallace-Wells says, “being alarmed is not a sign of being hysterical; when it comes to climate change, being alarmed is what the facts demand.” [...] Choosing to continue down our present path is madness. Nihilism. It is not “moderation.”

  (tags: activism climate-change climate green-new-deal green future ipcc david-attenborough nihilism politics)

• Neurosexism: the myth that men and women have different brains

  The history of sex-difference research is rife with innumeracy, misinterpretation, publication bias, weak statistical power, inadequate controls and worse. Rippon, a leading voice against the bad neuroscience of sex differences, uncovers so many examples in this ambitious book that she uses a whack-a-mole metaphor to evoke the eternal cycle. A brain study purports to discover a difference between men and women; it is publicized as, ‘At last, the truth!’, taunting political correctness; other researchers expose some hyped extrapolation or fatal design flaw; and, with luck, the faulty claim fades away — until the next post hoc analysis produces another ‘Aha!’ moment and the cycle repeats. As Rippon shows, this hunt for brain differences “has been vigorously pursued down the ages with all the techniques that science could muster”. And it has exploded in the past three decades, since MRI research joined the fray. Yet, as 'The Gendered Brain' reveals, conclusive findings about sex-linked brain differences have failed to materialize.

  (tags: brain men nature women gender sexism neurology neurosexism myths debunking)

• AIB makes a mess of security upgrade, locking out thousands of customers

  Ireland's largest bank, and they've really made a mess of this. Lots of false positives on the "rooted device" detection code it seems. It seems detecting "rooted" devices is a part of the PSD2 spec, and you have to wonder why...

  (tags: aib security fail rooting devices mobile paranoia)

• A deconstruction of the BBC's "windmills actually increase global warming" article about SF6 from last week

  'This is a neat example of how eminently resolvable challenges around the clean power transition are framed by deniers and ideologues as incurable curses, while actual scientists and engineers just get on with fixing them.' As Aoife McLysaght notes: 'This is a great, informative thread. Yes SF6 is has a warming effect, but it’s released v little, is a feature of all switches (not only wind turbines as implied), and alternatives are in the works. Wind turbines aren’t zero emissions but they are v low.'

  (tags: sf6 emissions wind electricity global-warming climate-change bbc bias science)

• Crash Course | The New Republic

  Boeing's MCAS disaster as a parable of late-stage capitalism:

  [Boeing] engineers devised a software fix called MCAS, which pushed the nose down in response to an obscure set of circumstances in conjunction with the “speed trim system,” which Boeing had devised in the 1980s to smooth takeoffs. Once the 737 MAX materialized as a real-life plane about four years later, however, test pilots discovered new realms in which the plane was more stall-prone than its predecessors. So Boeing modified MCAS to turn down the nose of the plane whenever an angle-of-attack (AOA) sensor detected a stall, regardless of the speed. That involved giving the system more power and removing a safeguard, but not, in any formal or genuine way, running its modifications by the FAA, which might have had reservations with two critical traits of the revamped system: Firstly, that there are two AOA sensors on a 737, but only one, fatefully, was programmed to trigger MCAS. The former Boeing engineer Ludtke and an anonymous whistle-blower interviewed by 60 Minutes Australia both have a simple explanation for this: Any program coded to take data from both sensors would have had to account for the possibility the sensors might disagree with each other and devise a contingency for reconciling the mixed signals. Whatever that contingency, it would have involved some kind of cockpit alert, which would in turn have required additional training—probably not level-D training, but no one wanted to risk that. So the system was programmed to turn the nose down at the feedback of a single (and somewhat flimsy) sensor. And, for still unknown and truly mysterious reasons, it was programmed to nosedive again five seconds later, and again five seconds after that, over and over ad literal nauseam.? And then, just for good measure, a Boeing technical pilot emailed the FAA and casually asked that the reference to the software be deleted from the pilot manual.? So no more than a handful of people in the world knew MCAS even existed before it became infamous. Here, a generation after Boeing’s initial lurch into financialization, was the entirely predictable outcome of the byzantine process by which investment capital becomes completely abstracted from basic protocols of production and oversight: a flight-correction system that was essentially jerry-built to crash a plane. “If you’re looking for an example of late stage capitalism or whatever you want to call it,” said longtime aerospace consultant Richard Aboulafia, “it’s a pretty good one.”?

  (tags: boeing business capitalism engineering management fail disasters automation cost-control stock-market fly-by-wire)

Here's a quick tip for people using Huawei or Honor phones.

Huawei recently released EMUI version 9.1.0.326 as an OTA update, which I applied once it was offered as an upgrade option.

Once I installed that OS upgrade, however, I noticed that whenever I listened to music or podcasts using a Bluetooth headset or stereo speakers, there was a new and very noticeable 'echoing' effect on the audio.

It appears this was due to the addition of Huawei Histen, a 3D audio/equaliser feature, which apparently will add 3D audio effects when listening on wired headphones of various varieties -- however this is supposed to be disabled on Bluetooth devices.

I spent several days fruitlessly googling how to disable Histen, but with no luck. Eventually, through trial and error, I discovered a workaround -- simply plug in a pair of wired headphones, go into Settings -> Sounds -> Huawei Histen sound effects, and choose "Natural sound". Hey presto, next time you use Bluetooth headphones, it should no longer have the echo.

• Why hard disks are/were called Winchester

  some ancient history. I'd forgotten about this nomenclature

  (tags: winchester history ibm disks hard-disks hardware)

• Use of an opaque binary class in a public iOS API causes problems

  "Apple changing the behavior of `NSData -description` in iOS 13 could break push notification registration for thousands of apps. Beyond the immediate concern for existing apps, this is an interesting case study in how to handle long-standing, widespread misuse of an API." This is messy. Not a good API design decision from Apple

  (tags: apple ios push-notifications apis api coding interoperability i14y)

• The Problem With Sugar-Daddy Science - The Atlantic

  The pursuit of money from wealthy donors distorts the research process—and yields flashy projects that don’t help and don’t work.

  (tags: science funding millionaires donors research ai mit jeff-epstein media-lab)

• Replacing Eir's FTTH WiFi router with a NetGear Orbi

  Great writeup from Padraig Brady. sounds like solid hardware -- I'd get one if I needed to replace my current setup based on this

  (tags: orbi netgear han lan home networking wifi ops)

• Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On - danah boyd - Medium

  “Move fast and break things” is an abomination if your goal is to create a healthy society. Taking short-cuts may be financially profitable in the short-term, but the cost to society is too great to be justified. In a healthy society, we accommodate differently abled people through accessibility standards, not because it’s financially prudent but because it’s the right thing to do. In a healthy society, we make certain that the vulnerable amongst us are not harassed into silence because that is not the value behind free speech. In a healthy society, we strategically design to increase social cohesion because binaries are machine logic not human logic.

  (tags: medialab mit speech tech society danah-boyd)

• Fairphone 3 Teardown - iFixit

  'We tear down the modular Fairphone 3 with a giant grin on our faces! It's not perfect, but this is just about all we can ask for from a smartphone in 2019.' Quite nice -- modular, reminiscent of the Samsung S5 a little. specs are not stellar, but the ethical construction is a major win IMO. I think this (or the next model if it's out by then) might be my next phone.

  (tags: repair mobile hardware phones fairphone ethics fairtrade)

• Paul Vixie's answer to "was DNS intentionally designed to be insecure?"

  no. nor ip itself, or ncp which preceded it, or tcp, or udp, or icmp, or smtp, ot http. it was insecure because it evolved in a safe, germ free academic bubble. absolutely none of it was designed with billions of people in mind, or the full cross section of humanity which would include criminals and national intelligence services. the world of the internet in 2019 would have been seen as a total freak show by the community who deployed dns in the 1980's. nothing that can be abused won't be. you may or may not believe this; it's considered controversial, and there are arguments being had about it today. but noone considered that now-controversial near-truism at all when the core internet protocols were first designed and implemented. the idea of abuse was considered novel in the 1990's when commercialization and privatization brought abuse into the internet world and burst the academic bubble. a lot of old timers blamed AOL and MSN and even Usenet for the problems, but in actuality, it's what humans _always_ do at scale. putting the full spectrum of human culture atop a technology platform designed for academic and professional culture should have been understood to be a recipe for disaster.

  (tags: ietf computers abuse internet security dns paul-vixie history scale culture)

• Project Alternator · scylladb/scylla Wiki

  an open-source project for an Amazon DynamoDB-compatible API. Alternator runs within Scylla. Enabling it is as simple as editing the yaml configuration. Existing DynamoDB clients would simply be pointed at the Scylla cluster. No other client coding is required.

  (tags: dynamodb aws emulation scylla ops)

• Millennium Challenge 2002 - Wikipedia

  omg I never knew about this. Post 9/11, the Bush administration ran a war game scenario which resulted in a massive fail for the US forces, and had to be re-run to ensure they won: 'At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue's ships were "re-floated", and the rules of engagement were changed; this was later justified by General Peter Pace as follows: "You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?"[1] After the reset, both sides were ordered to follow predetermined plans of action. After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and was not allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore.[3] Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed.[4]'

  (tags: military funny fail wargames history bush do-overs)

• ericflo/mediasummon: Summon your photos and videos back to you

  Mediasummon is an open source application that fetches a copy of all your photos and videos, and keeps them continuously backed up into one organized directory either on your computer or on a cloud storage provider.

  Currently supports reading from Instagram, Google Photos, and Facebook, and writing to Dropbox, GDrive or S3. Go, MIT Licensed.

  (tags: open-source apps photos sync google-photos facebook instagram backups s3 dropbox)

• EO Mini Smart Home

  UK-based vendor for electric vehicle charger driven off PV solar panels

  (tags: solar-power solar charging evs cars)

• zappi

  The incumbent solar-power-driven EV charger, also UK based

  (tags: zappi solar-power solar charging evs cars)

• The history of Tetris randomizers

  Fantastic writeup of the PRNGs used in various Tetris implementations -- for playability reasons, these are more "pseudo" than most PRNGs

  (tags: tetris algorithms coding games prng random randomness)

• TIL: bananas contain the primary compound in the honeybee's "alarm" pheromone

  Science helps us explain the phenomena. Turns out bananas contain a compound called isoamyl acetate (also known as isopentyl acetate) – the very same as that which is in honeybees’ alarm pheromone. Pure banana oil (used in emollients, perfumes, and to broaden the flavored milk range) is nothing but this colorless liquid ester, occasionally mixed with other chemicals. While bees’ alarm pheromone isn’t just isoamyl acetate – in fact there are over 40 compounds in the cocktail – it is the main active component. Guard bees, who patrol the entrance, and stinger bees, who comprise the militia, are the two castes within the hive most likely to release the pheromone. Both of these are worker bees (i.e. female) around 2-3 weeks old – the time it takes for their endocrine system to reach its prime. The scent – excreted from the Koschevnikov gland and other glands around the sting shaft – is released either when the bee pops out its stinger (like a cat retracting its claws), or goes full kamikaze and harpoons the mouse, robber bee or luckless human, rear-end first (inevitably dying in the assault). Having volatile properties, the ester evaporates and disperses rapidly from the origin point of the bee’s butt, making it suitable as a swift communication carrier. Once registered, it alerts the colony to the presence of an intruder or threat, lifting their aggro, and effectively coordinating an en masse defensive response. Any stray, lingering waft of a banana about you, then, will trigger a similar reaction (if slightly less intense). Don’t put too much faith in your smoker to avail you either.

  (tags: bees honeybees science pheromones fruit bananas factoids)

• The history of the Ampersand

  via the Tironian notes, a Roman shorthand syntax which originated the 'Tironian et' (?), Pompeii, and the Book of Kells (via Code Points)

  (tags: ampersand characters via:codepoints history writing shorthand tironian-notes ciphers)

• Google release an open-source differential-privacy lib

  Differentially-private data analysis is a principled approach that enables organizations to learn from the majority of their data while simultaneously ensuring that those results do not allow any individual's data to be distinguished or re-identified. This type of analysis can be implemented in a wide variety of ways and for many different purposes. For example, if you are a health researcher, you may want to compare the average amount of time patients remain admitted across various hospitals in order to determine if there are differences in care. Differential privacy is a high-assurance, analytic means of ensuring that use cases like this are addressed in a privacy-preserving manner. Currently, we provide algorithms to compute the following: Count Sum Mean Variance Standard deviation Order statistics (including min, max, and median)

  (tags: analytics google ml privacy differential-privacy aggregation statistics obfuscation approximation algorithms)

• Google Code Review Practices

  how Google do code reviews. pretty basic stuff but it's good to have it written down from an authoritative source

  (tags: google code-review prs pull-requests best-practices coding collaboration)

• TERFs: the rise of “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” explained - Vox

  Good long-read on TERFism, its history, and its ties to conservatism

  (tags: terfs transgender politics identity gender uk feminism)

• Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer - ScienceDirect

  hee hee:

  Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from [coronary artery bypass graft surgery], but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

  (tags: prayer religion funny papers science research health medicine surgery)

• Minecraft now publishing deobfuscation maps

  About time too.

  In an effort to help make modding the game easier, we have decided to publish our game obfuscation maps with all future releases of the game, starting today. This means that anyone who is interested may deobfuscate the game and find their way around the code without needing to spend a few months figuring out what’s what. It is our hope that mod authors and mod framework authors use these files to augment their updating processes that they have today. These mappings will always be available, instantly and immediately as part of every newly released version. This does not, however, change the existing restrictions on what you may or may not do with our game code or assets. The links to the obfuscation mappings are included as part of the version manifest json, and may be automatically pulled for any given version.

  (tags: minecraft obfuscation microsoft mods modding community coding games)

• Vox Hiberionacum explains the Loch Ness Monster's apocryphal origins

  The clue is the origin story, fuckos... And it's just that. A hagiographical motif in a story. In the original Life of Columba, by Adomnán, which is a string of stories drowning in Christian metaphor, it's refered to as Aquatilis Bestiae, a 'water beast'. But its not the point of the story. If you read [the] actual episode, point is that blue arsed pagan pictish feckers who witness Columba scaring the bejaysis out of the waterbeast (away from a devout follower, bravely swimming in river, full of faith, despite the danger) are impressed. In other words. It's some class of a metaphor. Now hold that thought, and go look up Leviathan motif in Hebrew Bible, or Beast from the Sea in Revelation, and/or other water beast appearances in medieval hagiography... Revelation 13:1-10 (ESV) The First Beast - And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. [....] In other words: Modern day Nessie Bolloxology, Tourist Trap Tat and Snake Oil 'Scientists' looking for funding, are all entirely based on actual seventh century insular Irish imagination and religious metaphor. The end.

  (tags: loch-ness sea-monsters picts history columba columbanus metaphor myth legends)

• cable internet is IP over MPEG

  DOCSIS sends downstream data in MPEG frames because that's what the cable networks are optimized for and what all the switching equipment understood when cable broadband took off.

  :facepalm: (via:jwz)

  (tags: history hysterical-raisins docsis protocols bizarre mpeg via:jwz)

• It's later than you think

  This is one heartbreaking blog post:

  Eight years ago, during the same month, I had twin boys and co-founded Cloudability. About three months ago Cloudability was acquired. About three weeks ago we lost one of our boys.

  (tags: death kids horror probabilities epilepsy health life chance)

• Trees on the Land

  a cross-border initiative working to establish young native trees across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. We run an annual tree planting event where landowners across the 32 counties turn out to plant their trees on a selected Saturday in February.  Our next planting day is Saturday 15th February 2020. We provide simple schemes for landowners to access quality native tree mixes each season.  We work with farmers, smallholders, community groups, councils, schools, colleges and many other landowners to coordinate sites to accommodate trees. Our vision is to establish tree cover and woodland in rural and urban areas that will grow for many years and provide valuable resources, beneficial ecosystem services and a lasting legacy for future generations.

  (tags: trees nature ireland woods green climate-change regreening rewilding)

• Shape the future: 3D Printing a Sustainable World

  our planet needs bright ideas and new ways of thinking, consuming and living. Pitch your idea and I-Form, the SFI Research Centre for Advanced Manufacturing, will turn the winning idea for sustainability into 3D printed reality.

  (tags: 3d-printing future sustainability design ireland sfi)

• AWS Post-Event Summaries

  'A list of post-event summaries from major service events that impacted AWS service availability'

  (tags: postmortems post-mortems aws ops outages availability)

• The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet

  “The proposed data collection goes beyond absurdity when they mention the desire to collect FitBit data,” Annas told Gizmodo. “I am unaware of any study linking walking too much and committing mass murder. As for the other technologies, what are these people expecting? ‘Alexa, tell me the best way to kill a lot of people really quickly’? Really?” [....] Fridel said that “literally any risk factor identified for mass shooters will result in millions of false positives,” adding that the most reliable risk factor is gender, and that most mass murderers are male. “Should we create a list of all men in the United States and keep tabs on them?” she said. “Although it would be absurd and highly unethical, doing so would be more effective than keeping a list of persons with mental illness.”

  (tags: dystopia technology grim-meathook-future data-protection data-privacy fitbit harpa)

• The Irish Native Woodland Trust are fundraising

  "We're raising funds to help to plant trees on our reserves [in Ireland] and to create more woodland nature reserves like the 11 we already manage, from Donegal to Waterford"

  (tags: trees wildlife nature carbon climate-change rewilding ireland)

• The Secret History of Dune - Los Angeles Review of Books

  The Sabres of Paradise (1960) served as one of those sources, a half-forgotten masterpiece of narrative history recounting a mid-19th century Islamic holy war against Russian imperialism in the Caucasus. [...] Anyone who has obsessed over the mythology of Dune will immediately recognize the language Herbert borrowed from Blanch’s work. Chakobsa, a Caucasian hunting language, becomes the language of a galactic diaspora in Herbert’s universe. Kanly, from a word for blood feud among the Islamic tribes of the Caucasus, signifies a vendetta between Dune’s great spacefaring dynasties. Kindjal, the personal weapon of the region’s Islamic warriors, becomes a knife favored by Herbert’s techno-aristocrats. As Blanch writes, “No Caucasian man was properly dressed without his kindjal.”

  (tags: books dune frank-herbert lesley-blanch caucasus scifi)

• Does Kafka really guarantee the order of messages? - SoftwareMill Tech Blog

  tl;dr: nope --

  It is worth to know that default configuration can lead to producing messages in the wrong order when a failure happens, and if message order is important for your application you can have a lot of trouble because someone told you about the guarantees that as you can see are not always true.

  (tags: messaging kafka streaming ordering exactly-once distcomp events)

• Solid advice on what to do in case the government shuts down the internet

  ....as is feared will happen right now in Hong Kong.

  Dear Hong Kong friends: as people are worried about an internet shutdown, do not be afraid to make plans now. Find a VPN that you like and test it out. If Telegram is unusable, use Signal or WhatsApp (both are safe). If LIHGK is not usable, use Reddit or Facebook groups. Above all, please remember that one of the biggest enemies you face are rumors. These will get worse if Internet access is curtailed; be careful about unverified news. As a general rule, you are best served by using a very big site (like Facebook or Google) than something small. The very big sites are harder to shut down and to attack. They also have security teams that make it harder for people to interfere with them. Whatever backup plan you have, test it while things are still working, so you don't have to learn it when under lots of stress. Twitter is another good choice for sharing information quickly. Google is also a safe option for chat/messages. All of these companies have experience fighting Chinese interference and will fight for you in case there is an effort to limit internet access in Hong Kong. My biggest piece of advice: do not forget to look at cat pictures once in a while to reduce anxiety and stress!

  VPN recommendations, via Zeynep Tufekci: 'the three I heard most about were: @getcloak (now encrypt.me), @theTunnelBear (PAID) and @FreedomeVPN. Don't use free ones.'

  (tags: security privacy internet shutdown via:pinboard via:zeynep hong-kong)

• Well Networked Self-Driving Cars Become A Surveillance Nightmare?

  It's time to establish precedents that the fleets of advanced cars on the road do not become a giant surveillance apparatus. That it should be illegal for police to request that car fleets perform surveillance for them. That companies operating fleets resist such requests when they come, in the courts if they have to.

  (tags: cars driving future surveillance cctv anpr alpr police privacy)

• How googly eyes solved one of today’s trickiest UX problems

  'A little robot at a library in Helsinki went from reviled to beloved, all because it got a new pair of plastic eyes.' AWWWW

  (tags: googly-eyes robots ux design cute funny)

• Irish firm’s device to detect IBS triggers praised by researchers

  The FoodMarble device is quite cool:

  Aire uses breath analysis to enable users to measure how well they absorb different types of foods, so they can identify what foods they can eat without discomfort. Researchers from the University of Auckland found that FoodMarble’s device successfully detected malabsorption of lactose and milk when put to the test against gold-standard clinical machines. The research was published in peer-reviewed journal, Nutrients.

  (tags: foodmarble aire food fodmaps ireland ibs lactose-intolerance nutrition)

• Roadside Picnic: Artifacts left by Visitors in the Zones

  Rattling napkins, so-sos, empties and Dick The Tramp

  (tags: roadside-picnic sf strugatsky-brothers the-zones stalker fiction)

• Daring Fireball: Siri, Privacy, and Trust

  My reading of this is that until last week, if you used Siri in any way, your recordings might be used in this “grading” process. If I graded Apple on the privacy and trust implications of this, I’d give them an F.

  (tags: siri grading privacy data voice ml training fail apple)

• Common ground: Holly Herndon in conversation with James Bridle

  long read, but I am looking forward to it

  (tags: cognition intelligence ai art holly-herndon james-bridle future)

• Dystopias Now

  Kim Stanley Robinson calling for fully automated luxury communism

  (tags: ksr kim-stanley-robinson future dystopia writing utopia scifi)

• 'Bees, not refugees': the environmentalist roots of anti-immigrant bigotry | Environment | The Guardian

  proclamations of looming dystopia in the form of a mass climate-caused global refugee crisis put well-intentioned environmentalists on some shared ground with fear-mongering nativists, even as they’re attempting to convey a useful urgency about the future of the planet and the disproportionate impacts of climate crisis on the developing world. “Not to say there won’t be climate-related migration, but I think that portrayal of migrants as climate change refugees, especially these mass movements of people, feeds into the anti-immigrant environmental worldview,” said Hartmann. “Alarmist hyperbole and stereotypes around climate conflict and even climate mass refugee dislocation is based on kind of old, racially and colonially charged stereotypes of poor people of color being more prone to violence in times of scarcity.” A worsening climate crisis could easily become a cudgel for anti-immigration activists looking to use ecological preservation as an excuse to close borders, a means of gesturing toward doing something about climate crisis that aligns with the right’s other political goals. “As it becomes more difficult for Republicans to deny that climate change is a thing, this is a really likely next move for the right in climate politics,” said Hultgren.

  (tags: environment racism politics climate-change future dystopia refugees immigration)

• "Trees in early Ireland" - Augustine Henry Memorial Lecture, Royal Dublin Society

  'In this article an attempt is made to identify all the twenty-eight trees and shrubs which are listed in Old Irish law-text of about the eight century AD. There is also an account of trees which are mentioned in early Irish poetry and proverbs, as well as brief description of woods and woodland management in pre-Norman Ireland. The article concludes with a discussion of tree-references in early English, Scottish and Welsh sources.' Particularly noteworthy are the 7 "lords of the wood" (airig fedo): 1. Dair 'oak' (Quercus robur, Quercus petraea) 2. Coil 'hazel' (Corylus avellana) 3. Cuilenn 'holly' (Ilex aquifolium) 4. Ibar 'yew' (Taxus baccata) 5. Uinnius 'ash' (Fraxinus excelsior) 6. Ochtach 'Scots pine' (Pinus sylvestris) 7. Aball 'wild apple-tree' (Malus pumila) (via Valen)

  (tags: lords-of-the-wood woods forestry forest history ireland trees shrubs woodland rewilding via:valen)

• Irish State told to delete ‘unlawful’ data on 3.2m citizens

  This is amazing:

  The State has been told it must delete data held on 3.2 million citizens, which was gathered as part of the roll-out of the Public Services Card, as there is no lawful basis for retaining it. In a highly critical report on its investigation into the card, the Data Protection Commission found there was no legal reason to make individuals obtain the card in order to access State services such as renewing a driving licence or applying for a college grant. [...] Helen Dixon, the Data Protection Commissioner, told The Irish Times that forcing people to obtain such a card for services other than those provided by the department was “unlawful from a data-processing point of view”.

  (tags: psc ireland politics data-privacy privacy data-collection dpo dpc)

• Climeworks Shop

  direct-to-consumer sales for carbon-sequestration tech -- effectively crowdfunding CCS with a monthly subscription

  (tags: co2 climate carbon-sequestration ccs crowdfunding)

• What the Heck Is Crab Rangoon Anyway? - Gastro Obscura

  this is great. Crab Rangoon (which I've never heard of on this side of the pond!) is a wholly concocted "preposterous dish":

  Crab rangoon is a pure distillation of tiki fusion weirdness. There was a strange, circular movement between tiki food and American Chinese food. Trader Vic’s created tiki food by making American Chinese food seem more tropical; American Chinese restaurants took his dishes right back and made them more American Chinese. The American Chinese version tends toward cheaper imitation crab, which is made, usually, of pollock blended with starch and other binders, crab flavoring, and red food coloring. Imitation crab simply wasn’t available to Trader Vic—it started being produced in 1975—and it’s also neither Polynesian nor Chinese, but Japanese. American Chinese crab rangoon is a 1940s crab-and-cream-cheese dip stuffed into a wonton and deep-fried—a pure distillation of tiki fusion weirdness. Crab rangoon is, after all, a preposterous dish. Many of the responses I got in my survey were sheepish, or seemed overly proud, as if to mask the problem of loving a dish that is utterly uncool, wildly outdated, and not even in the same ballpark as authenticity.

  (tags: tiki kitsch food gastro crab crab-rangoon trader-vics usa history)

• How YouTube Radicalized Brazil

  YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil. A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life. Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors. Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates. And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation. YouTube’s recommendation system is engineered to maximize watchtime, among other factors, the company says, but not to favor any political ideology. The system suggests what to watch next, often playing the videos automatically, in a never-ending quest to keep us glued to our screens.

  (tags: youtube politics brazil future grim engagement machine-learning google zika)

• security-bulletins/2019-002.md at master · Netflix/security-bulletins

  A variety of DOS attacks against HTTP/2 server-side implementations

  (tags: http2 dos security attacks netflix)

• IBM’s photo-scraping scandal shows what a weird bubble AI researchers live in - MIT Technology Review

  scraping data from publicly available sources is so much of an industry standard that it’s taught as a foundational skill (sans ethics) in most data science and machine-learning training. [...] this story highlights the need for the tech industry to adapt its cultural norms and standard practices to keep pace with the rapid evolution of the technology itself, as well as the public’s awareness of how their data is used.

  (tags: scraping privacy data ai big-data data-privacy flickr photos machine-learning)

• Panel: The Promises and Perils of Eschewing Distributed Coordination

  good panel chat

  (tags: distcomp coordination distributed-systems distributed coding algorithms)

• Adversarial Fashion

  The patterns on the goods in this shop are designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their locations.

  (tags: anpr alpr adversarial-classification privacy)

• Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo - VICE

  “During one conversation with my new manager in which I reiterated an early leave and upcoming bedrest, she told me that she had just listened to an NPR segment that debunked the benefits of bedrest,” she wrote. “She also shared that her doctor had ordered her to take bedrest, but that she ignored the order and worked up until the day before she delivered her son via cesarean section. My manager then emphasized in this same meeting that a management role was no longer guaranteed upon my return from maternity leave, and that she supported my interviewing for other roles at Google.”

  (tags: pregnancy life hr work google peopleops leaks bedrest maternity-leave career)

• Baseline EBS performance

  for AWS I/O optimized instance types. This is vital info to understand how I/O performance on AWS will degrade and what it'll drop down to, for production workloads

  (tags: aws ebs performance planning ops baselines)

• Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too. - VICE

  “Cracking down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted,” Berger said. “There's going to be controversy here that we didn't see with ISIS, because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”

  (tags: gop corruption twitter politics filtering ai fascism republicans)

• The White House is reportedly drafting an order to stop social media ‘bias’ - The Verge

  One shooting was apparently an act of far-right terrorism, based on an anti-immigrant screed posted online. There was a fine line between its rhetoric and the views of major conservative figures like Tucker Carlson or Trump himself. Preemptively flagging the shooter — or one of several far-right killers before him — could have looked like egregious anti-conservative bias. And since predictive AI has sky-high error rates, it would probably catch a lot of non-violent conservative accounts (alongside those of non-conservatives) purely by accident. That’s already a recipe for a PR disaster, and it gets even dicier if Trump adds new legal punishments.

  (via JK)

  (tags: filtering ai terrorism far-right fascism nazis trump twitter social-media)

• Thread of bike camera reviews

  (via ITC)

  (tags: bike-cameras cameras safety cycling)

• Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer - Last Week in AWS

  Amazon have filed a non-compete case against one of their sales execs who left and moved to Google. ouch

  (tags: aws amazing noncompetes jobs work legal non-competes)

• We Already Have the World’s Most Efficient Carbon Capture Technology

  it's the empress tree, which can absorb 10x to 100x the quantity of CO2-per-acre vs other tree species

  (tags: carbon climate trees co2 empress-trees ccs)

• David Jeske's answer to Why do some developers at strong companies like Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? - Quora

  Wow, this is a great answer. As he notes, the Scrum-style process is flawed for big backend projects: "This style of short-term planning, direct customer contact, and continuous iteration is well suited to software with a simple core and lots of customer visible features that are incrementally useful. It is not so well suited to software which has a very simple interface and tons of hidden internal complexity, software which isn’t useful until it’s fairly complete, or leapfrog solutions the customer can’t imagine." And he goes on to come up with something which works better for Google-style projects:

  Our highest priority is to increase customer (and programmer) productivity and access to information. Work on the biggest, most frequently used problems you can find, and create the largest net impact. Don’t give the customer what they ask for; understand them, and revolutionize their world. Developers should create a Google Design Document (a fairly minimal, but structured design doc), explaining the project, what goals it hopes to achieve, and explains why it can’t be done in other ways. This document should be circulated with stakeholders, to get early feedback before the project gets underway. The written record is essential, as it assures there is a clear and agreed understanding of when the project is a success and how it aims to get there. At all phases of the project, critical design elements for larger components should be concisely explained and captured in a design document. Innovate in leapfrogs. It’s more important to finish and deploy a leapfrog than to attempt perfection. There is no perfection. Instead be flexible, and plan to constantly reinvent at every level of the stack. Deliver working software as soon as is reasonably possible, and no sooner. “Dogfood” projects internally before they are shipped externally. Make sure products meet high quality standards before shipping. The quality of the product is more important than the time it takes to achieve it.

  (tags: agile architecture google scrum development coding projects project-management design)

• CarbonKit

  CarbonKit provides all the data and models necessary for calculating various greenhouse gas emissions in categories such as car, train and air transport, types of fuel or country-specific grid electricity, electrical appliances, agricultural and industrial processes and building materials.

  (tags: carbon co2 emissions data ghgs)

• Vectorized Emulation: Hardware accelerated taint tracking at 2 trillion instructions per second | Gamozo Labs Blog

  The goal is to take standard applications and JIT them to their AVX-512 equivalent such that we can fuzz 16 VMs at a time per thread. The net result of this work allows for high performance fuzzing (approx 40 billion to 120 billion instructions per second [the 2 trillion clickbait number is theoretical maximum]) depending on the target, while gathering differential coverage on code, register, and memory state. By gathering more than just code coverage we are able to track state of code deeper than just code coverage itself, allowing us to fuzz through things like memcmp() without any hooks or static analysis of the target at all. Further since we’re running emulated code we are able to run a soft MMU implementation which has byte-level permissions. This gives us stronger-than-ASAN memory protections, making bugs fail faster and cleaner.

  (tags: fuzzing hardware performance programming virtualization avx-512 avx)

• Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste - Scientific American

  I didn't know this:

  At issue is coal's content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or "whole," coal that they aren't a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels. Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas.

  (via Jamie McCarthy)

  (tags: via:jamiemccarthy coal environment nuclear pollution fly-ash coal-ash safety health)

• Fast and flexible observability with canonical log lines

  Interesting -- basically crossing the line between service metrics and logging, with a simple, readable structured logging format, and a well-defined structure

  (tags: stripe logging metrics canonical-logs structured-logs ops operability observability)

• How To Talk To Older People In Your Life About Fake News

  Caulfield said it’s common for older people to unwittingly share things that have extremist messages or iconography. “It's very hard to see people posting stuff that may come from a kind of a dark place that they don't realize is dark,” Caulfield said. “What do you do when your parents go from posting Minions to posting hard-right memes about cement milkshakes?”

  this is where we're at. (Thankfully not with _my_ parents, though)

  (tags: family fake-news propaganda facebook memes alt-right fascism)

• AWS S3 Event Notifications have "probably once" delivery

  you get the following Messages that are delivered once; Messages that are delivered multiple times; Messages that are not delivered This is in fact equivalent to "no guarantees at all" but the phrase "probably once" has a certain appeal to it. In my case I have an application that writes files to S3 at a regular interval. These files are processed by a lambda so they can be loaded into a database. This database is ultimately used in a customer facing application, so any duplicates gets noticed very quickly. Somehow I needed to come up with a way to deal with this pecuilar behavior of S3 Event Notifications.

  Christ, what a mess. Sounds like S3 Event Notifications are best ignored for production use. Disappointing :(

  (tags: aws s3 event-notifications consistency durability reliability ops)

• Loss of Arctic's Reflective Sea Ice Will Advance Global Warming by 25 Years

  “Losing the reflective power of Arctic sea ice will lead to warming equivalent to one trillion tons of CO2 and advance the 2ºC threshold by 25 years. Any rational policy would make preventing this a top climate priority for world leaders,” said Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at Scripps. [....] Computer forecast models are actually underestimating the extent of this trend.  “We analyzed 40 climate models from modeling centers around the world,” said Eisenman, a professor of climate, atmospheric science, and physical oceanography at Scripps. “Not a single one of the models simulated as much Arctic sea ice retreat per degree of global warming as has been observed during recent decades.”

  (tags: arctic climate-change climate global-warming fear ice earth)

• Latacora - How (not) to sign a JSON object

  good notes on authentication of API consumers using a HMAC. colmmacc also noted that using a constant-time comparison function of the expected and sent values, is important to avoid timing attacks. "A standard strcmp/memcmp isn't secure and I still see this error in 2019 :("

  (tags: hmac mac authentication crypto security json apis api coding signing)

• twitter thread on how same-sex romance was added to The Sims back in 1998

  Phil Salvador on Twitter: "Sims developer Don Hopkins released a bunch of design documents from The Sims, including this one from August 1998 with his notes about romance: [...] It's incredible to see the internal discussion about romance in The Sims written out so strongly like this."

  (tags: don-hopkins games history the-sims design romance 1990s)

• Data isn't the new oil, it's the new CO2

  great point.

  We should not endlessly be defending arguments along the lines that “people choose to willingly give up their freedom in exchange for free stuff online”. The argument is flawed for two reasons. First the reason that is usually given - people have no choice but to consent in order to access the service, so consent is manufactured.  We are not exercising choice in providing data but rather resigned to the fact that they have no choice in the matter.  The second, less well known but just as powerful, argument is that we are not only bound by other people’s data; we are bound by other people’s consent.  In an era of machine learning-driven group profiling, this effectively renders my denial of consent meaningless. Even if I withhold consent, say I refuse to use Facebook or Twitter or Amazon, the fact that everyone around me has joined means there are just as many data points about me to target and surveil. The issue is systemic, it is not one where a lone individual can make a choice and opt out of the system. We perpetuate this myth by talking about data as our own individual “oil”, ready to sell to the highest bidder. In reality I have little control over this supposed resource which acts more like an atmospheric pollutant, impacting me and others in myriads of indirect ways. There are more relations - direct and indirect - between data related to me, data about me, data inferred about me via others than I can possibly imagine, let alone control with the tools we have at our disposal today. 

  (tags: data ethics data-privacy privacy surveillance surveillance-capitalism co2 future profiling consent gdpr)

• Ikea Symfonisk review: affordable, fun Sonos speakers - The Verge

  looks like they've done a decent job on getting Sonos into IKEA furniture

  (tags: ikea sonos speakers audio home furniture)

• Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models | Nature Communications

  Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model.

  ouch.

  (tags: deanonymization deidentification anonymization anonymisation gdpr privacy data-privacy papers)

• Aurora Postgres - Disastrous experience : aws

  wow. absolute car crash of a thread regarding Postgres-on-Aurora

  (tags: aws postgresql rds scale aurora ops car-crash)

• "Let's talk about peeing in space."

  Great Twitter thread by @MaryRobinette on the intricacies of bodily functions in zero-G

  (tags: space zero-g gravity peeing bodily-functions funny shit)

• [1907.06902] _Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches_

  Deep learning techniques have become the method of choice for researchers working on algorithmic aspects of recommender systems. With the strongly increased interest in machine learning in general, it has, as a result, become difficult to keep track of what represents the state-of-the-art at the moment, e.g., for top-n recommendation tasks. At the same time, several recent publications point out problems in today's research practice in applied machine learning, e.g., in terms of the reproducibility of the results or the choice of the baselines when proposing new models. In this work, we report the results of a systematic analysis of algorithmic proposals for top-n recommendation tasks. Specifically, we considered 18 algorithms that were presented at top-level research conferences in the last years. Only 7 of them could be reproduced with reasonable effort. For these methods, it however turned out that 6 of them can often be outperformed with comparably simple heuristic methods, e.g., based on nearest-neighbor or graph-based techniques. The remaining one clearly outperformed the baselines but did not consistently outperform a well-tuned non-neural linear ranking method. Overall, our work sheds light on a number of potential problems in today's machine learning scholarship and calls for improved scientific practices in this area.

  (via Halvar Flake)

  (tags: via:halvarflake deep-learning machine-learning ml papers algorithms top-n heuristics)

• Bulgarian tax authority hacked, majority of population's tax details leaked

  Well this is pretty much the worst-case scenario for a tax authority:

  A 20-year-old man was arrested in Sofia, Bulgaria, on Tuesday afternoon and charged with an unprecedented hack of the country’s tax authority, ending with the theft of sensitive personal records from nearly every adult in Bulgaria, according to local reports. The suspect, whose name is Kristiyan Boykov, according to Bulgarian media, faces up to eight years in prison. Police say others may have been involved. The country’s officials have spent the week revealing and apologizing for the pillaging of Bulgaria’s National Revenue Agency (NRA) in June, Reuters reported. Personal and financial data for millions of taxpayers was leaked by email to local journalists. The data leak includes names, addresses, income and earnings information, and personal identification numbers, totaling 21 gigabytes and extending back over a decade.

  (tags: bulgaria security tax hacks leaks)

• Margaret Hamilton interviewed by The Guardian

  good interview with the software engineering pioneer

  (tags: margaret-hamilton tech software the-guardian interviews history apollo)

• When Non-Jews Wield Anti-Semitism as Political Shield | GQ

  a spate of ultra-Christian would-be spokespeople have demonstrated outrage against congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for daring to use the term “concentration camps” to describe the camps in which thousands of migrants are concentrated in squalor, and have died, on the Southern border. Wyoming representative Liz Cheney and Meghan McCain have volunteered, unasked-for, as blonde Christian Loraxes, prepared at all times to speak for the Jews. In late June, Cheney demanded Ocasio-Cortez apologize for utilizing the term, stating that “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.” But Jews are not trees, not animals, not mute props to use as cudgels in a war of escalating rhetoric. We do not need to be spoken for, we who have been here since before this country was a country, and want to remain, and know no other home; we are not waiting for your apocalypse. As if to prove a counterpoint, on Tuesday, July 15, one thousand “Jews and allies” led by a group called #NeverAgainAction and the immigrant justice group Movimiento Cosecha enacted a protest in Washington, D.C., blockading the entrances and exits to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s headquarters and the approaching street. Their chief slogan defied those who would use Jews’ bloody history to deny present atrocities; those who would utilize Jews as weapons to silence anti-racists; those who want us to wait, meekly, to be cozened by Christ in the end of days. What they chanted, holding hands, were four simple words: “Never Again is Now.”

  (tags: antisemitism us-politics politics smearing aoc rhetoric)

• The Codeless Code: Case 234 Ozymandias

  Love this:

  I chanced upon an ancient cache of code: a stack of printouts, tall as any man, that in decaying boxes had been stowed. Ten thousand crumbling pages long it ran. Abandoned in the blackness to erode, what steered a ship through blackness to the moon. The language is unused in this late year. The target hardware, likewise, lies in ruin. Entombed within one lone procedure’s scope, a line of code and then these words appear: # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE The code beside persisting to the last— as permanent as aught upon this sphere— while overhead, a vacant moon flies past.

  (tags: moon apollo coding history hacks comments funny poetry poems ozymandias)

• Modeling the Mythical Man-Month using the Universal Scalability Law

  turns out the USL can apply

  (tags: usl scalability scaling brooks teams mythical-man-month estimation)

• Reviewbot

  posts GitHub pull requests that are ready to be reviewed into Slack. How does it know when a pull request is ready? We have a special label in our repositories, aptly named READY TO REVIEW (all caps so it’s easier to spot). When a pull request is ready for review, the author adds this label to their PR to mark it as finished. Meanwhile, all pull requests without this label are seen as works in progress and shouldn’t be reviewed. Next, an engineer can pick from the READY TO REVIEW pull requests and start reviewing — all code changes at PSPDFKit get reviewed by at least one other person. After the review is done, the pull request author incorporates the feedback and merges the PR.

  (tags: github reviews code-review slack integration team)

• Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019

  Great writeup from jgc. Worth noting some important lessons: * config changes should be rolled out carefully and gradually, just like code; * particularly regexps, which are effectively code anyway; * emergency-use rollback systems need to work, of course!; * having emergency-only systems is a risk, too, since infrequently-used code paths are likely to atrophy and break without anyone noticing (as nsheridan said); * /.*/ in a regexp is pretty much always bad news, and would have been worth a linter to catch before commit.

  (tags: cloudflare outages regex postmortems regexps deployment rollback via:jgc)

• The Configuration Complexity Clock

  This, so much this.....

  Frustratingly there are still some business requirements that can’t be configured using the new [post-config-file] rules engine. Some logical conditions simply aren’t configurable using its GUI, and so the application has to be re-coded and re-deployed for some scenarios. Help is at hand, someone on the team reads Ayende’s DSLs book. Yes, a DSL will allow us to write arbitrarily complex rules and solve all our problems. The team stops work for several months to implement the DSL. It’s a considerable technical accomplishment when it’s completed and everyone takes a well earned break. Surely this will mean the end of arbitrary hard-coded business logic? It’s now 9am on the clock. Amazingly it works. Several months go by without any changes being needed in the core application. The team spend most of their time writing code in the new DSL. After some embarrassing episodes, they now go through a complete release cycle before deploying any new DSL code. The DSL text files are version controlled and each release goes through regression testing before being deployed. Debugging the DSL code is difficult, there’s little tooling support, they simply don’t have the resources to build an IDE or a ReSharper for their new little language. As the DSL code gets more complex they also start to miss being able to write object-oriented software. Some of the team have started to work on a unit testing framework in their spare time. In the pub after work someone quips, “we’re back where we started four years ago, hard coding everything, except now in a much crappier language.”

  (via Oisin)

  (tags: configuration scripting dsls script config rules-engines rules via:oisin dsl coding hard-coding)

• Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops

  The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The capabilities are staggering, according to the guide: If police have a name that’s associated with a license plate, they can use automatic license plate reader data to find out where they’ve been, and when they’ve been there. This can give a complete account of where someone has driven over any time period. With a name, police can also find a person's email address, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security number(s), business relationships, family relationships, and license information like height, weight, and eye color, as long as it's in the agency's database. The software can map out a person's family members and business associates of a suspect, and theoretically, find the above information about them, too. All of this information is aggregated and synthesized in a way that gives law enforcement nearly omniscient knowledge over any suspect they decide to surveil.

  (tags: police surveillance palantir creepy grim data-privacy privacy)

• Ireland putting profit before people with genomic medicine strategy

  From David McConnell and Orla Hardiman at TCD:

  Much of the medical information sought by GMI [Genomics Medicine Ireland] has been collected from patients in public hospitals funded by the exchequer at great expense [...]. Clinicians are being contracted and asked to obtain consent from their patients to transfer clinical information to GMI, along with a tissue sample for WGS [Whole Genome Sequencing]. We understand GMI will pay for the additional hospital clinical costs required for the project. It will obtain the full genetic code for each patient (WGS), and it will analyse all the data. For the most part .... there is minimal tangible benefit to the patient who participates in this programme. It is important to realise that GMI will own all the clinical and WGS data that they have acquired from the health service, which is of considerable commercial value. GMI will also have complete control over the research and any outcomes. Participating patients do not appear to have access to their data held by GMI – and there does not seem to be a “right to be forgotten”, despite the commercial nature of the enterprise. Moreover, the genomic and clinical data may also be transmitted outside of the European Union, and thus will not be protected by the stringent data-protection laws within the EU.[....] The Government has made a very big investment in GMI. There may be a view that it is not necessary to provide any additional public investments in genomic medicine in Ireland. However, to those of us who care about the longer-term development of genomic medicine in Ireland, this would be a seriously short-sighted approach. One person in 20 will develop a genetic disorder in their lifetime and half of the Irish population will experience a form of cancer. These and many other patients should be able to benefit from a publicly-available genomics project that can drive new medical care in Ireland. Genomic medicine is here to stay. We urgently need a properly governed genomics programme in Ireland that will ensure that Irish genomics remains within the public (non-commercial) domain, and that data obtained from Irish citizens will be used to benefit the entire Irish population.

  (via Aoife McLysaght)

  (tags: gmi wgs genome open-data data-privacy gdpr privacy health medicine ireland genomics)

• Rossa McMahon re GMI

  Rossa McMahon with a twitter thread on the legality of GMI's genomic data collection program in Ireland:

  GMI is a big, expensive company. It announced planned investment injection of $400m last year. It is engaged in a hot industry - hot because of investor interest and hot because of regulatory/ethics concerns. GDPR is not new. It has been known since 2016. Data protection law is not new. It has been known since 1988. The impact of these laws on genetic data collection & use is not a surprise. So if you have a $400m+ business and this is a key business issue, you have taken advice. And you have, no doubt, been in a position to take that advice from some of the best and/or most expensive advisors available. Assumptions are dangerous, but I think it is fair to assume this has happened. So read the story again. Would you be looking for repeated meetings with [Department of Health], answers to questions on regulatory matters and assurances from the State, if you had legal advice of your own to the effect that you are operating or can operate as your currently are?

  (tags: gmi genomics genetics data-privacy privacy gdpr ireland)

• Terrifying thread of Google Maps fails

  'This takes you over Hayden Pass Rd. "It’s a real challenging road and a true test of your vehicle and your stamina because the road abounds in twists and turns with wheels sometimes hanging above the precipice." "There is a very narrow section of shelf road before you get to the top that is very dangerous if icy. There are no rocks to stop you from sliding off the side. This section should not be attempted if there is any ice at all." I'm a little surprised that Google gave this route to me with no warning. It's also comical to say you can get the drive done in 30 minutes.' [....] 'A couple of years ago I did a drive from Port Headland (Northwest Western Australia) to Perth. When we got onto Nanutarra road (Near Paraburdoo), the maps decided we should take a road that was actually the Lyons River - if we were foreign tourists it would have led us into a spot where we could easily have died. Unfortunately in outback WA, many tourists have experienced this and succumbed to it.'

  (tags: driving safety google-maps google mapping routing fail via:danluu)

• excellent Twitter thread about Brexiteer attitudes to Ireland

  as one commenter notes: 'Ireland as Britain’s Taiwan, not a real country but a renegade province that must be brought to heel and reclaimed for the Motherland'

  (tags: brexit britain uk ireland politics)

• Moving From Apache Thrift to gRPC: A Perspective From Alluxio

  Good advice here:

  Thrift served well as a fast and reliable RPC framework powering the metadata operations in Alluxio 1.x. Its limitation in handling streamed data has led us to a journey in search of better alternatives. gRPC provides some nice features that help us in building a simpler, more unified API layer. In this post, we discussed some lessons learned to move from Thrift to gRPC, including performance tuning tips that helped us achieve comparable performance for both one-off RPC calls as well as data streams. We hope this helps if you are looking at gRPC as an option for building high-performance services. Check out our blog for more articles on how we build Alluxio.

  (tags: thrift alluxio java grpc protocols coding netty)

• Gaffologist

  'Homes for Sale and Rent (in Ireland), Mapped' -- neat dataviz site by Robert Lawson

  (tags: dataviz mapping ireland homes rent home)