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Justin's Linklog Posts

Links for 2022-05-03

Published May 3, 2022

Links for 2022-05-02

Published May 2, 2022

  • “Living with COVID” has been a lie

    This is a fantastic thread from Luca Ferretti:

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

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

Links for 2022-04-25

Published April 25, 2022

  • CoVariants

    Ireland is included:

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

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

  • Bringing emulation into the 21st century

    Well executed satire:

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

    (tags: emulation kubernetes satire k8s containers microservices yikes)

Links for 2022-04-21

Published April 21, 2022

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

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

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

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

Links for 2022-04-20

Published April 20, 2022

  • CVE-2022-21449: Psychic Signatures in Java

    Argh, this is a bad one:

    Recent releases of Java were vulnerable to a similar kind of trick, in the implementation of widely-used ECDSA signatures. If you are running one of the vulnerable versions then an attacker can easily forge some types of SSL certificates and handshakes (allowing interception and modification of communications), signed JWTs, SAML assertions or OIDC id tokens, and even WebAuthn authentication messages. All using the digital equivalent of a blank piece of paper. It’s hard to overstate the severity of this bug. If you are using ECDSA signatures for any of these security mechanisms, then an attacker can trivially and completely bypass them if your server is running any Java 15, 16, 17, or 18 version before the April 2022 Critical Patch Update (CPU). For context, almost all WebAuthn/FIDO devices in the real world (including Yubikeys*) use ECDSA signatures and many OIDC providers use ECDSA-signed JWTs.

    (tags: java jvm crypto security ecdsa webauthn saml jwt fail)

Links for 2022-04-13

Published April 13, 2022

Links for 2022-04-11

Published April 11, 2022

  • Data from French long COVID cohort

    This is a decent step forward in long COVID research. 968 self-selected long covid sufferers reporting their symptom progression over a year: "Proud to present our results on the course of Long Covid symptoms over time, using the @PatientsComPaRe cohort and recently published in @NatureComms. after 1 year 85% of patients still reported some symptoms; there were specific trajectories depending on symptoms (pane A). For example, 40% reported cough 60 days after symptom onset vs. 20% at 12 months after onset; 50% of patients report a considerable impact on their professional lives; Long Covid is a relapsing remitting disease. It seems that, over time, relapses tend to be less frequent; Future research will look at patient trajectories (understanding those who get better vs others) and looking at biomarkers of long COVID".

    (tags: long-covid covid-19 papers france symptoms)

Links for 2022-04-08

Published April 8, 2022

Links for 2022-04-07

Published April 7, 2022

  • "FAANG promo committees are killing Kubernetes"

    This makes a lot of sense. Letting "working for a big software company" be the only way to effectively get paid to collaborate on open source wasn't a great idea.

    Promo committees have, for years now, been consistently undervaluing the work of full-time Kubernetes contributors. Or really of open source work more broadly. Attributable revenue has been taking over as one of the most important factors at most companies. And Kubernetes has very little of that. It's happened gradually, and I don't think this was ever an intended outcome but it's a thing and we have to live with it. It's too indirect, fixing a bug in kube-apiserver might retain a GCP customer or avoid a costly Apple services outage, but can you put a dollar value on that? How much is CI stability worth? Or community happiness? And then add on top of it, the time cost. "FOSS maintainers are overloaded" should not be news to anyone, but now add 20/hours a week of campaigning to other high-level folks to "build buzz" for your work and let me know how that goes.

    (tags: k8s open-source google amazon faang work promotions career)

  • Absolutely mad numbers on Long COVID from the UK

    via Dr. Deepti Gurdasani: '1.7 million people now living with long COVID (28 day definition) - that's 1 in 37 people in the community; 780,000 have had this for *more than a year*; at least 334,000 got it during the omicron wave (impact since Feb not felt yet) increases are disproportionately high among young children -- which is likely a combination of mass exposure and lack of vaccinations & other protections.'

    (tags: long-covid covid-19 society health uk pandemics future)

Links for 2022-04-05

Published April 5, 2022

Links for 2022-04-01

Published April 1, 2022

Links for 2022-03-31

Published March 31, 2022

  • The three big myths about Omicron

    These bear repeating, despite being known since January. This is quite a failure by our media, IMO. The 3 myths are: "endemic doesn't mean mild; covid is not evolving to become milder; vaccinations are not 'finished'".

    (tags: covid-19 uk ireland omicron sars-cov-2 pandemics health)

  • We can’t rely on boosters to get through each new wave of Covid

    This is very worrying, given our government's current "just boosters" strategy for dealing with COVID-19:

    We are living in a precarious truce imposed through frequent mRNA boosters to keep the viral caseload “manageable”. But there are signs this isn’t sustainable, and that a strategy simply consisting of boosters in perpetuity may not be fit for purpose. Recent case surges in Hong Kong, Denmark and Scotland emphasise the fragility of that balance. And new evidence from the past two years suggests that encounters with different variants of Covid or different vaccine types can alter the effectiveness of later jabs in surprising ways – an effect called immune imprinting. This raises the possibility that booster performance could be even less predictable and effective in the future. Sars-CoV-2 began as a single variant, which we term the Wuhan strain. But we now inhabit a world where no two people share precisely the same exposure history: we have never been infected, or were asymptomatically, mildly or severely infected during any or a combination of the Wuhan to Alpha, Delta, Omicron or BA.2 waves, and we’ve all had somewhere from zero to four doses of diverse vaccines. The combination of these exposures gives each of us a unique immune memory repertoire.
    The author is Danny Altmann, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London.

    (tags: covid-19 boosters vaccines vaccination immunology sars-cov-2 variants immune-imprinting)

Links for 2022-03-24

Published March 24, 2022

Links for 2022-03-21

Published March 21, 2022

Links for 2022-03-15

Published March 15, 2022

  • Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery | Nature Machine Intelligence

    Well, this is terrifying:

    In less than 6 hours after starting on our in-house server, our [machine learning] model generated 40,000 molecules that scored within our desired threshold. In the process, the AI designed not only VX, but also many other known chemical warfare agents that we identified through visual confirmation with structures in public chemistry databases. Many new molecules were also designed that looked equally plausible. These new molecules were predicted to be more toxic, based on the predicted LD50 values, than publicly known chemical warfare agents (Fig. 1). This was unexpected because the datasets we used for training the AI did not include these nerve agents. The virtual molecules even occupied a region of molecular property space that was entirely separate from the many thousands of molecules in the organism-specific LD50 model, which comprises mainly pesticides, environmental toxins and drugs (Fig. 1). By inverting the use of our machine learning models, we had transformed our innocuous generative model from a helpful tool of medicine to a generator of likely deadly molecules.
    (via Theophite)

    (tags: dual-use grim-meathook-future ai machine-learning drugs vx scary papers)

  • New-onset IgG autoantibodies in hospitalized patients with COVID-19

    This is not great -- this article in Nature from Sep 2021 details "autoimmune features and autoantibody production" associated with COVID-19 infection.

    COVID-19 is associated with a wide range of clinical manifestations, including autoimmune features and autoantibody production. Here we develop three protein arrays to measure IgG autoantibodies associated with connective tissue diseases, anti-cytokine antibodies, and anti-viral antibody responses in serum from 147 hospitalized COVID-19 patients. Autoantibodies are identified in approximately 50% of patients but in less than 15% of healthy controls. When present, autoantibodies largely target autoantigens associated with rare disorders such as myositis, systemic sclerosis and overlap syndromes. A subset of autoantibodies targeting traditional autoantigens or cytokines develop de novo following SARS-CoV-2 infection. [....] We conclude that SARS-CoV-2 causes development of new-onset IgG autoantibodies in a significant proportion of hospitalized COVID-19 patients and are positively correlated with immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 proteins.

    (tags: covid-19 autoimmune autoantibodies immune-system diseases sclerosis igg antibodies via:fitterhappieraj)

Links for 2022-03-11

Published March 11, 2022

Links for 2022-03-09

Published March 9, 2022

  • Why America Became Numb to COVID Deaths - The Atlantic

    Excellent article by Ed Yong. 'The U.S. is nearing 1 million recorded COVID-19 deaths without the social reckoning that such a tragedy should provoke. Why?'

    (tags: covid-19 ed-yong us-politics death disease medicine public-health pandemics economy capitalism)

  • Fuck leftist westplaining

    Polish leftie giving out about western Tankies supporting Putin:

    Antifascism is protecting people from individuals with structural power. Right now that is Putin. If you are protecting his hegemony over his vast and increasing empire, if you are What Abouting into helplessness, you are part of the aggressor. So pick up a weapon, or organise a fundraiser, or welcome a refugee, but even more preferably at this point – shut the fuuuuck up. Log out, touch grass, leave this war with people that actually know what they’re fighting for. You’re fighting for likes – it’s humiliating – to the left in general, and to future generations who will be left demoralised, rather than inspired to fight for a world sans dictators. Yes, your leaders are some of them, so take care of taking them down. Sadly we seldom even trust the leaders you’d put in their place. This is the level of faith that you’re losing. Look in the mirror, destroy the imperialist exceptionalist cop inside your head. Good luck.

    (tags: politics ukraine putin whataboutery tankies)

Links for 2022-03-07

Published March 7, 2022

  • study of "Long COVID" symptoms in the Danish population

    These numbers are frankly massive:

    Six to twelve months after the test date, the risks of 18 out of 21 physical symptoms were elevated among test-positives and one third (29.6%) of the test-positives experienced at least one physical post-acute symptom. [jm: "test-positives" are "individuals aged 15-years or older, consisting of RT-PCR confirmed SARS-CoV-2 cases between September 2020 - April 2021"] The largest risk differences were observed for dysosmia (RD = 10.92%, 95%CI 10.68-11.21%), dysgeusia (RD=8.68%, 95%CI 8.43-8.93%), fatigue/exhaustion (RD=8.43%, 95%CI 8.14-8.74%), dyspnea (RD=4.87%, 95%CI 4.65-5.09%) and reduced strength in arms/legs (RD=4.68%, 95%CI 4.45-4.89%). More than half (53.1%) of test-positives reported at least one of the following conditions: concentration difficulties (RD=28.34%, 95%CI 27.34-28.78%), memory issues (RD=27.25%, 95%CI 26.80-27.71%), sleep problems (RD=17.27%, 95%CI 16.81-17.73%), mental (RD=32.58%, 95%CI 32.11-33.09%) or physical exhaustion (RD=40.45%, 95%CI 33.99-40.97%), compared to 11.5% of test-negatives. New diagnoses of anxiety (RD=1.15%, 95%CI 0.95-1.34%) or depression (RD=1.00%, 95%CI 0.81-1.19%) were also more common among test-positives. Interpretation: At the population-level, where the majority of test-positives (96.0%) were not hospitalized during acute infection, a considerable proportion experience post-acute symptoms and sequelae 6-12 months after infection.

    (tags: long-covid denmark studies papers covid-19)

  • Telegram Harm Reduction for Users in Russia and Ukraine

    The EFF's position on "should you use Telegram in Ukraine".

    (tags: apps communication eff encryption ukraine russia war security)

  • What Exactly are AWS VPC Endpoints

    VPC endpoints are AWS magic to allow private, secure access to S3, DynamoDB, and other AWS services without any traversal outside of your private VPC network. This blog post is a good description of how this is accomplished, and very useful if you need to debug AWS networking issues. (via Last Week In AWS)

    (tags: aws networking vpc vpc-endpoints architecture ops s3 dynamodb security)

  • Additional Checksum Algorithms for Amazon S3

    This is good stuff:

    It is now very easy for you to calculate and store checksums for data stored in Amazon S3 and to use the checksums to check the integrity of your upload and download requests. You can use this new feature to implement the digital preservation best practices and controls that are specific to your industry. In particular, you can specify the use of any one of four widely used checksum algorithms (SHA-1, SHA-256, CRC-32, and CRC-32C).
    (via Last Week in AWS)

    (tags: checksums integrity uploads s3 sha crc md5)

Links for 2022-03-04

Published March 4, 2022

Links for 2022-03-02

Published March 2, 2022

  • Crowdworking platforms used as a tool of war

    File under "grim dystopian 21st century": Bogdan Kulynych on Twitter: "New (to me) dimension of crowdwork platforms: Russian military [used] Premise microtasking platform to aim and calibrate fire during their invasion of Ukraine. Example tasks are to locate ports, medical facilities, bridges, explosion craters. Paying ¢0.25 to $3.25 a task." This may explain why Google Maps coverage of the area wound up with many of those features tagged in the past week.

    (tags: ethics security google crowdwork crowdsourcing warfare war ukraine grim-meathook-future)

  • Why you should develop a correction of error (COE) | AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

    AWS are proselytising their post-outage retrospective analysis process, the COE. Generally good stuff but they are clearly _still_ married to jeffb's local timezone:

    When documenting times, be sure to include a time zone, and make sure that you’re using it correctly (e.g., PDT vs. PST). Better yet, either use UTC or omit the middle letter of the time zone (e.g., “PT”).
    As Brian Scanlan sez: "A good 1/4 of the neurons in my brain were wired to quickly add and subtract 8 hours from timestamps by the time I left there" Just. Use. UTC.

    (tags: amazon aws timezones coe process postmortems dates pdt pst utc)

  • New – Customer Carbon Footprint Tool | AWS News Blog

    'Starting today customers can calculate the environmental impact of their AWS workloads with the new customer carbon footprint tool. This new tool uses easy-to-understand data visualizations to provide customers with their historical carbon emissions, evaluate emission trends as their use of AWS evolves, approximate the estimated carbon emissions they have avoided by using AWS instead of an on-premises data center, and review forecasted emissions based on current use. The forecasted emissions are based on current usage, and show how a customer’s carbon footprint will change as Amazon stays on path to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of its original target of 2030, and drives toward net-zero carbon by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge. The customer carbon footprint tool is visible today through the AWS Billing console and helps to support customers on their sustainability journey. When signed into the AWS Billing console, customers can view their carbon emissions data by geographical location and by AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). They can also measure changes in their carbon footprint over time, as they deploy new resources in the cloud. The new tool uses data that meets the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which is the international standard for greenhouse gas reporting.' Covers Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions.

    (tags: aws carbon emissions climate-change sustainability climate infrastructure ops ec2 s3)

Links for 2022-03-01

Published March 1, 2022

Links for 2022-02-22

Published February 22, 2022

Links for 2022-02-18

Published February 18, 2022

Links for 2022-02-16

Published February 16, 2022

  • GitHub now supports embedded graphs and diagrams using Mermaid

    This is very handy!

    Mermaid is a JavaScript based diagramming and charting tool that takes Markdown-inspired text definitions and creates diagrams dynamically in the browser. Maintained by Knut Sveidqvist, it supports a bunch of different common diagram types for software projects, including flowcharts, UML, Git graphs, user journey diagrams, and even the dreaded Gantt chart. Working with Knut and also the wider community at CommonMark, we’ve rolled out a change that will allow you to create graphs inline using Mermaid syntax.
    Nearly graphviz but not quite :)

    (tags: diagrams github markdown mermaid charts graphs)

Links for 2022-02-15

Published February 15, 2022

  • UKHSA review shows vaccinated less likely to have long COVID than unvaccinated - GOV.UK

    Good data from UKHSA:

    The data from some of the studies included in the review suggests that: people with COVID-19 who received 2 doses of the Pfizer, AstraZeneca, or Moderna vaccines or one dose of the Janssen vaccine, were about half as likely as people who received one dose or were unvaccinated to develop long COVID symptoms lasting more than 28 days; vaccine effectiveness against most post-COVID symptoms in adults was highest in people aged 60 years and over, and lowest for younger participants (19 to 35 years)
    They also estimate prevalence of long COVID as affecting 2% of the UK population.

    (tags: long-covid uk ukhsa vaccines sars-cov-2)

Links for 2022-02-14

Published February 14, 2022

  • a short story about pandemic misinformation & biased reporting

    Well-illustrated case study from 2021 in how misinformation evolves in the mainstream press. First, an Irish Times journalist concocted a thesis ("Given that only 1 in 1,000 cases of COVID-19 come from an outdoor setting, is the government too prohibitive on people meeting outdoors?"), and got a weakly confirmatory response from the HPSC (who should have known better). Through poor reporting by other newspapers around the world, this quickly became a "fact" reported by an Irish "study" -- despite being nothing of the sort -- and published in the New York Times and NPR. Eventually it became a research reference in several academic papers and the BMJ. Naturally, warnings from experts, and the Minister for Health, about its inaccuracy, were ignored. What a mess...

    (tags: misinformation irish-times fail health covid-19 safety hpsc new-york-times npr bmj)

  • A decade of major cache incidents at Twitter

    a massive list of cache-related outages from Dan Luu -- I still have fear of large scale cache reliance, inherited from Amazon, and this terrifying list doesn't help!

    (tags: caching architecture twitter ops outages history)

Links for 2022-02-10

Published February 10, 2022

  • COVID-19 takes serious toll on heart health—a full year after recovery | Science

    In an analysis of more than 11 million U.S. veterans’ health records, researchers found the risk of 20 different heart and vessel maladies was substantially increased in veterans who had COVID-19 1 year earlier, compared with those who didn’t. The risk rose with severity of initial disease and extended to every outcome the team examined, including heart attacks, arrhythmias, strokes, cardiac arrest, and more. Even people who never went to the hospital had more cardiovascular disease than those who were never infected. The results are “stunning … worse than I expected, for sure,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Research. “All of these are very serious disorders. … If anybody ever thought that COVID was like the flu this should be one of the most powerful data sets to point out it’s not.” He adds that the new study “may be the most impressive Long Covid paper we have seen to date.” [...] “In the post-COVID era, COVID might become the highest risk factor for cardiovascular outcomes,” greater than well-documented risks such as smoking and obesity, says Larisa Tereshchenko.

    (tags: covid-19 health medicine long-covid sars-cov-2 heart stroke)

  • Radio station snafu in Seattle bricks some Mazda infotainment systems

    Bananas. Crappy code in Mazda Connectivity Master Units (CMUs), a component in the Mazda infotainment system in models built between 2014 and 2017, had a massive bug: they would crash and enter a crash/reboot cycle on receiving unexpected input via radio.

    The problem, according to Mazda, was that the radio station sent out image files in its HD radio stream that did not have extensions, and it seems that Mazda's infotainment system of that generation needs an extension (and not a header) to tell what a file is. No extension, no idea, and the system gets corrupted.
    Just to add insult to injury, there's no way to field-repair this embedded system -- no "factory reset" switch was provided -- so the only way to fix it is to install a new CMU at the cost of $1,500, and none are available due to "supply chain issues". Goes to show you that image decoding libraries remain a fine source of vulnerability surfaces...

    (tags: radio security mazdas infotainment cars embedded-systems fail bugs images)

  • We won! UK Home Office to stop using racist visa algorithm

    Spectacular inbuilt algorithmic discrimination in the UK:

    The visa algorithm discriminated on the basis of nationality - by design. Applications made by people holding ‘suspect’ nationalities received a higher risk score. Their applications received intensive scrutiny by Home Office officials, were approached with more scepticism, took longer to determine, and were much more likely to be refused. We argued this was racial discrimination and breached the Equality Act 2010. Entrenched bias and racism in the visa system breaks hearts and tears families apart, like the four siblings from Nigeria unable to travel to the UK for their sister's wedding, or the countless skilled professionals refused unable to contribute to conferences and events in the UK just because they don't come from a rich white country - including scores of African academics and artists denied entry for no good reason. The streaming tool was opaque. Aside from admitting the existence of a secret list of suspect nationalities, the Home Office refused to provide meaningful information about the algorithm. It remains unclear what other factors were used to grade applications. The algorithm suffered from a feedback loop — a vicious circle in which biased enforcement and visa statistics reinforce which countries stay on the list of suspect nationalities. In short, applicants from suspect nationalities were more likely to have their visa application rejected. These visa rejections then informed which nationalities appeared on the list of ‘suspect’ nations. This error, combined with the pre-existing bias in Home Office enforcement (in which some nationalities are targeted for enforcement because they are believed to be easier to remove), accelerated bias in the Home Office’s visa process. Such feedback loops are a well-documented problem with automated decision systems.

    (tags: algorithms racism uk immigration automation home-office)

  • Environmental Reporting Dashboards for OpenStack

    A neat integration of Scaphandre into an OpenStack cluster by BBC R&D:

    While researching tools to monitor VM power usage, we evaluated Scaphandre – an open-source monitoring agent for energy consumption metrics created by Hubblo and Benoit Petit. Scaphandre can measure the CPU power consumption of the whole server and its processes using Intel RAPL alongside CPU utilisation statistics stored in proc/stat. Scaphandre estimates how many CPU watts each process is responsible for by looking at the CPU time spent on it, and the CPU power consumption for the whole server reported by Intel RAPL. Each running VM appears as a process running on the server – therefore, Scaphandre can report the CPU power consumption for each VM. We then used the Carbon Intensity API, created by the UK National Grid ESO, to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions corresponding to each VM’s CPU power consumption. This API provides the number of grams of carbon dioxide (gCO2) emitted to generate a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity consumed at a UK regional level. This figure, referred to as the carbon intensity of electricity generation, varies over time according to the type of generation and electricity demand. Multiplying the carbon intensity figure by the CPU power consumption of a VM at a given point in time results in the carbon dioxide emissions the VM is responsible for.

    (tags: scaphandre bbc openstack co2 climate emissions power)

Links for 2022-02-09

Published February 9, 2022

  • Energy crisis: Is net zero and environmental policy responsible for rising energy bills?

    If we're serious about replacing fossil fuels with renewables we will have to build an awful lot of them, and while the eventual lifetime cost could be lower than fossil fuels, the short-term cost per MWh is way, way higher. So if we're serious about net zero you'd expect our governments and companies to be spending extraordinary amounts on new primary power projects right now. But glance at the statistics and it turns out we're not. On the contrary, investment in primary energy -- those plans and solar panels and wind turbines we need to give us power -- has flatlined since 2015.

    (tags: energy future climate-change power fossil-fuels renewables research net-zero)

  • braided cables

    prized by audiophiles, but TBH I think they just look pretty cool

    (tags: cables braiding cool)

  • Missing Manuals - io_uring worker pool

    'Calling io_uring just an asynchronous I/O API doesn’t do it justice, though. Underneath the API calls, io_uring is a full-blown runtime for processing I/O requests. One that spawns threads, sets up work queues, and dispatches requests for processing. All this happens “in the background” so that the user space process doesn’t have to, but can, block while waiting for its I/O requests to complete. A runtime that spawns threads and manages the worker pool for the developer makes life easier, but using it in a project begs the questions: 1. How many threads will be created for my workload by default? 2. How can I monitor and control the thread pool size? [.....] 3. What is an unbounded worker? 4. How does it differ from a bounded worker? Things seem a bit under-documented as is, hence this blog post. Hopefully, it will provide the clarity needed to put io_uring to work in your project when the time comes.'

    (tags: linux io_uring apis runtime kernel system-calls coding performance)

DynamoDB-local on Apple Silicon

Published February 9, 2022

DynamoDB Local is one of the best features of AWS DynamoDB. It allows you to run a local instance of the data store, and is perfect for use in unit tests to validate correctness of your DynamoDB client code without calling out to the real service "in the cloud" and involving all sorts of authentication trickiness.

Unfortunately, if you're using one of the new MacBooks with M1 Apple silicon, you may run into trouble:

11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB > Feb 04, 2022 11:08:56 AM com.almworks.sqlite4java.Internal log
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB > SEVERE: [sqlite] SQLiteQueue[]: error running job queue
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB > com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteException: [-91] cannot load library: java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /.../DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib: dlopen(/.../DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib, 0x0001): tried: '/.../DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib' (fat file, but missing compatible architecture (have 'i386,x86_64', need 'arm64e')), '/usr/lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib' (no such file)
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLite.loadLibrary(SQLite.java:97)
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteConnection.open0(SQLiteConnection.java:1441)
11:08:56.893 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteConnection.open(SQLiteConnection.java:282)
11:08:56.894 [DEBUG] [TestEventLogger]          DynamoDB >      at com.almworks.sqlite4java.SQLiteConnection.open(SQLiteConnection.java:293)

It's possible to invoke it via Rosetta, Apple's qemu-based x86 emulation layer, like so:

arch -x86_64 /path/to/openjdk/bin/java dynamodb-local.jar

But if you don't have control over the invocation of the Java command, or just don't want to involve emulation, this is a bit hacky. Here's a better way to make it work.

First, download dynamodb_local_latest.tar.gz from the DynamoDB downloads page, and extract it.

The DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib file in this tarball is the problem. It's OSX x86 only, and will not run with an ARM64 JVM. However, the same lib is available for ARM64 in the libsqlite4java artifacts list, so this will work:

wget -O libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.arm64 'https://search.maven.org/remotecontent?filepath=io/github/ganadist/sqlite4java/libsqlite4java-osx-arm64/1.0.392/libsqlite4java-osx-arm64-1.0.392.dylib'
mv DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.x86_64
lipo -create -output libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.fat libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.x86_64 libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.arm64
mv libsqlite4java-osx.dylib.fat DynamoDBLocal_lib/libsqlite4java-osx.dylib

This is now a "fat" lib which supports both ARM64 and x86 hardware. Hey presto, you can now invoke DynamoDBLocal in the normal Rosetta-free manner, and it'll all work -- on both hardware platforms.

(This post is correct as of version 2022-1-10 (1.18.0) of DynamoDB-Local -- let me know by mail, or at @jmason on Twitter, if things break in future, and I'll update it.)

Links for 2022-02-08

Published February 8, 2022

  • Long-term cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19 | Nature Medicine

    Yikes:

    beyond the first 30 days after infection, individuals with COVID-19 are at increased risk of incident cardiovascular disease spanning several categories, including cerebrovascular disorders, dysrhythmias, ischemic and non-ischemic heart disease, pericarditis, myocarditis, heart failure and thromboembolic disease. These risks and burdens were evident even among individuals who were not hospitalized during the acute phase of the infection and increased in a graded fashion according to the care setting during the acute phase (non-hospitalized, hospitalized and admitted to intensive care). Our results provide evidence that the risk and 1-year burden of cardiovascular disease in survivors of acute COVID-19 are substantial. Care pathways of those surviving the acute episode of COVID-19 should include attention to cardiovascular health and disease.

    (tags: covid-19 papers nature disease health long-covid sars-cov-2)

  • Crypto, NFTs, and sports betting: Money is now a hobby - Vox

    "The internet turned “money” into a hobby -- Why (mostly) 20- and 30-something dudes made crypto and sports betting their personality":

    Jeff, like most skeptics for whom the system has actually worked pretty well, is eager to cash out once the price of ethereum goes back up. But talking to him, and to the rest of the (almost entirely) men who’ve turned money into a hobby, made me more than anything feel like I was too late to something that hadn’t even really happened yet. Because of course it isn’t “too late” to become an overnight crypto millionaire or to cash out on an incredibly lucky bet; it’s just highly unlikely that that person will be you. Nobody wants to be a cynical spoilsport, stewing in resentment of these men who have won and will probably keep winning, who look a lot like the ones who have always won: the men who have the time, the knowledge, the energy, and, most importantly, the money to turn “having money” into its own hobby.

    (tags: crypto finance gambling internet nfts ethereum scams hobbies betting)

Links for 2022-02-07

Published February 7, 2022

Links for 2022-02-03

Published February 3, 2022

Links for 2022-02-02

Published February 2, 2022

Links for 2022-01-26

Published January 26, 2022

  • Resurrecting Nikolai Fedorov

    The original "rapture of the nerds":

    [Fedorov's] thought was powerfully shaped by both Orthodox Christianity and Hegelian philosophy. [...] Rather than passively waiting for God to bring on the Millennium, being a good Christian meant participating in the building of heaven on Earth. It was the way in which he expected this to come about that really separated Fedorov from the others. In his thinking there is only one evil in the world that really counts, death. Moreover, rather than being accepted as a part of “the human condition,” part of the human mission is the technological conquest of death. This means not only achieving immortality, but restoring all the people who have ever walked the Earth to life so that they may share the gift as well, making the heaven of the afterlife a physical reality. [...] To help bring the dead back to life, Fedorov believed that humanity would eventually launch expeditions across the cosmos to recover particles that once belonged to their ancestors in order to reconstitute their bodies. Additionally, since Earth would not be big enough to accommodate all of the people who had ever lived at once, room would be found for them on other planets.
    (via Charlie Stross)

    (tags: via:cstross rapture nerds singularity futurism posthumanism space biotechnology death immortality life-extension future nikolai-fedorov philosophy religion)

  • Long Covid risk reduced by double vaccination

    _Self-reported long COVID after two doses of a coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine in the UK_ - report from the UK Office for National Statistics. Tl;dr: 'reduced odds of Long Covid if SARS-CoV-2 infection occurs after double vaccination in adults. Almost half less likely (OR 41%) compared to unvaccinated when infected.' See also this preprint https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v2

    (tags: long-covid covid-19 ons uk vaccines vaccination)

  • rMA 15 - 15 passages resulted in a very pathogenic variant of SARS-CoV

    "A Mouse-Adapted SARS-Coronavirus Causes Disease and Mortality in BALB/c Mice": "We adapted the SARS-CoV (Urbani strain) by serial passage in the respiratory tract of young BALB/c mice. Fifteen passages resulted in a virus (MA15) that is lethal for mice following intranasal inoculation." This is the scary paper which Anthony J Leonardi refers to regularly -- 15 passages through mice resulted in SARS-CoV (the first one) becoming much more pathogenic.

    (tags: viruses rma-15 sars-cov)

Links for 2022-01-25

Published January 25, 2022

Links for 2022-01-24

Published January 24, 2022

Links for 2022-01-21

Published January 21, 2022

  • My custom solar monitoring system (PVS6)

    Nelson's telegraf/grafana setup for monitoring his domestic solar power setup. Very nice indeed, I'll be taking some inspiration from this when I (finally) get around to getting panels on my roof

    (tags: solar-power solar home graphs grafana dashboards monitoring telegraf via:nelson)

  • DeliverMe.ie

    another UK / Northern Ireland delivery address parcel-forwarding service. Extremely expensive compared to the now-obsolete Parcel Motel, at 25 euros per parcel, but if there's no other option for ordering from Brexitland, at least it's there.

    (tags: delivery brexit uk parcels shipping ireland)

  • zzh Multiprotocol RF Stick

    Apparently the bees knees for Zigbee usage with an open platform like Home Assistant:

    zzh is the original "USB stick" form-factor development board for TI's new generation CC2652R chips. It features: TI CC2652R1 2.4 GHz multi-protocol wireless microcontroller targeting Thread, Zigbee, Bluetooth 5 Low Energy, IEEE 802.15.4g, IPv6-enabled smart objects (6LoWPAN) and proprietary systems; Communicates with the host computer via the common CH340 USB-UART bridge, no manual driver installation needed in most cases (Windows and Linux); Self-programming via the TI CC-series serial bootloader. As long as it is not explicitly disabled in code, no external programmer needed! Pushbutton on the default pin to trigger this mode; cJTAG debug header, in case you disable BSL by accident or want a proper debug interface; SMA antenna port for an external antenna of your choice

    (tags: ha hardware toget gadgets zha home home-assistant zigbee bluetooth ble usb)

Links for 2022-01-20

Published January 20, 2022

Links for 2022-01-19

Published January 19, 2022

Links for 2022-01-17

Published January 17, 2022

  • Prof. Akiko Iwasaki Twitter thread on a significant long COVID paper

    'Significant long-term neurologic damage can occur after a mild respiratory-only SARS-CoV-2 infection.' [...] 'In a nutshell, this study illustrates that respiratory-only mild SARS-CoV-2 infection can lead to detrimental changes in the brain, likely mediated by inflammatory factors. Similar neuropathobiology may be shared in chemo-brain, post-ICU syndrome and ME/CFS.'

    (tags: neurology long-covid papers medicine health me cfs inflammation cytokines)

  • Reverse Engineering Nike Run Club Android App Using Frida

    walkthrough of using Frida to decompile, hook into and reverse an Android app

    (tags: android scripting frida reverse-engineering security mobile)

  • Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection | Nature Immunology

    Nature Immunology paper on Long COVID, suggesting a clear physiological syndrome, and a set of reliable biomarkers that may be usable to diagnose it:

    In summary, our data indicate an ongoing, sustained inflammatory response following even mild-to-moderate acute COVID-19, which is not found following prevalent coronavirus infection. The drivers of this activation require further investigation, but possibilities include persistence of antigen, autoimmunity driven by antigenic cross-reactivity or a reflection of damage repair. These observations describe an abnormal immune profile in patients with COVID-19 at extended time points after infection and provide clear support for the existence of a syndrome of LC. Our observations provide an important foundation for understanding the pathophysiology of this syndrome and potential therapeutic avenues for intervention.

    (tags: nature papers covid-19 sars-cov-2 long-covid t-cells immunology)

  • Fever is good for you

    Fever -- the feeling of having a high temperature, sweats, shivering etc. -- is actually a *good* thing:

    Fever is preserved evolutionarily, suggesting benefit; There is a metabolic cost to fever which may partly explain why we’re not just evolving to be hotter; The benefit relates to its direct anti-pathogen effects and its ability to augment innate and adaptive immunity; Antipyretics are overused.
    In particular, a randomised controlled trial of fever treatment in trauma ICU patients was halted early, due to a significant difference in deaths during the trial!

    (tags: fever temperature body health medicine rcts metabolism trials)

  • The State of Web Scraping 2022

    Blog post from ScrapeOps.io (whoever they are). Interesting to see where web scraping has gone over the years -- looks like an arms race has taken place:

    Websites and anti-bot providers have continued to develop more sophisticated anti-bot measures. They are increasingly moving away from simple header and IP fingerprinting, to more complicated browser and TCP fingerprinting with webRTC, canvas fingerprinting and analysing mouse movements so that they can differentiate automated scrapers from real-users. But as of yet no anti-bot has found the magic bullet to completely prevent web scrapers. With the right combination of proxies, user agents and browsers, you can scrape every website. Even those that seem unscrapable. However, whilst scraping a website might be still possible, anti-bots can make it not worth the effort and cost if you have to resort to ever more expensive web scraping setups (using headless browsers with residential/mobile IP networks, etc).

    (tags: scraping web bots arms-races web-scraping)

  • Tek Fog in Action

    "Investigating claims behind the use of 'Tek Fog', a sophisticated app used by political operatives affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party to drive propaganda at scale in India." This is grim stuff -- a custom app to bulk-post harassment en masse on various social media platforms, targeting women and driving right-wing pro-BJP spam. Can't imagine this methodology will stay in India in future, either.

    (tags: india tek-fog grim-meathook-future spam abuse harassment bjp politics social-media)

Links for 2022-01-11

Published January 11, 2022

  • Long COVID in a very large Norwegian cohort study

    New preprint, "Excess risk and clusters of symptoms after COVID-19 in a large Norwegian cohort": 'Physical, psychological and cognitive symptoms have been reported as post-acute sequelae for COVID-19 patients but are also common in the general, uninfected population. We aimed to calculate the excess risk and identify patterns of 22 symptoms up to 12 months after COVID-19 infection. We followed more than 70,000 participants in an ongoing cohort study, the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Infected and noninfected cohort participants registered presence of 22 different symptoms in March 2021. One year after the initial infection, 13 of 22 symptoms were associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection, based on relative risks between infected and uninfected subjects. For instance, 17.4% of SARS-CoV-2 infected cohort participants reported fatigue that persist 12 months after infection, compared to new occurrence of fatigue that had lasted less than 12 months in 3.8% of non-infected subjects (excess risk 13.6%). The adjusted relative risk for fatigue was 4.8 (95 % CI 3.5 to 6.7). Two main underlying factors explained 50% of the variance in the 13 symptoms. Brain fog, poor memory, dizziness, heart palpitations, and fatigue had high loadings on the first factor, while shortness of breath and cough had high loadings on the second factor. Lack of taste and smell showed low to moderate correlation to other symptoms. Anxiety, depression and mood swings were not strongly related to COVID-19. Our results suggest that there are clusters of symptoms after COVID-19 due to different mechanisms and question whether it is meaningful to describe long COVID as one syndrome.' The participants were all unvaccinated, so hopefully vaccination has a decent protective effect...

    (tags: covid-19 long-covid papers medicine norway preprints)

  • sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver

    'generates a PNG from a Home Assistant Lovelace view, which can be displayed on a Kindle device which has the Online Screensaver plugin installed.' There's a lovely demo at https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/s0m4b9/kindle_eink_home_info_display/ -- although I'd be pretty worried about Kindle updates bricking the jailbreak. In my experience Amazon devices are not very jailbreak-friendly.

    (tags: jailbreaking kindle homeassistant devices gadgets home)

Links for 2021-12-21

Published December 21, 2021

  • _SARS-CoV-2 on surfaces and HVAC filters in dormitory rooms_

    Interesting new preprint on fomite transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from Linsey Marr et al. tl;dr: "SARS-CoV-2 RNA was found on more than half of surface samples and HVAC filters in dormitory rooms [housing students who were in quarantine or isolation]; the virus was not infectious."

    (tags: fomites transmission covid-19 sars-cov-2 surfaces university students dormitories linsey-marr)

  • Mass rapid tests in Liverpool cut hospital stays by a third

    Rapid antigen tests, deployed carefully to include serial testing of presymptomatic and asymptomatic people, saved lives:

    An analysis has shown that it was more successful than Liverpool’s scientists and public health teams had anticipated, after they compared Covid cases and outcomes in the region with other parts of England. Professor Iain Buchan, dean of the Institute of Population Health, who led the evaluation, said: “This time last year, as the Alpha variant was surging, we found that Liverpool city region’s early rollout of community rapid testing was associated with a 32% fall in Covid-19 hospital admissions after careful matching to other parts of the country in a similar position to Liverpool but without rapid testing. “We also found that daily lateral flow testing as an alternative to quarantine for people who had been in close contact with a known infected person enabled emergency services to keep key teams such as fire crews in work, underpinning public safety.”

    (tags: rapid-tests antigen-tests testing covid-19 sars-cov-2 liverpool public-health lfts serial-testing)

Links for 2021-12-20

Published December 20, 2021

Links for 2021-12-19

Published December 19, 2021

  • The CFS quota container throttling problem

    Well, this is quite a messy one:

    Almost all services at Twitter run on Linux with the CFS scheduler, using CFS bandwidth control quota for isolation, with default parameters. The intention is to allow different services to be colocated on the same boxes without having one service's runaway CPU usage impact other services and to prevent services on empty boxes from taking all of the CPU on the box, resulting in unpredictable performance, which service owners found difficult to reason about before we enabled quotas. The quota mechanism limits the amortized CPU usage of each container, but it doesn't limit how many cores the job can use at any given moment. Instead, if a job "wants to" use more than that many cores over a quota timeslice, it will use more cores than its quota for a short period of time and then get throttled, i.e., basically get put to sleep, in order to keep its amortized core usage below the quota, which is disastrous for tail latency1. Since the vast majority of services at Twitter use thread pools that are much larger than their mesos core reservation, when jobs have heavy load, they end up requesting and then using more cores than their reservation and then throttling. This causes services that are provisioned based on load test numbers or observed latency under load to over provision CPU to avoid violating their SLOs. They either have to ask for more CPUs per shard than they actually need or they have to increase the number of shards they use.
    Note that Kubernetes uses CFS to implement CPU quotas by default, too. In the twitter thread about this post, a commenter noted: "'By shrinking the CFS period, the worst case time between quota exhaustion causing throttling and the process group being able to run again is reduced proportionately'. Our P99s at previous gig reduced in line after I petitioned cloud provider to adjust setting." --- this at least seems like a relatively easy setting to tune.

    (tags: cgroups kubernetes linux k8s cfs scheduling containers quotas)

Links for 2021-12-17

Published December 17, 2021

  • The Web3 Fraud | USENIX

    By now effectively all ;login:’s readers have heard the term “web3” and “dapps” bandied about as if they are some great revolution.  They are not.  The technical underpinnings are so terrible that it is clear they exist only to hype the underlying cryptocurrencies.  The actual utility of these “decentralized” systems is already available in modern distributed systems in ways that are several orders of magnitude more efficient and more capable.

    (tags: bitcoin criticism cryptocurrency web3 crypto ethereum hype scams dapps)

Links for 2021-12-16

Published December 16, 2021

  • Consumer warranties and statutory rights

    wow, I didn't realise we had statutory right to redress for faulty goods for 6 years:

    Statutory rights are provided for by legislation (Irish law and EU law as transposed in Ireland). These act as a kind of “legal guarantee”, entitling consumers to seek redress where an item is faulty. Consumers may rely on their statutory rights regardless of whether an item has a warranty or not. Under Irish law, consumers have up to six years to seek redress for faulty or defective items (both new and second-hand). If the product is defective, the seller is generally responsible for providing redress. If a fault arises within six months of purchase, it is presumed to have existed at the time of purchase. For this reason, the consumer should not have to provide proof of the defect. If the fault arises more than six months after purchase, the seller may request that the consumer prove the fault did not arise as a result of misuse – for instance, by obtaining a report from an independent expert. Where an item is faulty, the seller may first offer a repair or replacement item. If this is not possible or fails to correct the problem, a refund may then be provided. Remedies for faulty goods must be provided free of charge.

    (tags: rights repair support defective-goods guarantee warranty defects ireland eu)

Links for 2021-12-15

Published December 15, 2021

  • Web3 is going just great

    the ongoing shitfest that is crypto/NFTs

    (tags: blockchain crypto cryptocurrency nfts shitfest web3)

  • rTMS RCT produces excellent results

    This is pretty amazing:

    A recent randomized control trial, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, shows astounding results are possible in five days or less. Almost 80% of patients crossed into remission — meaning they were symptom-free within days. This is compared to about 13% of people who received the placebo treatment. Patients did not report any serious side effects. The most common complaint was a light headache. [...] “This study not only showed some of the best remission rates we've ever seen in depression,” said Shan Siddiqi, a Harvard psychiatrist not connected to the study, “but also managed to do that in people who had already failed multiple other treatments.” Siddiqi also said the study’s small sample size, which is only 29 patients, is not cause for concern. “Often, a clinical trial will be terminated early [according to pre-specified criteria] because the treatment is so effective that it would be unethical to continue giving people placebo,” said Siddiqi. “That's what happened here. They'd originally planned to recruit a much larger sample, but the interim analysis was definitive.”

    (tags: depression fmri health neuroscience medicine rtms brain rcts)

Links for 2021-12-10

Published December 10, 2021

  • Bug #1624320 “systemd-resolved appends 127.0.0.53 to resolv.conf...” : Bugs : systemd package : Ubuntu

    Wow; recent Ubuntu versions force name resolution to operate via the systemd-resolved DNS resolver, which has some pretty major bugs and omissions:

    This bug just compromised every ubuntu machine on my network. It falsely says that DNSSEC is not supported by the nameserver and resorts to non-DNSSEC resolution. So every machine on my network just accepted bogus DNS replies from a MITM. Thanks.
    Is there anything systemd can't break :(

    (tags: systemd fail dns dnssec mitm security resolvers ubuntu bugs linux)

  • Birds Aren’t Real, or Are They? Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory

    This is glorious. Well done, this chap... very reminiscent of the Subgenii

    (tags: birds conspiracies qanon funny birds-arent-real us-politics)

  • The Stockdale Paradox

    On the one hand, they stoically accepted the brutal facts of reality. On the other hand, they maintained an unwavering faith in the endgame, and a commitment to prevail as a great company despite the brutal facts. [..] “I never lost faith in the end of the story,” [Stockdale] said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?” “Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.” “The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier. “The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” To this day, I carry a mental image of Stockdale admonishing the optimists: “We’re not getting out by Christmas; deal with it!”

    (tags: paradoxes jim-stockdale stoicism philosophy optimism pessimism)

Links for 2021-12-09

Published December 9, 2021

Links for 2021-12-07

Published December 7, 2021

  • Life360 sells kids' location data to "approximately a dozen data brokers"

    This is shocking: Wolfie Christl says "Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements." Also, it sells "data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers". Former employees of data brokers "described Life360 as one of the largest sources of data for the industry" -- "A former X-Mode engineer said the raw location data the company received from Life360 was among X-Mode’s most valuable offerings". X-Mode sold data to the US military. An app that claims to be a family safety service selling exact location data to several other companies, this is a total disaster. It would be a problem if it’s any other app, and it’s even more a problem when it’s an app that claims to be a family safety service. Selling data on children to companies who sell to the military is probably the most extreme form of decontextualizing sensitive data for profit." Life360 are now planning to buy Tile.

    (tags: refractive-surveillance surveillance children privacy data-privacy location gps life360 tile data-brokers)

Links for 2021-12-06

Published December 6, 2021

  • An upper bound on one-to-one exposure to infectious human respiratory particles | PNAS

    Masks just work:

    Our results show that face masks significantly reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to social distancing. We find a very low risk of infection when everyone wears a face mask, even if it doesn’t fit perfectly on the face.

    (tags: masks covid-19 papers face-masks infection)

  • Ikea Vindriktning Air Quality Sensor Review and Accuracy

    'Ikea recently came out with a range of air purifiers and also an air quality sensor. The Vindriktning does not have a display but shows the air quality data in the form of a traffic light with red, yellow and green LEDs. One of the most striking features is actually the price as it costs only around EUR 10 depending where you live. It looks very nice and the build quality is quite good but this article will look beyond the looks and see how good it is at actually measuring the air quality.' The results are mixed: 'I really want to like the Vindriktning! It has a great built quality and price and is very simple to use. The addition of a small fan to improve the air flow through the sensor is a good upgrade and shows that Ikea wants to provide accurate measurements -- even with a cheap sensor. However, the defined cut off values for the air quality and its description as “Good”, “OK”, and “Not Good” are not based on science or international recommendations and create the false understanding that the air is good, when in fact it is not good at all. I do hope that in one of the next upgrades of the Vindriktning, Ikea will bring its traffic light indicators more in line with WHO recommendations on healthy air quality.' Personally, this sounds useful -- as long as one remembers that the "OK" air quality level is in fact well into the "unhealthy" zone. Bit mysterious as to why IKEA made this choice though...

    (tags: ikea air-quality pm2.5 pm10 particulates home devices gadgets)

Links for 2021-12-03

Published December 3, 2021

  • The Labyrinth Stone

    In medieval times the labyrinth underwent a revival and became primarily a symbol of pilgrimage, and in particular pilgrimage to the holy shrine of Jerusalem (Coleman & Elsner 1995, 112). Shortly after the loss of Jerusalem to the Muslims in the twelfth century, large labyrinths of mosaic or paving stones were incorporated into the western nave bays of a number of European cathedrals in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Connolly 2005, 286). [....] By walking, or in some cases crawling on their knees, along the labyrinth, pilgrims could perform an imagined pilgrimage to Jerusalem (Westbury 2001, 51-52).

    (tags: pilgrimage history labyrinths mazes via:neil-jackman)

Links for 2021-11-24

Published November 24, 2021

  • FIND

    "Framework for Internal Navigation and Discovery" -- track device locations using active or passive (wifi-based) scan methods within a house or office, then trigger Home Assistant automation based on device locations -- e.g. turning on or off heating in specific rooms, etc.

    (tags: location home-assistant home automation tracking devices)

Links for 2021-11-23

Published November 23, 2021

  • Google Cloud incident was caused by a race condition which triggered 30 minutes before the bugfix deployment was due to complete

    Wow, this was tragic! "A Google engineer discovered this bug on 12 November, which caused us to declare an internal high-priority incident because of the latent risk to production systems. After analyzing the bug, we froze a part of our configuration system to make the likelihood of the race condition even lower. Since the race condition had existed in the fleet for several months already, the team believed that this extra step made the risk even lower. Thus the team believed the lowest-risk path [...] was to roll out fixes in a controlled manner as opposed to a same-day emergency patch. [...] Gradual rollouts of both patches started on Monday, 15 November, and patch B completed rollout by that evening. On Tuesday, 16 November, as the patch A rollout was within 30 minutes of completing, the race condition did manifest in an unpatched cluster, and the outage started."

    (tags: cloud outages tragic google race-conditions gclb patching deployment ops)

  • "Risk compensation" is garbage

    Risk compensation does occur in very narrow and specific circumstances, but all the studies purporting to show that it is a widespread, predictable outcome of any safety regulation have failed to replicate. [...] Risk compensation and health-and-safety panic are both part of a safety nihilism campaign that serves big business's deregulatory agenda, and the cruel moralizing of right wing religious maniacs, the traditional turkeys-voting-for-Christmas coalition. But risk compensation is especially salient in these covid days, where it's being used to fight rapid testing ("encourages risky behavior").

    (tags: risk-compensation risks safety)

Links for 2021-11-09

Published November 9, 2021

Links for 2021-11-08

Published November 8, 2021

Links for 2021-11-02

Published November 2, 2021

Links for 2021-10-26

Published October 26, 2021

Links for 2021-10-22

Published October 22, 2021

  • GNI report on biomethane generation in Ireland

    Good news for biogas feasability here: 'This report seeks to provide scientific analysis and real-world data on the key questions and knowledge gaps concerning the sustainability of an Irish agricultural-led biomethane industry. The core aim of this report is to assess whether Ireland can develop an environmentally sustainable biomethane industry without creating unintended negative consequences. [...] This report provides evidence that the development of a sustainable biomethane industry in Ireland is technically feasible and so long as it is developed in a co-ordinated manner, can avoid any negative unintended consequences. As such, a number of proven methodologies have been provided to drive the rollout of a biomethane industry whilst ensuring continued agricultural productivity and improved environmental sustainability.'

    (tags: biogas biomethane methane fuel ireland sustainability climate-change gni farming)

Links for 2021-10-20

Published October 20, 2021

  • Datamuse API

    This is extremely cool! "a word-finding query engine for developers. You can use it in your apps to find words that match a given set of constraints and that are likely in a given context. You can specify a wide variety of constraints on meaning, spelling, sound, and vocabulary in your queries, in any combination. Applications use the API for a wide range of features, including autocomplete on text input fields, search relevancy ranking, assistive writing apps, word games, and more." (via Rob Manuel)

    (tags: dictionary nlp words writing apis rhymes sounds-like adjectives nouns suggestions)

Links for 2021-10-18

Published October 18, 2021

  • Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 After COVID-19 Screening and Mitigation Measures for Primary School Children Attending School in Liège, Belgium

    This paper from a school in Belgium is really worrying, given Ireland's approach to schools and COVID-19. "Despite the implementation of several mitigation measures, the incidence of COVID-19 among children attending primary school in this study was comparable to that observed among teachers and parents. Transmission tree reconstruction suggests that most transmission events originated from within the school."

    Question: What is the possible role of children in SARS-CoV-2 transmission? Findings: This cohort study including 63 children and 118 adults found no significant difference between the number of children and the number of adults testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection during the study period; children were asymptomatic significantly more often compared with adults (46% vs 13%). In addition, a reconstruction of the outbreak showed that most transmission events originated from within the school. Meaning: These results suggest that children may play a larger role in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 than previously assumed.

    (tags: transmission schools education covid-19 sars-cov-2 papers belgium infection)

Links for 2021-10-17

Published October 17, 2021

  • "Grievance Mining"

    What a great term for what the Tories are up to in the UK: "Facing chaos and needing a scapegoat, the Tories seek an endless fight with Europe" --

    Frost is well aware of the futility of his demands – indeed, it is the whole point of his Lisbon performance. Instead of declaring victory, accepting the EU’s munificent offers and turning down the heat in Northern Ireland, he and Johnson prefer to make an impossible demand so that they can blame the EU for rejecting it. They are, as the South Belfast MP, Claire Hanna, has put it, “mining for grievance”.

    (tags: grievances neologisms phrases boris-johnson uk brexit politics northern-ireland eu)

Links for 2021-10-14

Published October 14, 2021

  • Fruit fly brains include a variant of a Bloom filter data structure

    Wow, this is incredible!

    We found that the fruit fly olfactory circuit evolved a variant of a Bloom filter to assess the novelty of odors. Compared with a traditional Bloom filter, the fly adjusts novelty responses based on two additional features: the similarity of an odor to previously experienced odors and the time elapsed since the odor was last experienced. We elaborate and validate a framework to predict novelty responses of fruit flies to given pairs of odors. We also translate insights from the fly circuit to develop a class of distance- and time-sensitive Bloom filters that outperform prior filters when evaluated on several biological and computational datasets. Overall, our work illuminates the algorithmic basis of an important neurobiological problem and offers strategies for novelty detection in computational systems.

    (tags: fruit-flies data-structures algorithms brains neuroscience smell)

Links for 2021-10-08

Published October 8, 2021

  • Let's Encrypt Root Expiration - Post-Mortem

    Overall, I think the expiration of the Let's Encrypt CA certificates went really quite well, largely due to the work Let's Encrypt did around arranging for a new cross-signed chain to be available beyond the expiration of the IdenTrust root. That said, there were far more issues in areas we didn't anticipate. Modern devices, all the way through to latest versions of iOS and macOS hit issues when connecting to servers that had a misconfigured certificate chain and quite serious issues from huge companies like Google and Microsoft in their cloud products that could no longer validate certificate chains was surprising to say the least. In all, I think this just highlights something that many of us that work in this space have known for some time, that TLS/PKI are complex and fragile systems that often go overlooked for long periods of time because they 'just work' most of the time. [....] One thing that's certain is that this event is coming again. Over the next few years we're going to see a wide selection of Root Certificates expiring for all of the major CAs and we're likely to keep experiencing the exact same issues unless something changes in the wider ecosystem.

    (tags: postmortem ssl tls pki fail post-mortems lets-encrypt cas)

Links for 2021-10-06

Published October 6, 2021

  • Frances Haugen says Facebook's algorithms are dangerous. Here’s why. | MIT Technology Review

    This is a good article on FB's disastrous situation, which would be bad enough were it not endangering our societies. Despite warnings from Google and others, they switched their engagement optimization tactics to rely heavily on machine learning, which (as noted elsewhere) devolves into a situation where it's thoroughly inscrutable:

    It developed an internal tool known as FBLearner Flow that made it easy for engineers without machine learning experience to develop whatever models they needed at their disposal. By one data point, it was already in use by more than a quarter of Facebook’s engineering team in 2016. Many of the current and former Facebook employees I’ve spoken to say that this is part of why Facebook can’t seem to get a handle on what it serves up to users in the news feed. Different teams can have competing objectives, and the system has grown so complex and unwieldy that no one can keep track anymore of all of its different components. [...] “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools,” the presentation said, predominantly thanks to the models behind the “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” features. [...] These phenomena are far worse in regions that don’t speak English because of Facebook’s uneven coverage of different languages. [...] When the war in Tigray[, Ethiopia] first broke out in November, [AI ethics researcher Timnit] Gebru saw the platform flounder to get a handle on the flurry of misinformation. [...] When fake news, hate speech, and even death threats aren’t moderated out, they are then scraped as training data to build the next generation of [language models]. And those models, parroting back what they’re trained on, end up regurgitating these toxic linguistic patterns on the internet."
    What. A. Mess.

    (tags: machine-learning social-networking facebook the-algorithm llms models frances-haughen)

  • The Verica Open Incident Database (VOID)

    'A community-contributed collection of software-related incident reports' -- this looks like it'll be a great resource.

    (tags: resilience engineering ops outages post-mortems rcas five-whys incidents)

  • debunking "it takes 48,000 miles for an EV to be greener than an ICE vehicle"

    Looks like this is disinformation produced by an Aston-Martin-affiliated lobbyist/PR company -- the true figure is 18,000 miles

    (tags: debunking pr lobbying cars evs aston-martin spin greenwashing)

Links for 2021-10-05

Published October 5, 2021

  • _Endgame: A zero-carbon electricity plan for Ireland_

    A report commissioned by Wind Energy Ireland in June 2021 -- key findings:

    Reducing power sector CO2 emissions in Ireland from around 9 million tonnes today to a target of less than 2 million tonnes of CO2 per year is very achievable by 2030, using the approach currently underway to achieve the ‘70 by 30’ target, and implementing more of existing and proven technologies; The current Programme for Government renewable capacity targets of 8.2 GW of onshore wind and 5 GW of offshore wind by 2030 should be maintained, with an additional target of 5 GW of solar PV. This target can be achieved at a lower cost to the end consumer in Ireland, compared to delivery of the less ambitious ‘70 by 30’ target. A zero-carbon power system is possible by 2030 and represents an achievable target in the 2030s.

    (tags: wind-energy energy ireland future 2030 climate-change co2 solar-power carbon)

Links for 2021-10-04

Published October 4, 2021

  • Wanghong

    At the simplest level, [wanghong] means “internet famous,” referring in its earliest iterations to viral personalities or social media influencers. The word has since mutated, expanding and venn-diagramming with a particular hipster aesthetic, strands of urban design and kinds of tech platform architecture.

    (tags: celebrity china photography internet neologisms wanghong instagram fame viral internet-famous)

  • The Three DynamoDB Limits You Need to Know

    tl;dr: the item size limit, the pagination page size limit for query and scans; and the partition throughput limits (which bit me earlier this year).

    (tags: dynamodb limits aws coding ops)

  • Orthodoxy, illusio, and playing the scientific game: a Bourdieusian analysis of infection control science in the COVID-19 pandemic

    I remember seeing discussion of aerosol and airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 observed in Asia, right back at the start of 2020. This paper is right; the WHO in particular were careful to write this off as incorrect, and tell people that it was transmitted mainly via droplets, which we now know was a massive failure.

    Scientific and policy bodies’ failure to acknowledge and act on the evidence base for airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in a timely way is both a mystery and a scandal. In this study, we applied theories from Bourdieu to address the question, “How was a partial and partisan scientific account of SARS-CoV-2 transmission constructed and maintained, leading to widespread imposition of infection control policies which de-emphasised airborne transmission?”. [...] Results: Political and policy actors at international, national, and regional level aligned — predominantly though not invariably — with medical scientific orthodoxy which promoted the droplet theory of transmission and considered aerosol transmission unproven or of doubtful relevance. This dominant scientific sub-field centred around the clinical discipline of infectious disease control, in which leading actors were hospital clinicians aligned with the evidence-based medicine movement. Aerosol scientists — typically, chemists, and engineers — representing the heterodoxy were systematically excluded from key decision-making networks and committees. Dominant discourses defined these scientists’ ideas and methodologies as weak, their empirical findings as untrustworthy or insignificant, and their contributions to debate as unhelpful.

    (tags: via:naomi-wu covid-19 discourse infection bourdieu transmission aerosols droplets)

  • Microsoft’s million-tonne CO2-removal purchase — lessons for net zero

    Via David Roberts: "Microsoft is trying to go carbon-negative. Its recent RFP solicited bids for 154 million tonnes of negative emissions; of those, only *2 million tonnes* met its criteria for real, permanent CO2 removal. It has written up its challenges in Nature." "We write as a team composed of Microsoft staff working on the company’s carbon-negative programme, and research scientists who analyse carbon reduction and removal strategies. We highlight three ‘bugs’ in the current system: inconsistent definitions of net zero, poor measurement and accounting of carbon, and an immature market in CO2 removal and offsets. These challenges need to be overcome if the world is to reach net zero by mid-century."

    (tags: earth co2 microsoft stripe carbon carbon-capture climate-change net-zero)

Links for 2021-10-03

Published October 3, 2021

  • Forrest Fleischman on "trillion trees" projects

    Some good points:

    A project whose goal is to plant a certain number of trees is particularly vulnerable to failure because its counting the wrong thing. If the goal is to absorb emissions, we should count the carbon, not the trees. A few small large absorb more carbon than a bunch of little trees. When we plant trees with carbon uptake or forest restoration as a goal, we don't try to maximize the number of trees. We try to maximize long-term carbon uptake, and this might actually mean planting fewer trees up front.

    (tags: forestry science data climate-change planting trees forests carbon-capture carbon)

Links for 2021-09-30

Published September 30, 2021

  • Introducing Echo Show 15

    Amazon's new "Full HD 15.6" smart display for family organisation with Alexa". I've built something similar (though much more basic) for our home using an e-Paper display and a Raspberry Pi, so I'm interested. My take: it looks very busy, heavy on the Alexa lock-in, would omit lots of useful data sources (like Home Assistant), and of course the spyware factor is a biggie -- although on that note it's interesting that there's a prominent "mic/camera off" switch...

    (tags: alexa amazon echo-show devices home family)

  • CR2032 battery review

    IKEA-branded CR2032 batteries last about 70% as long as Duracell or Energizer, or 50% if your devices turn off at 2.7V

    (tags: cr2032 batteries data power via:itc ikea)

  • Big tech relies on refugee labour

    Holy shit this is dystopian.

    All of the largest companies in the world are today powered by a covert crowd of the system’s castoffs. Platforms have found amid those struggling to stay afloat in informal work — or else barely clinging onto a life in formal employment — a desperate mass to be tempted with the promise of a better life. Such a promise, however, is broken as soon as it is made; the petty services of the informal sector resemble little more than a blueprint for the microtasks of big tech, without offering anything in the way of rights, routine, role, security, or a future.

    (tags: colonialism refugees ai data machine-learning amazon google tesla uber mechanical-turk)

Links for 2021-09-29

Published September 29, 2021

  • Partitioning GitHub’s relational databases to handle scale

    wow this is complex. Vitess playing a key part

    (tags: github mysql architecture database)

  • VR-based work setup

    "VR Productivity in (or above) a WFA world" --

    This week, I’ll spend 40–50 hours in Virtual Reality (Immersed), like I did last week and every (work) week for the last 2½ years. [...] Yes, really: 8–10 hours a day strapped in.
    Basically, it's using an Oculus Quest 2 to render multiple desktop displays from a laptop into a huge, full-visible-range virtual world:
    The resolution of these very large displays is surprisingly average—1080p (Reference, Communication) and 4k (Main). This makes the dot pitch unimpressive by the numbers, though still more than twenty-five times that of a roadside billboard display. Higher resolutions are available, but this is my calculated trade-off between pixel parity (more on that below), computer performance, and latency. Applications are tuned for readability and crispness, emphasizing information density over anti-aliasing or smoothness.
    The article sounds fairly solid, with good tips on how to make a VR headset suitable for constant daily use.

    (tags: oculus vr future work headsets display screens)

  • LEB128

    'a variable-length code compression used to store arbitrarily large integers in a small number of bytes.'

    (tags: encoding compression integers storage codes leb128)

  • Troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook before 2020 election

    This is a staggering stat: "19 of Facebook's top 20 pages for American Christians in 2019 were run by troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia, internal documents leaked to MIT Technology Review reveal [...] funded by the Russian Internet Research Agency." (via Charlie Stross)

    (tags: facebook politics russia disinfo kosovo macedonia us-politics manipulation)