Justin's Linklog Posts

Meta-analysis of the effects of indoor NO2 and gas cooking

The CRAC Lab at UCC notes: 'The use of gas stoves produces nitrogen dioxide which is associated with asthma -- this meta-analysis provides quantitative evidence that, in children, gas cooking increases the risk of asthma and indoor NO2 increases the risk of current wheeze.'

(tags: asthma health cooking gas papers no2)

ComReg SiteViewer

Handy to explore what 3G/4G/5G coverage a particular rural spot in Ireland may get

(tags: comreg telecoms 3g 4g 5g networking isps coverage ireland)

Do I have COVID or a cold?

Data-driven results from the UK ZOE symptom survey!

Currently, the most common COVID-19 symptoms in people who have been fully vaccinated [...] are: Runny nose, Headache, Sneezing, Sore throat, Loss of smell (anosmia)

(tags: covid-19 colds health symptoms diseases zoe)

Steve Yegge on deprecation policies

"Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You":

This lack of a support culture, combined with a “let’s break it in the name of making it prettier” deprecation treadmill, is alienating their developers. And that’s not a good thing if you want to build a long-lived platform. Google, wake the fuck up. It’s 2020. You are still losing. It’s time to take a hard look in the mirror and answer for yourselves whether you really want to be in the Cloud business. If you do, then stop breaking shit. You guys are rich. We developers are not. So when it comes to shouldering the burden of compatibility, you need to pay for it. Not us.

(tags: deprecation compatibility google apis support culture)

Managing Log Output in Buildkite

Nice, simple way to collapse long log streams into collapsable/hidable sections, from BuildKite

(tags: logging cli hacks buildkite streams)

Orange-OpenSource/bmc-cache

In-kernel memcache based on eBPF (via Brendan Gregg):

BMC (BPF Memory Cache) is an in-kernel cache for memcached. It enables runtime, crash-safe extension of the Linux kernel to process specific memcached requests before the execution of the standard network stack. BMC does not require modification of neither the Linux kernel nor the memcached application. Running memcached with BMC improves throughput by up to 18x compared to the vanilla memcached application.

(tags: memcached bpf ebpf linux performance kernel via:brendangregg)

why Apple devices have wifi problems on non-Apple APs

I've always suspected some bullshit like this -- Apple devices (Macs and iPhones) expect a specific non-standard wifi setting. If you've noticed Apple devices falling off the network and taking a long time (many seconds) to rejoin, where devices with other OSes do not have the same problem, this may be the cause. tl;dr: the DTIM (delivery traffic indication message) setting, which defaults to 1 in a standards-compliant AP, is expected to be set to 3 by Apple devices, in order to improve battery life. Source: https://twitter.com/revolutionwifi/status/725489216768106496 ("Apple engineers have strongly suggested a DTIM of 3.")

(tags: dtim wifi wireless 802.11 apple aps hardware networking)

Covid-19 and the new merchants of doubt

How best can scientists push back against [science denialists]? There is a range of evidence-based strategies. These include: “Public inoculation”–warning people about the risk of being misled and drawing attention to who is pushing the contentious information and their financial competing interests; Highlighting scientific consensus; and Mapping the institutional networks who are pushing controversial information and then using political and legal strategies to counter them. For physicians, scientists, and public health officials to be effective countering efforts like the [Great Barrington declaration], it will be absolutely critical for them to realize that they are not dealing with an orthodox scientific debate based on sound data and evidence, but a well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological and corporate interests.

(tags: denialism climate-change covid-19 science communication astroturf fakes evidence fake-news)

SIMD is coming to the JVM

as of Java 16, incoming, there's a new IntVector, LongVector, ... et al set of classes to implement CPU-level vectorization instructions on x64 and AArch64 architectures

(tags: simd performance java vectorization aarch64 x64)

RouterBOARD RBLHGR&R11e-LTE6, LHG LTE6 kit

comes recommended by a chap on the Irish tech slack -- he's using it for 4G last-mile internet access far out in the sticks and getting a decent 25Mbps upload/download

(tags: hardware 4g internet lte6 lte remote rural-internet)

Oracle Cloud Always Free Tier

Whoa, this is unexpected -- Oracle Cloud has a really good deal for hobby projects, including: '4 Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as one VM or up to 4 VMs; 2 Block Volumes Storage, 200 GB total; 2 AMD based Compute VMs with 1/8 OCPU** and 1 GB memory each.' The catch is that at the end of the 30 day trial period, the 4 ARM-based VMs will be terminated, but the other resources remain intact.

(tags: arm oracle hobbies projects hacks hosting cloud free)

doctorray117/minecraft-ondemand

'Almost-free serverless on-demand Minecraft server in AWS':

Instead of paying a minecraft hosting service for a private server for you and your friends, host it yourself. By utilizing several AWS services, a minecraft server can automatically start when you're ready to use it, and shut down when you are done. The final cost will depend on use but can be as little as a a dollar or two per month. The cost estimate breakdown is below. This is a reasonably cost effective solution for someone that doesn't need their server running 24/7. If that's you, read on! The process works as follows: Open Minecraft Multiplayer, let it look for our server, it will time out. The DNS lookup query is logged in Route 53 on our public hosted zone. CloudWatch forwards the query to a Lambda function. The Lambda function modifies an existing ECS Fargate service to a desired task count of 1. Fargate launches two containers, Minecraft and a watchdog, which updates the DNS record to the new IP The watchdog optionally sends a text message through Twilio when the server is ready. Refresh Minecraft server list, server is ready to connect. After 10 minutes without a connection or 20 minutes after the last client disconnects (customizable) the watchdog sets the desired task count to zero and shuts down.

(tags: minecraft fargate efs aws lambda hacks hosting)

Climate Adaptation and Equity

Great read from EARTH3R:

We have traditionally treated disaster management like we’re trying to build things back to what they were before the disaster. Climate change increasingly is showing us that’s not what we should be doing. Climate adaptation is not about maintaining the status quo. Frankly, the status quo sucks for a lot of people. [...] We have to think about doing things differently. New Orleans 100 years ago didn’t look exactly like it does today, and it won’t look like it does now 100 years from now. Things will change. Adaptation is deciding what things from 100 years ago we want to hold onto, and what things will change -- and making sure a bunch of rich white people aren’t the only ones deciding what to hold onto.

(tags: climate-change adaptation future flooding hurricane-ida)

Build-To-Rent (BTR), Aparthotels, and Irish housing policy

Good Twitter thread detailing the (IMO disastrous) history of these "new and exciting" ways in which Ireland's Fine Gael government were lobbied successfully in 2015 and 2018 to rewrite housing policy and permit co-living, communal living, very small studios, and 1-bedroom apartments. This then resulted in many property developers scrapping existing plans and going back to the drawing board to cram in as many tiny apartments as possible to maximise their returns

(tags: living ireland apartments rental btr aparthotels housing policy fg)

The Creative Process in 43 Hayao Miyazaki Screengrabs

painful

(tags: miyazaki creative process pain creation creativity documentary)

Caches, Modes, and Unstable Systems

Marc Brooker:

Good caches have feedback loops. Like back pressure, and limited concurrency. Bad caches are typically open-loop. This starts to give us a hint about how we may use caches safely, and points to some of the safe patterns for distributed systems caching. More on that later.

(tags: caching caches distcomp distributed-systems architecture storage)

How Data Brokers Sell Access to the Backbone of the Internet

Interesting, didn't realise this data was being resold....

"I'm concerned that netflow data being offered for commercial purposes is a path to a dark fucking place," one source familiar with the data told Motherboard. [...] At a high level, netflow data creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. It can show which server communicated with another, information that may ordinarily only be available to the server owner or the ISP carrying the traffic. Crucially, this data can be used for, among other things, tracking traffic through virtual private networks, which are used to mask where someone is connecting to a server from, and by extension, their approximate physical location. Team Cymru, one threat intelligence firm, works with ISPs to access that netflow data, three sources said. Keith Chu, communications director for the office of Senator Ron Wyden which has been conducting its own investigations into the sale of sensitive data, added that Team Cymru told the office "it obtains netflow data from third parties in exchange for threat intelligence." Companies that may source Team Cymru's data include cybersecurity firms hired to respond to data breaches or proactively hunt out hackers. On its website, Team Cymru says it works with both public and private sector teams to "to help identify, track and stop bad actors both in cyber space and on the ground." "I'm less worried about a bad guy hacker and more worried about a bad guy government or company or politician," one source familiar with the data said. A source in the threat intelligence industry added that they "always thought it was kinda bonkers," referring to Team Cymru's sale of netflow data.

(tags: vpns surveillance web privacy team-cymru netflow isps threat-intelligence)

Back Market

"Your Refurbished (Super) Marketplace" -- an eBay for refurbished devices. "Back Market has created a transparent grading system that takes into account both the cosmetic appearance and technical condition of every device. Every device is guaranteed to be 100% functional on our site—so ”technical condition” refers to the durability one can expect from a product given its refurbisher’s operations/processes and historical quality data). Everything is fully transparent so you can choose from three conditions based on your needs." Looks decent, Paris-based.

(tags: refurbs devices hardware smartphones iphones gadgets shopping)

The 50 Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Books Of The Past Decade : NPR

Excellent tips here (via meehawl)

(tags: via:meehawl sf science-fiction books reading toget fantasy)

Climate Delay tactics in the UK press

"It is increasingly clear that there's now a concerted effort under way in parts of the British press to derail action on the Climate Emergency. This [Twitter] thread highlights key examples & shows how the main arguments are textbook Climate Delay."

(tags: climate-change grim-meathook-future climate-delay denialism uk newspapers predatory-delay)

Introduction to VQGAN+CLIP - Google Docs

Amazingly, it seems you can experiment with GAN art using Google Collab, for free

(tags: art ml gan vqgan clip google collab toys)

Is DigitalOcean Green Hosting?

tl;dr: if you choose the right AZ, yes:

DigitalOcean is a fantastically simple provider of cloud hosting services with transparent pricing. Regrettably, they're less transparent about their green credentials. [jm: you should see AWS....] This post is a living document explaining which DigitalOcean data centres we think are green. This is surmised data through support requests, community notes, and some assumptions, and maybe incorrect.

(tags: digitalocean hosting green sustainability climate)

DCC's greenwashing PR

Excellent demonstration via Robbie Semple on Twitter: "Ireland’s biggest fossil fuel company is @dccplc. They are a FTSE100 company. Last year they made £13.4 billion in revenue and £530.2 million in profit. 71% of the profit came from their fossil fuel businesses. ‘In the face of a global crisis, Ireland’s biggest fossil fuel company refuses to stop selling fossil fuels ’: Why is this not more of a story? DCC are very good at communications. Given how they make their money, most publicity is bad for business, so they keep a low profile. And what they do communicate is very skilful. [...] "We have adopted a Net Zero 2050 target for our group Scope 1 and 2 emissions. Our interim target is a 20% reduction by 2025." This is a masterclass in how to tell the world you won’t stop selling fossil fuels without telling the world you won’t stop selling fossil fuels. The key is referring only to scope 1 and 2 emissions, meaning the emissions produced in running their business. For DCC, that will include things like electricity for their factories, and fuel for their trucks. But they don’t mention scope 3 emissions, which would include emissions produced in their supply chain, or by their customers. For DCC, that means they don’t have to worry about the methane that escapes when it's fracked out of the earth, or the carbon emitted as their oil and gas they sell is burned by end users. DCC’s 2021 sustainability report refers to scope 3 emissions, but doesn’t quantify them and has set no targets for reducing them. So with their current banner commitments, they could double the amount of fossil fuels they sell and still meet their 2050 targets." Scope 1/2/3 emissions are a hard concept to get your head around, but very important in dissecting greenwashing PR.

(tags: pr greenwashing dcc ireland via:robbie-semple net-zero fossil-fuels climate-change emissions scope-3 scope-1 scope-2)

Identity verification would not help racist abuse on Twitter

Twitter UK analysed the racist abuse directed at England football players on the night of the Euro 2020 final, and noted: "our data suggests that ID verification would have been unlikely to prevent the abuse from happening -- as of the permanently suspended accounts, 99% of account owners were identifiable."

(tags: anonymity abuse racism twitter social-media id-verification)

'I don't want to be seen as a zealot': what MPs really think about the climate crisis

Well, this is a problem --

Running these workshops was a fascinating experience. In each, there was a definite point which I came to think of as a “penny-drop moment”, when the participants came to realise the significance of the climate crisis and the way it would shape our collective future. In one workshop, for example, a very eminent scientist explained to MPs how crop yields are likely to be severely affected by extreme weather, a likely scenario if global average temperatures rise by 2C or more – and that this could lead to food shortages. The response was striking. There was a silence, a collective intake of breath, a recognition of the significance of the changes that could be upon us if we don’t act. And then, at the end of our workshop, they walked out of the door and back to their normal lives. [...] It became clear to me that there were two main reasons why MPs struggled with the issue: first, because it didn’t fit easily into the culture of political life and their own identity as a parliamentarian; and second, because they worried that public support for climate action was limited, and that, as representatives, they needed to be led by their electorate.

(tags: democracy elections future climate-change uk politics politicians)

Lambda vs EC2 costs

BBVA run the numbers on AWS Lambda vs bare-EC2 cost effectiveness. This is a good analysis, as of Dec 2020 pricing at least:

With traffic profiles where requests arrive in at periodic intervals, and a low total amount of requests, serverless architecture seems to be a great architecture in terms of cost, speed of delivery and effort. Thus, Lambda is probably the way to go if our application has sufficiently large periods of inactivity. Once the break-even point is reached, when EC2 is more cost-effective than Lambda, the cost difference grows rapidly, making Lambda less and less attractive in terms of cost. Thus, it is of great importance to know if the expected amount of traffic will be around the break-even point. Be aware of the CPU throttling you will get with the smaller memory flavors of Lambda. If your code is CPU-bound, choosing the smaller memory flavors might not be an option, since execution times, and thus latency, might grow beyond your requirements. On the other hand, if your code is I/O bound, the CPU throttling might not affect you significantly. Break-even point (if there is one, that is) strongly depends on the application itself. Without measuring the target application code, knowing the intended usage of the service, the SLA and the capabilities of the team in charge of building the application it is almost impossible to know for sure which service, Lambda or EC2, is more convenient.

(tags: serverless aws lambda costs cost-control ec2 hosting architecture)

For want of a screenless MP3 player

Yes, I know about Pi-Hole. If you are telling me about Pi-Hole you are inadvertently proving my point, which is that responsibility or intentionally parenting these days involves a frankly unreasonable and untenable amount of both content moderation both passive and interactive and at this point a quite enraging amount of goddamn systems administration.

(tags: culture tech ads spam pi-hole home parenting life)

Edward Luper’s "36 Views of the BT Tower"

These are fantastic -- "Much like Hokusai’s views of Mt. Fuji, Edward Luper’s prints capture London’s BT Tower from various vantage points and throughout different weather patterns and seasons. And while initiative’s like these run the risk of coming across a kitschy copies, Luper’s attention to detail and artistic execution renders them an artful adoration for a city. “[BT Tower] became a point of stability for me; like a lighthouse. My life seems to revolve around it in some way or form. Much in the same way Mount Fuji was to the artist Katsushika Hokusai.”"

(tags: hokusai ukiyo-e art prints london mt-fuji edward-luper)

'Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt'

Cannot agree more with this paper from Google: 'One of the basic arguments in this paper is that machine learning packages have all the basic code complexity issues as normal code, but also have a larger system-level complexity that can create hidden debt. Thus, refactoring these libraries, adding better unit tests, and associated activity is time well spent but does not necessarily address debt at a systems level. In this paper, we focus on the system-level interaction between machine learning code and larger systems as an area where hidden technical debt may rapidly accumulate. At a system-level, a machine learning model may subtly erode abstraction boundaries. It may be tempting to re-use input signals in ways that create unintended tight coupling of otherwise disjoint systems. Machine learning packages may often be treated as black boxes, resulting in large masses of “glue code” or calibration layers that can lock in assumptions. Changes in the external world may make models or input signals change behavior in unintended ways, ratcheting up maintenance cost and the burden of any debt. Even monitoring that the system as a whole is operating as intended may be difficult without careful design. Indeed, a remarkable portion of real-world “machine learning” work is devoted to tackling issues of this form. Paying down technical debt may initially appear less glamorous than research results usually reported in academic ML conferences. But it is critical for long-term system health and enables algorithmic advances and other cutting-edge improvements.' (via Grady Booch)

(tags: via:gradybooch ai ml machine-learning google papers coding research production glue)

Fronius Smart Meter 63A-3

Regarding smart home power management -- Niall Douglas on ITC says "If you choose your solar inverter components right, they'll come with a LAN capable mains AC meter which you stick just after the mains. It essentially duplicates the smart meter, should get very close, but it's on your LAN and you can Home Assistant script the lot. My notes here suggest [this meter] for €385 inc VAT delivered, it talks to all the other Fronius kit such as inverter and thermal store immersions over your LAN. All with high quality Home Assistant support."

(tags: fronius home-assistant smart-home home power energy solar-power)

Forecast.Solar - Home Assistant

The Forecast.Solar service provides solar production forecasting for your solar panel system, based on historic averages combined with weather forecasting. This integration provides an estimated forecast on how much energy your solar panels are going to produce, allowing you to plan ahead on how you spend your produced energy in most efficiently.

(tags: solar-power home forecasting home-assistant)

source for the Irish digital COVID cert checker app

a nice simple, human-readable Javascript validateRules() method

(tags: javascript covid-19 source via:itc)

SSDs - Google Sheets

An incredibly detailed sheet of SSD specs, maintained by a Redditor (via notjosh on the Irish Tech Community slack)

(tags: ssds hardware storage via:itc shopping)

Green Compute on Cloudflare Workers

Execute code in sustainable DCs:

Green Compute can be enabled for any Cron triggered Workers. The concept is simple: when turned on, we’ll take your compute workload and run it exclusively on parts of our edge network located in facilities powered by renewable energy. Even though all of Cloudflare’s edge network is powered by renewable energy already, some of our data centers are located in third-party facilities that are not 100% powered by renewable energy. Green Compute takes our commitment to sustainability one step further by ensuring that not only our network equipment but also the building facility as a whole are powered by renewable energy. There are absolutely no code changes needed.

(tags: green climate-change renewable-energy energy hosting cloudflare cron sustainability)

IRONIES OF AUTOMATION - ScienceDirect

"The irony: the more advanced a control system is, the more crucial may be the contribution of the human operator. [....] The more we depend on technology and push it to its limits, the more we need highly-skilled, well-trained, well-practised people to make systems resilient, acting as the last line of defence against the failures that will inevitably occur." (via Abeba Birhane)

(tags: via:abebab hci human-computer-interaction interfaces automation papers ai)

Biofuel: A Greenwashing Battleground — IrishEVs

"Biofuels have consistently been marketed as a 'green' alternative to fossil fuels, which hides their sky high emissions, human rights abuses & ecological impact."

(tags: biofuels greenwashing scams fossil-fuel climate-change renewables energy)

The nasal PCR test may not be the gold standard for COVID-19 detection

Detailed Twitter thread covering a preprint paper; tl;dr: RT-PCR of a saliva sample actually proved to have a higher sensitivity

(tags: sensitivity specificity rt-pcr pcr testing covid-19 sars-cov-2)

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped. | MIT Technology Review

This is an absolute litany of shitty ML practices, including a dataset which "mixed X-rays of supine and erect patients, without noting that only the sickest patients were X-rayed while lying down. The model learned to predict that people were sick if they were on their backs" (via Cory Doctorow)

(tags: via:doctorow covid-19 ai ml fail data health medicine statistcs)

Apache Helix

@KishoreBytes notes: "Helix [is] not well known but widely used at LinkedIn, Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, Yahoo to build distributed systems. Helix is probably managing hundreds of thousands of servers today!" It is "a generic cluster management framework used for automatic management of partitioned, replicated and distributed resources hosted on a cluster of nodes, [providing] the following features: Automatic assignment of resource/partition to nodes; Node failure detection and recovery; Dynamic addition of Resources; Dynamic addition of nodes to the cluster; Pluggable distributed state machine to manage the state of a resource via state transitions; Automatic load balancing and throttling of transitions" Sounds handy for automatic shard-based scaling. Built on Zookeeper.

(tags: zookeeper helix sharding scalability scaling via:kishorebytes partitioning architecture)

Half cooked & half raw: the Irish tradition of spuds with a moon

[...] a method of cookery practiced by the rural poor in the early to mid 19th century Ireland [...] Parboiling or half-roasting rendered a potato that was at once half-cooked and half-raw, with the inner core hard to the bite. Potatoes cooked in this way were called potatoes with the moon (an ghealach) or potatoes with the bone. William Wilde, father of Oscar, describes the practice in some detail in his essay, ‘The Food of the Irish’, which was published in 1854 in the Dublin University Magazine. Here is his explanation of the practice: "the heart of the potato was allowed, by checking the boiling at a particular point, to remain parboiled, hard and waxy; when the rest of the potato has been masticated in the usual manner, this hard lump, about the size of a walnut, was bolted; and in this manner nearly a stone of the root was taken into the stomach of the Irish labourer per diem… it was grounded on a certain knowledge of physiology. "The stomach digested the well boiled farinaceous portion of the potato within the space of a few hours, and that having all been disposed of, the half-boiled lumps remained behind, and a second digestion was commenced to assimilate this portion of food, and convert it into nutritious, life-sustaining material; which latter process lasted some hours longer, and thus the craving of hunger were warded off for five or six hours after the original meal."

(tags: parboiling potatoes history hunger ireland rural spuds moon physiology)

Funding GIMP developers for sustainable development

This is a great idea and a good way to approach OSS funding, IMO:

We have seen skilled developers come and go for years, the latter becoming a growing concern. Contributing takes a crazy amount of time and people have family, work and other responsibilities to take care of. Thus when core team contributors are willing to be paid for making Free Software, we have decided that GIMP as a project should encourage such endeavours by putting more emphasis on their funding. There are currently 2 such crowdfunding projects. You can consider these crowdfundings as “official” as can be and completely endorsed by the GIMP project.

(tags: oss funding via:hn gimp open-source crowdfunding gnome)

Long-term Symptoms After SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Children and Adolescents

Paper in JAMA, mentioned by Daniel Griffin in his COVID-19 Clinical Updates on TWIV. "We compared symptoms compatible with long COVID in children and adolescents reported within 6 months after SARS-CoV-2 serologic testing [... using] a longitudinal cohort study investigating SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in 55 randomly selected schools in the canton of Zurich in Switzerland." Results: 4% -- so 1 in 25 -- reported at least one symptom lasting more than 3 months after the initial infection date, particularly fatigue, or difficulty concentrating.

(tags: covid-19 via:daniel-griffin via:twiv long-covid children kids jama zurich switzerland)

“Brides to be” & Bullshit – A case study in Irish astroturf

There was a "protest" outside the Dail in Dublin yesterday purporting to be "brides-to-be" disappointed at ongoing COVID-19 restrictions on weddings. As this Reddit post notes, however, it seems extremely likely that this "protest" is an astroturfed PR campaign. Sadly the Irish news media were happy to report it straight and gloss over the astroturfing. 'Nothing I've said here will really be a surprise to anyone, and it's not exactly the Reichstag Fire, but I hope it's a useful example of just how poorly Irish media serves the audience, and how easily astroturfing is done here. This protest couldn't muster the hundred or so "real" people they expected to show up, as the padding they'd have needed to look convincing, but others can - and do. Something worth remembering for how our national media covers major, minor, totally or partly fake protests in future, and how protests are organised in the first place. Not all their instigators are as mostly-harmless as Wedding Planners.'

(tags: protests ireland pr astroturf)

Outdoor Swimming Pools in Ireland

Pretty short list, unfortunately :(

(tags: swimming ireland outdoors heated pools kids)

lengstrom/falcon

Chrome extension for flexible full text browsing history search. Press f, then space or tab, in the omnibar to start searching your previously visited websites! Every time you visit a website in Chrome, Falcon indexes all the text on the page so that the site can be easily found later. Then, for example, if you type f mugwort, Falcon will show the websites you visited containing the text "mugwort"! Install from the Chrome store here or get the CRX file!

(tags: extension chrome search falcon indexing)

a 20-year patent blocked gallium doping for solar panels

'the reason we have been stuck using boron instead of gallium over the past 20 years is that the process of doping silicon with gallium was locked under a patent.' IP destroying the world now....

(tags: ip climate-change solar-panels energy gallium patents)

The known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns of COVID-19 - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Finally, a decent article on the origins of COVID-19 from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, by Ian Lipkin:

Over the past 40 years, I have personally been involved in addressing several: HIV/AIDS, West Nile encephalitis, SARS, MERS, Lujo, Lassa, Nipah, Dandenong, Ebola, Marburg, dengue, monkeypox, Zika, influenza, and COVID-19. Estimates of numbers of unknown viruses lurking in mammals range from 320,000 to 1,000,000. If even 1 percent of them can infect humans or domestic animals, we may be ignorant of thousands of potential threats to human health and food security. In an increasingly interconnected world, diseases that might once have been contained to a region are now global. Accordingly, the international community can have zero tolerance for wildlife markets and wildlife trafficking for food, medicinal, or pet trade purposes. Our current focus in on China. However, trafficking in wildlife is a global threat and should be banned everywhere. It may have contributed to the emergence of HIV/AIDS and to outbreaks of Ebola and Marburg

(tags: known-knowns sars-cov-2 diseases zoonoses covid-19 ian-lipkin health future wildlife)

robhagemans/hoard-of-bitfonts

Wow, this is Proustian --

This repository contains bitmapped fonts from disused operating systems and graphical user interfaces. As operating systems and GUIs have moved on to scalable vector fonts, the bitmap fonts that dominated the 1980s and 1990s languish away in non-obvious and often binary formats that are rapidly falling into obscurity. The main purpose of this repository is to liberate these fonts from their binary shackles, preserving the ancient art of monochrome bitmap typography for human appreciation.

(tags: fonts typography via:hackernews bitmap retrocomputing history)

a great demo of log-scale graphing

The story of BigPharmia and Novaxia, from Oliver Johnson on Twitter, a nice demo of how log-scale graphs can make interesting patterns in the data clearer

(tags: log-scale logs graphs charts graphing oliver-johnson dataviz data)

We should shift our focus from covid-19 mortality to morbidity, particularly in children

BMJ op-ed from Karl Friston and Anthony Costello:

The UK is an outlier by allowing children to remain unvaccinated at a time when lifting of restrictions will increase covid-19 infection rates. We have heard much about how vaccination is breaking — or weakening — the link between SARS-CoV-2 and the clinical manifestations of covid-19. We consider the nature of this link from the perspective of quantitative modelling — and what it means for risks following exposure to the virus. In brief, it suggests we should shift our focus from mortality to morbidity, particularly in children.

(tags: bmj uk covid-19 morbidity mortality disease modelling kids)

What's Inside the EU Green Pass QR Code?

Including a Python script to decode a Green Pass code:

As you can see, 23 year-old Gabriele was vaccinated in February, once, with BioNTech/Pfizer's Comirnaty. What is not included is the date during which she is considered immune. Those are calculated from the number of shots received and the date of vaccination, as well as the circumstances (going to a restaurant vs. going to work, for example) by the scanner app. Apart from the name/manufacturer of the received vaccine, there is no superfluous data inside, so the QR code is not a privacy nightmare, as some have feared.

(tags: covid19 vaccination coronavirus green-pass eu qr-codes python data-privacy)

HSE Decision Aid for 18-34 year olds considering the AZ/J&J vaccine

Given the increased risk of vaccine-induced thrombosis, the HSE have produced this leaflet to advise young people. IMO it should really include details of Long Covid, although I guess that's hard to quantify at this stage

(tags: covid-19 hse astra-zeneca j-and-j vaccines vitt)

6502 “Illegal” Opcodes Demystified

This is fantastic! I spent a week or two as a kid attempting to reverse-engineer these "illegal" opcodes, 30 years ago, but never got into this level of depth...

(tags: 6502 6510 history cpus via:craig opcodes microcode)

Freespin

Amazing C=64 demo, running on a 1541 disk drive connected directly to the monitor! What an insane hack. I too ran demo code on the 1541 in one of my demos, but the only video output in that case was to flash the LED on the drive in time with the music :) (thanks Craig!)

(tags: via:craig c=64 commodore-64 1541 hacks demos intros)

Anthony Costello on Long COVID in the UK

what does the ONS data tell us with their very large datasets? They looked at 313,000 people aged 2 or over, surveyed in the month to June 6. On July 1 the new data shows 962,000 people in private households in the UK (1.5% of the population) were experiencing self-reported "long COVID" (symptoms persisting for more than four weeks). https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/1july2021 856,000 (89.0%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least 12 weeks previously, and 385,000 (40.0%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least one year previously. They estimate that 13,000 children aged 2-11, 20,000 aged 12-16 and 71,000 aged 17-24 had Long Covid of any duration. Most in these 3 age groups had had symptoms for AT LEAST 12 weeks (10,000, 16000, 65000 respectively). Perhaps most worrying is that the latest UK Long Covid estimate for children aged 12-16 who experience prolonged symptoms for at least ONE YEAR is 0.12% (0.06-0.17) or 1 in 830, with possible but unknown effects on developing brain structure based on recent adult studies.

(tags: sage anthony-costello long-covid covid-19 children kids)

The model used to simulate the Irish COVID-19 response

Detailed thread from Professor Philip Nolan on Twitter, on the scenario modelling used by NPHET to inform the government on likely COVID-19 infection trajectories; several models are used, including a basic SEIR model and an agent-based model, "where social structures and transmission are simulated in detail at the individual level; these show rapid spread in younger people with transmission into older groups, and highlight uncertainty on the role of children and adolescents", and the role of super-spreader events. tl;dr: "a variant with a transmission advantage [ie., Delta] can do very significant damage if we let it spread in a partially vaccinated population, the scale of the damage depends on the transmission advantage, and it starts slowly and escalates rapidly."

(tags: modelling data-science statistics epidemiology pandemics covid-19 sars-cov-2 ireland philip-nolan seir)

A potted history of IONA Technologies' early years

"19 March 1991: Three software developers. One desk. No chairs." -- I was there!

(tags: iona software dublin iona-technologies history 1991 startups ireland)

Underclocking Pi4 to Pi3B level - Raspberry Pi Forums

arm_freq_min and over_voltage settings do the job

(tags: raspberry-pi underclocking cpu performance hacks hardware)

How to Live in a Climate ‘Permanent Emergency’

According to one calculation, the heat wave was five standard deviations above expectations, meaning it was an event that should arrive, in the absence of climate change, once every 5,000 years. That’s once since the age of Ancient Egypt. We are experiencing that five-sigma event this year. In British Columbia, it was as hot as it was in Death Valley, California. They called it Death Valley for a reason.

(tags: grim-meathook-future climate-change climate global-warming heatwaves canada death-valley)

OpenStreetMap looks to relocate to EU due to Brexit limitations

One “important reason”, Rischard said, was the failure of the UK and EU to agree on mutual recognition of database rights. While both have an agreement to recognise copyright protections, that only covers work which is creative in nature. Maps, as a simple factual representation of the world, are not covered by copyright in the same way, but until Brexit were covered by an EU-wide agreement that protected databases where there had been “a substantial investment in obtaining, verifying or presenting the data”. But since Brexit, any database made on or after 1 January 2021 in the UK will not be protected in the EU, and vice versa. Other concerns Rischard listed include the increasing complexity and cost of “banking, finance and using PayPal in the UK”, the inability for the organisation to secure charitable status, and the loss of .eu domains. The increased importance of the EU in matters of tech regulation also played a role: “We could more effectively lobby the EU [and] EU governments and have more of an impact, especially in countries where there is no local chapter,” Rischard wrote.

(tags: mapping brexit uk osm openstreetmap eu copyright databases ip)

Discourses of climate delay

This is an excellent classification for a particular style of climate denialism: '‘Discourses of climate delay’ pervade current debates on climate action. These discourses accept the existence of climate change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts. In contemporary discussions on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast, proponents of climate delay would argue for minimal action or action taken by others. They focus attention on the negative social effects of climate policies and raise doubt that mitigation is possible. Here, we outline the common features of climate delay discourses and provide a guide to identifying them. [...] * Someone else should take actions first: redirect responsibility * Disruptive change is not necessary: push non-transformative solutions * Change will be disruptive: emphasise the downsides * It's not possible to mitigate climate change: surrender.'

(tags: ecology climate climate-change discourse denialism policy politics)

Hackers exploited 0-day, not 2018 bug, to mass-wipe My Book Live devices

All looking pretty shite for Western Digital -- one of their engineers *removed* the need for authentication on the factory-reset PHP script for the My Book Live devices:

A Western Digital developer created five lines of code to password-protect the reset command. For unknown reasons, the authentication check was [....] commented out as indicated by the double / character at the beginning of each line. [...] The discovery raises a vexing question: if the hackers had already obtained full root access by exploiting CVE-2018-18472 [a separate bug], what need did they have for this second security flaw? There’s no clear answer, but based on the evidence available, Abdine has come up with a plausible theory — that one hacker first exploited CVE-2018-18472 and a rival hacker later exploited the other vulnerability in an attempt to wrest control of those already compromised devices.

(tags: hacks exploits fail western-digital iot hardware php)

gProfiler

'a system-wide profiler, combining multiple sampling profilers to produce unified visualization of what your CPU is spending time on.' -- claims to have little impact on performance of running code, supports Linux, java and Ruby

(tags: gprofiler profiling performance testing measurement coding ruby java linux perf via:reddit)

Why Is the Intellectual Dark Web Suddenly Hyping an Unproven COVID Treatment?

Ivermectin, in this case, but hydroxychloroquine before that, and other treatments for cancer and so on before that. 'What seems to really be at work here, in the end, is a political battle, not a medical one. The laetrile wars of the 1970s also launched what’s known as the “health freedom” movement — a libertarian-tinged social tendency that holds Americans should have unrestricted access to alternative treatments—into the spotlight. [...] It's a familiar set of claims, amounting to an assertion that being given the broadest possible platform is the same as being silenced, and that one's theories being tested is the same as them having been suppressed.' I think part of the appeal of these drugs is that you can claim that they _are_ a miracle cure, and that they are being suppressed by a conspiracy of silence by Big Pharma. The conspiracy part is a key selling point for the promoters. Interesting phenomenon, though.

(tags: conspiracy-theories hcq hydroxychloroquine laetrile ivermectin treatments covid-19 medicine big-pharma miracle-cures)

QUIC at Snapchat - Snap Engineering

Snapchat are fans, using cronet on the Android/iPhone client side. The HN comment thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27626394 is also a decent read, some insightful discussion

(tags: http3 quic tcp networking mobile udp cronet snapchat)

Interesting AWS performance tip

we determined that calls to time.Now() or time.Since(time.Time) in Golang were taking about 200 times longer on new servers than they were on old servers. We found similar impacts in Python, which lead us to the clocksource. It turns out that in our Grub boot parameters for AL2, we had added clocksource=hpet about two years ago, but all of our servers launched prior to 6/17 had a clocksource of kvm-clock, apparently ignoring the Grub config. Servers launched after 6/17 (with the same AMI, Grub config, everything) were honoring the specified clocksource, which caused our performance issue.

(tags: ec2 aws clocksource linux kvm)

Apollo Flight Controller 101: Every console explained | Ars Technica

Amazing level of detail on how the Apollo mission control room operated! (plus more from Ken Shirriff at https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1409241533757345792 )

(tags: apollo nasa moon mission-control)

COVID-19 symptoms vary depending on vaccination status

It seems that 'symptoms vary slightly based on whether you're fully vaccinated, half vaccinated or unvaccinated.'

(tags: vaccination covid-19 sars-cov-2 symptoms medicine health)

French spyware bosses indicted for their role in the torture of dissidents | MIT Technology Review

Senior executives at a French spyware firm have been indicted for the company’s sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance of dissidents. While high-tech surveillance is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide, it is rare for companies or individuals to face legal consequences for selling such technologies—even to notorious dictatorships or other dangerous regimes. But charges in the Paris Judicial Court against leaders at Amesys, a surveillance company that later changed its name to Nexa Technology, claim that the sales to Libya and Egypt over the last decade led to the crushing of opposition, torture of dissidents, and other human rights abuses. The former head of Amesys, Philippe Vannier, and three current and former executives at Nexa technologies were indicted for “complicity in acts of torture” for selling spy technology to the Libyan regime. French media report that Nexa president Olivier Bohbot, managing director Renaud Roques, and former president Stéphane Salies face the same charges for surveillance sales to Egypt.

(tags: spyware surveillance france nexa amesys libya egypt torture human-rights)

Turn Your Old, Cracked Android Phone Into a Backup Server

It's gratifying to see that an apk called 'Linux Deploy' will run a chrooted Debian install on a rooted Android phone -- that's a great way to reuse and recycle old, nearly-dead hardware

(tags: backup android servers linux ops home)

google/fully-homomorphic-encryption

This repository contains open-source libraries and tools to perform fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) operations on an encrypted data set. [...] Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is an emerging data processing paradigm that allows developers to perform transformations on encrypted data. FHE can change the way computations are performed by preserving privacy end-to-end, thereby giving users even greater confidence that their information will remain private and secure.

(tags: cryptography encryption google security fhe homomorphic privacy data-privacy)

GPRS was deliberately backdoored by its designer (probably)

Matthew Green writes: "This is an amazing paper. It implies (with strong statistical evidence) that the design of a major mobile-data encryption algorithm — used in GPRS data — was deliberately backdoored by its designer."

Instead of providing full 64-bit security, we show that the initial state of GEA-1 can be recovered from as little as 65 bits of known keystream (with at least 24 bits coming from one frame) in time 240 GEA-1 evaluations and using 44.5 GiB of memory. The attack on GEA-1 is based on an exceptional interaction of the deployed LFSRs and the key initialization, which is highly unlikely to occur by chance. This unusual pattern indicates that the weakness is intentionally hidden to limit the security level to 40 bit by design.

(tags: gprs protocols security crypto gea-1 telecoms matthew-green backdoors)

Apache Pulsar: Seamless Storage Evolution

Impressive performance figures from the distributed messaging/streaming platform using NVMe and DCPMM persistent memory devices: 'Pulsar architecture can accommodate different types of hardware which allows users to balance performance and cost based on required throughput and latency. Pulsar has the capability to adapt to the next generation of storage devices to achieve better performance. We have also seen that persistent memory excels in the race to achieving higher write throughput by maintaining low latency. '

(tags: streaming distcomp distributed apache pulsar dcpmm nvme persistent-memory performance architecture storage)

Amazon S3 is quietly deprecating BitTorrent support

...apparently. (via Last Week in AWS)

(tags: bittorrent aws s3 deprecation features)

Photopea

'Online Photo Editor' -- basically, a really decent clone of The Gimp, running fully in the browser.

(tags: editor photoshop images graphics the-gimp editing photos photopea)

Trino on Ice IV: Deep Dive Into Iceberg Internals

Good writeup of the innards of the Iceberg format for writable ORC data lakes and how Trino can query them

(tags: trino iceberg data big-data data-lakes formats s3 avro orc)

The Three DynamoDB Limits You Need to Know

there are a few limits you must understand to model properly in DynamoDB. If you’re not aware of them, you can run into a brick wall. But if you understand them and account for them, you remove the element of surprise once your app hits production. Those limits are: The item size limit; The page size limit for Query and Scan operations; and The partition throughput limits. Notice how these limits build on each other. The first is about an individual item, whereas the second is about a collection of items that are read together in a single request. Finally, the partition throughput limit is about the number and size of concurrent requests in a single DynamoDB partition.

(tags: dynamodb aws storage gotchas limits ops architecture)

Met Éireann's IREPS weather forecasting system

The Irish Meteorological Service blog the innards of their current forecasting system, IREPS -- lots of juicy technical detail! Apparently it is a HARMONIE-AROME based model configuration: 'In 2018, Met Éireann developed its first ensemble-based NWP system, known as the Irish Regional Ensemble Prediction System (IREPS). Originally run twice per day, this system produced 11 forecasts (known as members) for weather conditions over the next 36 hours. On April 15th 2020, the IREPS system was upgraded to a 54-hour, 11-member ensemble which is run four times per day.'

(tags: harmonie met-eireann weather forecasting modelling ireps ireland)

The 17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS - Last Week in AWS

This is both (a) correct and (b) a nightmare. AWS need a coherent product plan where containers are involved...

(tags: containers aws ec2 eks k8s docker architecture)

nocodb

'The Open Source Airtable alternative' -- looks nifty as a quick and easy way to hook up an SQL database to a web-based spreadsheet view

(tags: airtable database sql mysql nocodb spreadsheets ui web)

US Soldiers Expose Nuclear Weapons Secrets Via Flashcard Apps

For US soldiers tasked with the custody of nuclear weapons in Europe, the stakes are high. Security protocols are lengthy, detailed and need to be known by heart. To simplify this process, some service members have been using publicly visible flashcard learning apps — inadvertently revealing a multitude of sensitive security protocols about US nuclear weapons and the bases at which they are stored. [...] the flashcards studied by soldiers tasked with guarding these devices reveal not just the bases, but even identify the exact shelters with “hot” vaults that likely contain nuclear weapons. They also detail intricate security details and protocols such as the positions of cameras, the frequency of patrols around the vaults, secret duress words that signal when a guard is being threatened and the unique identifiers that a restricted area badge needs to have.

(tags: army dystopia nuclear nukes privacy flashcards apps security weapons)

What are Scope 3 emissions?

I was looking for a decent definition of this over the weekend, and couldn't find it, so bookmarking for future reference. 'Greenhouse gas emissions are categorised into three groups or 'Scopes' by the most widely-used international accounting tool, the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from owned or controlled sources. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from the generation of purchased electricity, steam, heating and cooling consumed by the reporting company. Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain.'

(tags: ghgs climate-change scopes ghgp emissions carbon sustainability)

Fly.io

Looks extremely nifty -- a global CDN for your code: 'Fly is a platform for applications that need to run globally. It runs your code close to users and scales compute in cities where your app is busiest. Write your code, package it into a Docker image, deploy it to Fly's platform and let that do all the work to keep your app snappy.' Decent pricing, too.

(tags: cdn serverless docker containers fly.io hosting internet ops platforms)

Tetris used to prevent PTSD

'Our hypothesis was that after a trauma, patients would have fewer intrusive memories [from post-traumatic stress] if they got to play Tetris as part of a short behavioural intervention while waiting in the hospital Emergency Department,' says Professor Holmes. 'Since the game is visually demanding, we wanted to see if it could prevent the intrusive aspects of the traumatic memories from becoming established i.e. by disrupting a process known as memory consolidation.' The study involved 71 motor vehicle accident victims, of whom half received the intervention (recalled the trauma briefly and then played Tetris) while waiting in the hospital emergency department, and half performed another task, all doing so within six hours of the accident. Results showed that the researchers’ hypothesis was right: those who had played Tetris had fewer intrusive memories of the trauma in total over the week immediately following the accident than the controls. The researchers also found that the intrusive memories diminished more quickly.

(tags: brain neurochemistry memory long-term-memory memory-consolidation ptsd trauma medicine gaming tetris)

Chicago PD automated policing program got this man shot twice

What the hell. This is incredibly dystopian shit.

They told McDaniel something he could hardly believe: an algorithm built by the Chicago Police Department predicted [...] that McDaniel would be involved in a shooting. That he would be a “party to violence,” but it wasn’t clear what side of the barrel he might be on. He could be the shooter, he might get shot. They didn’t know. But the data said he was at risk either way. McDaniel was both a potential victim and a potential perpetrator, and the visitors on his porch treated him as such. A social worker told him that he could help him if he was interested in finding assistance to secure a job, for example, or mental health services. And police were there, too, with a warning: from here on out, the Chicago Police Department would be watching him. The algorithm indicated Robert McDaniel was more likely than 99.9 percent of Chicago’s population to either be shot or to have a shooting connected to him. That made him dangerous, and top brass at the Chicago PD knew it. So McDaniel had better be on his best behavior.

(tags: precrime predictive-policing policing chicago dystopia future ai heat-list)

The Unwritten Contract of Solid State Drives

We perform a detailed vertical analysis of application performance atop a range of modern file systems and SSD FTLs. We formalize the "unwritten contract" that clients of SSDs should follow to obtain high performance, and conduct our analysis to uncover application and file system designs that violate the contract. Our analysis, which utilizes a highly detailed SSD simulation underneath traces taken from real workloads and file systems, provides insight into how to better construct applications, file systems, and FTLs to realize robust and sustainable performance.

(tags: via:nelson optimization performance ssd disks storage coding architecture)

COVID-19 correlate of protection identified

Via Keith Dawson:

A large study out of Australia has added to the accumulating evidence that the level of neutralizing antibodies circulating in the blood is highly correlated with protection against symptomatic Covid-19. Ars Technica has a good summary of the research and what it means. It’s known that antibody levels decline with time. This work also gave hints about how long protection against disease might last after natural infection or vaccination — which bears on whether or when we might need a booster shot. The Ars reporter writes: 'A vaccine with 95% efficacy after the second dose would still have an estimated 77% efficacy 250 days out. And that’s for protection against a symptomatic infection. The protection against severe COVID-19 is much stronger and would likely take far longer to decline… A starting efficacy of 70% would be down to 33% efficacy at 250 days.' The model the researchers developed was able to predict, with good accuracy, the efficacy a vaccine should show in Phase III trials based on the antibody levels measured in Phase I and II.

(tags: vaccination virology vaccines covid-19 sars-cov-2 via:kdawson antibodies)

Using shared memory for low-latency, intra-node communication in AWS Batch | AWS Compute Blog

Crazy HPC-oriented feature in current AWS offerings: shared memory buffers over EFA:

HPC workloads use algorithms that require parallelization and a low latency communication between the different processes. The two main technologies used for the parallel communications are message-passing with distributed memory and shared memory. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a message-passing standard used for the communication in a parallel distributed environment. Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) enables your MPI applications to use low-latency, inter-node communication. The shared memory paradigm allows multiple processors in the same system to communicate using a memory (RAM) portion that is shared between the processes. This method takes advantage of the high-speed memory bus.

(tags: shared-memory hpc mpi shmem ram coding efa aws ec2 low-latency)

Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning: 1.2M API req/s on a 4 vCPU EC2 Instance | talawah.io

This is very cool. Updating the old "C10K" problem space to C1.2M -- the current state of Linux userspace networking -- using libreactor and a whole load of up-to-date tweaks. Interesting to note that this scale is feasible to run in Docker (using --network=host, of course).

(tags: http servers c10k linux performance scalability ops tuning libreactor networking tcp)

Scaleway and Chia

Scaleway dealing with the storage-driven cryptocurrency:

This cryptocurrency is a few months old, and at Scaleway, we are already witnessing the impact of Chia on all our products, from Object Storage and instances, to dedicated servers. Speculative farmers are forcing their way in to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. [....] In order to service as many clients as possible, we have decided that from today: Chia plotting is forbidden on all SSD and NVMe powered instances, dedicated servers, RPN-SAN, BMaaS and Block Storage services. Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks Important notice: Chia plotting engages client responsibility according to Section 9 of our contract. We will bill clients for any SSDs and NVMes destroyed due to Chia plotting activities.

(tags: chia cryptocurrency scaleway hosting ssds storage)

Alex Steffen on the discontinuity in our future

To believe that our choices are the restoration of continuity or the breakdown of society paradoxically is to not take the planetary [climate] crisis seriously enough — and that's terrible, because the unexpected boon of seriousness is awakening to possibility, to the capacities we gain amidst disruption and acceleration. Seen through 20th century eyes, everything is about to get really weird, really fast. But discontinuity is not just danger. Discontinuity means change in our selves and our societies. [....] It is too late to avoid huge losses, enormous suffering. But it is absolutely not too late to limit our losses to those we’ve already set in motion, and to seize our opportunities to build a better human world — indeed, quite possibly a better world than the one we have now.

(tags: climate-change biodiversity crisis future alex-steffen green)

File Descriptor Limits

tl;dr: 'Don't use select() anymore in 2021.' Select(2) on Linux has a limit of 1024 fds

(tags: linux programming select system-calls coding libc fds)

Bad Machinery: Managing Interrupts Under Load

'Each day, try to do either projects or interrupts, not both. If you’re oncall, don’t try to do projects, and vice versa. People aren’t machines, context switches are really expensive, and usually assumed to be free in process planning. People who are constantly interrupted end up with delayed and sloppy project work, and vice versa (people who have a lot of project work are sloppy at interrupts unless time is carved out for them). Your team’s oncall and interrupt-handling should be structured around funneling interrupts at the people who are supposed to be interrupted. If that’s too much for those people, add more people until it isn’t. “Spreading the load” by assigning items across the entire team randomly is counter-productive.'

(tags: sre devops coding ops planning teams work on-call interrupts)

Was a flying killer robot used in Libya? Quite possibly - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Great. Lethal machine learning is now in prod:

Last year in Libya, a Turkish-made autonomous weapon — the STM Kargu-2 drone — may have “hunted down and remotely engaged” retreating soldiers loyal to the Libyan General Khalifa Haftar, according to a recent report by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya. [....] the Kargu-2 signifies something perhaps even more globally significant: a new chapter in autonomous weapons, one in which they are used to fight and kill human beings based on artificial intelligence. The Kargu is a “loitering” drone that can use machine learning-based object classification to select and engage targets, with swarming capabilities in development to allow 20 drones to work together. The UN report calls the Kargu-2 a lethal autonomous weapon. Its maker, STM, touts the weapon’s “anti-personnel” capabilities.

(tags: machine-learning ai kargu-2 drones war grim-meathook-future stm un)

Mukama

'Essentials for your daily round' -- a really lovely set of EDC products, and not _too_ crazy expensive....

(tags: edc keys wallets tools gadgets design)

The freenode IRC network is under new management

crikey. Freenode ops resign en masse and move to another service due to a dodgy-sounding "change of management" by some MtGox dude

(tags: irc freenode ops takeovers)

PiDP-11

A modern -- working! -- replica of the DEC PDP-11/70. Truly a thing of retrocomputing beauty

(tags: pdp-11 retrocomputing raspberry-pi emulation computing history electronics digital)

Boosting Dropbox upload speed—and making Windows’ TCP stack resilient to network reordering - Dropbox

Featuring an interesting dig into the current state of Windows system and network-level diagnostic tools:

netsh trace [...] correlates events on the wire with events that happen on the TCP layer, timers, buffer management, socket layer, and even the Windows asyncio subsystem (IOCP).

(tags: windows tools cli networking dropbox iocp tcp ip internet kernel)

Tabula

'Extract Tables from PDFs - If you’ve ever tried to do anything with data provided to you in PDFs, you know how painful it is — there's no easy way to copy-and-paste rows of data out of PDF files. Tabula allows you to extract that data into a CSV or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using a simple, easy-to-use interface. Tabula works on Mac, Windows and Linux.'

(tags: converter data pdf tools cli tabula tables csv extraction)

Facebook moderator: ‘Every day was a nightmare’ - BBC News

Wow, this is not OK -- Facebook are massively mistreating these contract workers.

“Every day was a nightmare,” she said, adding that the support given was “insufficient.” Facebook says psychological help is available to all its moderators 24 hours a day, but Isabella claims its wellness coaches are not qualified psychiatrists. “I was seeing the wellness team but didn’t feel I got the support I needed. I can’t say I left work feeling relieved or knowing I could go home and have a good night's sleep - that’s not possible,” she added. “It would follow me home. I could just be watching TV at home and think back to one of the horrible, really graphic tickets.”

(tags: facebook ptsd exploitation trauma moderators moderation covalen violence)

The epidemiological impact of the NHS COVID-19 App

Nature paper on the UK contact notification app's impact on the COVID-19 pandemic:

Here we investigated the impact of the NHS COVID-19 app for England and Wales, from its launch on 24 September 2020 through to the end of December 2020. It was used regularly by approximately 16.5 million users (28% of the total population), and sent approximately 1.7 million exposure notifications: 4.4 per index case consenting to contact tracing. We estimated that the fraction of app-notified individuals subsequently showing symptoms and testing positive (the secondary attack rate, SAR) was 6.0%, comparable to the SAR for manually traced close contacts. We estimated the number of cases averted by the app using two complementary approaches. Modelling based on the notifications and SAR gave 284,000 (108,000-450,000), and statistical comparison of matched neighbouring local authorities gave 594,000 (317,000-914,000). Roughly one case was averted for each case consenting to notification of their contacts. We estimated that for every percentage point increase in app users, the number of cases can be reduced by 0.8% (modelling) or 2.3% (statistical analysis). These findings provide evidence for continued development and deployment of such apps in populations that are awaiting full protection from vaccines.

(tags: covid-19 contact-tracing apps pandemics npis)

Twitter thread on droplet transmission

An extremely long and detailed discussion from Jose-Luis Jimenez of how, exactly, the science of airborne transmission of disease via 5-micron infective droplets wound up wrong, and remained incorrect for much of modern medicine, culminating in the disastrous treatment of COVID-19

(tags: aerosols airborne medicine history covid-19 droplets infection transmission science)

Dr Rory Hearne: The Government does not want you to be able to afford to buy a home

This nails the issue with housing in Ireland:

The Government has been called on to do something to stop this. Even Fianna Fáil politicians have come out crying crocodile tears of outrage. But the truth is the investor purchase of housing in Ireland on a major scale is actually Government policy and has been for the last decade. The Government does not actually want you to be able to buy or rent an affordable home. They have created an unaffordable housing system that is focused on delivering housing as an investment asset, not a home.[...] This current crisis has been brewing for a long time. It goes back to the Celtic Tiger days of the late 1990s and early 2000s when the Fianna Fáil-PD Governments encouraged the shift from housing to be treated as a home, to people buying it up as an investment asset. They told people to speculate in the property market and gave tax breaks for landlords to buy a second, or third, home to rent out. These became the ‘buy-to-let’ investors. The banks lent out massively which added fuel to the fire of rising housing prices, and the inevitable crash happened in 2008 and 2009. As their response to the disaster they had created, Fianna Fáil turned to global ‘vulture’ funds to buy up the bad loans and failed housing projects. They set up the ‘bad bank’ NAMA, which went on, under the Fine Gael Government from 2011 to the current day, to sell off (at a discount) huge land banks and billions of euro worth of properties to vulture and real estate investment funds.

(tags: reits real-estate ireland politics housing homes rory-hearne)

mjg59 | Exploring my doorbell

Nice walkthrough of rooting and extending a bit of IOT hardware

(tags: linux exploits security iot gadgets embedded u-boot)

Interviews with Loyalist kids

It's a depressing read, as ever. Ulster Unionism is a mess, is falling apart, and is vulnerable to being taken over by the paramilitaries:

“Unionism is losing power and control. It needs leaders who have the skill to say, look, we have cards to play and if we are sensible we can save this place. Instead, Arlene said if there was a united Ireland she’d leave. People are left feeling unappeased but it is not a definite thing. It is more a kind of grief or sense they have lost something intangible. It is about shattered dreams.”

(tags: ulster unionism loyalists northern-ireland politics brexit)

MegaBlock

"Nuke tweets in one click" --

Don't like a bad tweet? Block the tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it—in one click.

(tags: twitter blocking killfile)

Tesla Car Hacked Remotely From Drone via Zero-Click Exploit

Here's the best bit:

Tesla patched the vulnerabilities with an update pushed out in October 2020, and it has reportedly stopped using ConnMan. Intel was also informed since the company was the original developer of ConnMan, but the researchers said the chipmaker believed it was not its responsibility. The researchers learned that the ConnMan component is widely used in the automotive industry, which could mean that similar attacks can be launched against other vehicles as well. Weinmann and Schmotzle turned to Germany’s national CERT for help in informing potentially impacted vendors, but it’s currently unclear if other manufacturers have taken action in response to the researchers’ findings.

(tags: intel tesla connman security hacks exploits fuzzing cars)

Lateral flow test sensitivity

Solid paper in PLOS - 'Validation testing to determine the sensitivity of lateral flow testing for asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 detection in low prevalence settings: Testing frequency and public health messaging is key':

Our data show that the Innova LFD can successfully detect SARS-CoV-2 infection in people with a viral titre above approximately 100 viral copies/ml. However, as determined at our site using the ThermoFisher COVID-19 TaqPath assay, it is incapable of detecting infection at comparable PCR Ct values of 30 and over. These levels of infection are indicative of very early or very late stages of infection, and as such, we would strongly recommend that LFD testing is used to screen people at very regular frequency and that a negative result should not be used to determine that someone is free from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

(tags: testing covid-19 sars-cov-2 lfa rapid-tests pcr papers)

Sidecar injection and transparent traffic hijacking process in Istio explained in detail · Jimmy Song

A solid explanation of Istio's traffic-hijacking mode using iptables and its sidecar pattern

(tags: kubernetes iptables sidecars istio service-mesh networking k8s eks routing)

The lost art of 'booleying' in Ireland's uplands

If you visit the west of Ireland or Achill, you can still see the traces of booleying today. Fascinating part of Irish rural history:

by the 1800s, it was mostly young people and teenage girls especially who had the job of looking after cows at these seasonal ‘boolies’. This gave rise to a vibrant but now largely forgotten cultural scene in Ireland’s uplands. Oral history collected in the 1930s and 1940s in Connemara, Mayo, Donegal, and the Galtee Mountains makes clear that booleying facilitated the transmission of a lot of important cultural knowledge. One man from Cloch Cheannaola in Donegal states that his mother had learned her songs from other dairymaids in the hills, while another account from Iorras Aintheach in Galway outlines how the girls not only sang but played musical instruments and danced as well. [....] The small degree of independence which young women gained as participants in booleying was sometimes missed later on in life. There is an unmistakeable sense of loss in songs like Na Gamhna Geala and Aililiú na Gamhna, in which married women reminisce about their time looking after cows and calves in the hills.

(tags: transhumance booleying history ireland rural achill galway donegal mayo connemara)

Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster

Hard not to sympathise with this take --

I’ve had to develop a special radar for reading product pages now: a mounting feeling of dread as a promising technology is introduced while I inevitably arrive at the buried lede: it’s more crypto bullshit. Cryptocurrency is the multi-level marketing of the tech world. “Hi! How’ve you been? Long time no see! Oh, I’ve been working on this cool distributed database file store archive thing. We’re doing an ICO next week.” Then I leave. Any technology which is not an (alleged) currency and which incorporates blockchain anyway would always work better without it. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cryptocurrency scams and ponzi schemes trussed up to look like some kind of legitimate offering. Even if the project you’re working on is totally cool and solves all of these problems, there are 100 other projects pretending to be like yours which are ultimately concerned with transferring money from their users to their founders. Which one are investors more likely to invest in? Hint: it’s the one that’s more profitable. Those promises of “we’re different!” are always hollow anyway. Remember the DAO? They wanted to avoid social arbitration entirely for financial contracts, but when the chips are down and their money was walking out the door, they forked the blockchain.

(tags: blockchain bitcoin crypto cryptocurrency abuse capitalism bullshit tech)

Medieval Archaeology of Ireland – Google My Maps

An exhaustive copy of the official Sites and Monuments Record annotated on Google Maps (via ITS Slack)

(tags: via:its maps ireland history monuments castles archaeology)

Regular HIIT Exercise Enhances Health via Histamine | The Scientist Magazine®

The precise molecular mechanisms connecting regular activity to improved health have been unclear. A study published April 14 in Science Advances makes major gains in this understanding. Building off previous work on single bouts of exercise, researchers at Ghent University in Belgium found that when humans perform long-term training, histamine receptors are activated, improving a variety of cardiometabolic risk factors, from insulin sensitivity to aerobic capacity and blood vessel health. “It’s awesome, it’s a very cool paper,” says University of Oregon exercise physiologist John Halliwill, who was not involved in the study. “This is one of a few studies out there finally looking at these molecular transducers, and this is the only one out there on histamine that showed that it has this lasting impact on how we adapt to exercise. . . . It’s not just a signal associated with allergies and asthma, wound healing. It seems to have a hand in everything related to exercise, which is quite amazing.”

(tags: histamine health medicine exercise hiit training)

Estimating AWS EC2 Instances Power Consumption

attempting to estimate the carbon footprint of cloud computing at AWS, by estimating the power consumption of individual EC2 instances running a workload.

(tags: aws ec2 cloud-computing energy carbon footprint power estimation ops)

From WinZips to Cat GIFs, Jacob Ziv’s Algorithms Have Powered Decades of Compression - IEEE Spectrum

'The lossless-compression pioneer received the 2021 IEEE Medal of Honor' -- well deserved

(tags: ziv compression lz77 lempel-ziv lz78 algorithms history computing ieee)

Genomics and epidemiology of P.1 SARS-CoV-2 lineage

The numbers are in, in this _Science_ paper --

Cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Manaus, Brazil, resurged in late 2020, despite previously high levels of infection. Genome sequencing of viruses sampled in Manaus between November 2020 and January 2021 revealed the emergence and circulation of a novel SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern. Lineage P.1, acquired 17 mutations, including a trio in the spike protein (K417T, E484K and N501Y) associated with increased binding to the human ACE2 receptor. Molecular clock analysis shows that P.1 emergence occurred around mid-November 2020 and was preceded by a period of faster molecular evolution. Using a two-category dynamical model that integrates genomic and mortality data, we estimate that P.1 may be 1.7–2.4-fold more transmissible, and that previous (non-P.1) infection provides 54–79% of the protection against infection with P.1 that it provides against non-P.1 lineages. Enhanced global genomic surveillance of variants of concern, which may exhibit increased transmissibility and/or immune evasion, is critical to accelerate pandemic responsiveness.

(tags: p1 sars-cov-2 covid-19 epidemiology transmission science papers)

Bert Hubert on the Huawei/5G backdoor controversy

Some context -- European telcos no longer operate their equipment:

As an icebreaker, [telco operators] were asked if they thought the Chinese could eavesdrop through “backdoors” in Huawei equipment. Every single hand went up. One of the bankers then asked, for balance, if they thought the US could access communications through key Cisco equipment. “All the hands went straight back up without hesitation” [....] In a modern telecommunications service provider, new equipment is deployed, configured, maintained and often financed by the vendor. Just to let that sink in, Huawei (and their close partners) already run and directly operate the mobile telecommunication infrastructure for over 100 million European subscribers. The host service provider often has no detailed insight in what is going on, and would have a hard time figuring this out through their remaining staff. Rampant outsourcing has meant that most local expertise has also left the company, willingly or unwillingly.

(tags: telcos telecoms ops networking eu 5g china huawei nsa tapping)

Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 - The Lancet

"The evidence supporting airborne transmission is overwhelming, and evidence supporting large droplet transmission is almost non-existent" (Greenhalgh et al., Lancet, 2021) (via Daniel Lemire)

(tags: via:lemire aerosols airborne transmission covid-19 sars-cov-2)

Indice de réparabilité

France's official "Repairability Index" site

(tags: repair repairability france shopping)

COVID-19 vaccine extended dose intervals for early vaccine rollout and population protection in Canada: NACI recommendations - Canada.ca

Very impressive level of detail here

(tags: canada vaccines covid-19 sars-cov-2 medicine)

I Thought My Job Was To Report On Tech In India. Instead, I’ve Watched Democracy Decline.

This is chilling:

I love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to. Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss in November.

(tags: india technology whatsapp facebook twitter scary authoritarianism dystopia tech)

Green Atlantic at Moneypoint

This is the best news to happen in Ireland's emissions situation for a while! The ESB plan to turn off the highly polluting coal power station at Moneypoint, switching it to be a hub for offshore wind energy, including energy storage using hydrogen. Moneypoint has massive connections to the Irish grid, and the amount of available wind power on the west coast is simply huge. Great stuff!

(tags: moneypoint ireland green energy emissions carbon future wind-energy hydrogen)

Parental control - DD-WRT Wiki

Using DD-WRT to turn off the internet for certain devices during night-time hours

(tags: dd-wrt networking parenting parental-controls kids internet home)

Fan-tastic misuse of Raspberry Pi's GPIO

'[River] wanted to use a Raspberry Pi to bring the fans into his home automation system, but the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have a 304.2 MHz radio. What it does have is user-programmable GPIO and the rpitx package, which converts a GPIO pin into a basic radio transmitter. Of course, the Pi’s GPIO pin’s aren’t long enough to efficiently transmit at 304.2 MHz, so [River] added a proper antenna, as well as a low-pass filter to clean up the transmitted signal. The rpitx package supports OOK out of the box, so [River] was quickly able get the Pi controlling his fan in no time'

(tags: home automation gpio raspberry-pi hacks hardware wireless)

The Gaslighting of Science - Insight

Zeynep Tufekci hits the nail on the head here -- 3 particular factors were wilfully overlooked in Western countries' early response to the COVID pandemic:

Put all three together: airborne transmission, clusters driving the epidemic, and presymptomatic transmission. Not only do we get a clear and consistent picture of many things that have happened since, we also get the mitigation strategy. Further, all three dimensions support each other: transmission from people not (yet) coughing or sneezing very much argues in favor of aerosol transmission, which explains how large clusters can be driving the epidemic and how transmission in a situation like that ship can occur. And the mitigation and other strategies become clear: pay attention to clusters and ventilation, universal masks, different policies for indoors and outdoors, etc. 

(tags: zeynep-tufekci coronavirus science covid-19 aerosols transmission clusters)

Tui plane in ‘serious incident’ due to software bug

Holy cow this could have been pretty serious:

A software mistake caused a Tui flight to take off heavier than expected as female passengers using the title “Miss” were classified as children, an investigation has found. The departure from Birmingham airport to Majorca with 187 passengers on board was described as a “serious incident” by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB). An update to the airline’s reservation system while its planes were grounded due to the coronavirus pandemic led to 38 passengers on the flight being allocated a child’s “standard weight” of 35kg as opposed to the adult figure of 69kg. This caused the load sheet – produced for the captain to calculate what inputs are needed for take-off – to state that the Boeing 737 was more than 1,200kg lighter than it actually was.

(tags: flight aviation bugs risks software flying tui titles i18n)

critique of the Digital Green Certificate (DGC) proposal

Excellent thread on privacy and security of the proposed Digital Green Certificate for intra-EU safe travel during the COVID-19 pandemic, from Carmela Troncoso. tl;dr:

My conclusion is: this is an immature design of an extremely complex infrastructure with no guaranteed security. The proposed scheme is likely to go down the slippery slope of discrimination and surveillance. I'd like to end reminding my wild thought: Given that fraud is possible anyway, a simple paper-based solution with enough protection to deter cheating may be sufficient to get us through this summer, avoiding long-term consequences.

(tags: surveillance dgc vaccination eu carmela-troncoso travel)

GeyserMC

Allow Minecraft Bedrock Edition clients on mobile devices, Switch, PS4 and XBox to connect to your Java edition Minecraft server. Works particularly nicely as a plugin in a PaperMC server -- will definitely give this a go and see how the kids get on....

(tags: kids minecraft interop bedrock papermc switch games)

Bufferbloat Test by Waveform

Handy link to test bufferbloat effects on your internet connection

(tags: bufferbloat buffering internet networking isps congestion)

Science Brief: SARS-CoV-2 and Surface (Fomite) Transmission for Indoor Community Environments | CDC

Official guidance from the CDC is toning down the "bleach everything!" messaging:

People can be infected with SARS-CoV-2 through contact with surfaces. However, based on available epidemiological data and studies of environmental transmission factors, surface transmission is not the main route by which SARS-CoV-2 spreads, and the risk is considered to be low. The principal mode by which people are infected with SARS-CoV-2 is through exposure to respiratory droplets carrying infectious virus. In most situations, cleaning surfaces using soap or detergent, and not disinfecting, is enough to reduce risk. Disinfection is recommended in indoor community settings where there has been a suspected or confirmed case of COVID-19 within the last 24 hours. The risk of fomite transmission can be reduced by wearing masks consistently and correctly, practicing hand hygiene, cleaning, and taking other measures to maintain healthy facilities.

(tags: covid19 infection pandemic washing fomites disinfection cleaning)

Defer disabling TLS 1.0/1.1 by default?

Colm MacCárthaigh:

The short version is this: we think about 1% of applications and traffic "out there" are still using TLS1.0/TLS1.1. Given where browsers are at, I think this percentage is an under-estimate of the usage on Java applications - I suspect it's even higher there. When we dig in with customers "Why are you still using TLS1.0 or TLS1.1" the most common reasons are legacy appliances and applications. Think of hardware load balancers that were never updated, or can't be, to support TLS1.2 or better. Compliance mandated traffic inspection devices that force TLS1.0 in certain industries are another reason. For these applications, the change will break them, and they'll get a low-level exception. The users can re-enable TLS1.0 and TLS1.1, but they may suffer an outage because they likely weren't expecting a breaking change low in the networking stack.

(tags: colmmacc java jdk tls ssl versioning backwards-compatibility internet)

10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL | by Rick Branson

oh god this brings back painful memories --

On a particularly large deployment, I eventually had to layer in a second pgbouncer tier. One tier ran on the application servers and another tier on the database servers. Altogether it aggregated connections for around 1 million client processes. Tuning it was 40% dark art, 40% brute force, and 10% pure luck.

(tags: database postgresql coding postgres pgbouncer ops rick-branson)

Covid aerosols: Avoiding coronavirus infection in indoor spaces: don’t breathe other people’s air

Good article on the topic of COVID-19 airborne transmission, with some decent graphics and charts

(tags: coronavirus disease transmission covid-19 aerosols airborne)

Why indoor spaces are still prime COVID hotspots

This is going to be one of the big scandals of COVID-19, when we get around to looking back from a position of safety in the future:

On 28 March 2020, two months after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a global health emergency, the agency broadcast a public-health message on Twitter and Facebook. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, labelling claims to the contrary as misinformation. But evidence quickly established that the virus is transmitted by air, and researchers roundly criticized the agency. The WHO updated its advice on SARS-CoV-2 transmission three months later, acknowledging the possibility that airborne transmission might occur in some community settings. Airborne transmission in “crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces over a prolonged period of time with infected persons cannot be ruled out”, the updated advice says. Yuguo Li, a building environment engineer at the University of Hong Kong, says that he is disappointed it took the WHO and other health authorities so long. “We would have saved a lot of people” if airborne transmission was recognized earlier, he says.

(tags: aerosols transmission airborne who covid-19 misinformation air-quality air)

Kids and COVID-19

Keith Dawson has written up a great summary of a paper by Dr. Zoë Hyde:

The general perception and belief for the last year has been that children are less likely than adults to be infected with SARS-CoV-2. A new paper in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases casts serious doubt on this assumption. The author of that paper, Zoë Hyde of the University of Western Australia, argues that there are two principal reasons why the myth of a lower attack rate in children developed: we don’t test kids much, and they may only be infectious for a very short window of time. The CDC’s stance on kids and Covid seems to be overly sanguine. The metric used in their paper is hos­pit­alization rate. It is true that hospitalization rates for teenagers and younger people are extremely low, but that may not be strongly indicative of infection rate. Kids’ infections are more likely to result in a mild or even asymptomatic case of Covid-19 — about twice as likely as for adults, according to Hyde. Combine this fact with the US bias towards testing only once symptoms appear, and you can see how this could contribute to an undercount of childhood cases. Compounding the dearth of testing is the (fairly robust) finding that, when infected, children may be shedding virus for a shorter time than adults: only two days on average, compared to five days for adults. So kids are more than twice as likely to show up PCR-negative even in the rare instances in which they are tested. Looking at seroprevalence surveys, Hyde cites studies from Italy and Brazil pointing to similar levels of children and adults who have antibodies indicating they have recovered from the disease. (In the Italian study from last year, children’s seroprevalence was even higher than that of the oldest adults, the result of what Hyde calls “survivorship bias” — i.e., the older people who got Covid-19 mostly died.) The hosts on This Week in Virology went over Hyde’s paper in last week’s podcast, TWiV #731. If you can spare the time, listen to 11 minutes’ worth of their discussion beginning at 23:33. One compelling point the TWiV team brought out: children are not immune from long Covid. A UK study found that 12.9% of kids had symptoms weeks after clearing the disease, compared with 22% of adults. The belief that children don’t get infected much should no longer be used as an argument for why schools ought to be reopened.

(tags: kids covid-19 schools safety bias kdawson)

NPHET's secret models

Turns out they accidentally released some charts back in Feb, modelling vaccination/reopening scenarios -- these were probably used in private briefings to the cabinet, and not intended for public consumption (via Andrew Flood)

(tags: nphet secrecy via:andrewflood models covid-19 vaccination)

vaccines performed as an ambient tune

'Pfizer (left channel) & Moderna (right channel) vaccine DNA sequences as ambient MIDI'

(tags: ambient music funny vaccines pfizer moderna dna)

The impact of population-wide rapid antigen testing on SARS-CoV-2 prevalence in Slovakia | Science

Well done, Slovakia -- massive decrease in prevalence after 2 rounds of mass testing.

Slovakia conducted multiple rounds of population-wide rapid antigen testing for SARS-CoV-2 in late 2020, combined with a period of additional contact restrictions. Observed prevalence decreased by 58% (95% CI: 57-58%) within one week in the 45 counties that were subject to two rounds of mass testing, an estimate that remained robust when adjusting for multiple potential confounders. Adjusting for epidemic growth of 4.4% (1.1-6.9%) per day preceding the mass testing campaign, the estimated decrease in prevalence compared to a scenario of unmitigated growth was 70% (67-73%). Modelling indicated that this decrease could not be explained solely by infection control measures, but required the additional impact of isolation and quarantine of household members of those testing positive.

(tags: testing slovakia via:luke-oneill covid-19 screening mass-testing)

Testcontainers

Testcontainers is a Java library that supports JUnit tests, providing lightweight, throwaway instances of common databases, Selenium web browsers, or anything else that can run in a Docker container.

(tags: docker java junit testing containers tests)

Peak map

Lovely little service to draw a map with ridgelines, Joy Division "Unknown Pleasures" style (via Nelson)

(tags: via:nelson ridgelines peak-lines mapping maps elevation peaks joy-division)

Chicken Story

'tl;dr: The time when Microsoft banned my entire country for cheating at Club Bing.' This is a great story -- though it must have been driving the MS Asirra anti-abuse team up the wall. Quite interesting to hear about low-cost/grassroots ways to accomplish some of the tech tasks, e.g. instead of firing up a farm of EC2 instances to crack a Captcha, he farmed out that work using thumbdrives, manually distributed to his friends.

(tags: coding asirra microsoft club-bing bing cheating usb-drives)

The unlikely story of how 'Dundee United' became an insult in Nigeria

'The club’s name is synonymous with idiocy in Africa’s most populous nation. How on earth did this happen?' -- what a great story! (via Ben)

(tags: via:bwalsh football language nigeria scotland dundee dundee-united slang)

Speedify and multipath

Interesting blog post from Nelson about Speedify, a proprietary multipath VPN service to bond two internet links to improve reliability

(tags: speedify multipath vpn vpns internet networking via:nelson)

The human footprints of Ojo Guareña | CENIEH

Amazing well-preserved human footprints from between 4200 and 4600 years ago:

The Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has participated in chapter 17, which covers the prints of bare feet preserved in the soft floor sediment of Palomera Cave in the Ojo Guareña Karst Complex (Merindad de Sotoscueva, Burgos, Spain). These footprints, ascribed to traces left by about ten individuals who explored the caves between 4200 and 4600 years ago, were discovered in 1969 by Grupo Espeleológico Edelweiss (GEE) at the Sala y Galerías de las Huellas site, some 1200 m from the entrance to Palomera Cave. The fragility of the footprints and their environment meant it was not possible to study them, and doing so has had to await the development of the new non-invasive teledetection techniques.

(tags: footprints history humans prehistory archaeology spain)

“THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?" | Medium

Great essay on the shitfest that is NFTs and cryptoart:

During unprecedented temperature increases, sea level rise, the total loss of permanent sea ice, widespread species extinction, countless severe weather events, and all the other hallmarks of total climate collapse, this kind of gleeful wastefulness is, and I am not being hyperbolic, a crime against humanity.

(tags: art bitcoin capitalism environment green cryptoart nfts ethereum)

Are the COVID-19 vaccines helping people with long COVID?

Prof. Akiko Iwasaki on Twitter: "This video shows that vaccines have helped some people with #longCOVID with their symptoms. While the numbers are still small in some groups, there are encouraging signs (also via @DanielGriffinMD). I present my hypothesis on how vaccines might improve #LongCovid (1/)"

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

How Competitive Matchmaking and Rating Works In Overwatch

Reverse-engineered by an external user, it seems: 'This information below is gathered from sporadic developer posts and videos, salted with my own experience and experiments, various forum threads, and watching streams. Note that since Blizzard does not give exact algorithms, I do have to fill in some gaps, or leave some items unknown.' The matchmaking systems are very complex and a key component of what makes games like Overwatch playable, so this is interesting stuff. (via Shevaun)

(tags: matchmaking overwatch gaming games pvp player-rating)

Amulet version 1

This is great. An amulet is 'a kind of poem that depends on language, code, and luck. To qualify, a poem must satisfy these criteria: Its complete Unicode text is 64 bytes or less; and the hexadecimal SHA-256 hash of the text includes four or more 8s in a row.'

The hash is a cold hexadecimal spew – 9a120001cc88888363fc67c45f2c52447ae64808d497ec9d699dba0d74d72aab – and, like a fingerprint, it doesn’t tell you anything about the entity it identifies. That’s by design, but even so, it feels strange for a value so pivotal to be totally disconnected from the underlying content, especially when it is this value that’s being collected and traded in cryptographic marketplaces. Ostensibly, the hash provides an immutable link between unique cryptographic object and free-floating digital media. The amulet asks: what if we took that link seriously? In a sense, the definition of the SHA-256 hash function created, at a stroke, all amulets of all rarities. Common to mythic, trashy to lovely, they have been hiding in the manifold combinations of language; we just didn’t know we ought to be looking for them. Until now!

(tags: poetry blockchain amulets poems sha-256 crypto)

Nestbox Designs for Birds and Wildlife - BirdWatch Ireland

might put one up this year, to join the swift and bat boxes

(tags: nestbox birds garden home diy)

want to ace an AI-based interview? add a bookshelf in the background

This is comedy gold. Turns out some digital phrenology software used for AI-aided interviewing will produce higher results for candidates who simply have a bookshelf as a background. As Daniel Bilar puts it: it's the "Clever Hans" phenomenon, [...] 'spurious correlations, can occur when there is a feature in the data that is highly correlated with the correct outcome, but is not the cause for the answer being correct.'

(tags: correlation clever-hans funny ai ml interviewing statistics phrenology)

Facebook knew for years ad reach estimates were based on ‘wrong data’ but blocked fixes over revenue impact, per court filing | TechCrunch

Via Colman Reilly -- this really sounds like outright fraudulent behaviour by FB:

The filing also reveals that a Facebook product manager for the “potential reach” tool warned the company was making revenue it “should never have” off of “wrong data”. The unsealed documents pertain to a U.S. class action lawsuit, filed in 2018, which alleges that Facebook deceived advertisers by knowingly including fake and duplicate accounts in a “potential reach” metric. Facebook denies the claim but has acknowledged accuracy issues with the “potential reach” metric as far back as 2016 — and also changed how it worked in 2019. [...] Redacted documents from the lawsuit, reported by the WSJ last year, included the awkward detail that a Facebook employee had asked “how long can we get away with the reach overestimation?”

(tags: fraud facebook ads ad-fraud bots revenue metrics via:colman)

UK ONS data showing school transmission of COVID-19

This is pretty solid real-world data, IMO -- even if they're not testing correctly to find it, it's there in the ONS data

(tags: ons uk covid-19 schools education)

'Classic triad' of symptoms misses positive COVID-19 cases, study finds

Testing people with any of the three ‘classic’ symptoms would have spotted 69% of symptomatic cases, with 46 people testing negative for every person testing positive. However, testing people with any of seven key symptoms - cough, fever, anosmia, fatigue, headache, sore throat and diarrhoea - in the first three days of illness would have detected 96% of symptomatic cases. In this case, for every person with the disease identified, 95 would test negative. Researchers also found users of the Symptom Study App were more likely to select headache and diarrhoea within the first three days of symptoms, and fever during the first seven days, which reflects different timings of symptoms in the disease course. Data from the ZOE app shows that 31% of people who are ill with COVID-19 don’t have any of the triad of symptoms in the early stages of the disease when most infectious.

(tags: covid-19 symptoms medicine diseases)

The Calculus of Service Availability - ACM Queue

working on the maths on outage probabilities.

(tags: sre availability architecture ops outages maths uptime)

SARS-CoV-2 variants in Ireland

via Paddy Mallon on twitter: 'results (pre-print) of an analysis examining SARS-CoV-2 variants in Ireland from hospital cases during 2020. This is the largest analysis of its kind to date in Ireland and provides some important insights into #COVID19Ireland."

1. Effective lockdown leading to low transmission rates can essentially eliminate common #SARS_CoV_2 variants contributing to disease ..BUT.. 2. ..new variants can be introduced (likely [via] travel) that seed new waves of #COVID19. As daily infections fall, hopefully correct implementation of new travel restrictions can help stop future W4 of #COVID19Ireland. We also hope that this data helps people understand how travel contributes to new #COVID19 infections (and new variants) coming into the country.

(tags: variants ireland papers covid-19 transmission)

12 of the Biggest Spreadsheet Fails in History

(via Yoz)

(tags: via:yoz spreadsheets excel fail bugs software)

Imperial College report on premature reopening under vaccination [pdf]

via John McClean: Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team report on premature reopening under different vaccination strategies in the UK. They find significant risk of a large 3rd wave of infections: 'For all gradual easing of NPI scenarios explored, unless vaccination is rapidly ramped up to 3 million doses a week, gradual lifting of NPIs from 1st March to 1st July will lead to a third wave of hospitalisations which will exceed our indicative threshold of 25,000 beds national hospital capacity.'

(tags: uk covid-19 vaccination imperial-college lockdowns epidemiology models)

Variants v. Vaccines - Tomas Pueyo

Excellent article from Tomas Pueyo on the new COVID-19 variants:

In the race between the variants and the vaccines, the variants are the hare and the vaccines are the tortoise. We all know that, in the end, the vaccines will win. Like the tortoise. By this summer, in developed countries, vaccination rates will likely range between 50% and 80%. Since there will also be some herd immunity, and summer means outdoors in the Northern hemisphere, it’s likely that the pandemic will die down some time during the summer. The question is: Will they also be rolled out in time to prevent the new variants from taking over? Now we have our answer: Unfortunately, no.

(tags: tomas-pueyo virology covid-19 sars-cov-2 variants vaccines herd-immunity via:cormac)

Informative Twitter thread on "herd immunity" vs eradication re COVID-19

Adam Kucharski on Twitter: "I've noticed people sometimes use 'herd immunity' to mean 'pathogen fades to zero and stays there' rather than the technical definition (i.e. R drops below 1 because of accumulated immunity, without NPIs). Why is the distinction important? ...."

(tags: immunity herd-immunity eradication covid-19 sars-cov-2 epidemiology epidemics pandemics r-value)

Fast Tar And Rsync Transfer Speed For Linux Backups Using Zstd Compression

I can confirm, zstd is awesome -- must use xxHash more, too.

Newer Tar 1.32+ and Rsync 3.2.3 versions have added Facebook’s zstd compression algorithm and Rsync has added lz4 and xxHash checksum algorithms which give Tar and Rsync a tremendous boost in transfer speed.

(tags: tar rsync backups xxhash hashing performance speed zstd compression lz4)

Cyan4973/xxHash: Extremely fast non-cryptographic hash algorithm

significantly faster than Murmur3 and City32; SSE code is even faster than sequential RAM reads :)

(tags: hashing hash xxhash performance coding speed algorithms)

Herd immunity failed against the South African COVID-19 variant

Kai Kupferschmidt on Twitter: "Natural immunity: This was maybe the worst bit of news buried here. In the placebo group there were previously infected people and people that had not been infected. In the trial both groups ended up getting #covid19 with the same likelihood: 2%."

(tags: herd-immunity covid-19 variants vaccines immunity)

Brazil coronavirus variant crushes Manaus - The Washington Post

Jaysus, this is terrifying.

Galvão, the lead physician in the coronavirus ward at a public hospital in the Brazilian city of Manaus, had been haunted by the wave that crashed last spring. In less than 10 days, it ruptured the city’s bewildered medical system. Sick patients were turned away. The dead were piled into mass graves. So Galvão’s hospital organized contingency plans. Additional beds were reserved, and a detailed schedule for opening them was created. But the new surge, when it came, was different. The virus had mutated, with a suite of alterations that probably made it more transmissible — and perhaps more lethal. Manaus was hit by what scientists call the P.1 variant. This time, it didn’t take 10 days to overwhelm Galvão’s hospital. It took 24 hours.

(tags: p.1 variants covid-19 manaus brazil medicine)

pascalw/kindle-dash: Power efficient dashboard for Kindle 4 NT devices

oh my, I didn't realise you could jailbreak a Kindle and do this! Simple dashboard that HTTP fetches a rendered PNG periodically and refreshes the Kindle screen with it

(tags: e-ink kindle jailbreak hacks dashboards e-paper)

Toxic Positivity

"Toxic Positivity" Is Doing More Harm Than Good:

Call it FONO, or fear of a negative outlook. Also known as “dismissive positivity,” it’s expressed as an overbearing cheerfulness no matter how bad things are, a pep that denies emotional oxygen to anything but a rictus grin.

(tags: happiness psychology culture positivity fono outlook mindset via:johnke)

FixTheMask.com

DIY mask braces, and a shop selling premade ones, from a former Apple designer

(tags: masks covid-19 mask-fitters facemasks)

Badger Seal (Mask Fitter)

What is a mask fitter? A soft, flexible and adjustable “frame” that significantly improves the outer seal of a mask. Why use it? Adding the Badger Seal to a 3-ply disposable mask reduces the effective particle penetration by typically 15x (see the Performance section below). What makes the Badger Seal unique? It’s cheap (< $1 in materials), easy to assemble, made from readily available materials and tools, comfortable, quickly customizable and open source. There are other fitters out there, though none seem to excel in all of these areas.

(tags: masks diy covid-19 badger-seal facemasks aerosols transmission makers)

Association between survival rates in intensive care and the level of ICU occupancy on the day of admission

Recent preprint paper from the UK --

Adjusting for patient-level factors, mortality was higher for admissions during periods of high occupancy (>85% occupancy versus the baseline of 45 to 85%) [OR 1.19 (95% posterior credible interval (PCI): 1.00 to 1.44)]. In contrast, mortality was decreased for admissions during periods of low occupancy (<45% relative to the baseline) [OR 0.75 (95% PCI: 0.62 to 0.89)]. [...] The results of this study suggest that survival rates for patients with COVID-19 in intensive care settings appears to deteriorate as the occupancy of (surge capacity) beds compatible with mechanical ventilation (a proxy for operational pressure), increases. Moreover, this risk doesn’t occur above a specific threshold, but rather appears linear; whereby going from 0% occupancy to 100% occupancy increases risk of mortality by 92% [...]

(tags: risk icu hospitals covid-19 pandemics medicine papers preprints mortality)

6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital: a cohort study - The Lancet

A recent preprint from China -- lots of "long COVID" impact, still:

Fatigue or muscle weakness (63%, 1038 of 1655) and sleep difficulties (26%, 437 of 1655) were the most common symptoms. Anxiety or depression was reported among 23% (367 of 1617) of patients. The proportions of median 6-min walking distance less than the lower limit of the normal range were 24% for those at severity scale 3, 22% for severity scale 4, and 29% for severity scale 5–6.

(tags: covid-19 long-covid china preprints papers)