Justin's Linklog Posts
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‘In this paper, we focus on the problem of searching sorted, in-memory datasets. This is a key data operation, and Binary Search is the de facto algorithm that is used in practice. We consider an alternative, namely Interpolation Search, which can take advantage of hardware trends by using complex calculations to save memory accesses. Historically, Interpolation Search was found to underperform compared to other search algorithms in this setting, despite its superior asymptotic complexity. Also,Interpolation Search is known to perform poorly on non-uniform data. To address these issues, we introduce SIP (Slope reuse Interpolation), an optimized implementation of Interpolation Search, and TIP (Three point Interpolation), a new search algorithm that uses linear fractions to interpolate on non-uniform distributions. We evaluate these two algorithms against a similarly optimized Binary Search method using a variety of real and synthetic datasets. We show that SIP is up to 4 times faster on uniformly distributed data and TIP is 2-3 times faster on non-uniformly distributed data in some cases. We also design a meta-algorithm to switch between these different methods to automate picking the higher performing search algorithm, which depends on factors like data distribution.’
(tags: papers pdf algorithms search interpolation binary-search sorted-data coding optimization performance)
nearly every site running ads has an /ads.txt
Pinboard on Twitter:
‘I just learned that nearly every site running ads has a standardized ads.txt file that helpfully shows you how badly it murders your privacy. The file is a whitelist of all authorized resellers for programmatic advertising. For example, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ads.txt ‘
(tags: ads.txt advertising pinboard privacy data-privacy adtech robots)
The one man behind all those slick, glossy, anti-abortion posters
If you were wondering where all those huge, glossy high-quality posters of foetuses came from during the abortion referendum campaign in Ireland last year: ‘Graphic pictures of aborted fetuses, prayer vigils and protesters. It’s no coincidence that the anti-abortion movement looks the same from London to Dublin to Warsaw. It’s mostly Gregg Cunningham. The California-based activist has been farming out his imagery and strategies to like-minded groups in Europe for more than five years.’ ‘if you see an abortion protester with one of those big, disturbing, graphic images, that says “CHOICE?” Or “ABORTION IS MURDER”, that’s Gregg Cunningham’s work, and that’s not a protest, that’s advertising.’ It’s a business. He sells this worldwide. He’s also a climate change denier, naturally. There’s even a ‘Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform’, mirroring the Irish operation. So now you know why right-wingers accuse lefties of being ‘paid protesters’ — it’s because that’s what _they_ do. Of course, this tactic backfired dramatically in Ireland — we don’t like being told what to think by paternalistic, patronising, colonialist foreign influences these days….
(tags: gregg-cunningham abortion us-politics posters icbr ccbr)
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Oh dear — not a happy camper….
This is not a bug in the system, but a feature of the system. The app is not automated to the degree that a cancelled bus service can be flagged on the spot. It has to pass through at least two human decision-making processes before it’s removed from the app. In the most simple terms, the system works in such a way that inaccurate information is an inevitable by-product. Similarly, the app struggles to account for buses that are held up in traffic: “When a bus is held in traffic, the predicted arrival time on the RTPI unit will reflect this as it is determined by the bus’ distance between its location and the bus stop and it is not possible to determine the duration of the period of congestion.” So while your bus could be 10 minutes away, on a busy main road full of traffic, the app could tell you that it is two or three minutes away, based purely on its distance.
(tags: buses public-transport dublin rtpi dublin-bus rants apps mobile)
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Google demonstrates their (extremely cool) privacy-preserving machine learning train/test architecture with a comic
(tags: google comics ai ml federated-learning privacy data-protection encryption training)
The many human errors that brought down the Boeing 737 Max – The Verge
Had anyone [at the FAA] checked, they might have flagged MCAS for one of several reasons, including its lack of redundancy, its unacceptably high risk of failure, or its significant increase in power to the point that it was no longer just a “hazardous failure” kind of system. When asked for comment, the agency said, “The FAA’s aircraft certification processes are well established and have consistently produced safe aircraft designs.” Boeing defended the process as well. “The system of authorized representatives — delegated authority — is a robust and effective way for the FAA to execute its oversight of safety,” a spokesperson told The Verge. But that system only works when someone actually reads the paperwork.
(tags: mcas boeing 737max fail safety faa flying regulation)
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Reducing your climate change impact by funding offsetting projects worldwide; usable by individuals
(tags: climate-change climate offsetting donation crowdfunding offset)
Opinion | The Uber I.P.O. Is a Moral Stain on Silicon Valley – The New York Times
Uber — and to a lesser extent, its competitor Lyft — has indeed turned out to be a poster child for Silicon Valley’s messianic vision, but not in a way that should make anyone in this industry proud. Uber’s is likely to be the biggest tech I.P.O. since Facebook’s. It will turn a handful of people into millionaires and billionaires. But the gains for everyone else — for drivers, for the environment, for the world — remain in doubt. There’s a lesson here: If Uber is really the best that Silicon Valley can do, America desperately needs to find a better way to fund groundbreaking new ideas.
(tags: startups uber silicon-valley morality ethics future work tech)
Youth Spies and Curious Elders – Austin Kleon
featuring Eno, John Waters and Stafford Beer:
The revolutions of the future will appear in forms we don’t even recognise—in a language we can’t read. We will be looking out for twists on the old themes but not noticing that there are whole new conversations taking place. Just imagine if all the things about which we now get so heated meant nothing to those who follow us—as mysteriously irrelevant as the nuanced distinctions between anarcho-syndicalism and communist anarchism. At least we can hope for that. As the cybernetician Stafford Beer once said to me: “If we can understand our children, we’re all screwed.” So revel in your mystification and read it as a sign of a healthy future. Whatever happens next, it won’t be what you expected. If it is what you expected, it isn’t what’s happening next.
(tags: kids learning fashion youth brian-eno john-waters stafford-beer children future music)
Tim Robinson’s townland index for Connemara and the Aran Islands | NUI Galway Digital Collections
Legendary west-of-Ireland mapmaker Tim Robinson has an archive at NUIG — including the maps themselves.
An extensive card catalogue compiled by Tim Robinson throughout the 1980s and 1990s, drawn from his field notes. The series has been arranged by Robinson into civil parishes, and further divided into townlands. For most of the townlands, there are several record cards that give a detailed description of the local landscape. These describe historical, ecclesiastical, geological, and archaeological features. Anecdotes and local lore also feature in these. Robinson adds the names of people who helped him compile his information, usually local people, and often correspondents who sent him information helping him identify the origins of placenames, or certain landmarks and artefacts. The cards also credit several secondary sources, including the OS maps and corresponding Field Name Books, Hardiman’s History of Galway, Alexander Nimmo’s map of the bogs in the West of Ireland, and many more. In all cases in this series, the placename Tim Robinson used as his title appears as the title here. Many are in Irish, and some are in English. The corresponding translation is provided in the description.
(tags: tim-robinson ireland history connemara via:voxhib galway maps mapping culture nuig)
Young Life Out Of Balance: The Impact and Legacy of ‘Koyaanisqatsi’
I found myself thinking about how 10-year-old Mike responded to these overwhelming images. The process of meaning-making for a 10-year-old kid watching a film containing a sophisticated symbolic critique of modern life fascinated me. I decided to watch Koyaanisqatsi in 2019 with a close eye towards the images and sounds that had stuck with me subconsciously in the intervening third of a century, the sequences that offered today’s me a direct connection to my younger self. In childhood I was surrounded by films, cartoons, and other educational programming that transmitted the profundity and complexity of human existence and the universe directly into my growing brain. What did Koyaanisqatsi‘s sensory bombardment, its sometimes overwhelming contrasting of nature and technology mean to me then? And how did that meaning change for me as an adult, now fully conscious of and conversant with the issues Reggio raises?
(tags: koyaanisqatsi godfrey-reggio film art 1980s)
Oh dear. Huawei enterprise router ‘backdoor’ was Telnet, sighs Vodafone
LOL:
Characterising Telnet as a backdoor is a bit like describing your catflap as an access portal with no physical security features that allows multiple species to pass unhindered through a critical home security layer. In other words, massively over-egging the pudding.
(tags: huawei vodafone funny security bloomberg overexcited drama us-politics china)
‘Looping’ Created an Underground Insulin-Pump Market – The Atlantic
By 2014, the hardware components of a DIY artificial pancreas—a small insulin pump that attaches via thin disposable tubing to the body and a continuous sensor for glucose, or sugar, that slips just under the skin—were available, but it was impossible to connect the two. That’s where the security flaw came in. The hackers realized they could use it to override old Medtronic pumps with their own algorithm that automatically calculates insulin doses based on real-time glucose data. It closed the feedback loop. They shared this code online as OpenAPS, and “looping,” as it’s called, began to catch on. Instead of micromanaging their blood sugar, people with diabetes could offload that work to an algorithm. In addition to OpenAPS, another system called Loop is now available. Dozens, then hundreds, and now thousands of people are experimenting with DIY artificial-pancreas systems—none of which the Food and Drug Administration has officially approved. And they’ve had to track down discontinued Medtronic pumps. It can sometimes take months to find one. Obviously, you can’t just call up Medtronic to order a discontinued pump with a security flaw. “It’s eBay, Craigslist, Facebook. It’s like this underground market for these pumps,”
(tags: looping insulin diabetes health hardware open-hardware medtronic glucose medicine fda black-market)
Packets-per-second limits in EC2
By running these experiments, we determined that each EC2 instance type has a packet-per-second budget. Surprisingly, this budget goes toward the total of incoming and outgoing packets. Even more surprisingly, the same budget gets split between multiple network interfaces, with some additional performance penalty. This last result informs against using multiple network interfaces when tuning the system for higher networking performance. The maximum budget for m5.metal and m5.24xlarge is 2.2M packets per second. Given that each HTTP transaction takes at least four packets, we can translate this to a maximum of 550k requests per second on the largest m5 instance with Enhanced Networking enabled.
(tags: aws ec2 networking pps packets tcp ip benchmarking)
Brian Moriarty – “I Sing the Story Electric”
The history of interactive storytelling, including a classification system for branching narrative techniques: The Foldback, Quicktime Events, Sardonic Options, Achtung Options, Checkpoint Saves, and Bait-and-Switch Options, and an example of a computerized interactive narrative from 1955, GENIAC Project 23.
(tags: geniac kinoautomat borges narratives non-linear branching interactive-fiction games gaming ludology history stories storytelling talks)
When License-Plate Surveillance Goes Horribly Wrong – The New York Times
“They built a system to mitigate harm, and yet I ended up with guns pulled on me due to faulty data,” he said. “And it’s more proof that we’ve built this invisible layer behind the scenes that leads to real-world consequences.”
This is the common thread between automated surveillance systems — false positives happen, but the systems are designed to assume this is harmless.(tags: false-positives surveillance anpr license-plates automation)
Ireland Blocks The World on Data Privacy
Last May, Europe imposed new data privacy guidelines that carry the hopes of hundreds of millions of people around the world — including in the United States — to rein in abuses by big tech companies. Almost a year later, it’s apparent that the new rules have a significant loophole: The designated lead regulator — the tiny nation of Ireland — has yet to bring an enforcement action against a big tech firm. That’s not entirely surprising. Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of catering to the very companies it is supposed to oversee, having wooed top Silicon Valley firms to the Emerald Isle with promises of low taxes, open access to top officials, and help securing funds to build glittering new headquarters. Now, data privacy experts and regulators in other countries are questioning Ireland’s commitment to policing imminent privacy concerns like Facebook’s reintroduction of facial recognition software and data-sharing with its recently purchased subsidiary WhatsApp, and Google’s sharing of information across its burgeoning number of platforms.
(tags: ireland fail gdpr privacy data-protection data facebook eu regulation)
Who’s using your face? The ugly truth about facial recognition
In order to feed this hungry system, a plethora of face repositories — such as IJB-C — have sprung up, containing images manually culled and bound together from sources as varied as university campuses, town squares, markets, cafés, mugshots and social-media sites such as Flickr, Instagram and YouTube. To understand what these faces have been helping to build, the FT worked with Adam Harvey, the researcher who first spotted Jillian York’s face in IJB-C. An American based in Berlin, he has spent years amassing more than 300 face datasets and has identified some 5,000 academic papers that cite them. The images, we found, are used to train and benchmark algorithms that serve a variety of biometric-related purposes — recognising faces at passport control, crowd surveillance, automated driving, robotics, even emotion analysis for advertising. They have been cited in papers by commercial companies including Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, SenseTime and IBM, as well as by academics around the world, from Japan to the United Arab Emirates and Israel. “We’ve seen facial recognition shifting in purpose,” says Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the EFF, who was shocked to discover that his own colleagues’ faces were in the Iarpa database. “It was originally being used for identification purposes?.?.?.?Now somebody’s face is used as a tracking number to watch them as they move across locations on video, which is a huge shift. [Researchers] don’t have to pay people for consent, they don’t have to find models, no firm has to pay to collect it, everyone gets it for free.”
(tags: data privacy face-recognition cameras creative-commons licensing flickr open-data google facebook surveillance instagram ijb-c research iarpa)
Tinder’s move to Kubernetes – Tinder Engineering – Medium
A solid technical writeup of Tinder’s k8s migration. Some problems with Flannel, DNS and (worryingly) ELB, but good +1s for Envoy as a sidecar
(tags: kubernetes k8s flannel networking elb aws envoy ec2 ops tinder)
Interesting thread on how trees should be managed by city councils, vs “topping”
‘Dr Eoin Lettice on Twitter: “At the risk of repeating myself, a serious discussion needs to be had about how @corkcitycouncil and its agents are managing our mature trees in the public realm. This horror show from Ballyphehane today. Topping trees is bad practice for a whole bunch of reasons. [Thread]’
(tags: topping trees ireland maintainance dcc)
James Bridle / New Ways of Seeing
This will be a must-listen, starting this week on BBC Radio 4 and for download: ‘New Ways of Seeing considers the impact of digital technologies on the way we see, understand, and interact with the world. Building on John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing from 1972, the show explores network infrastructures, digital images, systemic bias, education and the environment, in conversation with a number of contemporary art practitioners.’
(tags: seeing vision machine-learning james-bridle internet digital future art)
_First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. III. Data Processing and Calibration_
‘We present the calibration and reduction of Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) 1.3 mm radio wavelength observations of the supermassive black hole candidate at the center of the radio galaxy M87 and the quasar 3C 279, taken during the 2017 April 5–11 observing campaign. These global very long baseline interferometric observations include for the first time the highly sensitive Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA); reaching an angular resolution of 25 ?as, with characteristic sensitivity limits of ?1 mJy on baselines to ALMA and ?10 mJy on other baselines. The observations present challenges for existing data processing tools, arising from the rapid atmospheric phase fluctuations, wide recording bandwidth, and highly heterogeneous array. In response, we developed three independent pipelines for phase calibration and fringe detection, each tailored to the specific needs of the EHT. The final data products include calibrated total intensity amplitude and phase information. They are validated through a series of quality assurance tests that show consistency across pipelines and set limits on baseline systematic errors of 2% in amplitude and 1° in phase. The M87 data reveal the presence of two nulls in correlated flux density at ?3.4 and ?8.3 G? and temporal evolution in closure quantities, indicating intrinsic variability of compact structure on a timescale of days, or several light-crossing times for a few billion solar-mass black hole. These measurements provide the first opportunity to image horizon-scale structure in M87.’
(tags: papers data big-data telescopes eht black-holes astronomy)
Autonomous Precision Landing of Space Rockets – Lars Blackmore
from ‘Frontiers of Engineering: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering’ from the 2016 Symposium, published by the National Academies Press, regarding the algorithms used by SpaceX for their autonomous landings:
The computation must be done autonomously, in a fraction of a second. Failure to find a feasible solution in time will crash the spacecraft into the ground. Failure to find the optimal solution may use up the available propellant, with the same result. Finally, a hardware failure may require replanning the trajectory multiple times. Page 39 Suggested Citation:”Autonomous Precision Landing of Space Rockets – Lars Blackmore.” National Academy of Engineering. 2017. Frontiers of Engineering: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2016 Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/23659. × Save Cancel A general solution to such problems has existed in one dimension since the 1960s (Meditch 1964), but not in three dimensions. Over the past decade, research has shown how to use modern mathematical optimization techniques to solve this problem for a Mars landing, with guarantees that the best solution can be found in time (Açikme?e and Ploen 2007; Blackmore et al. 2010). Because Earth’s atmosphere is 100 times as dense as that of Mars, aerodynamic forces become the primary concern rather than a disturbance so small that it can be neglected in the trajectory planning phase. As a result, Earth landing is a very different problem, but SpaceX and Blue Origin have shown that this too can be solved. SpaceX uses CVXGEN (Mattingley and Boyd 2012) to generate customized flight code, which enables very high-speed onboard convex optimization.
(tags: spacex blue-origin convex-optimization space landing autonomous-vehicles flight algorithms)
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nice one.
Then the activists saw an article in Gizmodo, a technology news site, that outlined how Amazon’s cloud computing division was building special offerings for oil and gas companies. On its website, Amazon says its customers include BP and Royal Dutch Shell, and its products can “find oil faster,” “recover more oil” and “reduce the cost per barrel.” In a second meeting with Amazon, the workers raised the oil industry connections with the company’s sustainability team; its members did not seem to be aware of the business, according to several employees at the meeting. “That really showed us Amazon is not taking climate change seriously if the highest levels of the sustainability team are not even aware that we have an oil and gas business,” said Ms. Cunningham, who was at the meeting.
(tags: amazon aws fossil-fuels zero-carbon emissions climate-change sustainability)
Using 6 Page and 2 Page Documents To Make Organizational Decisions
Ian Nowland has written up the Amazon 6-pager strategy:
A challenge of organizations is the aggregation of local information to a point where a globally optimal decision can be made in a way all stakeholders have seen their feedback heard and so can “disagree and commit” on the result. This document describes the “6 pager” and “2 pager” document and review meeting process, as a mechanism to address this challenge, as practiced by the document’s author in his time in the EC2 team at Amazon, and then at Two Sigma. […] The major variant I have also seen is 2 pages with 30 minute review; when the decision is smaller in terms of stakeholders, options or impact. That being said, there is nothing magical about 2 pages, i.e., a 3 page document is fine, it just should be expected to take more than 30 minutes to review.
Europol Tells Internet Archive That Much Of Its Site Is ‘Terrorist Content’ | Techdirt
‘The Internet Archive has a few staff members that process takedown notices from law enforcement who operate in the Pacific time zone. Most of the falsely identified URLs mentioned here (including the report from the French government) were sent to us in the middle of the night – between midnight and 3am Pacific – and all of the reports were sent outside of the business hours of the Internet Archive. The one-hour requirement essentially means that we would need to take reported URLs down automatically and do our best to review them after the fact. It would be bad enough if the mistaken URLs in these examples were for a set of relatively obscure items on our site, but the EU IRU’s lists include some of the most visited pages on archive.org and materials that obviously have high scholarly and research value.’
(tags: eu europol policing france archive.org archival web freedom censorship fail)
At wit’s end with my preschooler : Parenting
This /r/parenting thread has some good advice on dealing with kids’ meltdowns. I wish I had this a few years ago
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‘Best practices for successfully managing memory for Apache Spark applications on Amazon EMR’, on the AWS Big Data blog. ‘In this blog post, I detailed the possible out-of-memory errors, their causes, and a list of best practices to prevent these errors when submitting a Spark application on Amazon EMR. My colleagues and I formed these best practices after thorough research and understanding of various Spark configuration properties and testing multiple Spark applications. These best practices apply to most of out-of-memory scenarios, though there might be some rare scenarios where they don’t apply. However, we believe that this blog post provides all the details needed so you can tweak parameters and successfully run a Spark application.’
Serverless for data scientists
good write-up of Zappa, a helper lib for running serverless Python web apps on Lambda and API Gateway
(tags: zappa talks presentations python data-science serverless lambda api-gateway aws)
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Your regular reminder that lobbying by tax-preparation agencies has ensured that US taxation is an overcomplex mess which requires you pay a third party to operate:
Intuit and H&R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues. Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block in the last two election cycles.
(tags: intuit hr-block taxes us-politics lobbying sleaze irs)
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This is really useful data. As expected the c5ns win, but good to validate that!
I used this to benchmark S3’s performance from all 155 EC2 instance types in existence. I put all the data in an interactive spreadsheet. […] Below is the max throughput I got from each instance type, but the spreadsheet shows you what object sizes and thread counts you need to get that performance.
(tags: ec2 instances instance-types hardware cloud s3 performance benchmarks ops)
ankane/strong_migrations: Catch unsafe Rails migrations at dev time
Strong Migrations detects potentially dangerous operations in [Rails database] migrations, prevents them from running by default, and provides instructions on safer ways to do what you want.
(tags: database migrations rails releases ops databases mysql ruby gems)
Claremont Court, Crescent and Close; Clareville Court and Grove; Claremont Lawns
A nice bit of local history
(tags: slutsend west-farm claremont clareville glasnevin history dublin d11)
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super-cheap ancient Thinkpads etc., ideal for low cost linux laptop usage
(tags: cheap thinkpads laptops linux via:markdennehy hardware)
How Gudetama, a lazy egg yolk with a butt, became an unstoppable cultural phenomenon – Vox
Gudetama isn’t so much about relaxation as about the unbearableness of the world around it. Gudetama, in its golden nakedness, questions the meaning of life. If idleness is true bliss, Gudetama asks, then isn’t anything more than that painful?
(tags: characters culture japan gudetama eggs odd ass yolks idleness laziness)
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Paper from Amy Orben, Andrew K. Przybylski, of the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, and the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford:
The notion that digital-screen engagement decreases adolescent well-being has become a recurring feature in public, political, and scientific conversation. The current level of psychological evidence, however, is far removed from the certainty voiced by many commentators. There is little clear-cut evidence that screen time decreases adolescent well-being, and most psychological results are based on single-country, exploratory studies that rely on inaccurate but popular self-report measures of digital-screen engagement. In this study, which encompassed three nationally representative large-scale data sets from Ireland, the United States, and the United Kingdom (N = 17,247 after data exclusions) and included time-use-diary measures of digital-screen engagement, we used both exploratory and confirmatory study designs to introduce methodological and analytical improvements to a growing psychological research area. We found little evidence for substantial negative associations between digital-screen engagement — measured throughout the day or particularly before bedtime — and adolescent well-being.
(tags: screens screen-time teens mental-health psychology papers research)
Waterford Distillery on Whisky “Finishing”
Here’s an inexpensive illusion for a whisky brand to acquire more shelf presence. Purchase three barrels of whisky from a generic pool of ex-bourbon matured stocks. Re-rack a couple of these barrels into new barrels – a sherry cask, or maybe you’d like the name of a French chateau to add more gravitas to a label and pull another rabbit out of the hat? Give it a few weeks, then bottle each of them in turn. Instead of one bottle on the shelf, you have three. You’ll more easily catch the eye of the whisky consumer as they walk by, pondering the nature of what ‘finishing’ actually means. These days, the shelves of retailers and at airports are rammed up with all sorts of fancy ‘finishes’ – which is to say a whisky that has been re-racked into another barrel and left to mature for a period of time; perhaps up to a couple of years, but usually just a few brief months.
Well said. I’m looking forward to their whisky…(tags: whiskey whisky waterford-distillery booze finishing distilling barrels)
Formal GDPR complaint against IAB Europe’s “cookie wall” and GDPR consent guidance
Fantastic :) A formal complaint has been filed with the Irish Data Protection Commission against IAB Europe, the tracking industry’s primary lobbying organization:
Tracking and cookie walls: Visitors to IAB Europe’s website, www.iabeurope.eu, are confronted with a “cookie wall” that forces them to accept tracking by Google, Facebook, and others, which may then monitor them. Dr. Ryan has complained to the Irish Data Protection Commission that this is a breach of the GDPR, which protects people in Europe from being forced to accept processing for their data for any purpose other than the provision of the requested service. “One should not be forced to accept web-wide profiling by unknown companies as a condition of access to a website”, said Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave. “This would be like Facebook preventing you from accessing the Newsfeed until you have clicked a button permitting it to share your data with Cambridge Analytica.” Simon McGarr of McGarr Solicitors, who has worked on data protection cases for Digital Rights Ireland, represents Dr Ryan in his complaint. Mr McGarr said “Where companies rely on consent to process people’s data it is critical that this is more than a box ticking exercise. For consent to be valid, it must be freely given, informed, specific and unambiguous. There’s nothing intrinsically good or bad in cookie technology – what matters is ensuring it’s applied in a way which respects individuals’ rights.” Challenging IAB Europe’s industry guidance on the GDPR: The complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commission will also test IAB Europe’s GDPR guidance to the online advertising industry. IAB Europe has put itself forward as a primary designer of the online tracking industry’s data protection notices. It has told major media organizations, tracking companies, and advertising technology companies that they can sidestep the GDPR, and rely instead on the ePrivacy Directive, which IAB Europe has interpreted as more lax in protecting personal data. IAB Europe has widely promoted the notion that access to a website or app can be made conditional on consent for data processing that is not necessary for the requested service to be delivered, despite the clear requirements of the GDPR, and statements from several national data protection authorities, that say otherwise. “This complaint will make it plain that the media and advertising industry should not rely on IAB Europe for GDPR guidance”, said Dr Ryan.
(tags: dpc ireland brave iab-europe iab cookies tracking gdpr law eu)
The 9 Categories of Reply Guys
“#WomeninSTEM get a lot of “Reply Guys” who repeat the same unhelpful comments. @shrewshrew and I (a woman & a man in science) have attempted to catalog those replies, to save us all the trouble of writing new responses every time. presenting THE NINE TYPES OF REPLY GUYS”
(tags: twitter thread humor mansplaining sexism misogyny reply-guys funny)
YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Let Toxic Videos Run Rampant – Bloomberg
As of 2017, YouTube’s policy for how content moderators handle conspiracy theories didn’t exist, according to a former moderator who specialized in foreign-language content. At the end of the year, fewer than twenty people were on the staff for “trust and safety,” the unit overseeing content policies, according to a former staffer. The team had to “fight tooth and nail” for more resources from the tech giant, this person said. A YouTube spokeswoman said that the division has grown “significantly” since but declined to share exact numbers. In February of 2018, the video calling the Parkland shooting victims “crisis actors” went viral on YouTube’s trending page. Policy staff suggested soon after limiting recommendations on the page to vetted news sources. YouTube management rejected the proposal, according to a person with knowledge of the event. The person didn’t know the reasoning behind the rejection, but noted that YouTube was then intent on accelerating its viewing time for videos related to news.
(tags: youtube google alphabet moderation conspiracy-theories news virality engagement)
April Fool’s Day is upon us – What’s your best prank given to or received by your kids? : Parenting
heh heh. revenge next year will be sweet
(tags: pranks april-fools kids parenting)
Tesla lane-recognition autopilot fooled by three small stickers
‘Tesla autopilot module’s lane recognition function has a good robustness in an ordinary external environment (no strong light, rain, snow, sand and dust interference), but it still doesn’t handle the situation correctly in our test scenario. This kind of attack is simple to deploy, and the materials are easy to obtain. As we talked in the previous introduction of Tesla’s lane recognition function, Tesla uses a pure computer vision solution for lane recognition, and we found in this attack experiment that the vehicle driving decision is only based on computer vision lane recognition results. Our experiments proved that this architecture has security risks and reverse lane recognition is one of the necessary functions for autonomous driving in non-closed roads. In the scene we build, if the vehicle knows that the fake lane is pointing to the reverse [oncoming traffic] lane, it should ignore this fake lane and then it could avoid a traffic accident.’
(tags: adversarial-classification cars ml machine-learning tesla driving self-driving-cars)
We Built A Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground.
The promise of the internet was that it was going to give voice to the voiceless, visibility to the invisible, and power to the powerless. That’s what originally excited me about it. That’s what originally excited a ton of people about it. It was supposed to be an engine of equality. Suddenly, everyone could tell their story. Suddenly, everyone could sing their song. Suddenly, that one weird kid in Helena, Montana, could find another weird kid just like them in Bakersfield, California, and they could talk and know they weren’t alone. Suddenly, we didn’t need anybody’s permission to publish. We put our stories and songs and messages and artwork where the world could find them. For a while it was beautiful, it was messy, and it was punk as fuck. We all rolled up our sleeves and helped to build it. We were the ones who were supposed to guide it there, and we failed. We failed because we were naive enough to believe everyone had the same goals we did. We failed because we underestimated greed. We failed because we didn’t pay attention to history. We failed because our definition of we wasn’t big enough. We designed and built platforms that undermined democracy across the world. We designed and built technology that is used to round up immigrants and refugees and put them in cages. We designed and built platforms that young, stupid, hateful men use to demean and shame women. We designed and built an entire industry that exploits the poor in order to make old rich men even richer.
Announcing Lucet: Fastly’s native WebAssembly compiler and runtime
Lucet is designed to take WebAssembly beyond the browser, and build a platform for faster, safer execution on Fastly’s edge cloud. WebAssembly is already supported by many languages including Rust, TypeScript, C, and C++, and many more have WebAssembly support in development. We want to enable our customers to go beyond Fastly VCL and move even more logic to the edge, and use any language they choose. Lucet is the engine behind Terrarium, our experimental platform for edge computation using WebAssembly. Soon, we will make it available on Fastly’s edge cloud as well. A major design requirement for Lucet was to be able to execute on every single request that Fastly handles. That means creating a WebAssembly instance for each of the tens of thousands of requests per second in a single process, which requires a dramatically lower runtime footprint than possible with a browser JavaScript engine. Lucet can instantiate WebAssembly modules in under 50 microseconds, with just a few kilobytes of memory overhead. By comparison, Chromium’s V8 engine takes about 5 milliseconds, and tens of megabytes of memory overhead, to instantiate JavaScript or WebAssembly programs. With Lucet, Fastly’s edge cloud can execute tens of thousands of WebAssembly programs simultaneously, in the same process, without compromising security. The Lucet compiler and runtime work together to ensure each WebAssembly program is allowed access to only its own resources. This means that Fastly’s customers will be able to write and run programs in more common, general-purpose languages, without compromising the security and safety we’ve always offered.
(tags: lucet cdn edge-computing wasm webassembly fastly rust c c++ typescript)
What is cultural Marxism? The alt-right meme in Suella Braverman’s speech in Westminster
Cultural Marxism is a theory that started in the early 20th century, which was popularised in the aftermath of the socialist revolution (this great piece in the Guardian explains it in depth). The idea was that Marxism should extend beyond class and into cultural equality and that, through major institutions like schools and the media, cultural values could progressively be changed. The theory was later adopted by the philosophers at the Frankfurt School who posited that the only way to destroy capitalism was to destroy it in all walks of life; where, not just classes, but all genders, races, and religions could live in society equally. While this may seem unimportant, the Frankfurt School’s adoption of – and modifications to – cultural Marxism is where the conspiracy theory truly begins. The Frankfurt School’s predominantly Jewish members of the school were forced to flee to America by the Nazis in the 1940s, where many went on to teach, write, and commentate in mainstream institutions. This, conspiracy theorists claim, is when cultural Marxists began to poison the West – and when cultural Marxists began their attempts to undermine its values. Cultural Marxism’s move from political theory to full memeification was fast-tracked when it was used by mass murderer Anders Breivik. Breivik was the sole perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks in which 77 people died across several sites. Before committing his attacks, much like the Christchurch shooter, Breivik sent an enormous personal manifesto to a group of friends and family which outlined his anti-multiculturalist, racist, and misogynist ideals. In the manifesto, he spends huge chunks of time crediting the writers who pushed cultural Marxist conspiracy theories into the mainstream. The 1,000-page document references “cultural Marxism” and “cultural Marxists” nearly 650 times. For the growing audience of anti-Semitic, alt-right white supremacists online, his musings have turned him into an icon – and “cultural Marxism” has become a foundational alt-right belief. It became an easy label for those white supremacists looking for an umbrella term to describe the people at which their anger about diversity, feminism, and religious freedom was directed. Cultural Marxist soon became a signal to mean anyone vaguely left-leaning – in some cases, even if this simply meant those who didn’t agree with white supremacy.
(tags: antisemitism alt-right suella-braverman marxism nazis fascism history memes dogwhistles)
Why Is AI Art Copyright So Complicated?
Claims that AI is creating art on its own and that machines are somehow entitled to copyright for this art are simply naive or overblown, and they cloud real concerns about authorship disputes between humans. The introduction of machine learning as an art tool is ironically increasing human involvement, not decreasing it. Specifically, the number of people who can potentially be credited as coauthors of an artwork has skyrocketed. This is because machine learning tools are typically built on a stack of software solutions, each layer having been designed by individual persons or groups of people, all of whom are potential candidates for authorial credit.
Pilots had 40 seconds to fix error in tests of Boeing 737 Max flight
During flight simulations recreating the problems with the doomed Lion Air plane, pilots discovered that they had less than 40 seconds to override an automated system on Boeing’s new jets and avert disaster. The pilots tested a crisis situation similar to what investigators suspect went wrong in the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last fall. In the tests, a single sensor failed, triggering software designed to help prevent a stall. Once that happened, the pilots had just moments to disengage the system and avoid an unrecoverable nose dive of the Boeing 737 Max, according to two people involved in the testing in recent days.
lucagrulla/cw: The best way to tail AWS CloudWatch Logs from your terminal
It even supports “tail -f”. Genius
(tags: tail logs cloudwatch aws ops)
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You have got to be joking.
a group of left-leaning Swedish MEPs have revealed that they pressed the wrong button, and have asked to have the record corrected. They have issued a statement saying they’d intended to open a debate on amendments to the Directive so they could help vote down Articles 11 and 13. We lost on a technicality, and there is no recourse. This is the most significant piece of internet regulation ever undertaken by a democratic government (that is, excluding Russian and Chinese internet regulations). It will do untold damage to the whole internet. And it’s because someone pushed the wrong button.
(tags: sweden meps fail voting evoting censorship article-13 eu europe)
“Baba Is You” is Turing-complete
‘This video demonstrates my design for a mechanism in #BabaIsYou which implements Cellular Automaton Rule 110, which suffices to prove the game is Turing-Complete!’ The write-up is here: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sqrh1m
(tags: baba-is-you games turing-completeness computing)
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Yukio-Pegio Gunji and Yuta Nishiyama from Kobe University, along with Andrew Adamatzky from the aptly named Unconventional Computing Centre at the University of the West of England decided they needed a new way to build logic gates using crabs [….] The colonies of soldier crabs that inhabit the lagoons of Pacific atolls display a unique swarming behavior in their native habitat. When in a swarm of hundreds of individuals, the front of the swarm is driven by random turbulence in the group, while the back end of the swarm simply follows the leaders. Somehow, this is a successful evolutionary strategy, but it can also be exploited to build logic gates using only crabs. The team constructed a Y-shaped maze for a pair of crabs to act as an OR gate. When two soldier crabs are placed at the top of the ‘Y’, they move forward until they meet and exit the maze through the output. This idea can be expanded to a slightly more complex AND gate, functionally identical to the electron-powered AND gate in a 7408 logic chip.
(tags: logic-gates logic soldier-crabs crabs computing hardware swarming nature animals via:theophite)
What causes Ruby memory bloat? – Joyful Bikeshedding
Another likely suspect is the memory allocator. After all, Nate Berkopec and Heroku remarked that fiddling with the memory allocator (either replacing it altogether with jemalloc, or setting the magical environment variable MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2) drastically lowers [Ruby] memory usage.
Fix glibc’s MALLOC_ARENA_MAX variable
It seems that recent versions of glibc (up to glibc 2.25 at least) have some dysfunctional behaviour around malloc’s arenas on multi-CPU systems, massively inflating the number of arenas allocated, which inflate reported VM sizes and (for multi-threaded Ruby services in particular) fragmenting memory badly. See also https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/testing-cedar-14-memory-use Presto issue reported with glibc malloc arena-per-thread behaviour resulting in Presto OOMs: https://github.com/prestodb/presto/issues/8993 Hadoop affected by the inflated VM sizes reported as a side effect: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-7154 Good detailed writeup from IBM’s WebSphere blog: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/kevgrig/entry/linux_glibc_2_10_rhel_6_malloc_may_show_excessive_virtual_memory_usage
(tags: ops ruby memory malloc allocation arenas tuning fragmentation)
The end of open: BBC blocks its podcasts on Google
Talking to Podnews, a BBC spokesperson said that Google is required to sign a licence to link to their podcasts; and that the Distribution Policy also requires Google to supply user data to the BBC. There has been a “consultation with Google”, and the BBC “has no choice but to stop Google from making podcasts available via Google products.”
‘A Swiss cheese-like material’ that can solve equations | Penn Today
This is incredibly cool.
“For example,” Engheta says, “if you were trying to plan the acoustics of a concert hall, you could write an integral equation where the inputs represent the sources of the sound, such as the position of speakers or instruments, as well as how loudly they play. Other parts of the equation would represent the geometry of the room and the material its walls are made of. Solving that equation would give you the volume at different points in the concert hall.” In the integral equation that describes the relationship between sound sources, room shape and the volume at specific locations, the features of the room — the shape and material properties of its walls — can be represented by the equation’s kernel. This is the part the Penn Engineering researchers are able to represent in a physical way, through the precise arrangement of air holes in their metamaterial Swiss cheese. “Our system allows you to change the inputs that represent the locations of the sound sources by changing the properties of the wave you send into the system,” Engheta says, “but if you want to change the shape of the room, for example, you will have to make a new kernel.”
(tags: computing analog computers hardware papers swiss-cheese equations)
Cloud Shell – Google Cloud Platform
I had no idea about this — every google user has instant in-browser shell access to a Linux VM with 1.7GB of RAM
Troubleshooting Problems With Native (Off-Heap) Memory in Java Applications
quite good advice on dealing with memory problems caused by off-heap DirectByteBuffers in java 8. ‘Furthermore, the JDK caches one or more DirectByteBuffers per thread, and by default, there is no limit on the number or size of these buffers. As a result, if a Java app creates many threads that perform I/O using HeapByteBuffers, and/or these buffers are big, the JVM process may end up using a lot of additional native memory that looks like a leak’. ‘java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Direct buffer memory’ is the indicative error message.
(tags: java off-heap buffers memory memory-leaks gc jdk ops)
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The Fake Disease That Saved Lives:
On October 1943, the Nazis raided a Jewish ghetto in Rome, and many Jews fled to Fatebenefratelli, where Borromeo admitted them as “patients”. The refugees were given a new [fake] fatal disease—Syndrome K—in order to identify them from the actual patients.
(tags: wwii syndrome-k fakes diseases rome giovanni-borromeo hospitals jews resistance)
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The Go implementation of the Common Expression Language (CEL). CEL is a non-Turing complete language designed to be portable and fast. It is well suited to embedded applications expression evaluation with familiar syntax and features, protocol buffer support, and not needing the sandboxing needed for a runtime like JavaScript or Lua.
(tags: scripting golang go cel languages coding configuration config embedded)
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‘a cross-over inspired by many other great hash algorithms, which proves substantially faster than existing variants of xxHash, across basically all dimensions.’
(tags: hashing algorithms xxhash xxh3 checksums performance)
2-hour-long meetings can impair cognitive functioning
‘Study shoes three people in a conference room over 2 hours can result in a Co2 level that can impair cognitive functioning. Ie. If you’re making decisions at the end of the meeting, you’re mentally less qualified to do so.’ Well, I’d say that fatigue could also result in this, but it’s interesting to see how unhealthy the typical office environment can be. (via Jeff Dean)
(tags: via:jeffdean meetings work offices brain co2 cognition)
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Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, this report provides a snapshot of an industry [news media] caught between the pressure to deliver page views, the impulse to cover manipulators and “trolls,” and the disgust (expressed in interviewees’ own words) of accidentally propagating extremist ideology. After reviewing common methods of “information laundering” of radical and racist messages through the press, Phillips uses journalists’ own words to propose a set of editorial “better practices” intended to reduce manipulation and harm. As social and digital media are leveraged to reconfigure the information landscape, Phillips argues that this new domain requires journalists to take what they know about abuses of power and media manipulation in traditional information ecosystems; and apply and adapt that knowledge to networked actors, such as white nationalist networks online.
(tags: media news harassment nazis fascism overton-window journalism racism press)
Ash Sarkar on how to counter the new right
‘a) Acknowledge that the fascist threat has changed. It’s political operations are far more nebulous and diffuse; it works in political institutions and dark corners of the internet; it will adopt and distort liberal tropes and talking points. b) Deal with the fact that traditional forms of policing will be of little effectiveness in countering it. Those with the most power to inhibit the dissemination of far-right and racist ideology are the digital platforms they rely on: reddit, Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. c) Transform current affairs media. For too long, producers and editors have taken the alt-right at their word, and framed issues as free speech/limits of offensive humour. That must change. Unless you’re willing to do rigorous research first, don’t commission the debate. d) Overhaul the teaching of PSHE & Citizenship in education to prepare young people for the desensitising and extreme content they will see online. Create space for healthy debate and discussion in respectful environments. Don’t let groomers take advantage of their curiousity. e) Get a very big bin, and put Melanie Phillips, Rod Liddle, and Douglas Murray in it. Then fire the bin into outer space.’
(tags: alt-right fascism media politics internet social-media twitter reddit ash-sarkar)
Why Do so Many Egyptian Statues Have Broken Noses? – Artsy
wow, TIL. ‘The ancient Egyptians, it’s important to note, ascribed important powers to images of the human form. They believed that the essence of a deity could inhabit an image of that deity, or, in the case of mere mortals, part of that deceased human being’s soul could inhabit a statue inscribed for that particular person. These campaigns of vandalism were therefore intended to “deactivate an image’s strength,” as Bleiberg put it.’
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‘one captain calling the flight manual “inadequate and almost criminally insufficient”‘ ‘The disclosures found by The News reference problems during Boeing 737 Max 8 flights with an autopilot system, and they were all during takeoff and nose-down situations while trying to gain altitude.’
(tags: boeing planes safety autopilots 737max)
What (And Why) I’m Stockpiling For Brexit
Jack Monroe’s shopping list. may be coming in handy soon, unfortunately
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Hardin’s paper starts with a history of the English Commons — publicly held lands that were collectively owned and managed — and the claim that commons routinely fell prey to the selfish human impulse to overgraze your livestock on public land (and that even non-selfish people would overgraze their animals because they knew that their more-selfish neighbors would do so even if they didn’t). But this isn’t what actually happened to the Commons: they were stable and well-managed until other factors (e.g. rich people trying to acquire even more land) destabilized them. Hardin wasn’t just inventing false histories out of a vacuum. He was, personally, a nasty piece of work: a white supremacist and eugenicist, and the Tragedy of the Commons paper is shot through with this vile ideology, arguing that poor people should not be given charity lest they breed beyond their means (Hardin also campaigned against food aid). Hardin was a director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the white nationalist Social Contract Press, and co-founded anti-immigrant groups like Californians for Population Stabilization and The Environmental Fund.
(tags: commons capitalism racism garrett-hardin tragedy-of-the-commons politics privatization public-ownership)
How Theranos used the USPTO to defraud investors and patients
When legendary grifter Elizabeth Holmes was 19 years old, she conceived of a medical device that could perform extensive diagnostics in an eyeblink from only a single drop of blood; she had no idea how such a device would work or whether it was even possible, but that didn’t stop her from drawing up a patent application for her “invention” and repeatedly submitting to the patent office until, eventually, she was awarded a patent for what amounted to a piece of uninspiring design fiction. For Holmes, the patent was key to convincing investors, partners, and patients that her massive, years-long fraud (a company called “Theranos” bilked investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars) was legit; the USPTO helped her out by trumpeting the importance of patents to “inventors” like Holmes, comparing her to Benjamin Franklin in their public communications. Patents are only supposed to be issued for devices with “utility” — that is, they have to actually work before you can get a patent for them. But it’s been decades since the USPTO has paid meaningful attention to this criterion when evaluating applications, handing out patents for imaginary “inventions” to con artists, delusional hucksters, and other “inventors” who are willing to pay the filing fees that keep the lights on at the Patent Office. And since most people only have a vague idea of the rigor used in patent examination, these patents for design fiction can be used as impressive “proof” when crooks set out to deceive their marks. [….] ‘More than a decade after Holmes’ first patent application, Theranos had still not managed to build a reliable blood-testing device. By then the USPTO had granted it hundreds of patents. Holmes had been constructing a fantasy world from the minute she started writing her first application, and the agency was perfectly happy to play along.’
(tags: fraud patents uspto theranos inventions boing-boing)
National Climate Assessment: How to deal with despair over climate change – Vox
The dominant narrative around climate change tells us that it’s our fault. We left the lights on too long, didn’t close the refrigerator door, and didn’t recycle our paper. I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. … Don’t give in to that shame. It’s not yours. The oil and gas industry is gaslighting you. That same IPCC report revealed that a mere 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global climate emissions. These people are locking you and everything you love into a tomb. You have every right to be pissed all the way off. And we have to make them hear about it.
(tags: climate climate-change anger capitalism ipcc fossil-fuels future)
camelcamelcamel, a free Amazon price tracker
‘Our free Amazon price tracker monitors millions of products and alerts you when prices drop, helping you decide when to buy.’ Supports amazon.co.uk, handily
Why do remote meetings suck so much?
Unstructured, “caucus”-style meetings suck particularly badly for remote workers.
When audio/visual delays exacerbate the caucus problem for people who always get the floor in meetings, it looks to them like a new problem. It’s not new; it’s just normally experienced by people in meetings with lower caucus scores. Leadership doesn’t notice because people in leadership positions tend to have higher caucus scores, and being in a position of leadership also tends to boost your caucus score (basically because people interrupt you less). But that’s a weakness of the way we identify decision-makers: good ideas come from everywhere, and especially from people who do a lot of thinking and observing before they say anything. Making meetings more accessible to remote employees doesn’t just make meetings more accessible to remote employees; it makes meetings more accessible to everyone.
(tags: team meetings remote communication management caucus-score remote-work)
Why did Sumerians use the sexagesimal system?
TIL that 60 is countable using the fingers of both hands, and this ancient Mesopotamian counting technique is still used in India, Pakistan, Indochina, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria and Egypt apparently
(tags: sexagesimal 12 60 counting fingers history sumerian mesopotamia)
Algorithms aren’t racist. Your skin is just too dark.
More than a few observers have recommended that instead of pointing out failures, I should simply make sure I use additional lighting. Silence is not the answer. The suggestion to get more lights to increase illumination in an already lit room is a stop gap solution. Suggesting people with dark skin keep extra lights around to better illuminate themselves misses the point. Should we change ourselves to fit technology or make technology that fits us?
(tags: ethics racism ai algorithms cameras melanin skin video videoconferencing)
“Understanding Real-World Concurrency Bugs in Go” (paper)
‘Go advocates for the usage of message passing as the means of inter-thread communication and provides several new concurrency mechanisms and libraries to ease multi-threading programming. It is important to understand the implication of these new proposals and the comparison of message passing and shared memory synchronization in terms of program errors, or bugs. Unfortunately, as far as we know, there has been no study on Go’s concurrency bugs. In this paper, we perform the first systematic study on concurrency bugs in real Go programs. We studied six popular Go software including Docker, Kubernetes, and gRPC. We analyzed 171 concurrency bugs in total, with more than half of them caused by non-traditional, Go-specific problems. Apart from root causes of these bugs, we also studied their fixes, performed experiments to reproduce them, and evaluated them with two publicly-available Go bug detectors. Overall, our study provides a better understanding on Go’s concurrency models and can guide future researchers and practitioners in writing better, more reliable Go software and in developing debugging and diagnosis tools for Go.’ (via Bill de hOra)
(tags: via:dehora golang go concurrency bugs lint synchronization threading threads bug-detection)
Paper: Hyperscan: A Fast Multi-pattern Regex Matcher for Modern CPUs
a software based, large-scale regex matcher designed to match multiple patterns at once (up to tens of thousands of patterns at once) and to ‘stream‘ (that is, match patterns across many different ‘stream writes’ without holding on to all the data you’ve ever seen). To my knowledge this makes it unique. RE2 is software based but doesn’t scale to large numbers of patterns; nor does it stream (although it could). It occupies a fundamentally different niche to Hyperscan; we compared the performance of RE2::Set (the RE2 multiple pattern interface) to Hyperscan a while back. Most back-tracking matchers (such as libpcre) are one pattern at a time and are inherently incapable of streaming, due to their requirement to backtrack into arbitrary amounts of old input.
(tags: regex regular-expressions algorithms hyperscan sensory-networks regexps simd nfa)
Thought-provoking thread on Facebook/YouTube content moderation
Extremely thought-provoking thread on the horrors of Facebook/YouTube content moderation, from Andrew Strait:
My time doing this work convinced me there is no ultimate mitigation measure for the mental harm it causes. Automation is not a silver bullet – it requires massive labeled data sets by moderators on a continuing basis to ensure accuracy and proper model fit. There are steps to make this process less worse, but IMO it all comes back to a basic question – what technologies are worth the incredible human suffering and cost that moderators will inevitably experience? Is image search worth it? Is YouTube? Is Facebook? I don’t have an answer. But these platforms create the need for this kind of horrific work and that must be considered at the forefront of design and deployment of any platform, not as an afterthought.
(tags: horror moderation youtube facebook video content mental-health andrew-strait image-search images labelling google)
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Nice new workflow system built on Kubernetes and Docker
(tags: k8s kubernetes docker containers workflow pipelines architecture batch nightly-jobs ops)
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interesting, a synchronization daemon from Databricks which they use to synch up dev repos with a remote “devbox” in EC2 for heavyweight compilation
(tags: remote-compiles compiling devbox databricks coding tools dev ec2)
The Woolsey fire started at the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory
‘The speculative and non-credible have now happened. A fire burned through most of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a site contaminated with radioactivity and toxic chemicals allowed by decades of shoddy environmental controls.’ This site is legendary as a place where dangerous, toxic and radioactive chemicals were experimented with – indeed it was where the 1959 sodium reactor partial meltdown occurred. I wouldn’t want to have been downwind of this fire…
(tags: health santa-susana-field-laboratory nuclear fast-breeders atomic-energy meltdowns history toxic-waste california woolsey-fire wildfires)