2021-08-20 Nerd Roundup
I knew having Greg Young online this week was going to be a trip, and it was everything I expected. Jon Kern was kind enough to visit us from his treadmill, and my friend James Grenning provided the usual excellent commentary — although I was disappointed that he did not get around to "It must be nice to have that much time on your hands..." We simply ran out of time. Much fun!
| STORY | BUT WHY? |
| Apaches use gunfire to clear panicked desperate crowd trying to leave. Afghans fall off a C-17 taking off from Kabul. | Fall of Kabul. Such a sad story. Lots of tech angles, including much more immediate coverage as it happened and all sorts of memes, vids, and awful jokes |
| Levels of autonomous driving explained | This is a nice reference. I keep coming across trhe auto auto levels idea online and forgetting what each stands for |
| Holy grail discovery' in solid-state physics could usher in new technologies | We're eventually going to run out of Holy Grails, probably long before we run out of killer rabbits. And what the hell is a topological axion insulator, anyway? In many of these stories, there's a difference between something being necessary for super coolness to arrive and being both necessary and sufficient. Any freaking science story should cover this difference and explain it, because that's as much of the story as what actually happened |
| The Topological Axion Insulator and Its Phenomenal Performance | TFA about TFAs. Turns out it's a new tiny super magnet that will make most of our electronic devices go up to 11. Tiny tunable supermagets, now in 3D! They've been theorized about for decades but are now actually being made and studied |
| SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec | Interesting audio nerd stuff, plus somewhat interesting mostly-PR article |
| Yale researchers say social media’s outrage machine has the biggest influence on moderate groups | There some' really sublle Pavlovian dog stuff going on here where we're both the dogs and the lab scientists |
| The Deep Strangeness of the Catholic Church’s Latest Scandal | It's a religious purity war, the kind we're so familiar with in odd social settings now, only playing out in a religious sect, one with a long history of religious wars. Can/will they handle this differenty? Nice ends vs. means discussion, also some interesting commentary from "experts", like it would take hundreds of thousands of dollars to sort through the raw data. Doesn't sound right to me |
| Sure there were divorces and people's lives were ruined. We also made a crappy product. But we had fun doing it! | I don't know what to do with this. In a way, it's a profound and true commentary on our industry, but it can be read so many ways. I am concerned that people will too easily take emotional pot-shots at this guy when I believe his intentions were good. Any effort worth doing will have unpleasant consequences. It's up to each of us to do the best we can to minimize those consequences for ourselves and others and make sure it was somehow worth it all. We can't live in a world where bad things never happen. |
| What domain name to use for your home network | Neat piece of trivia. I might make another run at a DHCP to override my crappy ISP modem. Lotta bickering online about whether to do this or just bite the bullet and buy/use your own domain. Note that the old recommendation was to use .local, which I didn't know and now it's already deprecated |
| Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook | Great doc for teaching and creating policy around cybersecurity |
| Imperative Thinking and the Making of Sandwiches | Some timeless thoughts. Also, why the heavy SQL hate from the community? |
| Programming Language Fragiilty | Michael Feather's comment: It's interesting to see this as a language modularity failure. |
| You can list a directory containing 8 million files! But not with ls. | Woo hoo! I can do this! Fun times. Auto-balancing journaling merkle-tree filestystems, anyone? Also nerd argument, ls doesn't have a problem? It can stream as it goes, see ls -l -f |
| A half-century in Roanoke journalism | Personal note: the guy who gave me my first freelance writing assignment is retiring. Thank goodness for folks reaching out to amateurs and asking them to play along with the professionals |
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