2021-11-19 Nerd Roundup
We had The Bobster, aka Uncle Bob this week, along with Jon Kern and the one and only Scott Ambler. The entire thing went down with only one technical hitch. (We've come a long ways since the first NR) We were unable to take Scott's lunch money, but I guess he can be one of the nerd clan anyway. We need a token Canadian.
Scott is proving to be a natural at Nerd Roundup, able to dive in and out of various technologies while keeping things appropriately silly. Jon gave us some pushback in defense of Ruby and dynamic types that was great to see. (It's a discussion that seems to pop up repeatedly when talking coding). Bob continues to regale us with stories of the retro game he's making in Clojure, Space Wars, which I'm hoping he will demo one week. When I started the roundup, I was concerned about having more than three people at a time, but it looks like so far it's working with four.
| STORY | BUT WHY? |
| C# 10 new feature CallerArgumentExpression, argument check and more | Maybe we could start adding emoji parameter support and little pictures of the author who is using the function |
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Goodbye clean code
Previous HN discussion |
DRY and premature abstraction: a continuing discussion among nerds |
| Online Identity Assassination | Parts of FBI infrastructure hacked. TIL about "identity assassination" |
| Truth ledgers | hoo boy. Looking back, I guess this was coming all along. Many social failure modes here |
| The Moon’s top layer alone has enough oxygen to sustain 8 billion people for 100,000 years | There's oxygen in dem der hills! CO2 buildup looks like the real problem, not water or oxygen |
| The Hunt for Earth’s Deep Hidden Oceans | Another one of those submarine (Ha!) science stories that keeps percolating in the background. Wonder what will come of it? |
| A New Theory for Systems That Defy Newton’s Third Law | What's going to happen to the lawbreakers? |
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Russia blows up a satellite, creating a dangerous debris cloud in space
HN thread |
I think we're reaching a WTAF moment with Russia. See HN comments |
| Kessler Syndrome | Some folks think we're already here |
| Cyber Marines could be empowered to act boldly under commandant’s future force vision | This is a really cool idea. I just can't see it ever actually happening |
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Also, here's the US Coast Guard essay on desperately needing to switch from monoliths to microservices. Below is the Monty Python Cheese Shop Sketch which I've captured to prevent it from disappearing off YT at some random later date.