2021-12-10 Nerd Roundup

The biggest jump forward in warfare since the machine gun, accidental warp bubbles and the math that powers them, CSS For-loops, InfoSec leaks, CRDTs for ASTs, and more.

2021-12-10 Nerd Roundup

The tech overlords were kind to us this week. We only had two hang-ups with the connection, and a four-guest panel worked great. (In fact, I think it was one of the better/funnier roundups). We got into a couple of very interesting tech discussions that I had to cut short for time. One of them was about Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). I imagine most tech folks will be hearing more and more about them over the next several years or so.

SpinLaunch looks really cool! But damn, it also looks really dangerous!

It was a very relaxed chat, and it made me want to build my very own giant potato gun restaurant.

links
STORY BUT WHY?
QUESTION: which words used in #infosec do you consider to be "marketing words" and therefore meaningless when describing a tool or product?

Buzzword Bingo
fun game!
For loops in CSS Yikes! Make it stop! Make it stop! My eyes! My eyes!
Worldline numerics applied to custom Casimir geometry generates unanticipated intersection with Alcubierre warp metric

DARPA project news. Accidental warp bubbles? Commentary from HN/physicists points out the huge number of orders of magnitutde between real-world spacetime bending and casmir. So ... so far, yes but no?
Warp drive? Sign me up!


Compare and contrast with Bob dole's last essay
1 in 10 UK folks dropped a parent as a friend because of Brexit? Seriously? How are we doing on lumber tarrifs from Portugal? International cheese standards. Politics can be extremely important, but your parents? I just don't get it. Note that there are abusive families, but it seems we're casting the net quite broad here
Kamikaze drones: A new weapon brings power and peril to the U.S. military The switchblade 300. Welcome to the future. We had a lot of "nothing to see here" regarding drones over the last decade. People should know that drones aren't necessarily what we think they are.
New snapdragons. Me want
Ubiquiti Developer Charged With Extortion, Causing 2020 “Breach”

HN comments including backstory. I hear that insider ISP security hacks are no joke ... and becoming more and more common
Employee hacks his own company, tries to blackmail them, and when that doesn't work leaks to the press that his company was hacked? Sounds like a movie plot. And the kicker: Krebs, the guy doing this report, was the place the hacker leaked the original info! But somehow they overlook bringing that up
Is SpinLaunch Viable?

Spinlaunch : Should be a MythBuster Episode
Want to do the spin launch guys
Where is the CRDT for syntax trees

HN discussion
Been wanting to do CDRTs for a while, and this would be a freakin' incredible coding-based applciation if we could do it. Think Google docs with everybody editing asynchronously. An alternate in some situations to a big git setup?
How to Read Less News But Be More Informed, According to a Futurist good advice to help move away from bright and shiny syndrome
Following the Unix philosophy without getting left padded There's an acorn under that tree somewhere. Good luck! The key here is semantic scoping and how it relates to dynamicism. Nobody needed to have a live update to left pad. That had nothing to do with dependency issues

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