Gooooooood morning, Earth!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.
AI, bots and robots
- Detecting ‘Professional’ Malicious Online Reviews with Machine Learning
- Visual explanations of core machine learning concepts
- AMD Xilinx Kria KR260 Robotics Kit Launched
- DEVONagent, a smart web (re)search assistant for the Mac
- AI-art isn’t art: DALL-E and other AI artists offer only the imitation of art
- Deep Learning in Business Analytics: A Clash of Expectations and Reality
- I made an AI write a story about AI then I made another AI illustrate it
I was walking home from school by myself when I saw it. A robot, just standing in the middle of the street. - SARS2 infects the Neurons before it is seen in the Blood
Neurological symptoms are increasingly associated with COVID-19, suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 is neuroinvasive. Although studies have focused on neuroinvasion through infection of olfactory neurons and supporting cells or hematogenous spread, little attention has been paid to the susceptibility of the peripheral nervous system to infection or to alternative routes of neural invasion. We show that neurons in the central and peripheral nervous systems are susceptible to productive infection with SARS-CoV-2. Infection of K18-hACE2 mice, wild-type mice, and primary neuronal cultures demonstrates viral RNA, protein, and infectious virus in periphera - How many bots are on Twitter? Question is tough to answer and misses the point
- Learning Theory and the Neurotic Paradox
- We use Dependabot to secure GitHub
- Implementation of Imagen, Google’s text-to-image neural network, in PyTorch
- Mental time travel: a hierarchical memory for reinforcement learning agents
- Data ordering attacks on deep neural networks
- Decoding A City In A Bottle
I’m trying to understand https://twitter.com/KilledByAPixel/status/1517294627996545024. - ESPHome – Connect ESP32 with Sensors to HomeAssistant
- Bots behind the game console shortage
Blockchain and decentralization
- .01% of Bitcoin holders hold 27% of all Bitcoin
- Databases = Frameworks for Distributed Systems
- Top Stablecoins Shed $7B in May as Traders Redeem Tokens En Masse
The top four stablecoins by market capitalization have shrunk around 4% in May, with Tether losing 11% of its supply to redemptions - The philosophy of Bitcoin and the question of money
- The Bitcoin Investment Thesis Is Broken
- Minimizing correlated failures in distributed systems
- Two thought experiments to evaluate automated stablecoins
- A Response to Paul Krugman from a Keynesian Bitcoiner
- Joseph Stiglitz: ‘We should shut down the cryptocurrencies’
- A Cryptocurrency Comic – PeerTangle the So-Called Crypto Wizard
In which Nubbles is sceptical about PeerTangles’ self-styled ‘Crypto Wizard’ title.
Woman computer scientist of the week
Thelma Estrin was an American computer scientist and engineer who did pioneering work in the fields of expert systems and biomedical engineering. She was one of the first to apply computer technology to healthcare and medical research. She was professor emerita in the Department of Computer Science, University of California at Los Angeles.
Cloud and architecture
- Felienne Hermans: How patterns in variable names can make code easier to read
- Securing AWS Lambda Function URLs
- AWS Should Be Easy
- What One-person SaaS Healthchecks.io uses for hosting, hardware and software
Here’s the summary of the hardware and the software that powers Healthchecks.io.
Hardware
Since 2017, Healthchecks.io runs on dedicated servers at Hetzner. The current lineup is:
HAProxy servers: 4x AX41-NVMe servers (Ryzen 3600, 6 cores)Web servers: 3x AX41-NVMe servers (Ryzen 3600, 6 core
- DigitalOcean Functions: A powerful serverless computing solution
- Vantage Autopilot – Save 50%+ on AWS EC2 Costs
- AWS SNS vs. SQS – Main Differences
- Architecture Notes: Datasette
Simon is the creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django web framework. Formerly he was a JSK journalism fellow at Stanford, and prior to that an Engineering Director at Eventbrite. Who is going to be talking about Datasette, SQLite and the challenges of building a server-side web application that also works in both Electron and WebAssembly. - Building a Cloud Database from Scratch: Why We Moved from C++ to Rust
- Neon – Serverless Postgres
Postgres made for developers. Easy to Use, Scalable, Cost efficient solution for your next project. - Exploring Architectural Concepts Building a Card Game
- Ariel Ekblaw on building beautiful architecture in space
Development and languages
- Why SQLite may become foundational for digital progress
- Whalesong: A Racket to JavaScript Compiler
- Gitee to review all code by temporarily closing public open-source projects
- The Dao of Functional Programming
- C# 11 Preview Updates – Raw string literals, UTF-8 and more
- Programming with Nothing
- Programmed Inequality
- Case Studies in USB-C Debugging – Analog and digital compliance of a PD-enable
- STUNner: A Kubernetes ingress gateway for WebRTC
- What’s in Which Python
- Proper Use of Git Tags
- Things I’d Want to See Improved in WordPress Core
- The Future of the Gitlab Web IDE
- Minimalism in Programming Language Design
- Logitech MX Mechanical Keyboard
Shop MX Mechanical. Features low profile form factor, smart illumination, quick charge, Bluetooth and, 3 Unique switch types – tactile, clicky, linear. - Python utility for tracking third party dependencies within a library
Python utility for tracking third party dependencies within a library – GitHub – IBM/import-tracker: Python utility for tracking third party dependencies within a library - Digital technology demands a new political philosophy
- Heroku GitHub integration finally coming back online after a month offline
- Windows Update vs. My Router
- Terminal.Gui – Cross Platform Terminal UI Toolkit for .NET
- GitHub Is Down Again
- Microsoft Windows operating system talks to 291 hosts and 2,764 IPs
- GitHub saved plaintext passwords of NPM users in log files, post mortem reveals
- Web scraping with Python open knowledge
Repository of open knowledge about web scraping in Python – GitHub – reanalytics-databoutique/webscraping-open-project: Repository of open knowledge about web scraping in Python - Contribution Graph as a Git Command
- Senators Draft Bill to Ban Use of Digital Yuan in US-Based Mobile Apps
Quote of the week
It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.
— Keith Braithwaite
Enterprises
- Intel plans immersion lab to chill its power-hungry chips
- Netflix’s Bad Habits Have Caught Up with It
- Amazon Redshift Re-Invented
- Google blocked patch to disable extraction to APK
- Details on AMD’s Quirky Chipset Solutions for AM5
Eastbridge? Westbridge? - Intelligent Indentation, Seriously
- Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model
- Seven Teslas have caught fire in the last four days
- DuckDuckGo’s Microsoft deal disallows blocking MS trackers on 3rd party sites
- Docker Acquires Tilt
- Stripe App Marketplace
- Linen – Make your Discord community Google-searchable
- May 2022 core update releasing for Google Search
- Google has been DDoSing Sourcehut for over a year
- Parsing JSON faster with Intel AVX-512
- FTC Fines Twitter $150M for Using 2FA Phone Numbers for Ad Targeting
It’s FTC 101. Companies can’t tell consumers they will use their personal information for one purpose and then use it for another. - Nvidia Adds Liquid-Cooled GPUs for Sustainable, Efficient Computing
A liquid-cooled NVIDIA A100 PCIe GPU is the first in a line of GPUs for mainstream servers responding to customer demand for high-performance, green data centers. - Lidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon
Two remarkably large sites in southwest Amazonia, belonging to the Casarabe culture, include complex civic-ceremonial architecture and large water-management infrastructure, representing a type of tropical low-density urbanism that has not previously been described in Amazonia. - Jack Dorsey leaves Twitter’s board of directors
Dorsey signaled his plans last fall. - Broadcom to Acquire VMware for $61B
Broadcom Inc said on Thursday it will acquire cloud computing company VMware Inc in a $61 billion cash-and stock deal, the chipmaker’s biggest and boldest bid to diversify its business into enterprise software. - The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn
- ‘Mind blowing’ ancient settlements uncovered in the Amazon
- Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212m CEO pay
- Proton Is Trying to Become Google–Without Your Data
The encrypted-email company, popular with the security-conscious, has a plan to go mainstream. - Microsoft to Reportedly Recognize Raven Software’s Union After Aquisition
- Google Has Banned the Training of Deepfakes in Colab
Other news
- Sam Bankman-Fried Described Yield Farming and Left Matt Levine Stunned
- Teach your Kids Bridge, not Poker
- Collection of US Navy Training Courses Developed
- When we learn more about a stranger, we feel like they know us better too
By Matthew Warren. Knowing about local police officers also reduces sense of anonymity and lowers crime rate. - Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2022
- The Math Prodigy Whose Hack Upended a Crypto Platform Won’t Return Funds
- The math prodigy whose hack upended DeFi won’t return funds
- Lessons Learned from Running Apache Airflow at Scale
Shopify shares some of the lessons we learned and solutions we built in order to run Airflow at scale. - Many graduate programs are “scams,” according to higher education policy analyst
As many as 40% of master’s degree programs cost more than the value they return to the student, recent research shows. - My free course for learning Imba
- A Kernel Hacker Meets Fuchsia OS
- Lessons learned as a software developer turned project manager
- GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell
a game to learn (or teach) how to use standard commands in a Unix shell – GitHub – phyver/GameShell: a game to learn (or teach) how to use standard commands in a Unix shell - MicroFLENG – concurrent logic programming for CP/M, C64 and the “uxn” VM
- The Last Cigarette: Cinema’s most seductive prop
- Last public payphone removed from Manhattan streets
- Linux distro downloads MySQL database password with curl to “fix” security bug
- AlmaLinux 9
- PayPal Announces Layoffs, Closes San Fransisco Office
Long-Term Benzodiazepine Use Attacks Synapses Long-term use of benzodiazepines has been linked to cognitive deficits according to Ludwig Maximilian University Of Munich (LMU) researchers. Benzodiazepines are a class of medications that are used to treat anxiety and sleep disorders. While short-t
For Immediate Release — IRVINE, CA, USA —
Deus Finance’s stablecoin Dei is the latest stabelcoin to lose its 1-to-1 peg to the U.S. dollar. The coin is currently trading at $0.64
wazero: the zero dependency WebAssembly runtime for Go developers – GitHub – tetratelabs/wazero: wazero: the zero dependency WebAssembly runtime for Go developers
Render mathematical expressions in Markdown
Not All Heroes Wear Capes
Windows XP Delta Edition is a modification of Windows XP which aims to recreate the Windows XP Beta 2 aesthetic and bring back lost features, functions, and programs from previous versions of…
TL;DR – From May 13-15, 2022, SparkToro and Followerwonk conducted a rigorous, joint analysis of five datasets including a variety of active (i.e.
Microsoft has been deeply rooted in Canada for nearly 40 years and our commitment to help grow Canada’s innovation economy has never been stronger. With the launch of our new headquarters, official opening of our Data Innovation Centre of Excellence and expansion of our regional presence, even more organizations of all sizes and sectors can leverage the power of cloud and data to accelerate their organization’s growth and drive new economic opportunity for Canada.
The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y employ a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based passive entry system. This system allows users with an authorized mobile device or key fob within a short range of the vehicle to unlock and operate the vehicle, with no user interaction required on the mobile device or key fob. This system infers proximity of the mobile device or key fob based on signal strength (RSSI) and latency measurements of cryptographic challenge-response operations conducted over BLE
Last last month, a post from the relatively obscure Good e-Reader claimed that Amazon would finally allow the Kindle to read EPUB files. The story was picked up by all the major tech sites, and for…
FairEmail
Maker of stereos and speakers doomed by market shift to streaming and smartphones
Scientific Reports – Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives
Gophie is the Open Source Gopher browser for Windows, macOS, Linux and many more operating systems with Java support. 
The puzzling movement reduce diagnostic tests because of harmful downstream treatments
Apple’s director of machine learning, Ian Goodfellow, has resigned from his role a little over four years after he joined the company after…
On going beyond message-passing based graph neural networks with physics-inspired “continuous” learning models
The Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) today each released a technical assistance document about disability discrimination when employers use artificial intelligence (AI) and other software tools to make employment decisions.
The development comes after the Luna Foundation Guard announced that its massive bitcoin reserves will be used to defend UST’s dollar peg.
If the exchange goes down, it’s taking investors with it.
Last week, a luna coin was worth $85. Now it’s worth a penny. Here’s why that matters.
Cloud TPU VMs with Ranking & Recommendation acceleration are generally available on Google Cloud. Customers will have direct access to TPU host machines.
Overlay networks based on WebRTC. Contribute to pojntfx/weron development by creating an account on GitHub.
Windows PowerToys are a set of powerful utilities (I can’t live without them btw) that Microsoft just hasn’t implemented into Windows OS.
Pure Javascript OCR for more than 100 Languages ??? – GitHub – naptha/tesseract.js: Pure Javascript OCR for more than 100 Languages ???
Certificate transparency is superb improvement to HTTPS certificate security on the web that’s great for users and businesses, but on…
The first open-source release of GPU kernel modules for the Linux community help improve NVIDIA GPU driver quality and security.
The first open-source release of GPU kernel modules for the Linux community help improve NVIDIA GPU driver quality and security.
New Javacript API will «simplify the access to data for all,» developer says.
My investigation into mission generation in the Stealth Fighter games by Microprose. – GitHub – debugcom/Hacking-F117A: My investigation into mission generation in the Stealth Fighter games by Micr…
A recap of the recent interview process with several companies, what I learned, and what others should know.
https://youtu.be/DkJ9rb85LC0 https://youtu.be/DkJ9rb85LC0 Quickly getting between tmux splits is critical skill for productivity. You Quickly getting between t
Establishes the New York Health program, a comprehensive system of access to health insurance for New York state residents; provides for administrative structure of the plan; provides for powers and duties of the board of trustees, the scope of benefits, payment methodologies and care coordination; establishes the New York Health Trust Fund which would hold monies from a variety of sources to be used solely to finance the plan; enacts provisions relating to financing of New York Health, including a payroll assessment, similar to the Medicare tax; establishes a temporary commission on implementation of the plan; provides for collective negotia
Joey Santore’s YouTube channel, Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t, crosses citizen science with vigilante environmentalism
Vanilla JS TodoMVC App in 2022. Contribute to 1Marc/todomvc-vanillajs-2022 development by creating an account on GitHub.
The behind-the-scenes of our decision to sell Postmark and DMARC Digests to ActiveCampaign in 2022
This is the source code for the original Microsoft 3D Movie Maker released in 1995. This is not supported software. – GitHub – microsoft/Microsoft-3D-Movie-Maker: This is the source code for the or…
Getting to the next level unlocks a lot – more money, more responsibility, more respect, a feeling of progress – and even if you care deeply about other things (your product, your users, etc), you can’t really avoid caring about promotion as well. This post talks a bit about the (well-known) issues with this type of culture, and suggests some alternatives for startups not looking to replicate it.
Offrez à vos utilisateurs la possibilité de partager leurs données financières en toute sécurité afin de simplifier les paiements, de réduire la fraude, d’évaluer les risques et de créer de nouveaux produits.
The original game held a wealth of surprises. Its meta-obsessed follow-up has even more.
Training materials and labs for a "Getting Started" level course on COBOL – GitHub – openmainframeproject/cobol-programming-course: Training materials and labs for a "Getting Started…
I’ve used Linux for many years on servers, but still kept macOS as my main working environment for almost ten years now. A few months ago, I gave up on macOS and started using Fedora as my main operating system on the ThinkPad P1 Gen3 15”.
Click to read more.
This AI Does Not Exist generates realistic descriptions and code snippets of machine learning models given a made-up name.
Spacedrive is an open source cross-platform file explorer, powered by a virtual distributed filesystem written in Rust. – GitHub – spacedriveapp/spacedrive: Spacedrive is an open source cross-platf…
I’ve been concerned about the excesses of the blockchain industry and their spread into all parts of society for some time now. Here I’ve summarized my thoughts regarding the subject.
Even after 10 years of programming, I still have a relentless curiosity about new software algorithms, reading papers and blog posts, and learning from other engineers. The best part, however, really comes when you have the opportunity to implement one algorithm and even customize it for your specific use case. In this post, I will walk you through my journey from understanding cluster membership fundamentals to the implementation of Chitchat, our Rust implementation of the Scuttlebutt algorithm with a phi accrual failure detector.
Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS dominate the smartphone operating system (OS) space. Today 7 out of 10 phones run on the Android OS, while two of the remaining three are most likely to be iOS powered. Occasionally, one out of those three will be using one of the other less known OS’. However, Android’s dominance …
A blog about (mostly) computery things
Git.io deprecation
The Digital Berlin Wall: How Germany (Accidentally) Created a Prototype for Global Online Censorship – Part two The German Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) continues to inspire authoritarian and illiberal internet censorship around the world. In under a year, the number of countries copy-pasting the NetzDG matrix to provide cover and legitimacy for digital censorship andRead More
Web Scraping via Javascript Runtime Heap Snapshots
tl;dr We found that 10% of the 666 most popular Python open source GitHub repositories had the following f-string typo bugs: f prefix was missing:”hello {name}”instead of f”hello …
Elon Musk clinched a deal to buy Twitter Inc for $44 billion cash on Monday in a transaction that will shift control of the social media platform populated by millions of users and global leaders to the world’s richest person.
Mastodon is an open source decentralized social network – by the people for the people. Join the federation and take back control of your social media!
The news of Elon Musk buying Twitter has put Mastodon into the public spotlight as an alternative social network, rapidly exploding our growth with over 30,000 new users in just a single day. This is because at Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bought and owned by any billionaire, and strive to create a more resilient global platform without profit incentives. We believe that your ability to communicate online should not be at the whims of a single commercial company.
Online health information is terrible. How can we fix it?
Google said this week it is expanding the types of data people can ask to have removed from search results, to include personal contact information like your phone number, email address or physical address. The move comes just months after…
The Venice-based COVID-19 testing company doing business as «Sameday Health» allegedly falsified and forged test results, according to a complaint.
Cyberattacks on three European wind-energy companies since the start of the war in Ukraine have raised alarm that hackers sympathetic to Russia are trying to cause mayhem in a sector set to benefit from efforts to lessen reliance on Russian oil and gas. 
From the Big bang to the Heat death of the universe
Update (April 27): Boaz Barak—Harvard CS professor, longtime friend-of-the-blog, and coauthor of my previous guest post on this topic—has just written an awesome FAQ, providing his pers…
The stress hormone cortisol reduces altruistic behaviors and alters brain activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in people with higher levels of empathy.
I’ve been an SELinux complexity apologist for years. Lately, I’ve concluded that every implementation with difficult-to-configure policies is just unmanageable.
A self-described «comically terrible spy» who is believed to have worked with federal authorities investigating the activities of Deutsche…
CLOG – The Common Lisp Omnificent GUI. Contribute to rabbibotton/clog development by creating an account on GitHub.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed into law SB 220, a bill mandating personal finance classes for high school students.
ProPublica’s Justin Elliot on how Intuit built its TurboTax empire. 
A new tool that blends your everyday work apps into one. It’s the all-in-one workspace for you and your team
Contribute to wildarch/jepsen.rqlite development by creating an account on GitHub.
It does everything differently, because of course it does.
Another new release of Git is here! Take a look at some of our highlights on what’s new in Git 2.36.
Memray is a memory profiler for Python. Contribute to bloomberg/memray development by creating an account on GitHub.
Private Profiles
After 16 hours of discussion, negotiators from the European Parliament and EU governments have just made deal on a new EU Digital Services Act. Pirate Party MEP Patrick Breyer sat at the negotiating table as Rapporteur for the Committee on Civil Liberties (LIBE) and summarises:
Brave is rolling out a new feature called De-AMP, which allows Brave users to bypass Google-hosted AMP pages, and instead visit the content’s publisher directly.
MASSIVE dataset and Massively Multilingual NLU (MMNLU-22) competition and workshop will help researchers scale natural-language-understanding technology to every language on Earth.
TL;DR; We are changing std::sort in LLVM’s libcxx. That’s a long story of what it took us to get there and all possible consequences, bugs you might encounter with examples from open so…
A feature rolling out this month uses algorithms to suggest edits in Google Docs, but falls into the same bias traps it’s trying to prevent.
I once wrote an article about being poor, and I started it out with a story about a friend who had spent some time explaining to my wife (who, at the time, was struggling to maintain a household of four on entry-level retail money) how hard up for funds they were, and how stressful it was. The zinger of the story, such as it was, was that the woman and her husband were both doctors. They weren’t bad people, but they came from a context where things like “being broke” had entirely different meanings.
We confirm that in 2020 and 2021 we observed and notified the government of the United Kingdom of multiple suspected instances of Pegasus spyware infections within official UK networks, including the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Training a collaborative filtering based recommendation system on a toy dataset is a sophomore year project in colleges these days. But where the rubber meets the road is building such a system at scale, deploying in production, and serving live requests within a few hundred milliseconds while the user is waiting for the page to load. To build a system like this, engineers have to make decisions spanning multiple moving layers like:
Exploring why Rust is our preferred language for a core WebRTC library
Upgrade your local installation of Git, especially if you are using Git for Windows, or you use Git on a multi-user machine.
Upgrade your local installation of Git, especially if you are using Git for Windows, or you use Git on a multi-user machine.
Contribute to analang/ana development by creating an account on GitHub.
A stable, non-intrusive yet fully functional build of Windows 10 to anyone, who requires the Windows operating system natively
The board voted unanimously to adopt the plan.
How a generation of programmers in the 90s learned to collaborate in the most unlikely of places, now on The ReadME Project:
The StarBook Mk V has an increased chassis size when compared to its predecessor. This allows for a battery that is 10% larger, a 14-inch display, twice the amount of speakers and removable memory.