Dead simple games made with word vectors.

Hot things glow red, hotter things yellow, and really hot things white. When you heat glass, it does not shine forth with an encouraging green or pale.

Long article dealing with the several aspects and impacts of climate change.

With many references to papers and multimedia content to deepen the concepts.

Over the past year, I’ve worked on and off documentation for WordPress. I started contributing during a freeze around launch to help developers transition to the new platform. I found writing documentation is something I enjoy, plus rewarding to help and educate people. Though it’s not a primary part of my job, I’ve continued to find time here and there to keep contributing.

In this time, I’ve read various resources on technical writing and documentation. These are my notes, both to help me remember later, but also as a tool to help me think about writing now.

A few ones:

• To Jeff Dean, "NP" means "No Problemo"
• Jeff Dean's IDE doesn't do code analysis, it does code appreciation
• Jeff Dean's PIN is the last 4 digits of pi
• Google Search was Jeff Dean's Noogler Project
• Jeff Dean invented MapReduce so he could sort his fan mail
• Emacs' preferred editor is Jeff Dean
• Jeff Dean doesn't exist, he's actually an advanced AI created by Jeff Dean
• Jeff Dean compiles and runs his code before submitting, but only to check for compiler and CPU bugs
• Jeff Dean can instantiate abstract classes
• gcc -O4 sends your code to Jeff Dean for a complete rewrite
• When Jeff Dean listens to mp3s, he just cats them to /dev/dsp and does the decoding in his head
• Jeff Dean's resume lists the things he hasn't done; it's shorter that way
• Jeff Dean once implemented a web server in a single printf() call. Other engineers added thousands of lines of explanatory comments but still don't understand exactly how it works. Today that program is known as GWS
• When your code has undefined behavior, you get a seg fault and corrupted data. When Jeff Dean's code has undefined behavior, a unicorn rides in on a rainbow and gives everybody free ice cream
• When Jeff Dean says "Hello World", the world says "Hello Jeff"
• Jeff Dean traps the KILL signal
• Jeff Dean programs don't SEGFAULT. The memory rearranges itself in order to put data and code where it belongs.

Detection and attribution typically aims to find long-term climate signals in internal, often short-term variability. Here, common methods are extended to high-frequency temperature and humidity data, detecting instantaneous, global-scale climate change since 1999 for any year and 2012 for any day.

There is often the desire to start "standard" or pre-configured workspaces in tmux.
For example, run tail on two log files in a pane, or to start both vim and mysql in a pane, etc.

If you try to find information about starting tmux workspaces, you typically get advised to use wrapper programs such as tmuxinator, tmux-resurrect, or tmux-continuum. These programs may be great, but the article proposes a simpler approach.

I personally like this approach.

In a world of evolving and targeted cyber threats understanding your attacker’s intentions and tools has never been more crucial. By deliberately maintaining vulnerable systems, or Honey Pots, and letting the attackers in you can analyse their activity and gather intelligence so you can be ahead of the game if you ever have a compromise. When running an SSH Honey Pot you can gain a full log of the commands an attacker attempts to run on your system and any files which they attempt to download and can be a great way to obtain samples of malicious software for analysis or understand the techniques used by an attacker to scour your data.

Generate images of chessboards with specific positions, share them around the web!

This article, explains different ways of preventing Git from repeatedly prompting for username and password when interacting with a remote repository over HTTP(S).

In one of the breakthrough experiments, researchers at the University of Bristol’s Quantum Engineering Technology Labs (QET Labs) demonstrate the quantum teleportation of information between two programmable chip for the first time, which they remark is a cornerstone of quantum communications and quantum computing.

Quantum teleportation offers quantum state transfer of a quantum particle from one place to another by utilising entanglement. Teleportation is not only useful for quantum communication but is a fundamental building-block of optical quantum computing. Establishing an entangled communication link between two chips in the lab however has proven to be highly challenging.

“Each chip was then fully programmed to perform a range of demonstrations which utilise the entanglement.

“The flagship demonstration was a two-chip teleportation experiment, whereby the individual quantum state of a particle is transmitted across the two chips after a quantum measurement is performed. This measurement utilises the strange behaviour of quantum physics, which simultaneously collapses the entanglement link and transfers the particle state to another particle already on the receiver chip.”

Researchers at EPFL have developed an ultra-light robotic insect that uses its soft artificial muscles to move at 3 cm per second across different types of terrain. It can be folded or crushed and yet continue to move.

BusKill is a Kill Cord for your laptop implementing a Dead Man Switch using $20 in USB hardware + udev rule to trigger your laptop self-destruct if stolen.

A funny checklist to understand the common errors from all the persons/companies wishing to propose their own "brand new programming language".

You may have heard about Bandersnatch, an interactive film released on Netflix as part of the Black Mirror series. I’ve heard about it when it was released, but didn’t get around to watch it until recently, and I was surprised at how deep and thorough the implementation is.

Analysis and numbers of the Bandersnatch interactive film.

How to combine data spread over two CSV files, like separate tables in a normalized relational database.

From a tiny observation at work about odd behaviors of spinlocks I spent months trying to find good benchmarks, (still not entirely successful) writing my own spinlocks, mutexes and condition variables and even contributing a patch to the Linux kernel. The main thing I’ll try to answer is to give some more informed guidance on the endless discussion of mutex vs spinlock. Besides that I found that most mutex implementations are really good, that most spinlock implementations are pretty bad, and that the Linux scheduler is OK but far from ideal.

Rhasspy (pronounced RAH-SPEE) is an open source, fully offline voice assistant toolkit for many languages that works well with Home Assistant, Hass.io, and Node-RED.

exa is a replacement for the venerable ls command. exa sports more features and arguably better defaults. Free and open source software.

Formerly known as what, it is a CLI utility for displaying current network utilization by process, connection and remote IP/hostname.