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.

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.

Now to perform a circular crop.

Normally, the arrangement of mines is decided at the start of the game (except for some trickery so that you cannot lose on the first click). But what if there was no pre-determined arrangement, and the game was allowed to choose after you play?

An interesting article describing the logic of this original minesweeper game.

Federal public comment websites currently are unable to detect Deepfake Text once submitted. I created a computer program (a bot) that generated and submitted 1,001 deepfake comments regarding a Medicaid reform waiver to a federal public comment website, stopping submission when these comments comprised more than half of all submitted comments. I then formally withdrew the bot comments.

The original system study, the key innovations, and the forgotten heroes of the world’s first — and still greatest — global navigation satellite system. True history, told by the people who made it.

I like to use Makefiles. I like to use Makefiles in Java. I like to use Makefiles in Erlang. I like to use Makefiles in Elixir. And most recently, I like to use Makefiles in Ruby. I think you, too, would like to use Makefiles in your environment, and the engineering community would benefit if more of us used Makefiles, in general.

When my scientist colleagues and I invented the internet 50 years ago, we did not anticipate that its dark side would emerge with such ferocity — or that we would feel an urgent need to fix it.

I often advocate people surrounding me to build their own side projects. I believe they can fulfill you in so many ways: for your career, your relationships, or your independence. Buffer, the company I currently work for, was itself a side project.
I’ve built myself multiple side projects. The major ones being PartyInBeijing (inactive), Nodablock (inactive), Citymayor (need to fix), and now TravelHustlers. I believe each of them contributed and lead me to my current situation: being satisfied in my career, financially, and socially.

The best designers employ specific habits, learned practices, and observed principles when they work. Here are a few of them.

1. Experts involve the user
2. Experts design elegant abstractions
3. Experts focus on the essence
4. Experts simulate continually
5. Experts look around
6. Experts reshape the problem space
7. Experts see error as opportunity
8. Experts think about what they are not designing

(read the article: nice pictures to visualize the different concepts :-))

Somewhere around 2014 I found an /etc/passwd file in some dumps of the BSD 3 source tree, containing passwords of all the old timers such as Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian W. Kernighan, Steve Bourne and Bill Joy.

Clever tricks work around major hurdles, but it's not a route to high performance.

We venture into the dark, fascinating, and often misunderstood world of the Defense Department's code word and nickname generating processes.

Most of the talk about renewable energy is aimed at electricity production. However, most of the energy we need is heat, which solar panels and wind turbines cannot produce efficiently. To power industrial processes like the making of chemicals, the smelting of metals or the production of microchips, we need a renewable source of thermal energy. Direct use of solar energy can be the solution, and it creates the possibility to produce renewable energy plants using only renewable energy plants, paving the way for a truly sustainable industrial civilization.

A couple of years back, even researchers would wave off using DNA to store data as something too futuristic to have any practical value. Today, you can extend PostgreSQL with the right software and bio-chemical modules, and run SQL on DNA.

Interesting links on technology and programming.

Moreover, the shaarli showcases the use of a plugin to suggest the top 5 related links to each bookmark.

Fake Text uses AI to analyze text and then generate incredibly detailed and realistic written responses to it, giving the impression that an exchange between humans is taking place. The AI analyses text patterns to put together disturbingly lucid text, typified by this Reddit thread.

Launched by leading global AI research lab OpenAI, Fake Text is already recognized as so potentially dangerous that even its inventors have publicly warned about it.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

I’ve seen the inside of the Google and Amazon tech stacks. There are common threads that run through them and also, I bet, through most BigTechCos. Here and there down the stack is a lot of C++ and vestigial remnants from earlier days, Perl or PHP or whatever. Out in front of humans, of course, JS. But in between, there are oceans and oceans of Java; to a remarkable degree, it runs the Internet. Except for, here and there, you find a small but steadily increasing proportion of Go.