an optical metamaterial, finally! now they just need to add a gradient to fully transparent plastic on the edges and it would be great #gits #camo

if you though it's just rich text input that's complicated...
https://lord.io/blog/2019/text-editing-hates-you-too/

studying wildlife with drones!
https://twitter.com/HerdHover?s=20

Writing userspace USB drivers for abandoned devices

> a hell of a roller coaster in USB protocol details, kernel debugging/module reverse engineering, and general video format decoding!
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/userspace-usb-drivers

that's why defense in depth is important
https://twitter.com/hashbreaker/status/1198395661403725824

MMORPG's are awesome emergent behavior playgrounds
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/11/18/planet-zoo-is-temporarily-a-game-about-mass-producing-knackered-warthogs/

Nice to see that even in 2019, there's still room for new short, fast, and practical algorithms. Though note that xor filters aren't a replacement for bloom filters, they're more of an optimization of one particular use case.
https://lemire.me/blog/2019/12/19/xor-filters-faster-and-smaller-than-bloom-filters/

Finally, a book that bridges ML with control theory and dynamical systems (and a bit of chaos theory).

Well written, comprehensive overview of the field. Got quite a few insights and filled the gaps.

Also, I was totally surprised to find that dynamical systems research is nowhere near the 4th paradigm (data-intensive scientific discovery). I thought it's my Google-fu is failing me, but it seems there's really no (published) math yet that enables one to robustly identify, describe and simulate anything beyond simple quadratic or periodic processes :(

Now longing for something similar connecting dynamical systems to game theory, catastrophe theory, emergent behaviors, and multi-agent modeling. And something about time-varying systems/processes :)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40714461-data-driven-science-and-engineering

#controltheory #book #dynamicalsystems #bookreview

I haven't dived into underlying math yet, but it certainly looks interesting
https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2019/11/25/forget-homomorphic-encryption-here-comes-functional-encryption/

TLDR: when people can't compare themselves to other people they cooperate and create wealth. when status is codified, they play status games instead.
https://alexdanco.com/2020/01/23/social-capital-in-silicon-valley/

on long-tail risks:
> You copy/paste the code, it seems to work, and you don't realize it's broken because you don't run either of these programs which made the same mistake. And you don't find out the error until users report it.
> How could you change your development processes to detect this kind of error prior to shipping it?

(also, one of the reasons I think docker in particular is shit, even though virtual machines and containers in general are great)

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1229641258370355200

wow, turns out CDC6600 is not that far from state-of-the-art in RTL logic even now! (ok, everybody moved from bipolar to field-effect transistors, but it's still impressive they built discrete logic computer that was ten times faster than ICs back then)
https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2020/02/14/what-made-the-cdc6600-fast/

How do you engineer a system to be resilient against large-scale correlated failures?
https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/03/04/millions-of-tiny-databases/

leaky hardware abstractions!
https://www.ifixit.com/News/11986/iphones-are-allergic-to-helium

correlations are not causations, but removing (or maintaining) correlations can be helpful
https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/03/13/correlation-x-2/

I rarely consider videos a preferred format for lectures, but... this one is great
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_7d-m1ehoY&feature=youtu.be&t=3m

hmm, I think I know what I want to learn and experiment with, besides FPGAs...

Deep Molecular Programming:
A Natural Implementation of Binary-Weight ReLU Neural Networks
> Embedding computation in molecular contexts incompatible with traditional electronics is expected to have wide ranging impact in synthetic biology, medicine, nanofabrication and other fields. A key remaining challenge lies in developing programming paradigms for molecular computation that are well-aligned with the underlying chemical hardware and do not attempt to shoehorn ill-fitting electronics paradigms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13720

aww, AES-ECB in 2020! niiiiice! (TLDR: if it's really ECB - get yourself some traffic dumps and have fun, you can decrypt that at home!)
https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto-a-quick-look-at-the-confidentiality-of-zoom-meetings/

this is gotta be a year of 'reality is stranger than fiction'. I discussed COBOL on AWS Lambda for laughs just weeks ago, and now this:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-workers-now-support-cobol/