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/
https://cpldcpu.wordpress.com/2020/02/14/what-made-the-cdc6600-fast/
Tim's Blog
What made the 1960s CDC6600 supercomputer fast?
Anybody who has ever taken an advanced computer architecture class has heard of the CDC6600, which was the world’s fastest computer from 1964 to 1969. It was the machine that put Seymour Cray…
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/
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
https://www.ifixit.com/News/11986/iphones-are-allergic-to-helium
iFixit
iPhones Are Allergic to Helium
This is the kind of tale that you don’t hear every day. During the installation of a new MRI machine, a technician started getting calls that iPhones weren’t working—but Androids were just fine.
correlations are not causations, but removing (or maintaining) correlations can be helpful
https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/03/13/correlation-x-2/
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_7d-m1ehoY&feature=youtu.be&t=3m
YouTube
#170: Basics of IQ Signals and IQ modulation & demodulation - A tutorial
This video presents an introductory tutorial on IQ signals - their definition, and some of the ways that they are used to both create / generate modulated RF signals, and demodulate / analyze RF signals. IQ signals are most often used in the transmit and…
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
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/
https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto-a-quick-look-at-the-confidentiality-of-zoom-meetings/
The Citizen Lab
Move Fast and Roll Your Own Crypto
This report examines the encryption that protects meetings in Zoom and finds that they have made their own encryption scheme and has significant weaknesses.
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/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-workers-now-support-cobol/
The Cloudflare Blog
Cloudflare Workers Now Support COBOL
COBOL is often a source of amusement for programmers because it is seen as old, verbose, clunky, and difficult to maintain. COBOL can now be used to write code for Cloudflare’s serverless platform Workers.
more ancient stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE (skip to 10:20 for action) via @kurumpa
comments > Reminds me of something I read about the Three Mile Island incident: the computer was printing out alarms on a paper log (as well as showing them via more immediate means) but there were so many events and the printer was so slow that it was several minutes before the significant event appeared on paper
comments > Reminds me of something I read about the Three Mile Island incident: the computer was printing out alarms on a paper log (as well as showing them via more immediate means) but there were so many events and the printer was so slow that it was several minutes before the significant event appeared on paper
YouTube
Using a 1930 Teletype as a Linux Terminal
Commenters requested that we use our restored vintage 1930 Model 15 Teletype as a terminal for Linux. Hooking up a 5-bit mechanical contraption that predates computers by eons to a modern OS, even one that is terminal friendly, is not without some challenges.…
TLDR: CME testing negative prices for commodity futures contracts.
I wonder if this will eventually come to equities as well. Is there a niche where it makes economic sense? Public unlimited companies maybe?
https://www.cmegroup.com/notices/clearing/2020/04/Chadv20-160.html#pageNumber=1 #finance
I wonder if this will eventually come to equities as well. Is there a niche where it makes economic sense? Public unlimited companies maybe?
https://www.cmegroup.com/notices/clearing/2020/04/Chadv20-160.html#pageNumber=1 #finance
Cmegroup
Testing Opportunities in CME's
Use the search tool to access all Notices for CME Group exchanges, CME, CBOT, NYMEX, and COMEX.
Finally, temporal dimension comes to the mainstream machine learning
https://link.medium.com/9H82wmMe25
https://link.medium.com/9H82wmMe25
Medium
Knowledge Graphs @ ICLR 2020
👋 Hello, I hope you are all doing well during the lockdown. ICLR 2020 went fully virtual, and here is a fully virtual article (well…
XML is the gift that keeps on giving!
https://wojciechregula.blog/post/stealing-your-sms-messages-with-ios-0day/
https://wojciechregula.blog/post/stealing-your-sms-messages-with-ios-0day/
wojciechregula.blog
Stealing your SMS messages with iOS 0day
This is a special post because I fully based on another researcher, s1guza’s 0day. All of this story began from the following tweet:
Siguza told us that his 0day was patched in the iOS 13.5 beta3. So this is actually a sandbox escape 0day for the newest,…
Siguza told us that his 0day was patched in the iOS 13.5 beta3. So this is actually a sandbox escape 0day for the newest,…
...and the exploit denoscription itself. it’s fucking perfect!
https://siguza.github.io/psychicpaper/
https://siguza.github.io/psychicpaper/
ASAP: As Static As Possible memory management (Proust'17)
"Long story short, this is an attempt to see if we really can have unrestrictive compile-time garbage collection."
#to_read_later via @olegkovalov
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-908.pdf
"Long story short, this is an attempt to see if we really can have unrestrictive compile-time garbage collection."
#to_read_later via @olegkovalov
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-908.pdf
whoa, potentially a new chip tech which looks practical this time!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16105-y
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16105-y
Nature
Perovskite neural trees
Nature Communications - Designing energy efficient and scalable artificial networks for neuromorphic computing remains a challenge. Here, the authors demonstrate tree-like conductance states at...
an underappreciated piece of history
https://wz.ax/dshr-death-of-corporate-research-labs
https://wz.ax/dshr-death-of-corporate-research-labs
Universal Relation between Corrections to Entropy and Extremality
> Perturbative corrections to general relativity alter the expressions for both the entropy of black holes and
their extremality bounds. We prove a universal relation between the leading corrections to these quantities.
The derivation is purely thermodynamic and the result also applies beyond the realm of gravitational
systems.
https://wz.ax/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.101103/sfokuvfd
> Perturbative corrections to general relativity alter the expressions for both the entropy of black holes and
their extremality bounds. We prove a universal relation between the leading corrections to these quantities.
The derivation is purely thermodynamic and the result also applies beyond the realm of gravitational
systems.
https://wz.ax/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.101103/sfokuvfd
Gorgeous automatic diagramming (still WIP but, but!)
https://wz.ax/penrose.ink-gorgeous-automatic-diagramming-beactfyd
https://wz.ax/penrose.ink-gorgeous-automatic-diagramming-beactfyd
penrose.ink
Penrose: from mathematical notation to beautiful diagrams
Materials from our SIGGRAPH '20 paper.