Ken Thompson’s Unix Password — 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. Those passwords are very amenable to modern cracking methods, but Thompson’s was […]
Yellowbrick — Open source visual analysis and diagnostic tools to facilitate machine learning model selection. Eight Habits of Expert Software Designers: An Illustrated Guide — Experts imagine how a design will work—simulating aspects of the envisioned software and how the different parts of the design support a variety of scenarios. When working with others, experts
SQL Queries Don’t Start with SELECT (Julia Evans) — today I learned… Vickery Auctions to Discover Demand Curve — this is gold! Hydra — A framework for elegantly configuring complex applications. Python library that makes config, command-line flags, logging, etc. EU Wants Global Control of Facebook Content (Verge) — On Thursday, the European Union’s top
Why Do Companies With Huge Resources Still Have Terrible Moderation? — an extremely readable explanation of why it’s so damn hard. Hint: AI isn’t it. ent — An entity framework for Go. Simple, yet powerful ORM for modeling and querying data. Open source, from Facebook. Adversarial Interoperability (Cory Doctorow) — collection of articles on when
Data Fallacies to Avoid — nifty infographic for the beginning torturer of data. Transparency Reports Suffering — “The momentum has faded,” says Peter Micek, general counsel with Access Now. The digital rights advocacy group is updating its index of transparency reports, which it last posted in 2016, and this pending revision will document serious stagnation
Just Enough Research — a book that comes recommended by Simon Willison. Observations on Observability — I think the future of operating software systems at scale will look like process engineering. We will rely on continuous signals and look at software systems as dynamical systems. We will embrace similar techniques for process control and continuous
Stamos on CLOUD Act — cogent and informative set of tweets (words I never thought I would say) from Alex Stamos, with context for the latest piece of Internet regulation to get alarmist and wrong media coverage. Migrating from Cloudflare — This is pretty cool, and it’s why I’ve used Cloudflare for a few years.
Intro to Creative Coding — this is the repo, also check out p5.js demos and tone.js demos. (via @mattdesl) The Dynamics of Collective Social Behavior in a Crowd-Controlled Game — We find that having a fraction of players who do not follow the crowd’s average behavior is key to succeed in the game. Recent Programming
Tiktok and Ethnic Cleansing — as hardline governments rise all around the world, the whole “design policy and tools for the worst case environment” is looking a whole lot more salient. There are worse situations in the world than that of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, but not many. Tiktok’s shadowbans and content blocks are worth learning more
Removing Slurs from ImageNet — The first issue is that WordNet contains offensive synsets that are inappropriate to use as image labels. Although during the construction of ImageNet in 2009 the research team removed any synset explicitly denoted as ‘offensive,’ ‘derogatory,’ ‘pejorative,’ or ‘slur’ in its gloss, this filtering was imperfect and still resulted in
