Signals

IFRC Data Playbook Toolkit — The Data Playbook Beta is a recipe book or exercise book with examples, best practices, how-to’s, session plans, training materials, matrices, scenarios, and resources. The data playbook will provide resources for National Societies to develop their literacy around data, including responsible data use and data protection. The content aims to […]

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