Four short links: 19 August 2019

Developer Tool, Deep Fakes, DNA Tests, and Retro Coding Hacks

CROKAGE: A New Way to Search Stack Overflow — a paper about a service [that] takes the description of a programming task as a query and then provides relevant, comprehensive programming solutions containing both code snippets and their succinct explanations. There’s a replication package on GitHub. Follows in the footsteps of Douglas Adams’s Electric Monk (which people bought to pay for them) and DVRs (which people use to watch TV for them), now we have software that’ll copy dodgy code from the web for you. Programmers, software is coming for your jobs.
Cheap Fakes Beat Deep Fakes — One of the fundamental rules of information warfare is that you never lie (except when necessary.) Deepfakes are detectable as artificial content, which reveals the lie. This discredits the source of the information and the rest of their argument. For an information warfare campaign, using deepfakes is a high-risk proposition.
I Took 9 Different Commercial DNA Tests and Got 6 Different Results — refers to the dubious ancestry measures. “Ancestry itself is a funny thing, in that humans have never been these distinct groups of people,” said Alexander Platt, an expert in population genetics at Temple University in Philadelphia. “So, you can’t really say that somebody is 92.6 percent descended from this group of people when that’s not really a thing.”
Dirty Tricks 6502 Programmers Use — wonderfully geeky disection of a simple task rendered in as few bytes as possible.