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A collection of 193 posts

Technical

Profiling media workloads in Firefox (Mozilla)

It will come as no surprise that playing video and audio in a web browser requires a certain attention to performance. Whether it is by getting the design right, using good implementations of codecs (potentially with hardware acceleration), taking care of using memory properly and avoiding unnecessary copies, or ultimately

Society

Turkmenistan’s Dirty Secret (Bloomberg Green)

The former Soviet republic is one of the world’s worst emitters of planet-warming methane. Its exported natural gas is becoming crucial to China. Carrie Herzog was sitting at her desk in Montreal one day in early 2019, studying satellite images for signs of mud volcanoes. These geological oddities, common

Science

Why does it take so long to get to Mercury? (ESA)

Earth is on average ten times closer to Mercury than Jupiter, but missions to both planets can take a similar amount of time to reach their science orbits. Why is that? (…) The energy our spacecraft needs to shed is on a completely different scale to using brakes to slow down

Management

Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model (Erik Bernhardsson)

Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It's hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in itself is about solving something. (…) If my model is right (a

Comics

Élan School

Élan School was a private, coeducational, and controversial residential behavior modification program and therapeutic boarding school in Poland, Androscoggin County, Maine. It was a full member of the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs (NATSAP). The facility was closed down in 2011 due to allegations of abuse, many from

Society

iOS 15, Humane: How Apple Could Help Us Reclaim Our Attention (Potential)

We believe technology should help us live well. It can and should be designed to help us be intentional, to do the things that truly matter. Yesterday, iOS 15 was introduced to the world. It's an exciting update, and includes meaningful steps towards more comprehensive tools for digital wellbeing, like

Science

Graphene sandwiches that form moiré superconductors (Quanta Magazine)

An unexpected superconductor was beginning to look like a fluke, but a new theory and a second discovery have revealed that emergent quasiparticles may be behind the effect. (…) Two papers published in the journals Nature and Science described (…) a three-layer graphene sandwich with the “bread” sheets aligned and the filling

Science

The strange fate of a person falling into a black hole (BBC Earth)

It could happen to anyone. Maybe you're out trying to find a new habitable planet for the human race, or maybe you're just on a long walk and you slip. Whatever the circumstances, at some point we all find ourselves confronted with the age-old question: what happens when you fall

Science

Firing Lasers to Tame the Sky (Astronomy Picture of the Day)

> Why do stars twinkle? Our atmosphere is to blame as pockets of slightly off-temperature air, in constant motion, distort the light paths from distant astronomical objects. Atmospheric turbulence is a problem for astronomers because it blurs the images of the sources they want to study. The telescope featured in this

Science

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine (Bert Hubert)

Welcome! In this post, we’ll be taking a character-by-character look at the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine. (…) Now, these words may be somewhat jarring - the vaccine is a liquid that gets injected in your arm. How can we talk about source code? This is

Technical

The world in which IPv6 was a good design (Avery Pennarun)

(…) The IETF people, when they were thinking about IPv6, saw this mess getting made - and maybe predicted some of the additional mess that would happen, though I doubt they could have predicted SDN and wifi repeater modes - and they said, hey wait a minute, stop right there. We

Technical

Your Computer Isn't Yours (Jeffrey Paul)

It’s here. It happened. Did you notice? I’m speaking, of course, of the world that Richard Stallman predicted in 1997 [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html]. The one Cory Doctorow also warned us about [https://craphound.com/pc/download/]. On modern versions of macOS, you simply

Management

Take the Time to Explain (Michael Marçal)

One of the last steps in a doctoral program is the defense. This is where you, the doctoral candidate, after years of research, are presenting the results of your work in front of a panel of experts in your field who will judge if the merits of your results are

Technical

Super Mario Bros 3 speedrun in ~3 minutes

Video explaining how a series of glitches in Super Mario Bros 3 are exploited to warp to the end of the game, without crashing it. This feat is possible by an in-depth knowledge of the game at the assembly level and a rock-solid execution. Assembly instructions are coded by moving

Science

Squash kill shot (Darbois Texier)

In squash, it exists a perfect killing shot which is almost impossible to catch. It occurs when the ball hit an edge of the court. In this situation the ball exits at very low speed and rolls along the wall or the floor. With Caroline Cohen [http://www.researchgate.net/

Philosophy

Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism (NY Times, 1992)

> [Niebuhr's] emphasis on sin startled my generation, brought up on optimistic convictions of human innocence and perfectibility. But nothing had prepared us for Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust, concentration camps and gulags. Human nature was evidently as capable of depravity as of virtue ... Traditionally, the idea of the frailty of

Comics

Just a phase? (Owlturd)

– Oh, is that so??? This is "just a phase"?? That's what it is? A phase??? – Suck it, mom.

Technical

How NAT traversal works (Tailscale)

Very well written article by Tailscale that covers the detail of connectivity between hosts behind firewalls and NATs. After reading this, you will be able to, in networking terms, punch holes, place hairpins and build the foundations of peer to peer applications. https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/ PS: you may

Culture

Good Night, and Good Luck: Murrow vs McCarthy (Wikipedia)

(…) One of the most influential opponents of McCarthyism was the famed CBS newscaster and analyst Edward R. Murrow. On October 20, 1953, Murrow's show See It Now aired an episode about the dismissal of Milo Radulovich, a former reserve Air Force lieutenant who was accused of associating with Communists. The

Society

Cradled by therapy (Dermendzhiyska, Aeon)

How attachment theory works in the therapeutic relationship (…) When you delve into it, the question of how people change through therapy can make your head swim. Here’s a psychological intervention that seems to work as well as drugs (and, studies suggest, possibly better over the long term), and yet

Technical

Libtorrent adds support for the WebTorrent protocol (Feross)

(…) The engine that powers many of the most popular torrent clients including qBittorrent, Deluge, and many more – has added support for the WebTorrent protocol. WebTorrent support in libtorrent opens the door for many more torrent clients to connect to browser peers. Browser peers (which must use WebRTC) will now be

Science

Ridiculous math problems (Quora)

(…) You may have seen such meme images before. They are always pure click-bait garbage: “95% of MIT graduates couldn’t solve this!”, where “this” is some inane, or ill-defined, or trivial brain teaser. This one is not. The meme is a clever, or wicked, joke. Roughly 99.999995% of the

Technical

Noise cancelling device halves noise pollution through open windows (NTU)

Sometimes there's nothing like a nice breeze from an open window, but in the city that can come with an unwanted side order of street noise. Inspired by the kind of noise-canceling tech used in headphones, researchers at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU) have developed a window-based system that can

Society

Cities and Ambition (Paul Graham, 2008)

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. (…) How much does it matter what message

Technical

A Statistical Analysis of Coughing Patterns on ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ (Liam Shaw)

This is (…) about using statistics to understand a process of exponential growth linked to coughing. No, not coronavirus. I’m talking about Charles Ingram’s infamous 2001 appearance on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? where he (allegedly) cheated his way to win £1 million with the help of his