A game where you place planets in a system. The goal is to place as many planets as possible while avoiding collision or flinging them out.

It's an interesting playground for learning concepts like why small planets are likely located in near star orbit, three-body problem, etc.

Another fasterthanlime's article on troubleshooting Rust memory leaks. It's good to learn about the memory profiler bytehound (https://github.com/koute/bytehound). I also learned about this Rust-native embedded language called Rhai.

Intelligence: what is it? Is it fair to consider human the only intelligent animal? This article talks about various traits animals exhibit that we typically associate with having a intelligence.

To be honest, this AI is the closest thing to a sentient being I ever read about. I don't think it is sentient per se according to my own interpretation of being "sentient", for that it is not still capable of thinking out of the box, i.e. the context, personality, which are still set up or hinted by human.

However, I also believe that given enough effort, it's quite likely to see a "real" sentient AI being in forthcoming years.

I had the same issue with my previous work laptop earlier. Turns out it was caused by the always scanning™ AirPlay. What a (not) surprise! Fortuitously I have switched to Linux few months ago.

A rather thought-provoking argument on how HTML should be written. In short, it should be written as like troff rather than like XML or JSON.

The idea is quite new to me. I thought that close tag should always be present, and the attributes should always be quoted, and browsers are only lenient for those "mistakes". Turns out the standard explicitly permits otherwise. And the reason for it is the topic of this article.

Writing HTML in this style has benefits - the document is much readable, as if it was written in Markdown or something alike but more powerful. It's obvious that this type of document is not good for complex layout or "web application" due to the overly implicit nested DOM structure. However, it at least look pleasant to me and at lot easier to edit in without using structure-aware editors. So I may switch to actually write in plain HTML in this style in blog posts or wherever "<div>" is not expected.

There is a lot of controversy around it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31694849). It's not difficult to foresee that a lot of people will dislike it.

Search YouTube videos by subtitles (including automatic transcriptions). The site features a tool to allow searching for unlisted videos: https://filmot.com/unlistedSearch.

Welcome to the dark side of Rust :)

A bunch of funny Rust trivias! (by @Jonhoo)

A nicely looking and informative rust cheat sheet. Not sure when it's helpful, but it looked like good place for learn for certain unfamiliar practices.

DALLE-2 has a secret language. "Apoploe vesrreaitais" means birds. "Contarra ccetnxniams luryca tanniounons" means bugs or pests.

The poster asked DALLE-2 to produce seemingly nonsense words, and then prompt DALL-E with these words and find that these nonsense words contain meanings coherent to the initial prompt.

It's no longer seem like a mystery to me after I read explanations. But it's undoubtfully a super interesting phenomenom.

See more discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31573282.

Ask questions while you read mathematics grants deeper understanding. There is no point in aiming for speed. You must learn to read to learn how to write articles about mathematics. The article also includes a detailed example on writing about birthday paradox.

A post by Julia Evan on ftrace - a feature in kernel to trace any kernel functions! trace-cmd is a command line tool that makes it easy to do so.

A searchable list of Linux x64 and x86 syscall numbers. Also shows the kernel source code where the syscall is defined, as well as the registers for each of the arguments.

Interesting summary of the evolution of Unix command line argument conventions.

An educational article into how mechanical clock works with a LOT of interactive demo to play with!

"Shibboleths" are phrases you use to tell if a person is of a geniune member of a society or a pretender. The article discuss some of the positive and negative Shibboleths a vendor may use for distributed systems:

Positive:

• We made the operation idempotent
• The system makes incremental progress
• Every component is crash-only
• We shard it on <some reasonably high cardinality value>

Negative:

• Our system is Consistent and Available.
• at-least-once and at-most-once are nice, but our system implements exactly-once
• I just need Transactions to solve my distributed systems problems
• I will take a distributed lock

("Shibboleths" may be best translated into "暗號" I suppose?)

A hilarious and potentially useful site. It's an epitome for modern double speak in professional occasions.

A comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31226899) demonstrated how to use GPT-3 to generate such language.

I also learned about the concept of PDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_distance

A fasterthanlime video on injecting code to a foreign Windows processes.

A really informative article that explained a lot of mysteries I previously had.

For example, given that a black hole can be described from just three numbers and thus "highly ordered", how is it that a black hole is said to have a very high entropy?

The biggest takeaway from the article (to me) is that: entropy is not about disorderness, but rather about the amount of information (microstat) packed in an apparent phenomenon (macrostat).