871 private links
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).
Not only the answer help solved a mystery I had for weeks, it also demonstrated how to solve the same kind of problem using auditd. Great to learn about it!
Interactive explanation on X Window systems, including the interesting history limitation and workarounds, and the mess brought up by the need of direct gpu-access.
Interesting article comparing x86 with other IA by Raymond C.
Also see: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220418-00/?p=106489 (The x86 architecture is the weirdo, part 2)
An interesting article on why there is half megabytes of empty bytes in every music file.
Alongside the desire to brainwash people, the regime also wants to remind people of their power. When citizens are bombarded with propaganda everywhere they look, they are reminded of the strength of the regime. The vast amount of resources authoritarian regimes spend to display their message in every corner of the public square is a costly demonstration of their power.
Propaganda is intended to instill fear in people, not brainwash them. The message is: You might not hold pro-regime values or attitudes. But we will make sure you are too frightened to do anything about it.
Insightful! Considering China on these days, if the torrent of stupid propaganda abated, it would be resonable to suspect that Xi's power has been suppressed probably by his political enemies.
I find this documentation as interesting as DALL-E 2 itself. It underlines a number of potential "misuses" and mitigation.
A list of search engines as alternatives to Google. Unlike engines like duckduckgo that uses bing as backend and yield inferior results, these ones each has different ways of innovation. I've been using Kagi for more than half a year now, and pretty happy with it.
Fun and useful HTML attributes that I didn't know before.
The part that interest me the most is a comment which I copied here:
ORG-MODE TOOLS OUTSIDE EMACS
Hacking with DDC, HDMI, i2c, SMBus, XRandR. It's such an interesting experiment and I learned a lot from the post!
No need to trust self-signed certificate to intercept tls traffic, if we have the secret keys.
Good info on how to use GDB with Rust, as well as other profiling/tracing tools. It also showcased how to use various error handling tools to catch and display nested exceptions.
Free high quality public domain books formatted and curated by one woman. Marvelous.
Other high quality public domain ebooks: