Abacus Noir

Science

• A trove of old Denisovan artifacts
  • Including the first ever stone bracelet …

• “Matter from light” aka a demonstration of the Briet-Wheeler effect

• Fungi hunting worms
  • Not something I’d have believed if I hadn’t seen it, since we usually think of “predators catching prey“, etc,

Culture

• Can’t believe that there is even such a thing: “haunted dolls” on eBay!

• On NFT-mania

  • “This is the stupidest or the most incredible decision of our lives,” said one buyer of an EtherRock, which are all based on the same free clipart.

• On “Video games as the new smoking“

  In our new reality, videogames is what smoking was in the ’60s. Cheap, damaging and addictive.
  Unfortunately this parallel world is so cool that you start losing interest in the “normal” wonders of reality. A walk in a forest doesn’t interest you that much, in fact it seems boring. They are just trees after all and it is not worth to move your ass from your couch to the outside world. Reality is neither predictable nor comfortable as a video-games.

History

• Old camel sculptures
  • Previous article in NYTimes dated them 6000 earlier

• “WTF happened in 1971” (hint: a lot)

• 23000 year old human activity in the Americas
  – This is a big deal because … it means they either crossed the oceans to get there, or were there for …. uh … much longer

Computing

• Interesting comparison of the current state of NeoVim and Doom Emacs

• On the downsides of too much type-level programming

• From 1992 “the first year of Linux Distributions“

  • Slackware and Debian both kicked off in 1993 (and are still rocking to this very day). SUSE rolled along in 1994 (which was, initially, based on Slackware), followed shortly thereafter by Red Hat.

• Cloudflare’s “disruption” of S3

  • This is where zero egress costs could be an even bigger deal strategically than they are economically. S3 was the foundation of AWS’s integrated cloud offering, and remains the linchpin of the company’s lock-in; what if R2, thanks to its explicit rejection of data lock-in, becomes the foundation of an entirely new ecosystem of cloud services that compete with the big three by being modular? If you can always get access to your data for free, it becomes a lot more plausible to connect that data to best-of-breed compute options built by companies focused on doing one thing well, instead of simply waiting for Amazon to offer up their pale imitation that doesn’t require companies to pay out the nose to access.