Generally interesting links – Oct 2021

Science

• Ancient flash floods on Mars

• Moths taking off, very slowly

• The “earth blobs“

• Some unknowns about water

History

• The story of the Tsar Bomba

• Vikings in America, except with proof this time

People, culture, society

• Cautionary tale: carry water while hiking

• On the impermanence of digital culture

  • If you’re young today, your formative years depend on auto-deleted snapchat videos, short-lived memes, stories told in computer games likely unplayable in 30 years (without emulation of complex proprietary CPUs and GPUs), and whatever happens to flutter by in a feed. I’m curious what the future of reminiscing will look like, even if all of this is saved somehow. So much to sift through, so few tangible artifacts.
  • Even more traditional culture is less permanent: we get our music and movies from streaming services, we rent our e-books through EULA:s and consume them on devices controlled by the manufacturer. I do most of this myself – but I was young in a different era and I at least have my stacks of CD:s (including bob hund) tucked away in a safe place and shelves full of the prose and movies that shaped me.
  • And yet, despite these and countless other examples, we still put our faith in digital permanence. We create so many mementos we hardly have time to look at them and then we entrust them all to companies and platforms beyond our control, storing them on machines we don’t own using services that could disappear tomorrow. Will Youtube still be there in 50 years? Will Instagram and Dropbox?
  • I mostly have questions, not answers. But I do know that a carefully handled bunch of photographs can last for over a century.

• Bizarre conference call mishap

  • Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: That Ozy was a great success on YouTube. As he spoke, however, the man’s voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said.

  • (later …) A confused Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Piper on the call with Ozy.

Computing & Software

• Sussman on flexible systems and generic operations

• Insight into the typical “lifecycle of programmers” (refers to this Github drama)

• With “wasm-all-the-things”, there had to be an efficient database in your browser, right? DuckDB is the answer.

• Guido on imporoving Python performance

• A look at OpenBSD history

• “Compile-time computation” and more, in Gambit Scheme

• An interesting OS: Genode

Tools

• Paradox of what we want from a text editor (all the time vs no time at all?)

• Based on FreeBSD: helloSystem (a return to the creator-friendly desktop systems of the late 90s or early 00s)

• On “complexity education“

• A call to “computing on your own terms“

Reader submissions

• “The importance of human tool co-evolution“

  • “We are inside the machine”: even truer a decade later (!)
  • “Micro-biome of a massive AI only now being born”
  • “Always get your wish, and always get it wrong”
  • “…. runaway objective function … Growth must go on forever”

btw, I’m always happy to hear about interesting stuff, please feel free to send them over to mail+curation@agambrahma.com