the door close button
https://computer.rip/2023-03-13-the-door-close-button.html [computer.rip]
2023-03-14 18:19
tags:
article
factcheck
hoipolloi
life
media
ux
Elevator control panels have long featured two buttons labeled “door open” and “door close.” One of these buttons does pretty much what it says on the label (although I understand that European elevators sometimes have a separate “door hold” button for the most common use of “door open“). The other usually doesn’t seem to, and that has lead to a minor internet phenomenon. Here’s the problem: the internet is wrong, and I am here to set it right.
source: HN
Vigilantes for views: The YouTube pranksters harassing suspected scam callers in India
https://restofworld.org/2023/youtube-scam-call-vigilantes/ [restofworld.org]
2023-01-16 16:41
tags:
article
hoipolloi
social
Los Angeles-based Trilogy Media took “scambaiting” to a new level, but some claim they’re gaining viral fame at others’ expense.
Trilogy’s pursuit of vigilante justice has proved a hit with their many fans, whom they refer to as “the squad.” But for some, their antics lay bare an uncomfortable power dynamic in which YouTubers in Los Angeles gain viral fame at the expense of Indian call center workers, physically harassing people whose situation they may know little about.
What's new in CPUs since the 80s?
https://danluu.com/new-cpu-features/ [danluu.com]
2022-04-19 17:10
tags:
article
concurrency
cpu
perf
programming
systems
Everything below refers to x86 and linux, unless otherwise indicated. History has a tendency to repeat itself, and a lot of things that were new to x86 were old hat to supercomputing, mainframe, and workstation folks.
x86 chips have picked up a lot of new features and whiz-bang gadgets.
Overall, a pretty good introduction to modern CPUs, performance, and concurrency.
The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen
https://nicole.express/2022/the-center-point-can-not-hold.html [nicole.express]
2022-04-17 20:04
tags:
article
business
development
gaming
hardware
random
retro
Recently, I took a look at Nintendo’s MMC line of mappers, and some other boards. All boards for the NES’ western releases had to be manufactured by Nintendo, and so they generally met certain standards set by Nintendo. But these rules were enforced by technology, not by law. And the company that had previously killed the American game industry decided to break those rules. Madness? No. This… is Tengen.
Lots of custom cartridges here.
Some additional info: https://hackmii.com/2010/01/the-weird-and-wonderful-cic/
source: HN
It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/its-time-to-stop-talking-about-generations [www.newyorker.com]
2022-04-03 22:33
tags:
article
history
hoipolloi
From boomers to zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong.
Generics can make your Go code slower
https://planetscale.com/blog/generics-can-make-your-go-code-slower [planetscale.com]
2022-03-30 18:46
tags:
article
compiler
go
perf
programming
type-system
Go 1.18 is here, and with it, the first release of the long-awaited implementation of Generics is finally ready for production usage. Generics are a frequently requested feature that has been highly contentious throughout the Go community. On the one side, vocal detractors worry about the added complexity. They fear the inescapable evolution of Go towards either a verbose and Enterprisey Java-lite with Generic Factories or, most terrifyingly, a degenerate HaskellScript that replaces ifs with Monads. In all fairness, both these fears may be overblown. On the other side, proponents of generics believe that they are a critical feature to implement clean and reusable code at scale.
This blog post does not take sides in that debate, or advise where and when to use Generics in Go. Instead, this blog post is about the third side of the generics conundrum: It’s about systems engineers who are not excited about generics per se, but about monomorphization and its performance implications. There are dozens of us! Dozens! And we’re all due for some serious disappointment.
Very thorough.
source: HN
Two new color spaces for color picking
https://bottosson.github.io/posts/colorpicker/ [bottosson.github.io]
2021-09-13 04:31
tags:
article
graphics
ideas
Picking colors is a common operation in many applications and over the years color pickers have become fairly standardized. Ubiquitous today are color pickers based on HSL and HSV. They are simple transformations of RGB values to alternative coordinates chosen to better correlate with perceptual qualities.
Is their dominance well deserved or would it be possible to create better alternatives? I at least think that this question deserves to be explored and that color picker design should be an active research topic. With this post I hope to contribute to the exploration of what a better color picker could and should be, and hopefully inspire others to do the same!
source: HN
Capital crossings
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2021/washington-dc-bridges-new-and-old/ [www.washingtonpost.com]
2021-04-01 17:21
tags:
architecture
article
history
maps
photos
transport
urban
Washington is a city of great bridges and terrible bridges. These are their stories.
No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/hagfish-slime/581002/ [www.theatlantic.com]
2021-03-06 07:01
tags:
article
biology
chemistry
It expands by 10,000 times in a fraction of a second, it’s 100,000 times softer than Jell-O, and it fends off sharks and Priuses alike.
Decades-Long Quest Reveals Details of the Proton’s Inner Antimatter
https://www.quantamagazine.org/protons-antimatter-revealed-by-decades-old-experiment-20210224/ [www.quantamagazine.org]
2021-02-25 01:36
tags:
article
paper
physics
science
Twenty years ago, physicists set out to investigate a mysterious asymmetry in the proton’s interior. Their results, published today, show how antimatter helps stabilize every atom’s core.
We learn in school that a proton is a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks — two “up” quarks and a “down” quark, whose electric charges (+2/3 and −1/3, respectively) combine to give the proton its charge of +1. But that simplistic picture glosses over a far stranger, as-yet-unresolved story.
In reality, the proton’s interior swirls with a fluctuating number of six kinds of quarks, their oppositely charged antimatter counterparts (antiquarks), and “gluon” particles that bind the others together, morph into them and readily multiply. Somehow, the roiling maelstrom winds up perfectly stable and superficially simple — mimicking, in certain respects, a trio of quarks.
paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03282-z
source: HN
People Are Worried About Payment for Order Flow
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-05/robinhood-gamestop-saga-pressures-payment-for-order-flow [www.bloomberg.com]
2021-02-05 20:32
tags:
article
business
finance
Okay let’s do payment for order flow again, because people are talking about it and that always stresses me out. Here’s an intuitive description of how it works.
source: ML
Exploring the Supply Chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines
https://blog.jonasneubert.com/2021/01/10/exploring-the-supply-chain-of-the-pfizer-biontech-and-moderna-covid-19-vaccines/ [blog.jonasneubert.com]
2021-01-19 17:45
tags:
article
biology
chemistry
tech
The following text is a collection of notes I wrote down while exploring the process for manufacturing and distributing the two new vaccines that have appeared all over the news and in more and more people’s arms over the recent weeks. I started reading about mRNA but quickly found myself on tangents about glass vials and temperature tracking devices.
How NAT traversal works
https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/ [tailscale.com]
2021-01-11 23:30
tags:
article
networking
We covered a lot of ground in our post about How Tailscale Works. However, we glossed over how we can get through NATs (Network Address Translators) and connect your devices directly to each other, no matter what’s standing between them. Let’s talk about that now!
Very detailed.
The 8th Wonder Of The World
https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wisconsin-jobs-loophole-trump [www.theverge.com]
2021-01-02 08:20
tags:
article
business
policy
valley
In exchange for billions in tax subsidies, Foxconn was supposed to build an enormous LCD factory in the tiny village of Mount Pleasant, creating 13,000 jobs. Three years later, the factory — and the jobs — don’t exist, and they probably never will. Inside the empty promises and empty buildings of Wisconn Valley.
Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ [berthub.eu]
2020-12-29 18:05
tags:
article
biology
chemistry
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 a good question, so let’s start off with a small part of the very source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, also known as BNT162b2, also known as Tozinameran also known as Comirnaty.
A Cryptologic Mystery
https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/neinnines/ [www.mattblaze.org]
2020-12-24 23:02
tags:
article
history
opsec
Did a broken random number generator in Cuba help expose a Russian espionage network?
I remember concluding that the most likely, if still rather improbable, explanation was that the 9-less messages were dummy fill traffic and that the random number generator used to create the messages had a bug or developed a defect that prevented 9s from being included. This would be, to say the least, a very serious error, since it would allow a listener to easily distinguish fill traffic from real traffic, completely negating the benefit of having fill traffic in the first place. It would open the door to exactly the kind of traffic analysis that the system was carefully engineered to thwart. The 9-less messages went on for almost ten years. (If I were reporting this as an Internet vulnerability, I would dub it the “Nein Nines” attack; please forgive the linguistic muddle). But I was resigned to the likelihood that I would never know for sure.
How Toxic Fumes Seep Into The Air You Breathe On Planes
https://www.latimes.com/projects/toxic-chemicals-planes-covid-19-travel-woes/ [www.latimes.com]
2020-12-17 16:35
tags:
article
flying
life
policy
The air you breathe on airplanes comes directly from the jet engines. Known as bleed air, it is safe, unless there is a mechanical issue — a faulty seal, for instance. When that happens, heated jet engine oil can leak into the air supply, potentially releasing toxic gases into the plane.
For decades, the airline industry and its regulators have known about these incidents — called fume events — and have maintained that they are rare and that the toxic chemical levels are too low to pose serious health risks.
And yet there’s a lot of pushback to measuring just how bad the problem is.
Cameras and Lenses
https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/ [ciechanow.ski]
2020-12-10 22:20
tags:
article
best
graphics
interactive
physics
tech
visualization
Cameras and the lenses inside them may seem a little mystifying. In this blog post I’d like to explain not only how they work, but also how adjusting a few tunable parameters can produce fairly different results:
This is amazing work.
source: HN
Space Oddity
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/07/20/nearly-100-years-ago-man-tried-blast-off-venus-now-documentary-crew-is-mission-find-rocket-built-that-journey/ [www.washingtonpost.com]
2020-07-25 19:16
tags:
article
history
space
In 1927, a Baltimore man was on a mission to blast off to Venus. Nearly a century later, a documentary crew is on its own mission to find the rocket built for that journey.
Some great illustrations, too.
When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery
https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/ [obscuritory.com]
2020-07-12 06:42
tags:
article
gaming
retro
SimCity wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.
The game was inspired by research on real-world urban planning concepts, and although it was created as a way for players to experiment running a city, the goal was to be fun rather than accurate. “I realized early on, because of chaos theory and a lot of other things,” said designer Will Wright, “that it’s kind of hopeless to approach simulations like that, as predictive endeavors. But we’ve kind of caricatured our systems. SimCity was always meant to be a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model of the way a city works.”