The Arc of the Covenant. I recommend this piece if you want to get some data on what the fuck is happening in international finance.
Culture
Microcovid Calculator. Play around with your COVID-19 risk level! If you’re someone who likes extrapolating risk from incomplete data sets, you’ll probably have fun with it. This is a reminder that I am Not A Doctor.
Lofi-Player. Creative project from Google Brain’s magenta project that creates lo-fi beeps n boops using RNNs and provides a cute pixelated UI to boot. Not quite robust enough to have running in the background during work to try and flow to, but definitely good for spending a break to play around with it.
Hic Sunt Dracones. You’ll like this is you’re either (a) a doomer neolib who thinks we’re on the cusp of societal collapse (b) someone who enjoys dunking on doomer neolibs but you’re curious what sort of content they read and share. I’ll let you guess which one I am ;)
Github Audio. When paired with mynoise.net you can attain focus bliss
What if Facebook is the real silent majority. “But what sticks out, when you dig in to the data, is just how dominant the Facebook right truly is. Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition”.
Tech
Typing is Hard. This post outlines type checking and decidability in an accessible way. I recommend it to someone who’s familiar with the concepts of type systems and can understand the difference between statically and dynamically typed languages but wants to learn more about the subtle differences across popular statically typed langages. If you’re into compilers you’ll probably like it :)
Against Online Tooling. The TL;DR is that online tools for things like JWT generation, diff checking, or anything else are access points for accidentally leaking sensitive data. The author encourages doing these operations locally as much as possible.
How NAT Traversal Works. Tailscale is a cool company that is tackling the challenge of building a secure network without needing to rely on sysadmins for each intersection, and their blog is generally great. I recommend this piece if you’re curious about the technical specifics of how networked devices actually connect with each other.
An Overview on the Science of Function Length. More empirical analysis of software quality, this time trying to answer the hypothesis of whether very short functions are actually a code smell (one of my many pieces that challenges the “clean code” style of programming). I recommend it if you like reading attempted objective analysis of a relatively ambiguous subject.
Shell Commands Rewritten in Rust. List of shell utilities (traditionally written in C) that have been re-written and improved in Rust. You’ll probably like this if you’re into system utilities or are a big Rust fan.
Describing Microservices using Modern Haskell. This was written by my coworkers and is an example of a formal paper about industry-specific CS (in contrast with formal papers about more theoretical or abstract concepts). I recommend it if you’re curious about microservice design using purely functional architectures, and I’m also biased because I work on the Scala version of this library so I think the work is personally cool.
Towards rigorous design of domain-specific distributed systems. So much of modern cloud computing is in distributed systems, and one of the killer apps of domain-specific modeling that many static FP languages do well is the ability to create programmatic DSLs (i.e. NOT yaml) to define complex distributed systems. This paper lays out a potential DSL design using that idea.
The Bicycle Threat Model. An introduction to threat modeling via a practical example: keeping your bicycle safe in a city. I recommend for anyone who wants a practical example for threat modeling (perhaps to explain to a non-tech-y family member or friend).
The Case of the top secret iPod. Cool read on an internal project at Apple that sheds some insights into what work at one of the most secretive companies in the US is like.