Interesting Things #11 — Generative Art

Hi,

This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie biz, science, and related fields.

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#tech

A First Look Into Generative Art — My experience with generative art and some of the things I have discovered so far about it.

Incident writeup as sociological storytelling — A good incident writeup is a sociological story about our system. (hn)

Software development is a creative process — Understanding you cannot have both a fixed plan and changing requirements helps everyone involved.

How databases handle 10 million devices in high-cardinality benchmarks — Learn more about high-cardinality and how to benchmark database performance with this type of data.

understanding thread stack sizes and how alpine is different — It is my opinion that if your program is crashing on Alpine, your program is not actually portable. (hn)

Copying all of MySQL’s dumbest decisions — We replicate some very odd behavior of MySQL because we promised.

A closer look at Acorn, our open source precision farming rover — Help produce healthier food, reduce harmful agricultural poisons, and fight climate change. (hn)

A Vim Guide For Veteran Users — Discover Vim’s keystrokes for INSERT mode completion, abbreviations, how work the viminfo file, and more!

Measuring memory usage in Python: it’s tricky! — It turns out, however, that measuring memory usage isn’t as straightforward as you’d think. (hn)

The State of Python Packaging in 2021 — Every year, I revisit the current best practices for Python packaging. This is my 2021 edition. (hn)

Bash Function Names Can Be Almost Anything — My guess is Bash behaves this way to preserve backwards compatibility.

When To Rewrite — A working system is a valuable asset. It works. It lets you test new ideas cheaply. Don’t take that for granted.

Teaching Open Source Software in North Korea — The patches submitted from this class might be the first ever open source contributions to come from North Korea.

How We Are Able To Hack Any Company By Sending Message — Find a hack. Report it. Make $20,000. (hn)

How not to break a search engine or: What I learned about unglamorous engineering — Gruntwork, if not glamorous, is certainly valuable. I wish we grasped its value a bit better.

How to Recover a Bitcoin Passphrase — Perform a Breadth-First search on typos of increasing Damerau-Levenshtein distances from an initial guess. (hn)

Solve software problems by adding more — I continued building more pieces without realising removing the first piece is the better solution. (hn)

Damn Vulnerable GraphQL Application — An app that is intentionally vulnerable so you can poke around and learn about app security.

What is simplicity in programming and why does it matter? — Clojure is about simplicity. Simplicity means ‘untangling things’ (such as concepts) and requires hard work. (hn)

Unicode sorting is hard and why browsers added special emoji matching to regexp — Unicode text sorting is so annoying in the modern day.

Semgrep: The Surgical Static Analysis Tool — Why I like Semgrep. Why I think you should use it. How I use Semgrep. (hn)

Bare Necessities for All Log Lines (May 2021) — Help Your Future Self. Context is Everything.

Cross-Branch Testing — There’s a certain class of problems that’s hard to test. (hn)

Ten years of nCine — A retrospective on ten years of developing a cross-platform 2D game engine.

What should the CPU usage be of a fully-loaded CPU that has been throttled? — One theory says this should report 100% CPU usage. Another says this should report 50% CPU usage. (hn)

DevOps; a decade of confusion and frustration — What is “DevOps”? is a question I’ve heard a lot, often I’ve asked it implicitly to myself. (hn)

Hands-Free Coding — How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking. (hn)

Getting unstuck — Being stuck can come in two shades. The first is when you’re missing information.

Image color replacement with numerical optimization — It’s a challenging problem and while the results are far from perfect, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. (hn)

#business

Product Validation Frameworks are Mostly Useless Without Taste — Here’s why you can’t build new products without having good taste. (hn)

It’s Finally Clear Why Amazon Bought Whole Foods — A massive nationwide chain of Amazon Fresh stores might just be Trojan horses for Amazon’s actual goal. (hn)

#science

No One Imagined Giant Lizard Nests Would Be This Weird — People didn’t know where yellow-spotted goannas laid their eggs, until one team started digging. (hn)

Flying car completes test flight between airports — A prototype flying car has completed a 35-minute flight between international airports.

How Underground Fiber Optics Spy on Humans Moving Above — Researchers have turned an underground telecom fiber optic cable into a kind of scientific surveillance device.

Advancing AI to make shopping easier for everyone — Our latest AI advancements could power entirely new future shopping experiences.

Same or Different? The Question Flummoxes Neural Networks. — AI systems can’t seem to generalize the concepts of ‘same’ and ‘different’. Without that, the quest for AI may be hopeless. (hn)

Will We Ever Fly Supersonically Over Land? — By turning sonic booms into sonic thumps, engineers hope to domesticate faster-than-sound transport.

One man’s plan to resurrect the animal species we can’t save — The backup plan? Freeze their cells to preserve their genes.

Scientists are teaching drones to hunt down human screams — Researchers developed a drone-carried acoustics system to find people calling out for help

Why bigger species live longer, and what we can learn from it — Why does lifespan decrease with body mass intraspecies, and increase with body mass interspecies?

How farmers and scientists are engineering your food — Scientists create better-tasting produce by manipulating genes, but is it necessary?

#life

The Job Juggle: Gen Z and millennial employees embrace the concept of ‘Polywork’ — The professional workforce is increasingly rejecting the concept of a full-time job. (hn)

Harder Than It Looks, Not As Fun as It Seems — Almost everything looks better from the outside. It’s the same for people.

5 Hidden Mistakes That Can Ruin a Developer’s Career — Have you lost a development job without knowing why? (hn)

It’s Time to Fight for a Dual Product Management Career Path — If you pressure individual contributors to climb a management ladder, you end up losing talent.

NFTs and me: meet the people trying to sell their memes for millions — Once, people who owned viral photos made little money from them. Now, they can sell for an enormous sum.

Many people don’t want to work unless it’s from home — There are more remote jobs than ever. That doesn’t mean you’ll get one.

IQ tests can’t measure it, but ‘cognitive flexibility’ is key to learning and creativity — Are you good at changing perspectives? If so, it may benefit you in more ways than you imagine.

What Deadlines Do to Lifetimes — Can we find a balance between structuring our time and squandering it?

Mate Selection for Modernity — An increasing cohort of successful women are chasing a shrinking number of high-value, commitment-averse men. (hn)

Truth Is a Weird Shape — It is only through gazing at the truth from as many different angles as possible that we may finally begin to see it’s shape. (hn)

#random

Is This Some Kind of Code? You Can Solve the … — Mathematically inspired typefaces that are also puzzles. (hn)

#end

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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng