Interesting Things #31 — Trillion Dollar Disaster

19 Nov 2021

Hi,

This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff.

Happy reading!

Object-Oriented Programming — The Trillion Dollar Disaster — Why it’s time to move on from OOP. (hn)

The Unfulfilled Promise of Serverless — Say what you will about serverless, it’s failed to live up to its promise and hasn’t proved to be particularly lucrative for anybody. (hn)

Special relativity keeps digital identities secure — Speed of light could provide ultimate bulwark against hackers. (hn)

Notes on Web3 — A counterweight to the growing hype. (hn)

Researchers wait 12 months to report vulnerability with 9.8 out of 10 severity rating — Palo Alto Networks patches critical buffer overflow bug in its GlobalProtect VPN. (hn)

The Internet’s Unkillable App — The noisier our digital lives get, the more popular the humble newsletter becomes. (hn)

The Monstrosity Email Has Become — I’m currently thinking deeply about email. This prompted me to write about what was bad with it. (hn)

Semgrep: a static analysis journey — How an academic project for the Linux kernel evolved into a multilingual security tool. (hn)

Secure software supply chain: why every link matters — It is impossible to secure everything, you have to focus on each layer of the software supply chain to be as protected as possible. (hn)

Haskell in Production: Scarf — Find out the pros and cons of using Haskell for developing production-level applications. (hn)

Cargo cult programming is killing the software industry — When a programmer copies programming techniques or uses “technologies” without understanding, it is killing our industry. (hn)

Flexible Monocopter Drone Can Be Completely Rolled Up — A single motor and flexible wing are all this drone needs. (hn)

What’s the Future of IDEs? — Can we move our development environment to a remote server and interact with it through a browser-mediated IDE? (hn)

How we use Lisp to be independent and resilient — I was displeased to see an unexpected error: License for <proprietary product> expired. (hn)

ChaosDB Explained: Azure’s Cosmos DB Vulnerability Walkthrough — Step-by-step technical walkthrough of ChaosDB, one of the most severe Azure vulnerabilities of all time. (hn)

How hustle culture can crush your soul, and how to fix it. — Stop flirting with burnout. Learn how to recover from work exhaustion without quitting your job. (hn)

Reflecting on 11 years of side projects — I’ve been building side projects for 11 years. Here’s my history and learnings from them. (hn)

Rewriting the History of Computing — Inventing the future through hindsight. (hn)

This Tech Entrepreneur Is Miniaturizing the Chocolate Factory — Five years later, Nate Saal aims to bring his smart, small, do-it-all chocolate machine to your countertop. (hn)

How to build an Open Source Business in 2021 (Part 1) — A step-by-step guide to build an Open Source Business from scratch. (hn)

Laws of Logic Lead to New Restrictions on the Big Bang — Translating commonsense principles into strict mathematical constraints on how our universe must have behaved at the beginning of time. (hn)

Diamond hauled from deep inside Earth holds never-before-seen mineral — Researchers thought the mineral was impossible to find on Earth’s surface. (hn)

Near-Earth asteroid is a fragment from the moon, say scientists — Spectrum of reflected light from Kamo`oalewa closely matches lunar rocks from Nasa’s Apollo mission. (hn)

The Nothingness of Money — It’s the great everything and the great nothing. (hn)

Experts From A World That No Longer Exists — What was foolish to one generation was smart to the next. Every generation goes through this. Every generation fights it. (hn)

Young Investors to Financial Planners: Thanks, But No Thanks — Young people aren’t interested in the traditional financial planners because the services offered haven’t changed all that much. (hn)

A Dog’s Life — Why are so many people so cruel to their dogs? My search to understand a hidden scourge. (hn)

Europe’s Big Bang: How Gunpowder Transformed the Medieval World — What made artillery possible was gunpowder, and gunpowder was the single greatest invention of the European Middle Ages. (hn)

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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng