Interesting Things #39 — Random thoughts

Hi,

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

Happy reading!

#tech

Letting Go of Random — What is a good use of random and what is not? (hn)

Memory leaks: the forgotten side of web performance — If a web app leaks 5 MB on every interaction, but it still works and nobody notices, then does it matter? (hn)

Why I Switched From Firefox to Brave After 21 Years — I was amazed to see a browser that did all of the things that I had suggested that Firefox should do. (hn)

Return to the Text — Audiovisual fasting in a propagandized age. (hn)

Grep one-liners as CI tasks — Leveraging grep’s exit status and output for simple code checks. (hn)

More than 1,200 phishing toolkits capable of intercepting 2FA detected in the wild — To counter this new trend in account security protections, threat actors started adopting new tools that would allow them to bypass 2FA. (hn)

12 Rust Tips and Tricks you might not know yet — Over the past two years, I stumbled upon many useful patterns and crates that I wish I knew beforehand. (hn)

Useful & Unknown Java Features — This article describes several useful but not very well-known features of Java like DelayQueue, Phaser or BitSet. (hn)

Beyond the Borrow Checker: Differential Fuzzing — Using a modern fuzzing technique to validate the high-level logic of a safe Rust library. (hn)

Lessons from Developing an App on the iPad in Swift Playgrounds from Start to Finish — Swift Playgrounds will shine mostly as a great educational and prototyping tool. (hn)

I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR. Here’s What I Learned — This is how it feels in the future: Disembodied and unaware of my surroundings. (hn)

What would a real Web3 look like? (Dec 2021) — I started wondering what would a true iteration of the Web look like? (hn)

Lessons from Log4j (Dec 2021) — The lessons from Log4j highlight some problems in the free-software ecosystem in an unambiguous way. (hn)

Real-time machine learning: challenges and solutions — Solutions for online prediction and continual learning with step-by-step use cases, considerations, and technologies. (hn)

#science

Researchers design antibodies that destroy old cells, slowing down aging (Oct 2021) — An antibody recognizes specific proteins on the surface of aged or senescent cells and attaches itself to them. (hn)

Entangled microwave photons may give 500x boost to radar — Stretched, entangled microwave pulses are the key. (hn)

NASA’s Retiring Top Scientist Says We Can Terraform Mars and Maybe Venus, Too — Jim Green has shaped much of the space agency’s scientific inquiry for decades. (hn)

Not your ordinary houseplant: World’s tallest begonia found in Tibet — When researchers found a begonia plant twice as tall as a person, they knew they had something extraordinary. (hn)

Qubits Can Be as Safe as Bits, Researchers Show — A new result shows that quantum information can theoretically be protected from errors just as well as classical information can. (hn)

Astronomers Discover a Strange Galaxy Without Dark Matter — New, high-resolution observations of a faint, fluffy galaxy suggest that dark matter’s not as ubiquitous. (hn)

#society

Cyber Command Task Force Conducted Its First Offensive Operation As The Secretary Of Defense Watched — A sign of the rapidly evolving nature of warfare in the digital domain and the future importance of offensive cyber operations. (hn)

You Can’t Simply Decide to Be a Different Person — Forming new habits isn’t impossible, but it’s much easier for some people than others. (hn)

Cognitive Load Theory and its Applications for Learning — What makes learning hard? How can we make it easier? Cognitive load theory explains. (hn)

History of Pepper — The most important spice in the world. (hn)

Reasons Pistachios Are So Expensive — Snacking on a handful of pistachios is a delight but can be pretty expensive. There’s a very good reason though. (hn)

#end

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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng