February 2020 Links

Culture

• History of Czechoslovak LSD is the story of legality of LSD manufacture and use in an authoritarian communist state (After LSD had been largely banned in western society).
• Protocols not Platforms apparently inspired twitter to announce funding an open source decentralized standard for social media.
• History of Fidonet by Tom Jennings tells an interesting story. If you make it to the end you encounter that people who “had nothing to do with the design, creation or maintenance of the FidoNet software” formed groups that started asserting control over how the project was run. Discussion on Hn. If this interests you, please examine BBS the Documentary. Also Tom Jennings is a pretty interesting character.
• Two beautiful typographical works by Wouter Soudan who was working on a textus.io project that produced beautiful websites.
• A decomposition of how some good corporate engineering blogs are written.
• Beautiful typeset website by Gwern Branwen with Knuth style detailed margin additions and some amazing hover renders. The typography thread continues from January.
• Old Time Radio Research Group archives of X Minus One, a science fiction radio series from 1955-58.
• Jitsi is getting hammered by the pandemic. Founder Emil Ivov has written about the architecture, but also recently interviewed on scaling during the pandemic.

Technology

• Blog post about developing a new distributed DBMS.
• Cloudflare digging into performance of dm-crypt and ultimately giving back to upstream!
• The super useful excalidraw explains how they implement end-to-end encryption within browser sessions
• Use of a fitlet device to make a homelab in your pocket.
• Systemd maintainer writes about the underpinnings of how Linux systems are composed and shipped as a follow on to writing about stateless systems.

Analysis

• An large collection of financial models and numerical methods.
• Collection of 200+ flashcards of algorithms
• Identifying radio side channels with SND and some hacking.
• Performance benchmark analysis of egress filtering on Linux

Travel

• Exploring the logistics of moving the Boston Symphony Orchestra around the world.
  • Nearly 15 tons of gear, valuation around $20M
  • Exotic materials (e.g. woods, skins) have to be reported and inspected to be in accordance with international trade of endangered species.