2018 August Assorted Links

September 4, 2018

Photo taken in July 2016 at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area in Las Vegas, Nevada with a Sony Alpha α7II, FE 28mm F/2.

Couple days late due to some travel, but this one was larger than my first attempt.

Culture #

• There was an interesting article about bloat in our current web experience titled the The Bullshit Web which was pretty dang interesting, especially for those of us who are between 30 and 40 and watched this phenomena occur pretty intimately. This led on to reading about Bullshit Jobs, which was an interesting way to think of productivity in a modern age. The article is a little tilted (written for strike magazine), the author is a pretty interesting guy to dig into. Then I’ll lump this other article in; Learning From Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces which discussed what are likely common frustrations with the user experience of most software now days. It pushes past the concept of bullshit web to get into some more details of things that we experience everyday due to the focus on the web as a development medium.
• This awesome site called two bit history had a nice article on where vim came from
• A recent article about some academic institutions in Germany fighting with Elsevier is really heartwarming. Check out Sci-Hub and academictorrents if this type of stuff is interesting to you.
• Well done visualization of land utilization in the United States, was surprising to see how much is allocated towards agricultural effects. Is a wonder that the EU can survive given the landmass available, must have to be extremely efficient and import quite a bit.
• Interesting rticle about the 10:1 rule of writing and programming pulling from the authors own experience in writing a couple books.
• With a GEB reference in the last article, here is an interesting critique of Hofstadter’s popular book
• I’ve been reading Here’s Looking at Euclid and have been poking around a little online based on some of the topics. Recently found that there is a site dedicated to translating Leibniz works, check out this article on binary arithmatic.
• Overton Window is a conceptual specturm of tolerable discourse.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an extensive computer science section.
• A developer named Latish Sehgal has a “read my book notes” site that has a nice format.
• There is some fallout from the recent FCC leadership on Net Neutrality where it appears that there was never a “hack” that comprimised their feedback system. The top comment right now on Hn alludes to the Three Envelopes joke, which is quite interesting.

Technology #

• Things like the demoscene have always amazed me, where amazing engineering inginuity is celebrated in a visual and auditory experience. With machines being so powerful it seems crazy that someone would give themselves an arbitrary limit so small, but these limits force some pretty wild creativity. This guy crammed a bootable cd retro game into a tweet
• Why I ripped the same CD 300 times and it’s follow up Error Beneath the Wavs was an awesome read. There was a fun Hn conversation to follow along with as well. If you’re interested in music archival you should look at beets.
• The Cloudflare Blog usually has interesting articles, this one on C10K problem was interesting as it headlines with saving “54 years per day” on the internet. Simultaneously interesting and a bit shaking to realize how pervasive cloudflare is for serving content these days.

Analysis #

• Interesting project within gitlab called meltano, from that I saw superset which looks really interesting for prototyping dashboards.
• A short writup on optimizing building layouts by relaxing convetional contstraints such as constructability yeilded some interesting graphics and discussion
• Well laid out visual example in 2D/3D of PCA with an interesting discussion.
• University of Notre Dame professor Nicholas Zabaras has some well laid out courses with artifacts and video lectures on scientic computing.
• An awesome post on how to use rayshader to create 3D maps.
• Example post on creating a high quality raster image from street data of a city with python, postgres, and openstreemap.
• Impressive looking mapping tool from Uber called Kepler.gl
• Well written self contained post on building a Markov Chain Twitter bot that mashes up Karl Marx and Steve Jobs.