Bookmarks 2024-41

Science

• 🇬🇧 A Skeptic's Take on Beaming Power to Eath from Space, by IEEE
  Why we shouldn’t try to stick solar plants where the sun always shines

• 🇬🇧 Why You Can Hear the Temperature of Water, by The New York Times
  A science video maker in China couldn’t find a good explanation for why hot and cold water sound different, so he did his own research and published it.

• 🇬🇧 46,000-year-old worms wriggle back to life after scientists defrost them, by The Telegraph
  The tiny creatures, discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2018, existed when woolly mammoths still roamed the planet

Art || Design

• 🇬🇧 How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe, by The Marginalian
  How many revolutions does the cog of culture make before a new truth about reality catches into gear?

• 🇬🇧 Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature, by Locus Magazine
  In truth, the Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of technology (...). In truth, their goal was something closely related to science fiction: to challenge not the technology itself, but rather the social relations that governed its use.

• 🇬🇧 From Coffee to Cacao to Clitoria: Luscious Antique Botanical Illustrations of the Most Vibrant Flora of the Americas, by The Marginalian
  Beautiful botanical illustrations from my continent of birth.

• Playlist of Brazilian Indigenous Songs, YouTube/Spotify, by Alice Pataxó

• 🇬🇧 40 outrageous photos that changed fashion, from teenage Kate Moss to Twiggy in a mini and Lady Gaga’s meat dress, by The Guardian
  Leigh Bowery provoked, Dior’s elegant New Look inspired, Katharine Hamnett’s slogan T-shirts challenged: these are the shots that made the world see clothes differently

Maths || Maps

• 🇬🇧 Log Scales, by Briefer
  Lucas da Costa: The first lesson I learned about logarithms is not to mention them when speaking to a large crowd. All the other lessons sucked, so I thought I'd create my own.

Society || Tech

• 🇬🇧 Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment?, by MIT Technology Review
  Researchers are using generative AI and other techniques to teach robots new skills—including tasks they could perform in homes.

• 🇬🇧 We can have a different web, by Citation Needed
  Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

• 🇬🇧 The Gruesome Story of How Neuralink’s Monkeys Actually Died, by Wired
  Elon Musk says no primates died as a result of Neuralink’s implants. A WIRED investigation now reveals the grisly specifics of their deaths as US authorities have been asked to investigate Musk’s claims.

• 🇬🇧 What is a good image description for accessibilty in social media, by @RobotHugsComic

• 🇬🇧 A brief, weird history of brainwashing, by MIT Technology Review
  L. Ron Hubbard, Operation Midnight Climax, and stochastic terrorism—the race for mind control changed America forever.

• 🇬🇧 Fab-brik
  A company that transforms textile waste into construction material

• 🇬🇧 Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution, by The Guardian
  Study confirms Altria, Philip Morris International, Danone, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola are worst offenders

• 🇬🇧 The World Is Going Blind. Taiwan Offers a Warning, and a Cure, by Wired
  So many people are nearsighted on the island nation that they have already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us.

• 🇬🇧 We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned, by NPR

• 🇬🇧 Why Metadata Matters, by SSD
  Those who collect or demand access to metadata, such as governments or telecommunications companies, argue that the disclosure (and collection) of metadata is no big deal. Unfortunately, these claims are just not true. Even a tiny sample of metadata can provide an intimate lens into a person’s life.

• 🇬🇧 The Simpleton Manifesto, by Nathaniel Rachman
  For the simplist, “just saying the right thing, believing the right thing, is the substance of victory and remedy.”

• 🇬🇧 The Most Vulnerable Place on the Internet, by Wired
  Underwater cables keep the internet online. When they congregate in one place, things get tricky.

Career || Programming

• 🇬🇧 Are recruiters better than a coin flip at judging resumes? Here's the data., by Interviewing.io
  Below are all the details, but here’s the TL;DR: we reproduced my results from 10 years ago! Our new study showed that recruiters were only a bit better than a coin flip at making value judgments, and they still all disagreed with each other about what a good candidate looks like.

• 🇬🇧 Your Makefiles Are Wrong, by Davis Hansson
  Your Makefiles are full of tabs and errors. An opinionated approach to writing (GNU) Makefiles that I learned from Ben may still be able to salvage them.

• 🇬🇧 Coding for non-programmers: Why we need better GUI automation tools, by Mat Duggan

• 🇬🇧 Dependency Time Machine, by pilotpirxie
  Tool to automatically update dependencies one by one in chronological order. Most dependencies are compatible with other packages from a similar time or pastime. This tool helps to find the latest compatible version of the dependencies and update them.

• 🇬🇧 Deep dive in CORS: History, how it works, and best practices, by Ilija Eftimov

• 🇬🇧 Moving from logs to metrics, by Martin Albisetti
  Long story short, at ShipHero we’ve moved away from using logs to debug our software and are all-in on using metrics (Honeycomb, opentelemetry-based specifically!). It’s one of those things that in hindsight seems easy to do, something that we should have done years ago, and that’s a no-brainer for any new project. But if you’ve been around software long enough you’ll understand why so many things seem easy in hindsight and super hard at the time.

• 🇬🇧 Memory allocation, by samwho
  One thing that all programs on your computer have in common is a need for memory. Programs need to be loaded from your hard drive into memory before they can be run. While running, the majority of what programs do is load values from memory, do some computation on them, and then store the result back in memory.

• 🇬🇧 It is time to fulfill the promise of continuous delivery, by Charity Majors

• 🇬🇧 Know how your org works (or how to become a more effective engineer), by Cindy Sridharan
  You can either complain and pontificate on Twitter on how the tech industry should ideally work, or you can learn how your org really works and what’s rewarded, and optimize for that. Or quit and find another job. 🤷‍♀️ This might sound cynical - but it’s what it is.

• 🇬🇧 Observability is More than Logs, Metrics & Traces, by Philipp Krenn
  You know the drill: DevOps is using tool(s) X. So obviously, observability can be solved by throwing some tools together as well; generally logs, metrics, and traces often called the pillars of observability. But observability is not a tool — it is a property of a system.

• 🇬🇧 How to write technical blog posts, by Quincy Larson

• 🇬🇧 Practical tips to be fairly evaluated on Performance Reviews, by Mekka Okereke
  This is really, really good advice. Seriously.

General

• 🇬🇧 Forget the four seasons: how embracing 72 Japanese ‘micro-seasons’ could change your garden (and your life), by The Guardian
  Unlike its western equivalent, Japan’s ancient agricultural calendar is governed not solely by the waxing and waning of the moon and the sun’s position in the sky, but also by the blooming of seasonal flowers and other small changes in nature against the wider backdrop of the seasons.

• Paper snowflakes cutting guide, in r/coolguides

• 🇬🇧 Shock of the old: 11 wild views of the future – from winged postmen to self-cleaning homes, by The Guardian
  Do you have to brush your own hair, own an umbrella or keep at least one hand on your steering wheel? Don’t blame these visionary thinkers

Christianity || Theology

• 🇬🇧 How God's Presence Came to Dwell with All His People, by The Bible Project

• 🇬🇧 Why women should be church leaders and preachers, by N. T. Wright

• 🇧🇷 Law & Gospel, a Lutheran View

• 🇬🇧 List of good introductions to systematic theology that you'd recommend to a congregant, kicked-off by Jordan Rice

• Understanding the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, by Ian Paul
  [The Beatitudes] are very well known, often being cited as favourite texts, and yet there are some serious puzzles that they present us with. Why are there nine, with the last one seemingly tagged on at the end? Why is there a mixture of future and present tenses in the sayings? Why is one of the promises (about the kingdom of heaven) repeated—did Jesus run out of other good things to say? Are they encouragements under pressure, or commendations of virtue? More to the point, are they realistic, or are they (with the rest of the ‘Sermon on the Mount’) setting out an unattainable ideal?

• List of Parallel Passages in New Testament Quoted from Old Testament, by Blue Letter Bible

Philosophy || Psycology

• 🇬🇧 Sentience, Sapience, Consciousness & Self-Awareness: Defining Complex Terms, by Less Wrong
  The terms in the title are commonly used in crucial debates surrounding morality & AI. Yet, I feel like there is no clear consensus about the meaning of those terms. The words are often used interchangeably, causing people to think they are all the same or very closely related. I believe they're not. Clearly separating these terms makes it a lot easier to conceptualize a larger "spectrum of consciousness".

Quotes || Questions

Click on the author's name to see full context/community replies

• [I apologize even if I don’t feel like I did anything wrong] if my actions impacted someone negatively. Intention does not supersede impact.
  SupernovaMomma

• A common definition of idolatry is 'anything you love more than God'. But idolatry is actually first and foremost about trust in something other than God. If someone demandsds unconditional trust from you, they are demanding worship, even if they don't know it.
  Rachel Darnall

• For Christians, our “goal” in life is not an accomplishment, a life stage, or any type of earthly success. It is likeness to Jesus. Which means seasons of waiting are not an obstacle to our progress. In fact, they can accelerate it. Sharon Hodde Miller

• What future body augmentation are you looking forward to being a reality?
  Jack Rhysider

• What is a passage of Scripture so beautiful that commenting on it further seems fruitless?
  Justin Sytsma

• What are your tips for spotting a red flag at a company when interviewing?
  Randall Kanna Franson and kefimochi

• What's a good website to waste a whole night on?
  r/AskReddit

• What’s a movie that had the BIGGEST PLOT TWIST EVER and it still blows your mind just thinking about it ???? cavalierremedy

• Do you see yourself as a mind living in your body, or are you your body?
  Jessica Rose