Technology
AI Free Will, Crime and Punishment
Our previous issue ended with a strong case for the incoherence of the concept of free will. It made only one cogent argument for free will. The argument posits a split between the world of science and the world of Shakespeare, and claims that the human person belongs to the latter, where free will is …
How we’ve saved 98% in cloud costs by writing our own database
What is the first rule of programming? Maybe something like “do not repeat yourself” or “if it works, don’t touch it”? Or, how about “do not write your own database!”… That’s a good one. Databases are a nightmare to write, from Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID) requirements to sharding to fault recovery to administration …
Microsoft blamed for “a cascade of security failures” in Exchange breach report
Getty Images A federal Cyber Safety Review Board has issued its report on what led to last summer’s capture of hundreds of thousands of emails by Chinese hackers from cloud customers, including federal agencies. It cites “a cascade of security failures at Microsoft” and finds that “Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate” and needs to adjust …
Americans are YOLO spending more but savings hits lows of Great Recession
Arriel Vinson hadn’t traveled much before the pandemic. Now she can’t stop. The 28-year-old writer leaves her Dallas apartment every chance she gets: to see Beyoncé in Atlanta, Usher in Chicago and for girls’ trips in Jamaica and Mexico. When a favorite artist announces new tour dates, Vinson starts rallying friends and snapping up tickets, …
MOnSter 6502
A dis-integrated circuit project to make a complete, working transistor-scale replica of the classic MOS 6502 microprocessor. FAQ Sixty-Five-Oh-What? The 6502 is the famous processor found at the core of such influential computer systems as the Apple ][, the Commodore PET, the Atari 400 and 800 home video game consoles, the BBC Micro, and the …
A lazy and flippant classification of programming languages
Sometimes I post in an online community of computer touchers, as one does. When talking flippantly about programming languages, it’s sometimes useful to glob a bunch of them together based on characteristics, whether superficial or not. This started with jokes about common features of “P languages” like Perl, PHP, Python, JavaScript and Ruby, but you …
Visual Subnet Calculator – Split/Join
Visual Subnet Calculator strives to be a tool for quickly designing networks and collaborating on that design with others. It focuses on expediting the work of network administrators, not academic subnetting math. Design Tenets Simplicity is king. Network admins are busy and Visual Subnet Calculator should always be easy for FIRST TIME USERS to quickly …
Discord to start showing ads in the coming week after resisting for almost a decade
Popular gaming social media platform Discord Is no longer going to be one of the rare ad-free havens of the tech market. The Wall Street Journal reported that the startup with over 200 million monthly active users plans to start showing advertisements “in the coming week”. “The paid promotions are from videogame makers and will …
The DFINITY Foundation
Security Alert: Recently, we’ve seen a marked increase in phishing scams on third-party job boards — where an individual impersonating a DFINITY team member persuades job-seekers to send confidential information and/or payment. As good practice, please continue to be vigilant regarding fraudulent messages or fake accounts impersonating DFINITY employees. If you need to confirm the …
How npm install scripts can be weaponized: A real-world example of a harmful npm package
At the beginning of 2020, my boss at GitHub pulled me in to a surprise meeting. “I think that we’re going to buy npm,” he told me. “The npm registry keeps growing, and the team managing it can’t keep up. We want to make sure that the npm registry stays online. Anyway, I want you …
