Makura no Soshi

• The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI
  No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.
• The Threat
  There were only a few application areas [of information security] that people really worried about thirty years ago: diplomatic and military communications at one end, and the security of things like cash machines at the other. As we’ve gone about putting computers and communications into just about everything that you can buy for more than ten bucks that you don’t eat or drink, the field has grown.
• Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web
  Why is Google building a browser? A better question is, why did it take so long for Google to build a browser?
• WWW: The Way We Were
  The final two episodes of Halt and Catch Fire aired last night. […] The Web that they are talking about on the show, the open Web, is ailing, dying. It was like listening to a eulogy at a funeral, this thing that I love, poured the best of my self into, gone forever.
• Everything Is Fucked and I’m Pretty Sure It’s the Internet’s Fault
  Democracy relies on trust. Rule of law requires trust. If we lose our trust in our institutions, then those institutions will either crumble or turn cancerous. But the internet lines up incentives in such a way that it makes it profitable to breed distrust.
• The Real Name Fallacy
  The idea that anonymity is the real problem with the internet is based in part on misreadings of theories formed more than thirty years ago.

• AWS Security Primer
  I was preparing some AWS Security related training. Soon, I realized that this topic is too huge to fit into my brain. So I structured my thoughts in a mind map. Within a couple of minutes1 I came up with this.
• Takeaways From the ServerlessConf 2017
  Serverless computing basically adds another layer of abstraction on top of cloud infrastructure so that the developer doesn’t need to worry about servers, including virtual ones.
• How Much Does It Cost To Run A Serverless API on AWS? · Alestic.com
  Folks tend to be curious about how much real projects cost to run on AWS, so here’s a real example with breakdowns by AWS service and feature. During this month, TimerCheck.io service processed over 2 million API requests.
• How Google Is Challenging AWS
  Big companies are often criticized for having “missed” the future — from the comfortable perch of a present where said future has come to pass, of course — but while the future is still the future incumbents are first more often than not.
• Best Practices for Building a Microservice Architecture
  A microservice architecture shifts around complexity. Instead of a single complex system, you have a bunch of simple services with complex interactions. Our goal is to keep the complexity in check.
• How the Internet works: Submarine fibre, brains in jars, and coaxial cables
  Have you ever thought about how that cat picture actually gets from a server in Oregon to your PC in London? We’re not simply talking about the wonders of TCP/IP or pervasive Wi-Fi hotspots, though those are vitally important as well. No, we’re talking about the big infrastructure: the huge submarine cables, the vast landing sites and data centres with their massively redundant power systems, and the elephantine, labyrinthine last-mile networks that actually hook billions of us to the Internet.

On tools …

• Setting the Record Straight: containers vs. Zones vs. Jails vs. VMs
  Solaris Zones, BSD Jails, and VMs are first class concepts. [..] Containers on the other hand are not real things.
• CPU Utilization is Wrong
  The metric we all use for CPU utilization is deeply misleading, and getting worse every year. What is CPU utilization? How busy your processors are? No, that’s not what it measures. Yes, I’m talking about the “%CPU” metric used everywhere, by everyone.
• Practical jq
  I really love jq, the JSON processor. It has changed my life and pretty much replaced Perl and Ruby as my ETL and data-munging go-to tools.
• Reshaping JSON with jq
  Working with data from an art museum API and from the Twitter API, this lesson teaches how to use the command-line utility jq to filter and parse complex JSON files into flat CSV files.
• A Visual Guide to What’s New in Swagger 3.0
  Over the past few years, Swagger 2 has become the de facto standard for defining or documenting your API. Since then, it’s been moved to the Linux foundation and renamed to OpenAPI Spec.
• A plan for open source software maintainers
  As I envision it, a solution would look something like a cross between Patreon and Bugzilla: Users would be able sign up to “support” projects of their choosing […] and would be able to open issues.

• The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
  One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. […] You can do it; 92%–95% of the population can’t.
• Towards an understanding of technical debt
  Technical debt exists. But it’s relatively rare. […] The term is being abused, or at least dangerously overloaded.
• Developer hiring and the market for lemons
  The fact that joining a new team is uncertain makes developers less likely to leave existing teams, which makes it harder to hire developers. But the fact that developers often join teams which they dislike makes it easier to hire developers. What’s the net effect of that? I have no idea.
• Bots won’t replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.
  Lately, everyone’s talking about “conversational UI.” It’s the next big thing. But the more articles I read on the topic, the more annoyed I get. It’s taken me so long to figure out why!
• Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns
  In the Kingdom of Javaland, where King Java rules with a silicon fist, people aren’t allowed to think the way you and I do. In Javaland, you see, nouns are very important, by order of the King himself. Nouns are the most important citizens in the Kingdom.
• Graphical fidelity is ruining video games / fuzzy notepad
  So my problem is that striving for realism is incredibly boring and counter-productive. I don’t even understand the appeal; if I wanted reality, I could look out my window.

When I worked on IPv6 implementations I used tcpdump(1) on a daily basis. — Those times are long gone, but even today it is an extremely helpful tool. Just last week it helped me to debug a database connection problem.

To quote the great Rachel: “tcpdump -e can resolve a great many mysteries.”

If you never used tcpdump (or Wireshark) before then Julia Evan’s zine “let’s learn tcpdump” is a great place to start and to learn the 3-7 important command line parameters.

• Trump, Putin and the Pipelines to Nowhere
  A crisis in investor confidence is the biggest threat to fossil fuel companies — not environmentalists, regulations, clean energy competitors or climate agreements.
• The 1930s were humanity’s darkest, bloodiest hour. Are you paying attention?
  Even to mention the 1930s is to evoke the period when human civilisation entered its darkest, bloodiest chapter. No case needs to be argued; just to name the decade is enough. It is a byword for mass poverty, violent extremism and the gathering storm of world war.
• When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig
  The excruciating power of Zweig’s memoir lies in the pain of looking back and seeing that there was a small window in which it was possible to act, and then discovering how suddenly and irrevocably that window can be slammed shut.
• Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria
  When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an “international catastrophe.” When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who’d had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster.
• Die Globale Klasse – Eine andere Welt ist möglich. Aber als Drohung.
  Es gibt heute eine globalisierte Klasse der Informationsarbeiter, der die meisten von uns angehören und die viel homogener und mächtiger ist, als sie denkt.
• Wie politisch darf, soll oder muss eine Firma sein?
  In kleinen und großen Gruppen sind wir auf der ganzen Welt und in unterschiedlichsten Kulturkreisen unterwegs. Die Vorbehaltlosigkeit und das Interesse, welches uns überall entgegengebracht wird, hat auch jeder andere verdient. Und dafür stehen wir als Open Source Company in besonderem Maße.

• Learning From A Year of Security Breaches
  A theme in this article will be: what separates standard incidents from horrifying nightmares?
• I Peeked Into My Node_Modules Directory And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next
  It’s time we as a community stand up and say enough is enough, this community belongs to all of us, and not just a handful of JavaScript developers with great hair.
• Python FAQ : Why should I use Python 3? / fuzzy notepad
  Well, here I am, standing up for Python 3. I write all my new code in Python 3 now — because Python 3 is great and you should use it. Here’s why.
• Ruby in Production: Lessons Learned
  Having deployed a variety of Ruby apps (Rails and non-Rails) over the course of many years, here are some lessons I’ve learned to keep things afloat.
• The good and bad in Apple’s new APFS file system: A ZFS developer’s analysis
  APFS will be an improvement at stability for Apple users of all kinds, on every device. There are some clear wins and some missed opportunities.
• Dark corners of Unicode / fuzzy notepad
  So here is a collection of curiosities I’ve encountered in dealing with Unicode that you generally only find out about through experience. Enjoy.

On programming…

• The hardest problem in computer science
  …is, of course, naming. […] We can’t even agree on names for basic concepts.
• Know Thy Complexities!
  This webpage covers the space and time Big-O complexities of common algorithms used in Computer Science.
• Let’s stop copying C / fuzzy notepad
  The popularity of C has led to a number of programming languages’ taking significant cues from its design, and parts of its design are… slightly questionable.
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About CSVs
  Partially as a companion piece to my recent post about how CSV is an encoding nightmare, and partially an expression of frustration, I’ve decided to make a list of falsehoods programmers believe about CSVs.
• Parsing: an expanded timeline
  After five decades of parsing theory, the state of the art seems to be back where it started.
• explainshell.com
  write down a command-line to see the help text that matches each argument