Archive: January 16, 2023

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Monday,  01/16/23  10:32 PM

Good evening.  Still raining, but sun on the horizon.  Yay.  Watching football - big queue left over from the weekend - Zwifting, coding, and of course, blogging... Can't decide whether to synthesize a title for filter pass posts or not.  Guess, not? A gift from my daughter Alex: Exceptionally Bad Dad Jokes.  They are.  "When does a joke become a Dad joke?  When it becomes apparent."  You have been warned. News you might use, from Shelly Palmer: the alphabet soup of video monitors.  A perfect example of how scale reduces cost; you can get a great, huge monitor for <$1,000 today, and it's good enough; the best might be better, but it's at the margin now.  So cool: Wired reports a teenager solved a stubborn prime number 'look-alike' riddle.  Have you ever heard of Carmichael numbers before?  Me neither.  But now we know there are infinitely many of them, and for any X there's always one between X and 2X.  This is pretty great, from The Discoverer: 10 natural wonders that prove magic exists.  Not sure they are actually magic, but certainly awe-inspiring.  And all on my bucket list.  The one which might actually be magic is the sailing stone racetrack playa.  No satisfactory scientific explanation has been made for this yet. This is hilarious: Avatar and the Papyrus typeface.  Ryan Gosling is perfect.  Too bad I never went: Noma is closing its doors.  (Headline should have been, "Noma no more".)  Somehow the strain of keeping one of these top restaurants at the top tells.  I hope they don't end up like The Menu :)  For some reason our local theater had billed The Menu as a comedy, so we went.  Pretty interesting, starts as a great sendup of high-end dining, but then... Washington Free Beacon: the lives of Brian.  (... Johnson, frontman for AC/DC afetr Bon Scott died.)  "The big rock acts have become tribute bands to their younger selves."  That's kinda true, but but not always.  We recently saw Robert Plant and he was great, but in no way a tribute band for Led Zeppelin.  Then again he had quite a solo career after Zep.  Interesting question: Was Salesforce's acquisition of Slack a bust?  Not sure how the numbers worked out, but they definitely paid a lot: $27B!  How much revenue would it have had to generate annually to support that price?  Or asked another way, how much increase in the value of Salesforce stock?  Yet again, it was primarily a strategic move; Microsoft Teams was emerging as an important competitor, and Salesforce maybe felt they had to be in that market.  Most development teams I know love Slack more, but many are being asked to use Teams because it's part of Office.  Popular Science considers: Dark Matter, Jupiter's Moons, and more: what to expect from space exploration in 2023.  They had me at Dark Matter.  And the picture of the SpaceX Dragon too.  Sadly: 'The Science' is ruining science.  "Perhaps the most startling aspect of the story is the sub-headline Nature used: 'No One Knows Why.'"  Well I'll be 'no one': political correctness has intruded.  Interesting that this was published in Nature, which itself is exhibit A of this trend... Powerline: The Science isn't scientific.  In regards to Covid...   Real science: SpaceX USSF-16 Mission.  So cool.  Yes, you must watch!  Elon Musk: And that's how we will land on Mars.  I haven't gotten tired of watching two stages land together side-by-side yet.  Still feels like I'm watching a good movie. Apropos: SpaceX signs agreement with US National Science Foundation to prevent Starlink’s interference with astronomy.  "Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, said SpaceX would ensure that Starlink has no material effect on discoveries in astronomy. 'We care a great deal about science'"  Well, good.  Wow.  Sam Bankman-Fried's secret 'backdoor' discovered, FTX lawyer says.  "Sam Bankman-Fried instructed his FTX cofounder Gary Wang to create a "secret" backdoor to enable his trading firm Alameda to borrow $65 billion of clients' money from the exchange without their permission, the Delaware bankruptcy court was told Wednesday."  That's B as in Billion.  Amazing.  Brad Feld: Reflecting on Ponzi Schemes.  So yeah, but more interesting, he followed with I don't hate crypto.  I think he took a lot of inbound from fellow investors who don't want the secret to be revealed.  News I hope you won't have to use: How to Use the iPhone 14’s Emergency Satellite SOS.  Interestingly it only works if you are off the grid, so it's hard to test.  But if you need it, you need it.  This was not an easy feature to add, I wonder why they did it?  Will people buy new iPhones to get this feature?  Huh. Wow, what a long post!  I need to stop blogging now.  Okay one more...  This tiny little capybara travels around via surfboard, except the surfboard is a big capybara.  You're welcome :)

 

cookies

Monday,  01/16/23  10:52 PM

<rant> So, cookies.  Since the dawn of Internet time, websites have been able to work around the inherently stateless mode of web browsing by sending small bits of information called "cookies" to web browsers.  Later, when the browser returns to the site (could be 1s later), the cookies are sent back to the site, enabling state to be maintained.  A good solution. Later, people began exploiting cookies in bad ways.  A second website belonging to, say, an advertising company, could send cookies, then later have them sent back, and this allows them to track you.  And/or, in a variation, the first website could share your information with the second website, as part of presenting ads, or for any other reason.  A bad problem. And so this somewhat arcane technical issue hit the radar of regulators, and they passed laws: now, in order for a website to send you a cookie, you have to agree to it first.  And so now every website asks you, annoyingly, if you're okay with cookies, and you say "yes" and life goes on.  After you say "yes" all the tracking/sharing stuff that could happen before can still happen.  If you say "no", the website probably won't work and you can't use it.  So this is a terrible non-solution to the problem. What can be done?  Well first, we shouldn't ask legislators to solve this kind of problem.  They don't understand it, and they pass dumb laws which make life more difficult but don't solve the problem.  We need a simple technical solution to a simple technical problem. What if browsers had a global option to accept cookies?  You could turn it on or off, depending on your preference.  Oh wait - they already had that option.  So no laws were actually needed.  But yeah if you said "no" to cookies, the website probably didn't work. What we really want is an option that says, "don't send cookies from anyone else, and don't share my information with anyone".  That would be an easy option to set, it would be sent to every website in the HTTP header, and then it would be on the website to accede to your request.  This is what has happened on phones, for example; you are asked whether it's okay to share your information (once!), and if you say no, then it's no.  Every phone app doesn't have to ask every time.  No new laws needed. In the meantime, we all have to say "yes" every time we visit a website.  How great is that?  And it doesn't solve the problem, because we always say "yes".  Well it isn't our biggest problem, but it's another example of a dumb law that makes our lives worse.  Onward! </rant>

 

Happy Rabbit Year!

Monday,  01/16/23  11:09 PM

Happy Lunar Rabbit Year! As helpfully explained in this article in the South China Morning Post, this holiday is celebrated in China, Indonesia, and many other countries; over 2B people celebrate the new year this way!  And so now we are in the Year of the Rabbit. These old traditions are cool - I love thinking about what people were thinking about when they were created.  They didn't understand about the Sun and the Moon and the Planets and the Stars, but it was easy to think they ruled our lives.  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  And I love thinking about the fact that we US people are so Western centric.  The face that billions of people - way more than us - are celebrating a new solar orbit differently doesn't enter our thinking.  (Well, most of the time it doesn't...) 新年好!

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