Bulletin for Friday, 06 Sep 2024
7 days digest
null program (1)
Maurycy's blog (1)
Sourcegraph Blog (1)
Tech Blog (1)
John Graham-Cumming's blog (1)
Computer Things (1)
Stratechery by Ben Thompson (1)
Evan Hahn's blog (1)
Engineer’s Codex (1)
Avestura's Blog (1)
LogRocket Blog (1)
QuestDB Blog (1)
The Go Blog (1)
Ferd.ca (1)
The Ably Blog (1)
Ratfactor Feed (1)
Eight to Late (1)
Latent Space (1)
- Efficiency is Coming: 3000x Faster, Cheaper, Better AI Inference from Hardware Improvements, Quantization, and Synthetic Data Distillation
The Technium (1)
Vallified (1)
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow (1)
Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques (1)
InfoQ - Articles (1)
Go (Golang) Programming Blog - Ardan Labs on (1)
BLOG@CACM – Communications of the ACM (2)
- Cybersecurity in Industrial IoT: Protecting Critical Infrastructure
- Everything You Always Wanted to Know About PCs, But Were Afraid to Ask
Timescale Blog (2)
- In-Database AI Agents: Teaching Claude to Use Tools With Pgai
- The 2024 State of PostgreSQL Survey Is Now Open!
- Sextortion Scams Now Include Photos of Your Home
- Owners of 1-Time Passcode Theft Service Plead Guilty
taylor.town (2)
Metadata (2)
- DDIA: Chp 4. Encoding and Evolution (Part 2)
- Taming Consensus in the Wild (with the Shared Log Abstraction)
DTN (2)
Grafana Labs blog on Grafana Labs (3)
- Incident management that actually makes sense: SLOs, error budgets, and blameless reviews
- Grafana Tempo 2.6 release: performance improvements and new TraceQL features
- Visualize Catchpoint, PagerDuty, and Amazon DynamoDB data: what's new in Grafana Enterprise data source plugins
Discord Blog (3)
- Legacy Shop Favorites Emerge from The Vault for a First Anniversary Encore!
- How to Make Your Discord Messages Bold, Italic, Underlined & Tons More
- Defeat Discord on Chess.com, Win a Month of Nitro!
- Bringing insights into TCP resets and timeouts to Cloudflare Radar
- A global assessment of third-party connection tampering
- Making progress on routing security: the new White House roadmap
- The hidden cost of speed
- Best practices for cost-efficient Kafka clusters
- At scale, anything that could fail definitely will
- Mobile Observability: monitoring performance through cracked screens, old batteries, and crappy Wi-Fi
- Why don't more people use Linux?
- Free speech isn't guaranteed to be forever
- For what it'll make of you
- We once more have no full-time managers at 37signals
Percona Database Performance Blog (4)
- How to Upgrade a Kubernetes Cluster
- Percona In-Product Telemetry: Updates, Findings, and News
- What are Kubernetes Pods? A Deep Dive
- When Warnings Deceive: The Curious Case of InnoDB’s Row Size Limitation
- Don’t ever use these TypeScript features (JS Party #337)
- Open source threaded team chat?! (Changelog Interviews #607)
- AI is more than GenAI (Practical AI #285)
- Cursor wants to write all the world's code (Changelog News #110)
- The diagram IS the code (Ship It! #119)
- #define: piggyback (Changelog & Friends #59)
The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods (7)
- IPB159: IPv6 Basics – Router Advertisements
- D2DO250: The Realities of Responsible Disclosure in the Cloud
- HW035: The Experience Paradox
- NB493: Cisco Acquires AI Startup to Police AI; Nvidia, Dell Ride GPU Profit Wave
- Tech Bytes: Smarter Networking and Automation With SuzieQ’s Network Observability (Sponsored)
- PP029: Translating Security Objectives into Business Outcomes
- HN747: Automate The Easy Things
IEEE Spectrum (8)
- When "AI for Good" Goes Wrong
- How Region Realignment Will Impact IEEE Elections
- How the Designer of the First Hydrogen Bomb Got the Gig
- IEEE President’s Note: Why Students Should Stay with IEEE
- AI Has Created a Battle Over Web Crawling
- Was an AI Image Generator Taken Down for Making Child Porn?
- Unitree Demos New $16k Robot
- Video Friday: Robots Solving Table Tennis
APNIC Blog (9)
- Announcing the new APNIC Academy IPv6 certification
- Watch incoming APNIC Director General’s opening remarks at APNIC 58
- 2024 APNIC Survey report released
- VPP with loopback-only OSPFv3: Part 2
- [Podcast] The APNIC Labs measurement system
- Announcing the 2024 ISIF Asia Grants
- Welcome to APNIC 58
- Event Wrap: LkNOG 8
- Crafting endless AS-PATHS in BGP
- OAuth from First Principles
- Qwen2-VL: To See the World More Clearly
- Quoting anjor
- Python Developers Survey 2023 Results
- Why I Still Use Python Virtual Environments in Docker
- Anatomy of a Textual User Interface
- uvtrick
- Quoting Ted Chiang
- OpenAI says ChatGPT usage has doubled since last year
- Quoting Forrest Brazeal
- Quoting Andreas Giammarchi
- llm-claude-3 0.4.1
- Leader Election With S3 Conditional Writes
- OpenAI: Improve file search result relevance with chunk ranking
- Quoting Magic AI
- Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial
We sometimes have to work a large quantity of floating-point numbers. This volume can be detrimental to performance. Thus we often want to compress these numbers. Large-language models routinely do so. A sensible approach is to convert them to brain floating point numbers. These are 16-bit numbers that are often capable of representing accurately a … Continue reading Compressing floating-point numbers quickly by converting them to brain floats (BACK TO TOP)
Suppose you’re working in C using one of the major toolchains — that is, it’s mainly a C++ implementation — and you need regular expressions. You could integrate a library, but there’s a regex implementation in the C++ standard library included with your compiler, just within reach. As a resourceful engineer, using an asset already in hand seems prudent. But it’s a C++ interface, and you’re using C instead of C++ for a reason, perhaps to avoid dealing with C++ . Have no worries.e. data [ i ].... (BACK TO TOP)
https://10maurycy10.github.io/
Sound normally behaves linearly, a tone at one frequency won’t create or effect one at another. But this isn’t always the case if the sound is loud enough. As a quick experiment, I took an ultrasonic distance sensor, and connected a function generator directly to the sensor’s transducer. I also connected another transducer to my oscilloscope as an ultrasound detector. Interestingly, it sounded like it was coming from the wall the transducer was pointed at. Even my small ~1. (BACK TO TOP)
The general availability of Cody for JetBrains IDEs, https://sourcegraph.com/blog/cody-for-jetbrains-is-generally-available brought new features as well as performance and stability improvements, and in the months since GA we’ve been adding additional functionality to improve the day-to-da... (BACK TO TOP)
The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a ship tracking system. It's main aim is to help avoid maritime collisions by making vessels identify where they are. AIS messages include a Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) number. This is a temporarily-assigned unique identifier that among other things, will identify the flag a vessel is sailing under. The Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency (FTIA) hosts an open data API for maritime traffic in and around Finnish Waterways.1 GHz .0.38.0. (BACK TO TOP)
PlanetScale now supports instant DDL. Where eligible, you can run deploy requests that complete near-instantly. (BACK TO TOP)
In this short video Steve Ballmer talks about a puzzle question he would ask candidates interviewing at Microsoft. Solving it is based on binary search and the expected value . Here's what he says: " I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100. You can guess, after each guess I'll tell you whether high or low. You get it the first guess I'll give you five bucks. Four bucks, three, two, one, zero, you pay me a buck, you pay me two, you pay me three ". He's right on the first count.. dollar($ev) . (BACK TO TOP)
https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne
Last week Leslie Lamport posted The Future of TLA+ , saying "the future of TLA+ is in the hands of the TLA+ foundation". Lamport released TLA+ in 1999 and shepherded its development for the past 25 years. Transferring ownership of TLA+ to the official foundation has been in the works for a while now, and now it's time. In the document, Lamport also talks about some of his hopes for how the foundation will think about evolving TLA+. "Simplicity is a major goal of TLA+". Complicating the tooling.. (BACK TO TOP)
There’s a genre of computer games called incremental games , whose entire design philosophy can be summarized as, “numbers go up.” These games focus on the fundamental gaming loop rather than plot, characterization or anything beyond the foundational satisfaction of numbers increasing. I’m thinking about numbers going up, because I’ve been watching the number of Amazon ratings on Staff Engineer creep up over the past few months knowing that it would soon reach 1,000 ratings. (BACK TO TOP)
The best way to both save Intel and have leading edge manufacturing in the U.S. is to split the company, and for the U.S. government to pick up the bill via purchase guarantees. (BACK TO TOP)
Ensure HIPAA compliance, protect patient data, and streamline telehealth and remote monitoring. Discover how HealthTech Innovations uses our solution to overcome infrastructure challenges and maintain top security standards. (BACK TO TOP)
https://www.aaron-powell.com/posts/
In the 2024.4 release of Home Assistant, the Labels feature was introduced. This feature allows you to add labels to entities, areas, and automations. This is a great feature for organisation as you can apply as many as you want and then perform actions based on those labels. Previously, I’d tackled this style of organisation (and the organisation that Categories introduced) by putting keywords into the names of my automations, and while this worked, it wasn’t as clean as I would have liked. (BACK TO TOP)
I was working on a game that has randomness. After some play testing, I decided I wanted that randomness to be deterministic—in other words, I needed to seed the random number generator. I wanted players to be able to share seeds so they could play the same games. Unfortunately, I was using JavaScript’s Math.random() to get random values. This isn’t seeded. I needed to replace Math.random() with something else! First, I found a dependency that did this for me... rules: { // ... (BACK TO TOP)
https://read.engineerscodex.com
Use enums instead (BACK TO TOP)
[...] Read More... The post Read Meta’s 2024 Sustainability Report appeared first on Engineering at Meta . (BACK TO TOP)
Let's create a Git commit using Git's low-level (plumbing) commands (BACK TO TOP)
Analogous color schemes offer a powerful way to guide user emotions and behavior. This guide shows you how to make colors do the good work of improving UX. The post Using an analogous color scheme in UX design appeared first on LogRocket Blog . (BACK TO TOP)
Hurrying through the National Gallery of Art five minutes before closing, I passed a Navajo weaving with a complex abstract pattern. Suddenly, I realized the pattern was strangely familiar, so I stopped and looked closely. The design turned out to be an image of Intel's Pentium chip, the start of the long-lived Pentium family. 1 The weaver, Marilou Schultz, created the artwork in 1994 using traditional materials and techniques. "Replica of a Chip", created by Marilou Schultz, 1994. Wool.5".S.A. (BACK TO TOP)
https://newsletter.programmingdigest.net/
Reduce a massive pile of data into a small dataset (BACK TO TOP)
It is estimated that 80% to 90% of the data worldwide is unstructured. However, when we look for data in a specific domain or organization, we often end up finding structured data. The most likely reason is that structured data is still the de facto standard for quantitative information. Consequently, in the age of Large… (BACK TO TOP)
https://flightaware.engineering/rss/
This summer, FlightAware welcomed five interns from various parts of the country. These interns worked closely with our engineering team on their projects, achieving remarkable results. (BACK TO TOP)
https://www.allendowney.com/blog
An article in a recent issue of The Economist suggests, right in the title, “Investors should avoid a new generation of rip-off ETFs”. An ETF is an exchange-traded fund, which holds a collection of assets and trades on an exchange like a single stock. For example, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) tracks the S&P 500 index, but unlike traditional index funds, you can buy or sell shares in minutes. There’s nothing obviously wrong with that – but as... Read More Read More (BACK TO TOP)
https://www.construction-physics.com
This post is cross-posted at Noahpinion. (BACK TO TOP)
In this tutorial, we’ll use Kafka to stream weather data from the OpenWeatherMap API, store and process it with QuestDB, and create insightful visualizations with Grafana. Example code and easy-to-follow instructions. (BACK TO TOP)
By Artem Dinaburg and Peter Goodman (Would you get up and throw it away?) [sing to the tune of The Beatles – With A Little Help From My Friends] Here’s a riddle: when new GPUs are constantly being produced, product cycles are ~18-24 months long, and each cycle doubles GPU power (per Huang’s Law), what […] (BACK TO TOP)
https://engineering.atspotify.com/
On Spotify’s Analytics Platform, we’re dedicated to building products that empower data practitioners to discover, analyze, and share insights — [...] The post Are You a Dalia? How We Created Data Science Personas for Spotify’s Analytics Platform appeared first on Spotify Engineering . (BACK TO TOP)
The Go Blog Telemetry in Go 1.23 and beyond Robert Findley 3 September 2024 #blog #content img#prompt { max-width: 500px; } .centered { display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; } .chart { width: 100%; } @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { .chart { border-radius: 8px; } } figure.captioned { display: table; } figure.captioned figcaption { display: table-caption; caption-side: bottom; font-style: italic; font-size: small; text-align: center; } Go 1.go.dev . Starting with Go 1. (BACK TO TOP)
From time to time, people ask me what I use to power my blog, maybe because they like the minimalist form it has. I tell them it’s a bad idea and that I use the Erlang compiler infrastructure for it, and they agree to look elsewhere. After launching my notes section , I had to fully clean up my engine. I thought I could write about how it works because it’s fairly unique and interesting, even if you should probably not use it. The Requirements I first started my blog 14 years ago.x script ...md. (BACK TO TOP)
As fans become increasingly global, and virtual, Ably CEO Matthew O'Riordan outlines the essential requirements for modern realtime realtime experience platforms. (BACK TO TOP)
https://eight2late.wordpress.com
A recent article in The Register notes that Microsoft has tweaked its fine print to warn users not to take its AI seriously. The relevant update to the license terms reads, “AI services are not designed, intended, or to be used as substitutes for professional advice.” Aside from the fact that users ought not […] (BACK TO TOP)
Efficiency is Coming: 3000x Faster, Cheaper, Better AI Inference from Hardware Improvements, Quantization, and Synthetic Data Distillation
NVIDIA, Convai, and Google's Nyla Worker on the brutally efficient drivers of production AI inference - where we've been, and where LLMs are likely to go. (BACK TO TOP)
I found myself in great agreement with the advice in this crisp essay on why you should quit your job, particularly a good job, and encourage productive leisure. Quit Your Job (BACK TO TOP)
rqlite is a lightweight, user-friendly, open-source, distributed relational database. It’s written in Go and uses SQLite as its storage engine. Release 8.30.0 is out now and adds support for Automatic Optimize. Automatic OPTIMIZE The new Automatic Optimize feature automates the PRAGMA optimize command for the underlying SQLite database. Why does optimize matter? It matters because … Continue reading rqlite 8.30.0: Introducing Automatic Database Optimization → (BACK TO TOP)
Today's links Marshmallow Longtermism: My latest Locus Magazine column. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. In this framing, poverty is a consequence of immaturity. Moreover, putting the innately foolish in charge is a recipe for disaster. (BACK TO TOP)
“Acts of trust are the bedrock on which relationships are formed.” There’s a lot in the world to make us cynical about other people and their motives and intentions. But by “trusting loudly,” Professor Jamil Zaki believes we can renew our faith in one another. Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford, director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience lab, and author of several books, including his most recent, Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness . (BACK TO TOP)
Michael Friedrich is exploring how teams face varying levels of inefficiency in their DevSecOps processes, hindering progress and innovation. He highlights common issues like excessive debugging time and inefficient workflows, while also demonstrating how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a powerful tool to streamline these processes and boost efficiency. By Michael Friedrich (BACK TO TOP)
“What are your goals for this quarter?” It’s the question every manager asks, and one that often prompts a flurry of technical objectives and project milestones. Jumping into this internship, I knew my answer. I wanted to practice making informed decisions on my project, since that was one of the challenges I faced last summer. […] The post Engineering with Empathy: My Journey to Understanding the User Experience appeared first on Slack Engineering . (BACK TO TOP)
If you've ever tried to animate a gradient, you've been met with a harsh reality—it isn't possible. At least, it wasn't! In this tutorial, we'll leverage bleeding-edge browser features to animate ANY CSS property, including background gradients, using CSS Houdini, CSS variables, and React. (BACK TO TOP)
A few weeks ago my 5-year-old and I tried playing Cat Crimes , a puzzle game in which you work out which of your cats ate your shoes. We had a wonderful time - for about 20 minutes. In each round of Cat Crimes you get a puzzle card with a list of clues on it. You have to use the clues to figure out where in your front room each of your 6 cats were sitting. This tells you which one of them was responsible for your ruined stilettos. For example, a clue might have told us that Mr. (BACK TO TOP)
https://www.ardanlabs.com/blog/
Introduction: In Episode 6 of the Intro to Generative A.I. series, Daniel shifts the focus from basic search techniques to more dynamic, on-the-fly AI applications. He demonstrates how to enhance AI-driven interactions by integrating real-time data retrieval and multi-turn conversations, pushing beyond static data sources to create more responsive and context-aware systems. Implementing real-time parsing and AI search of live websites. (BACK TO TOP)
New method leverages vision-language models to formalize a comparison that had previously required human judgment. (BACK TO TOP)
https://read.highgrowthengineer.com
Guest post by ex-Amazon Principal Engineer, Steve Huynh (BACK TO TOP)
Today's IIoT environments demand sophisticated, multi-layered security strategies. (BACK TO TOP)
There are important ground rules one needs to follow to make the submission review process fulfilling for reviewers and fair and productive for our technical communities. (BACK TO TOP)
https://www.timescale.com/blog/
Simplify your architecture and reduce latency by building AI agents within your PostgreSQL database using Claude and the pgai extension. (BACK TO TOP)
The 2024 State of PostgreSQL survey is now live! Help us learn more about this community, and check out last year’s main highlights. (BACK TO TOP)
An old but persistent email scam known as "sextortion" has a new personalized touch: The missives, which claim that malware has captured webcam footage of recipients pleasuring themselves, now include a photo of the target's home in a bid to make threats about publishing the videos more frightening and convincing. (BACK TO TOP)
Three men in the United Kingdom have pleaded guilty to operating otp[.]agency, a once popular online service that helped attackers intercept the one-time passcodes (OTPs) that many websites require as a second authentication factor in addition to passwords. Launched in November 2019, OTP Agency was a service for intercepting one-time passwords needed to log in to various websites. (BACK TO TOP)
This essay is part of a series on offensive horticulture . Dumpster Chocolates "Hey, what are you doing for the rest of the evening? I wanna show you something." My friend leads me to an unremarkable parking lot, where we chat about girls and career goals and music. Some local folks saunter around the corner, "Hey! You here for the chocolate?" "Yeah, come join us! My friend Taylor here is visiting from Cali." "Oh, welcome to town! Nice to meet you both. It's all yours.e. (BACK TO TOP)
When a mommy flower loves a daddy flower, pollinators exchange their love letters; flowers create seeds together, which grow into baby plants. …or an ameteur botanist reproduces a genetic clone from some "floor finds" at Walmart. …or an entire plant is poached from Peru and shipped to a collector in Italy. …or a farmer purchases seeds whose DNA is edited to resist cycles of new pests and newer pesticides. …or a corporation synthesizes sacred biomaterials for pharmaceutical profits.09.09.09.10. (BACK TO TOP)
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/
This second part of Chapter 4 of the Designing Data Intensive Applications (DDIA) book discusses methods of data flow in distributed systems, covering dataflow through databases, service calls, and asynchronous message passing. For databases, the process writing to the database encodes the data, and the reading process decodes it. We need both backward and forward compatibility, as older and newer versions of code may coexist during rolling upgrades. Two main approaches here are REST and SOAP. (BACK TO TOP)
This paper recently appeared at ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review. It provides an overview of the shared log abstraction in distributed systems, particularly focusing on its application in State Machine Replication (SMR) and consensus protocols. The paper argues that this abstraction can simplify the design and implementation of distributed systems, and can make them more reliable and easier to maintain. This is a wisdom packed paper. Here is how we will crack this nut.2.D of the paper.e.g. (BACK TO TOP)
https://surfingcomplexity.blog
I’m sure you’ve heard the slogan “safety first”. It is a statement of values for an organization, but let’s think about how to define what it should mean explicitly. Here’s how I propose to define safety first, in the context of a company. I’ll assume the company is in the tech (software) industry, since that’s … Continue reading Safety first! → (BACK TO TOP)
The other day, The Future of TLA+ (pdf) hit Hacker News. TLA+ is a specification language: it is intended for describing the desired behavior of a system. Because it’s a specification language, you don’t need to specify implementation details to describe desired behavior. This can be confusing to experienced programmers who are newcomers to TLA+, … Continue reading You can specify even when you can’t implement → (BACK TO TOP)
Experts discuss the evolving landscape of event planning, focusing on new weather risks and best practices for preparedness of extreme weather events. The post Tackling Increasing Weather Risks for Event Organizers appeared first on DTN . (BACK TO TOP)
Discover the differences in weather radar: mosaic vs. single site. Learn how to choose the right radar for your needs and make informed weather decisions. The post Are You Looking at the Right Weather Radar? appeared first on DTN . (BACK TO TOP)
Incident response is about more than just putting out fires. Yes, there are definitely those all-hands-on-deck moments when an incident arises. But you also need a structure in place ahead of time to provide the right information to the right people when they need it — while still avoiding alert fatigue. Plus, you need a culture that actually encourages people to continually improve what’s in place without just pointing fingers. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity..com . (BACK TO TOP)
Grafana Tempo 2.6 is here with performance improvements and buckets of new TraceQL features! Watch the video above for an overview of the new TraceQL features, or continue reading to get a quick overview of the latest updates in Tempo. If you’re looking for something more in-depth, don’t hesitate to jump into the Grafana Tempo 2.6 release notes or the changelog . Events Span events are an important method of communicating when something of note occurs during a span.6/tempo-2.6-exceptions.header. (BACK TO TOP)
Visualize Catchpoint, PagerDuty, and Amazon DynamoDB data: what's new in Grafana Enterprise data source plugins
As part of our big tent philosophy here at Grafana Labs, we believe you should be able to access and derive meaningful insights from your data, regardless of where that data lives. One of the ways we stay true to that philosophy is through our Grafana Enterprise data sources. Grafana Enterprise data sources are also maintained and supported by Grafana Labs — which means they eliminate the overhead of building and maintaining your own plugins in-house.).2 release . (BACK TO TOP)
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ongoing.atom
An ancient Vault has opened, and some of the most-loved Avatar Decorations & Profile Decorations of the last year have returned to the Shop. See what’s been uncovered and made available once again! (BACK TO TOP)
Make your words bold, big, fancy, or flashy — read this article to see how to format your messages on Discord to get the point across! (BACK TO TOP)
Play chess against Discord on Chess.com for a chance to win a one-month trial of Discord Nitro! Existing Nitro members can claim a month of Chess.com’s Diamond membership. Read on to see how it all works! (BACK TO TOP)
New TCP resets and timeouts dataset on Cloudflare Radar surfaces connection tampering, scanning, DoS attacks, and more. (BACK TO TOP)
Cloudflare brings visibility to the practice of connection tampering as observed from our global network. (BACK TO TOP)
On September 3, 2024, the White House published a report on Internet routing security. We’ll talk about what that means and how you can help. (BACK TO TOP)
It’s tempting to push projects out the door to woo and impress colleagues and supervisors, but the stark truth is that even the smallest projects should have proper review periods. (BACK TO TOP)
In today's data-driven world, Apache Kafka has emerged as a cornerstone of modern data streaming, particularly with the rise of AI and the immense volumes of data it generates. (BACK TO TOP)
On today’s episode, we chat with Pradeep Vincent, Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Architect for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI for short. He shares experiences from his time as an engineer at IBM and what it was like to be a senior engineer working on AWS during the early years of its development as a commercial product. (BACK TO TOP)
Mobile Observability: monitoring performance through cracked screens, old batteries, and crappy Wi-Fi
Today we chat with Austin Emmons, an iOS developer at Embrace, where he spent time rebuilding their SDK to work with OpenTelemetry. He discusses the challenge of tracking performance and watching for edge cases when your app is deployed across dozens of devices with enormous variability in their hardware, software, and network capabilities. (BACK TO TOP)
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking: "If Linux is so good, why aren't more people using it?" And it's a fair question! It intuitively rings true until you give it a moment's consideration. Putting it crudely, it's easier to be fat and ignorant in a world of cheap, empty calories than it is to be fit and informed. It's hard to resist the temptation of minimal effort. And Linux isn't minimal effort. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. Or ought to be different. (BACK TO TOP)
History is full of long stretches of dominance by noble ideas and despots, times of prosperity and of dark ages. Each of which must have seemed like they would never end to the people who lived through them. If you were a citizen of the Ottoman empire 1452, you probably didn't imagining life any other way. Ditto the height of the Roman empire. Ditto today. Humans of all times have acclimated to their environment, their culture, and their politics. It's just that kind of planet. Sixty years...". (BACK TO TOP)
I've always had an ambivalent relationship with goals. I don't like goals that feel like checkpoints on a treadmill. They make you reach for a million dollars in revenue, celebrate for a second, and then turn the chase to five million the minute after. No thanks. But specific, material goals aren't the only kind you can set. Here's a goal I remember setting that wasn't like that. I was mesmerized by Kent's command of the material and the audience. And have faith that I was going to get there. (BACK TO TOP)
After experimenting with a number of management roles over the last few years, 37signals is back to its original configuration: None. We once more have no full-time managers whose sole function is to organize or direct the work of others. Everyone doing management here does so on the side, next to their primary work as an individual contributor. Including Jason and I. And it works. That's not to say that there's no managerial work at 37signals. You just can't do that in a traditional setup. (BACK TO TOP)
I still remember upgrading a Kubernetes cluster for the first time. Despite taking great care and following all the documentation, I managed to break some applications. Luckily, the impact was minimal, and the issue was solved quickly. The most interesting part is that the same set of steps worked perfectly in upgrading non-production clusters, but […] (BACK TO TOP)
This article is, in fact, two topics merged into one publication. Both are related to anonymous statistical data collection within Percona releases of database engines: MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL. In the first part of this article, I will share some of our findings and observations and discuss the various conclusions we have drawn from them. […] (BACK TO TOP)
You might have driven a car, but have you ever wondered how the engine works? Similarly if you have used Kubernetes and if you are interested to know how a pod works, this blog post is the right place to start with. Pods are the smallest deployable units of computing that you can create and […] (BACK TO TOP)
Mysterious warning Recently, I was involved in an investigation whose goal was to find out the reason for a warning message like this: [crayon-66e097d95c13b579419583/] The message looks clear, isn’t it? Well, the problem was that this particular table had not been changed for years, and so no DDL (ALTER) query was involved here. Moreover, there […] (BACK TO TOP)
Jerod, Nick & Chris discuss a next-gen JavaScript bundler, Node getting even tighter with TypeScript, the top programming languages according to IEEE Spectrum, Chris' feelings on Node's built-in test runner & more! (BACK TO TOP)
We're joined by Alya Abbott from Zulip, the open source, organized, threaded, team chat for distributed teams of all sizes. We talk about Zulip's origins, how it's open source, the way it's led, no VC funding, what makes it different/better, how you can self-host it or use their cloud, moving to Zulip, contributing and being a part of the community...all the things. (BACK TO TOP)
GenAI is often what people think of when someone mentions AI. However, AI is much more. In this episode, Daniel breaks down a history of developments in data science, machine learning, AI, and GenAI in this episode to give listeners a better mental model. Don't miss this one if you are wanting to understand the AI ecosystem holistically and how models, embeddings, data, prompts, etc. all fit together. (BACK TO TOP)
The Cursor AI code editor raises $60 million, RedMonk's Rachel Stephens tries to determine if rug pulls are worth it, Caleb Porzio details how he made $1 million on GitHub Sponsors, Elastic founder Shay Banon announces that Elasticsearch is open source (again) & Tomas Stropus writes about the art of finishing. (BACK TO TOP)
What if your infrastructure diagram was responsible for the actual infrastructure?! John Watson & Scott Prutton from System Initiative join Justin & Autumn to discuss. (BACK TO TOP)
What happens when you take two #define champs (Taylor Troesh, Thomas Eckert), a grizzled veteran (Adam Stacoviak), a british bard (Mat Ryer), a PhD (Carol Lee) & you pit them against each other in a game of fake tech definitions?! There's only one way to find out... (BACK TO TOP)
Our series on IPv6 basics continues with Router Advertisements (RAs) within the Neighbor Discovery Protocol. We look at how hosts bootstrap onto a network using ICMPv6, discuss the timing of sending out an RA, and then cover the configuration of RAs, including key flags and options. We also talk about the importance of understanding the ... Read more » (BACK TO TOP)
Cloud security and responsible disclosure are the focus of today’s conversation with guest Kat Traxler. Kat shares her insights on identifying vulnerabilities in cloud services, particularly Google Cloud, and the importance of curiosity in her research. The episode explores the role of bug bounty programs and the shift towards issuing CVEs for cloud vulnerabilities. Lastly, ... Read more » (BACK TO TOP)
In this episode of Heavy Wireless, host Keith Parsons and guest Tom Hollingsworth delve into the “experience paradox” in the tech industry: to get experience, you need to have experience. They highlight the disconnect between job requirements and candidates’ actual experience. Tom emphasizes the importance of hands-on learning, home labs, and making mistakes as essential ... Read more » (BACK TO TOP)
Take a Network Break! This week we cover a couple of listener FUs, and then dive into the news. Attackers exploit a zero-day in Versa to harvest credentials, AT&T agrees to a fine of nearly $1 million for a network outage that affected 911 calls, and Intel and Broadcom tout integrated optics for more broadband ... Read more » (BACK TO TOP)
Today on the Tech Bytes podcast: network observability. SuzieQ is an open-source project that collects, normalizes, stores, and analyzes multi-vendor network data. This data becomes a foundation for network observability and automation. We talk with Dinesh Dutt, creator of SuzieQ and founder of Stardust Systems, which makes a commercial version of SuzieQ. Stardust Systems is ... Read more » (BACK TO TOP)
On today’s Packet Protector we talk about how to talk about security objectives in ways that resonate with business and non-technical leaders in your organization. Tying security objectives to business outcomes can help you maintain (or increase) budgets, build trust and credibility with executives, and better align your risk management efforts with the organization’s broader ... Read more » (BACK TO TOP)
Our Heavy Networking guest today is Hans Driessens, and we sat down at AutoCon1 to talk through some of his network automation projects. Hans shares his journey from a service engineer to a consultant specializing in network automation. We discuss the evolution of programming languages, the importance of foundational programming skills, and the practicalities of ... Read more » (BACK TO TOP)
This guest article is adapted from the author’s new book From Pessimism to Promise: Lessons from the Global South on Designing Inclusive Tech , published by MIT Press. MIT Press The hunger for AI-based solutions is understandable. In 2023, 499 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa, an increase of more than 10 percent from 2022. As for healthcare, despite decades of effort to boost the numbers of healthcare practitioners in rural areas, they continue to migrate to cities. (BACK TO TOP)
The work of restructuring IEEE’s geographic regions is well underway. Six U.S. regions will be consolidated into five, joining together the current IEEE Region 1 (Northeastern U.S.) and Region 2 (Eastern U.S.) to form Region 2 (Eastern and Northeastern U.S.). IEEE Region 10 (Asia and Pacific) will be split into two to form Region 10 (North Asia) and Region 11 (South Asia and Pacific).” The realignment will impact this year’s annual IEEE election process , which runs through 1 October. (BACK TO TOP)
By any measure, Richard Garwin is one of the most decorated and successful engineers of the 20th century. The IEEE Life Fellow has won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, France’s La Grande Médaille de l’Académie des Sciences, and is one of just a handful of people elected to all three U.S. National Academies: Engineering, Science, and Medicine. And all that was after he did the thing for which he is most famous.4 megatons of TNT. Teller died in 2003.S.S.S.M.].I. J. (BACK TO TOP)
I would like our student members to know that IEEE is much more than just a club you join at school. It is an international community that can help students build and sustain successful careers as technical professionals after they graduate. For more than 40 years, IEEE has been a great place to build my personal brand and to create a valuable professional network. I know it can do the same for the next generation of engineers. They are the future of IEEE. Get involved.” (BACK TO TOP)
Most people assume that generative AI will keep getting better and better; after all, that’s been the trend so far. And it may do so. But what some people don’t realize is that generative AI models are only as good as the ginormous data sets they’re trained on, and those data sets aren’t constructed from proprietary data owned by leading AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. It became the de facto standard in the age where websites used it primarily for directing web search.” But in a robots. (BACK TO TOP)
Why are AI companies valued in the millions and billions of dollars creating and distributing tools that can make AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM)? An image generator called Stable Diffusion version 1.5, which was created by the AI company Runway with funding from Stability AI , has been particularly implicated in the production of CSAM. In some cases, companies may even be breaking laws by hosting synthetic CSAM material on their servers.5 has been removed from Hugging Face.K.S. (BACK TO TOP)
At ICRA 2024, Spectrum editor Evan Ackerman sat down with Unitree founder and CEO Xingxing Wang and Tony Yang, VP of Business Development, to talk about the company’s newest humanoid, the G1 model . Smaller, more flexible, and elegant, the G1 robot is designed for general use in service and industry, and is one of the cheapest—if not the cheapest—humanoid around. (BACK TO TOP)
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. Google DeepMind has managed to achieve amateur human-level competence at table tennis, which is much harder than it looks, even for humans. But first, video! Some behind the scenes detail from Pannag: The robot had not seen any participants before.e. (BACK TO TOP)
Be among the first to earn an IPv6 certification and help shape the future of IPv6 training in the Asia Pacific region. (BACK TO TOP)
Jia Rong Low gave his inaugural opening remarks as APNIC’s incoming Director General at APNIC 58. (BACK TO TOP)
The 2024 APNIC Survey report is now available. (BACK TO TOP)
Guest Post: Using Vector Packet Processing and Bird2 to eliminate IPv4 point-to-point networks, freeing up IPv4 addresses. (BACK TO TOP)
Joao Damas explains how the APNIC Labs measurement system works. (BACK TO TOP)
The APNIC Foundation is pleased to announce the 2024 round of the ISIF Asia grants. (BACK TO TOP)
Welcome to APNIC 58! Here’s how to get the most from your conference experience. (BACK TO TOP)
APNIC presented and conducted training at LkNOG 8, held in Colombo, Sri Lanka from 12 to 16 August 2024. (BACK TO TOP)
Guest Post: Combining BGP confederations and AS override can potentially create a BGP routing loop, resulting in an indefinitely expanding AS-PATH. (BACK TO TOP)
Bulletin by Jakub Mikians