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August linkspam
Just cleaned out, uhhh, a lot of months' worth of links from my phone. Here's the ones that seemed fun enough to share:
* Outhorse your email. Iceland's tourism marketing team remains utterly undefeated, lol
* Behold Sovereign Chess, the most ridiculous chess variant since Bennett Foddy's Speed Chess! (And another review of the same.)
* Lo, someone made an "existential horror phone sex hotline" and it's good fun. Call the Bureau of Telephone Fornication today!
* What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists. "I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin." Warm, human, lovely little piece.
* On a less heartwarming note: The Cruelty of the Adjunct System. Some of this was already familiar to me via friends in academia, but the stark and thorough way it lays bare just how crushing and precarious adjuncting is—and how much universities rely on it—is really effective. I think the bit that stuck with me most was the observation that this overreliance on adjunct labor really distorts tenured faculty's understanding of what their students are actually struggling with, and what the "typical" student looks like—because they only have to teach upper-level courses! with students who survived whatever 100-level class meat grinders were there! and then often have the gall to say the most out-of-touch stuff as a result... yeah.
* Your goofy viral music video of the day, featuring a bizarre yet charming German guy
* Did you know you can watch the first two seasons of Iron Chef (the OG version), on Youtube, for free? And yeah it absolutely holds up. You're welcome :P
* Did you know: mergansers can run REAL fast
* Home Sweet Homepage. A nostalgic lil' web essay thing about Growin Up On The Internet.
* All 50 US state logos, please argue over Best State in the comments
* A tour of the computers used to do 3d animation for Final Fantasy VII! Came for the ye old computers, and also learned (1) apparently Square did a tech demo at SIGGRAPH in 1995 that feature FF6 characters???, and (2) Intel used to manufacture RISC processors??? Like, for a niche use case, but still, feels like I should've stumbled over that before I stumbled over (oh god) Itanium? Anyway, beep boop
* Shakesville’s unravelling and the not-so-golden age of blogging. This is just messy internet drama, haha. Concluding sentence: "The internet was always awful, and I'm never leaving." same, girl, same
* The Video Game History Foundation's blog has some neat lil stories in it. (Though whenever game history comes up, I feel obliged to shill the No Don't Die interview series, which is truly fantastic; Rebecca Heineman's interview is a standout if you don't know where to start. SORRY IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS PITCH BEFORE YOU'LL JUST HAVE TO HEAR IT AGAIN) (But yeah, I saw one of these game history museums give a presentation at Magfest a few years back, in the before-times, and one of the most fascinating bits was the efforts they've gone to to retrieve source code. Sometimes you call a guy up and he's like "oh yeah I think I have all that stuff, somewhere, in my attic," and the museum sends out dudes to scour through the dude's attic and scrape bits off some ancient disc and get some lil high school intern to annotate the whole thing. Based.)
* Two dope sculptures: Serpent d'océan (doper pics here), and Jatayu, the world's largest bird sculpture (doper picture here).
Most the rest of the links lean kinda techy; I've put them on a cut:
* DNS esoterica: Why you can't dig Switzerland. Hilariously charming misadventure of networking code vs legacy cruft.
* Ever wonder why is there both /bin and /usr/bin on your Unix system? WELL...
* There's a lot of (often but not always dubious) "bitflip ate my homework" stories out there, but this one's my new favorite. Turns out when encryption's fucked on your fancy space sattelite, you can call up the NSA and they will sic their weird math wizards on the problem, lol
* Love this programmer's absolutely cursed Rust macros ([1], [2]), and her artist's statement, of a sort.
* Speaking of cursed things: someone made an old school demoscene-y demo... in awk. amazing
* Also, here's Katamari Damacy but you play it in your terminal window
* There's an interesting bit of anti-piracy protection in N64's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
This is interesting mostly because of how... clumsy it is? Preventing someone from beating the game is a huge middle finger to 'em, sure, but this check doesn't occur until, like, the last five minutes of the game—at that point, the pirate's already gotten nearly the entire experience! Which is an issue the Spyro: Year of the Dragon developers tried to address with their own anti-piracy measures—that article's fantastic, by the way, goes into all the fun technical detail of how they implemented it and why they did it the way they did.
* TIL about ddd, a visual debugger meant as a counterpart for gdb. I got pretty comfortable in gdb pretty early on, but this still seems like this might've been a neat tool while I was learning. [rambly side tangent alert] I think a lot of the longing for visual programming tools comes from newbies, who understandably find walls of code and terminals a little overwhelming, but actually making useful tools for them is such a hard problem. It requires the person designing the tool understand, at a minimum, "what's pointless cruft we can abstract away" vs "what's the actual useful stuff the person needs to see," which is a hard problem even for professionals. (Like, the C language itself is not and never was a thoroughly accurate abstraction of that the computer is "actually" "doing", but it's such an elegant and useful abstraction that you'll have people confidently asserting that it is So Close To The Metal, Such A Literal Representation... and, like! They'll figure out how wrong they are when they need to, it's fine :P) And then there's a ton of UX/HCI considerations I'm not at all familiar with... but idk, seems like a space the field could do more in, given how hype I get whenever I do find some unexpectedly useful little tool with UX That Isn't Total Garbage. [end side tangent]
* Finally, have this silly virgin vs chad meme: API consumer vs web scraper :P
* Outhorse your email. Iceland's tourism marketing team remains utterly undefeated, lol
* Behold Sovereign Chess, the most ridiculous chess variant since Bennett Foddy's Speed Chess! (And another review of the same.)
* Lo, someone made an "existential horror phone sex hotline" and it's good fun. Call the Bureau of Telephone Fornication today!
* What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists. "I still get the occasional joke from colleagues about my ‘crackpot consultant business’, but I’ve stopped thinking of our clients that way. They are driven by the same desire to understand nature and make a contribution to science as we are. They just weren’t lucky enough to get the required education early in life, and now they have a hard time figuring out where to even begin." Warm, human, lovely little piece.
* On a less heartwarming note: The Cruelty of the Adjunct System. Some of this was already familiar to me via friends in academia, but the stark and thorough way it lays bare just how crushing and precarious adjuncting is—and how much universities rely on it—is really effective. I think the bit that stuck with me most was the observation that this overreliance on adjunct labor really distorts tenured faculty's understanding of what their students are actually struggling with, and what the "typical" student looks like—because they only have to teach upper-level courses! with students who survived whatever 100-level class meat grinders were there! and then often have the gall to say the most out-of-touch stuff as a result... yeah.
* Your goofy viral music video of the day, featuring a bizarre yet charming German guy
* Did you know you can watch the first two seasons of Iron Chef (the OG version), on Youtube, for free? And yeah it absolutely holds up. You're welcome :P
* Did you know: mergansers can run REAL fast
* Home Sweet Homepage. A nostalgic lil' web essay thing about Growin Up On The Internet.
* All 50 US state logos, please argue over Best State in the comments
* A tour of the computers used to do 3d animation for Final Fantasy VII! Came for the ye old computers, and also learned (1) apparently Square did a tech demo at SIGGRAPH in 1995 that feature FF6 characters???, and (2) Intel used to manufacture RISC processors??? Like, for a niche use case, but still, feels like I should've stumbled over that before I stumbled over (oh god) Itanium? Anyway, beep boop
* Shakesville’s unravelling and the not-so-golden age of blogging. This is just messy internet drama, haha. Concluding sentence: "The internet was always awful, and I'm never leaving." same, girl, same
* The Video Game History Foundation's blog has some neat lil stories in it. (Though whenever game history comes up, I feel obliged to shill the No Don't Die interview series, which is truly fantastic; Rebecca Heineman's interview is a standout if you don't know where to start. SORRY IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS PITCH BEFORE YOU'LL JUST HAVE TO HEAR IT AGAIN) (But yeah, I saw one of these game history museums give a presentation at Magfest a few years back, in the before-times, and one of the most fascinating bits was the efforts they've gone to to retrieve source code. Sometimes you call a guy up and he's like "oh yeah I think I have all that stuff, somewhere, in my attic," and the museum sends out dudes to scour through the dude's attic and scrape bits off some ancient disc and get some lil high school intern to annotate the whole thing. Based.)
* Two dope sculptures: Serpent d'océan (doper pics here), and Jatayu, the world's largest bird sculpture (doper picture here).
Most the rest of the links lean kinda techy; I've put them on a cut:
* DNS esoterica: Why you can't dig Switzerland. Hilariously charming misadventure of networking code vs legacy cruft.
* Ever wonder why is there both /bin and /usr/bin on your Unix system? WELL...
You know how Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix on a PDP-7 in 1969?(source, h/t)
Well around 1971 they upgraded to a PDP-11 with a pair of RK05 disk packs (1.5
megabytes each) for storage.
When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their
root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the
user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They
replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp...) and
wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of
space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all
the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both
disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!).
Of course they made rules about "when the system first boots, it has to come up
enough to be able to mount the second disk on /usr, so don't put things like
the mount command /usr/bin or we'll have a chicken and egg problem bringing
the system up." Fairly straightforward. Also fairly specific to v6 unix of 35
years ago.
* There's a lot of (often but not always dubious) "bitflip ate my homework" stories out there, but this one's my new favorite. Turns out when encryption's fucked on your fancy space sattelite, you can call up the NSA and they will sic their weird math wizards on the problem, lol
* Love this programmer's absolutely cursed Rust macros ([1], [2]), and her artist's statement, of a sort.
* Speaking of cursed things: someone made an old school demoscene-y demo... in awk. amazing
* Also, here's Katamari Damacy but you play it in your terminal window
* There's an interesting bit of anti-piracy protection in N64's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
bg_zg is the actor that controls the bars in Ganon's Castle which block the exits during the escape sequence. Normally, Zelda is able to open the bars, but if the CIC6105 [security chip] is not detected, then the bars will not open. Zelda will instead run straight through them and leave the player behind to die. This makes the game impossible to complete.(source, h/t)
This is interesting mostly because of how... clumsy it is? Preventing someone from beating the game is a huge middle finger to 'em, sure, but this check doesn't occur until, like, the last five minutes of the game—at that point, the pirate's already gotten nearly the entire experience! Which is an issue the Spyro: Year of the Dragon developers tried to address with their own anti-piracy measures—that article's fantastic, by the way, goes into all the fun technical detail of how they implemented it and why they did it the way they did.
* TIL about ddd, a visual debugger meant as a counterpart for gdb. I got pretty comfortable in gdb pretty early on, but this still seems like this might've been a neat tool while I was learning. [rambly side tangent alert] I think a lot of the longing for visual programming tools comes from newbies, who understandably find walls of code and terminals a little overwhelming, but actually making useful tools for them is such a hard problem. It requires the person designing the tool understand, at a minimum, "what's pointless cruft we can abstract away" vs "what's the actual useful stuff the person needs to see," which is a hard problem even for professionals. (Like, the C language itself is not and never was a thoroughly accurate abstraction of that the computer is "actually" "doing", but it's such an elegant and useful abstraction that you'll have people confidently asserting that it is So Close To The Metal, Such A Literal Representation... and, like! They'll figure out how wrong they are when they need to, it's fine :P) And then there's a ton of UX/HCI considerations I'm not at all familiar with... but idk, seems like a space the field could do more in, given how hype I get whenever I do find some unexpectedly useful little tool with UX That Isn't Total Garbage. [end side tangent]
* Finally, have this silly virgin vs chad meme: API consumer vs web scraper :P
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What goofy dogs.
-m
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The comments about C being so close to the metal made me laugh because my most recent quarterly security training involved not one, but two videos about how to avoid memory corruption when programming in C by cleaning up your memory usage!
Tech we use at my job: Python, Rails, SSMS
Tech we do not use: Anything in fucking C
And imagine me, someone whose programming experience is *entirely* at the Rails and SQL level, staring at this video like "what the fuck even IS that syntax????"
Anyway I had to share that with someone, lol. (My Rails environment is in RubyMine, which is a variation of JetBrains, and the single most useful thing it offers me is the ability to step through code and peek into variables to see what they say without writing a billion print statements.)
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(And, yes! Being able to debug via stepping through is so powerful and nice; love when the environment has that sort of thing built in)
good luck with the env being a fuck, tho :P
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I do find it massively hilarious that one of the suggestions for how to properly secure your C code is "write in a higher-level language," like, even the security monkeys have given up at this point.
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several of your tech links reminded me of this incredible iceberg meme, which you've probably seen: https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/ computers, man.
tho i LOVED the OoT piracy link, oh man. I knew about the star fox easter egg (it could have been just in the master quest version? not sure), but that's a bit hilarious they used zelda in a crude way of storytelling to give the middle finger there to the player on that level of a troll.
the snake statue is INDEED dope ... man, kind of want that somewhere around. vaporwave but in a archeological dig sort of way :P
i think the state logo link is broken - was this what it was showing? https://www.flickr.com/photos/vivalasam/3861247371/in/photostream
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and, ah, thanks for the catch re: state logos! that is indeed what it was showing; updated accordingly~
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STATE LOGO THOUGHTS (I know nothing about graphic design and only a few things about states):
The Maryland state logo is extremely on brand. "Our state flag is wack, and we love it! Admire our flag!"
Props to Nevada for including a pronunciation guide in their logo, it's kinda tastefully snarky.
Why are South Dakota and South Carolina both doing the same cheesy faces / places type slogan? I suppose South Dakota is trying to justify it with the Rushmore image, but then my follow-up question is why they think their logo should be twice as tall as everyone else's.
Maine feels threatening somehow. I can't explain it.
Pennsylvania logo is very Pennsylvania (derogatory).
North Carolina is the worst one, though. That's not a logo, that's just a sans serif font.
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also i'm lol that indiana decided just referencing the indy 500 in their slogan was the way to go. lean aaaaaall the way into the one most stereotypical element of your state i guess. (i would've guessed some kind of basketball reference before the racecars, personally)
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...Granted, if you go with "corn" you really have no way to differentiate yourself from Ohio, so not prioritizing that is understandable.
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So many interesting links here! My goodness, that awk demo is amazing. I had no idea all that was possible in awk. I just use it for extracting columns from text files... :D
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