The Rundown for May 23, 2022

• Marginalia: “This is an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed.”

• The tombstone of Evelyn Davis (Twitter post): “Power is greater than love, and I did not get where I am today by standing in line, nor by being shy.”

• Really deep dive into the internal workings of a mechanical watch

• Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models :

Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. We show how a malicious learner can plant an undetectable backdoor into a classifier. On the surface, such a backdoored classifier behaves normally, but in reality, the learner maintains a mechanism for changing the classification of any input, with only a slight perturbation. Importantly, without the appropriate "backdoor key", the mechanism is hidden and cannot be detected by any computationally-bounded observer. We demonstrate two frameworks for planting undetectable backdoors, with incomparable guarantees.

• Contra Chrome - “With her meticulous rearrangement of Scott McCloud's Google-commissioned Chrome comic from 2008, she delivers what she calls "a much-needed update". Laying bare the inner workings of the controversial browser, she creates the ultimate guide to one of the world's most widely used surveillance tools.”

The Rundown for January 20, 2022

Been a minute but might as well just get back to it. I’ll start the year by ragging on crypto:

• Pretty good takedown of the Web3 fraud:

So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only "utility" for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers.

• This leads me to an post that nicely sums up the creep factor that I get when reading or interacting with cryptobros:

They promised us Bond villains with lasers and unhackable data centers in atmosphere-evacuated vaults in international waters. What they gave us was the banality of day-traders, armchair finance-bros with laser-eye avatars, who are unable to give up on the grift because the grift requires that they must always find the greater fool.

• Of course it’s all fun and games until everything collapses and gives birth to fascism.

• And for all the hype, most implementations don’t even deliver on the original promises of decentralization and immutability.

• Platonic Solid Snake (Twitter thread) - or what the hell it is you’re actually getting when you buy an NFT.

The Rundown for September 8, 2021

• How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10? - “[I]f you dig down deep enough in Windows 10, you’ll find elements that date from Windows 3.x days.“ Realized what makes Windows such an uneven experience for an interface OC like myself.

• Things Queer Culture Teaches You That Straight Culture Doesn’t:

• Federal Court decision on the Antitrust complaint against Facebook - It dismisses the complaint but just about gives a blueprint of what would have been a winning a case against the giant social network.

• And the FTC seems to have taken these lessons to heart in its revised complaint against Facebook.

• Finding the Marcos billions - Because our money is still out there.

The Rundown for July 25, 2021

• Happy Independence Day, superhero-style!: “A common leftist critique of superhero comics is that they are inherently anti-collectivist, being about small groups of individuals who hold all the power, and the wisdom to wield that power. But it’s a sterile reading. It examines superhero comics as a cold text, and ignores something that I believe in fundamental, especially to superhero storytelling: the way people engage with text. Not what it says, but how it is read. The average comic reader doesn’t fantasize about being a civilian in a world of superheroes, they fantasize about being a superhero. One could charitably chalk this up to a lust for power, except for one fact…The fantasy is almost always the act of helping people. Helping the vulnerable, with no reward promised in return. “

• Dangers Posed by Evidentiary Software—and What to Do About It: “The software engineers proposed a three-part test. First, the court should have access to the “Known Error Log,” which should be part of any professionally developed software project. Next the court should consider whether the evidence being presented could be materially affected by a software error. Ladkin and his co-authors noted that a chain of emails back and forth are unlikely to have such an error, but the time that a software tool logs when an application was used could easily be incorrect. Finally, the reliability experts recommended seeing whether the code adheres to an industry standard used in an non-computerized version of the task (e.g., bookkeepers always record every transaction, and thus so should bookkeeping software).“

• Defining the skills citizens will need in the future world of work.

• MIT’s Shigeru Miyagawa on Digitally Enhanced Education - “In remote teaching, we have often found ourselves in the students’ own living quarters, have seen and heard the challenges they are coping with. Many students do not have a quiet space for studying, forcing faculty members to vie with their family and even pets for their attention.”

• Scientists discover spiders are eating snakes all over the world. Yeesh.

The Rundown for June 23, 2021

• Advertisers trying to target your dreams: - “‘Dream incubation advertising’ is an experimental marketing technique that uses audio and video to shape the content of your dreams. The journal Science surveys the field and reports on a group of legit dream researchers ‘calling for the regulation of commercial dream manipulation,’ which does have some real science behind it.”

• Van Buren v. United States - The U.S. Supreme Court rules on the “exceeds authorized use” language of the CFAA. It’s a narrower reading that prevents any violation of a system’s terms from being turned into an indictment. 

• Microsoft Excel has an Esport now - “Eight spreadsheet jockeys from eight different countries will compete to 'use the most of Excel's capabilities to solve complex problems in no time.“

• The Most Irrational Number -  “But my favorite thing about the golden ratio has nothing to do with pentagons or Pepsi. It’s that the golden ratio, among all irrational numbers, is the most irrational one.”

• Firms are giving out bonuses to keep lawyers working 100 hour weeks -

“The boom in legal services comes after law firms had prepared for the worst last summer, in the wake of the coronavirus. Many firms cut salaries for lawyers and staff, while some furloughed their employees to get through what they thought would be a massive economic downturn.

Instead, 2020 turned into a windfall year for the industry’s top 100 law firms by revenue, which brought in almost $111 billion in revenue, up 6.6% from 2019 and the biggest increase since 2018, according to data from the American Lawyer.”

The Rundown for June 05, 2021

• From Nature, looks like another advance in Brain Computer Interfaces:”Here we developed an intracortical BCI that decodes attempted handwriting movements from neural activity in the motor cortex and translates it to text in real time, using a recurrent neural network decoding approach. With this BCI, our study participant, whose hand was paralysed from spinal cord injury, achieved typing speeds of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% raw accuracy online, and greater than 99% accuracy offline with a general-purpose autocorrect. To our knowledge, these typing speeds exceed those reported for any other BCI, and are comparable to typical smartphone typing speeds of individuals in the age group of our participant (115 characters per minute). Finally, theoretical considerations explain why temporally complex movements, such as handwriting, may be fundamentally easier to decode than point-to-point movements.” Maybe in the future they’ll just plug in electrodes into bar candidates to see if they have enough legal knowledge sloshing around in their brains.

• Interesting post on the most likely endgame for the pandemic - that it will be endemic just like the flu. Something we would just have to deal with year in and year out with meds and booster shots. Sounds reasonable. A part of me still things that we should take the XKCD route and eradicate the damned thing out of spite.

XKCD

• The internal combustion engine - Interesting in and of itself but also a demonstration of the web’s potential for teaching - through analysis, illustration, and animation.

Bartosz Ciechanowski

• The best single from every decade, 2010s to 14,000 B.C.

• The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told:

For those with a longer memory, though, the RSA breach was the original massive supply chain attack. State cyberspies—who were later revealed to be working in the service of China’s People’s Liberation Army—penetrated infrastructure relied on across the globe to protect the internet. And in doing so, they pulled the rug out from under the entire world’s model of digital security.

The Rundown May 21, 2021

• Magneto was right: “Through it all, Ackerman makes clear: Magneto was right (although he is certainly not above criticism, and has made many mistakes that he owns). In the global theatre of war, there are certain marginalized groups who will always be hated and hunted by those in power. Assimilation is presented as the path of least resistance by those like Charles Xavier, but it can never truly erase the threat. But perhaps more importantly is that Magneto has demonstrated a capacity for change, without ever losing sight of his convictions, and his steadfast defense of his people, whom he hopes to never see suffer again.”

• The cursed computer iceberg: “the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers…hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.”

• Taylor Swift Remade ‘Fearless’ as ‘Taylor’s Version.’ Let’s Discuss. There are artists big enough to get back their masters, and artists great enough to re-record their masters. Also see how this boils down to the non-fungibility of Taylor Swift.

• Big Tech’s guide to talking about AI ethics. “accountability (n) - The act of holding someone else responsible for the consequences when your AI system fails.”

• The Incredible Rise of North Korea’s Hacking Army: “North Korea’s cybercrime program is hydra-headed, with tactics ranging from bank heists to the deployment of ransomware and the theft of cryptocurrency from online exchanges. It is difficult to quantify how successful Pyongyang’s hackers have been. Unlike terrorist groups, North Korea’s cybercriminals do not claim responsibility when they strike, and the government issues reflexive denials.”

The Rundown April 22, 2021

• How to outrun a dinosaur - So that sequence in Jurassic park (where the Tyrannosaurus chases a vehicle but gives up after a while ) does make sense after all. 

• Designing online assessments to minimize cheating - I am still amazed by the lengths through which some students will try to game the system or cheat outright. 

• The Internet Archive hosts a beautiful collection of art and historical documents from the University of Tokyo.

• AI tries to generate pickup lines:

Once upon a time I decided to train a neural net to generate pickup lines. Once I started collecting the training data I began to regret it when I saw how awful the existing lines were. Turns out I needn’t have worried. The neural net I used was so small and clueless that its pickup lines were mostly incoherent and confusing.

• Supreme Court Ruling in Google v. Oracle: - No ruling as to the copyright-ability of APIs, but Court found that Google’s use fell within the four factors of fair use. Each API use case would still have to weighed on a case-by-case basis, but the ruling is still a win for software developers.

The Rundown April 4, 2021

• The $69 Million JPEG - So far, the most sober explanation of NFT’s I’ve seen/heard.

• How to beat a Boston Dynamics robot in mortal combat:

PSA: if you or someone nearby are being brutalized by a police Spot robot and can get a hand or something underneath, grab this handle and yank it forward…

• The directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility. I am not aware of any similar linguistic construct for Filipinos. The closest thing I can think of is comparing incomprehensible writing to chicken scratches. What does that say about the culture?

• Gorgeous cover images from Taiwan’s CDC personifying a rogue’s gallery of infectious diseases. 

• The Lonely Orbit:

The Rundown January 28, 2021

• Anything can be an instrument: Broken air con unit plays a jazz drum solo.

• The great graphics card shortage of 2020 (and 2021).

• An alphabet made from architectural designs.

• Is Everything securities fraud? Interesting paper on a phenomenon in the US where securities fraud litigation is being used as a proxy for regulation and corporate governance.

• 5. The American Abyss - What the January 6 coup attempt could mean for the future of American politics.

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.