Nearly 10 years after Congress passed a law to curb online gambling, a new investigation finds offshore sites are not only still thriving, but in some cases routing crucial parts of their operations through equipment based in the U.S.

'Hollywood' actor Samara Weaving lets us in on all of the movies and television she's been watching during quarantine.   Read more...

libfacedetection — they claim 1000fps. Open source. Rich Hickey on Becoming a Better Developer — By constantly switching from one thing to another you are always reaching above your comfort zone, yes, but doing so by resetting your skill and knowledge level to zero. Mastery comes from a combination of at least several of the […]

Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer (Bryan Cantrill) — talk at Stanford, about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side machine—and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision. Let’s Use Kubernetes: Now You Have 8 Problems — If you’re part of […]

Sno — Distributed version control for geospatial and tabular data. Finally, git for (geo)data done right. Open source. The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation — plugging prompts like “the woman worked as” and “the white person worked as” into text generation systems, and the horrors you get back. (via Violent […]

MLflow — an open source platform to manage the ML lifecycle, including experimentation, reproducibility, and deployment. It currently offers three components: tracking, projects, and models. Eventing Facets (Tim Bray) — the word “eventing” makes my skin crawl, but this series of posts has A+ info in it. Workbox — JavaScript Libraries for adding offline support […]

Pluralistic — Cory Doctorow’s news site and newsletter, where you can learn about African WhatsApp modders among other things. Mapnik — LGPLed software that combines pixel-perfect image output with lightning-fast cartographic algorithms, and exposes interfaces in C++, Python, and Node. pi node — A π-box is a modular system of radio/streaming broadcast, composed of multiples […]

AWS Bill Analysis — always interesting to see how to approach lowering your costs. In this case, the project owner works for Amazon on AWS, but still there were savings to be had. A Design Guide to Writing Offline-first Apps — In this article, we will be diving into some of the engineering challenges that […]

OpenAM — an open-access management solution that includes authentication, SSO, authorization, federation, entitlements and web services security. Building Relationships as a Remote Engineering Manager — And if you haven’t realized it yet, get used to this—you’re going to spend a lot of time writing. API Security Maturity Model — I’m not sure if I agree […]

The Uncensored Library — Reporters Without Borders built a library in Minecraft, in which you can read banned books. (via Gizmodo) Shmoocon 2020 Talk Recordings — everything from email addresses to Verilog by way of Zero Trust, social media, and choose-your-own-adventure ransomware. Differential Privacy: A Comparison of Libraries — We will have a look at […]

How the Great Firewall Discovers Hidden Circumvention Servers — really interesting CCC talk from a few years ago. The Challenge of Software Liability — Liability for insecure software is already a reality. The question is whether Congress will step in to give it shape and a coherent legal structure. XOXO Talks — video archive of […]

Inklewriter — open source interactive text adventure game creator. (Fun for adults, but also great to give to kids who love to read) (via Andy Baio) The Virus Survival Strategy Guide for Your Startup (Steve Blank) — Unfortunately, it’s no longer a normal market. All your assumptions about customers; sales cycle; and, most importantly, revenue, […]

Dos and Don’ts in Open Source (Olaf Geirsson) — really useful advice to would-be contributors and project owners. It’s tempting to respond to a welcome contribution with a quick, “This looks amazing, I will review tomorrow!” Consider giving a thumbs-up reaction instead and wait with commenting until you complete the review. Promises are estimates and […]

NASCAR Replaces Canceled Races with Esports Featuring Pro Drivers (Engadget) — the world is getting weirder. Firebase Scrutinized By Antitrust Regulators — Firebase tools give Google, the internet’s top ad seller, information on what consumers are doing inside apps that it can exploit to target ads to users, according to makers of Firebase alternatives. Journey […]

Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages — Stanza features a language-agnostic fully neural pipeline for text analysis, including tokenization, multi-word token expansion, lemmatization, part-of-speech and morphological feature tagging, dependency parsing, and named entity recognition. Code and models available for 66 languages. Dropbear SSH — Dropbear is a relatively small SSH […]

Potential Distributed Reading Group on Distributed Systems — for some folks, this will be a great time to start reading groups to work through papers. You’ll never get a time with less physical distraction. (Just remember to ration your socials time or you and your time will vanish into the maelstrom.) Jitsi Meet — open […]

Medtronic Releases Ventilator Designs — not open source, as the license is a limited-time limited-purpose license that retains rights. I imagine some corporate lawyers have done some frantic Googling for open meditech licensing clauses. dolt — version history for tabular data. Compare to sno, which is version control for geospatial and tabular data. Toast UI […]

Replaying Traffic to Test Proprietary Systems — using Wiresham to replay traffic to test blackbox proprietary systems. Outlaw Innovations — This paper will explore how the often illegal activities of hackers (in the original usage of the term to refer to individuals who modify computer hardware and software) may produce valuable innovations. It will explore […]

Imperial College’s COVID19 Model — in github, in R, MIT-licensed. This repository has code for replication purposes. The bleeding edge code and advancements are done in a private repository. Readings on Time — I bumped on this idea while reading Alan Kay’s writing about making the difference between mutable and immutable data “moot” in the […]

The Zero Trust Learning Curve (Palo Alto Networks) — don’t learn with the Crown Jewels. The trouble with starting with the most sensitive protect surfaces is that they’re often too fragile and many people don’t know how they work. Starting there with Zero Trust frequently results in failures. Too often, when this happens, organizations blame […]

Rufus — Create bootable USB drives the easy way. Improving Audio Quality in Duo with WaveNetEQ — Google filling in missing packets in voice calls using deep learning. CRN++ — language for programming deterministic (mass-action) chemical kinetics to perform computation. Crafting Crafting Interpreters — story behind the writing of the Crafting Interpreters book.

locust — open source load testing tool: define user behaviour with Python code, and swarm your system with millions of simultaneous users. (via @nzigel) Background Matting — a method for creating a matte – the per-pixel foreground color and alpha – of a person by taking photos or videos in an everyday setting with a […]

System Design for Advanced Beginners — a friendly explanation of the what and why of systems, with acknowledgement of the real world like There are many tools out there, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and many ways to build a technology company. The real, honest reasons that we will make many of our technological […]

The Fuzzy Edges of Character Encoding — the history, politics, and computational basics of text-based character encoding and digital representations of text, from Morse Code to ASCII to Unicode (and emoji), as well as alternative text encoding schemes. (via Everest Pipkin) AutoHotkey — an automation scripting language for Windows. The Electronic Nose and its Applications: […]

FairMOT — one-shot multi-object tracking that remarkably outperforms the state-of-the-arts on the MOT challenge datasets at 30 FPS. pipedream — IFTTT for coders. Compiler Explorer — an interactive tool that lets you type code in one window and see the results of its compilation in another window. Using the site should be pretty self-explanatory: by […]

Introduction to COBOL — a 1999 web site (!) with slides from a University of Limerick course. IBM will offer free (presumably more modern) training. zoombot — a highly advanced AI to handle Zoom calls. storybook.js — open source toolkit and sandbox to build UI components in isolation so you can develop hard-to-reach states and […]

The Science of Happiness — free enrolment in Berkeley’s MOOC to teach positive psychology. Learn science-based principles and practices for a happy, meaningful life. The New Business of AI (A16Z) — many AI companies have: Lower gross margins due to heavy cloud infrastructure usage and ongoing human support; Scaling challenges due to the thorny problem […]

Coding vs Programming (John Gruber) — I’d noticed this linguistic change too. See also Engineering vs Programming vs Computer Science. Coding is shorter so it’s probably gaining in popularity because shorter is easier to say and thus more convenient. micrograd (Andre Karpathy) — A tiny Autograd engine (with a bite! :D). Implements backpropagation (reverse-mode autodiff) […]

Kanboard — free and open source Trello-like Kanban boards. Remote Work Playbook — really useful advice on the actual mechanics of working remotely, not just which tools to use but how to use them. E.g., As an individual contributor, is there something you just did that you think a colleague would have to do at […]

Nebula —open source distributed, scalable, lightning-fast graph database. COBOL Programming Course — from the Open Mainframe Project. Serverless Handbook — a resource teaching frontend engineers everything they need to know to dive into backend. Novel Annealing Processor Is the Best Ever at Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems (IEEE Spectrum) — Dubbed STATICA (Stochastic Cellular Automata Annealer […]

CastleDB — a structured static database […]. CastleDB looks like any spreadsheet editor, except that each sheet has a data model. […] stores both its data model and the data contained in the rows into an easily readable JSON file. […] allows efficient collaboration on data editing. Mainframes Are Having a Moment (IEEE Spectrum) — […]

It’s Time to Learn (Scott Berkun) — a strong response to Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build. It feels like we are in a disrupted time when anything is possible, and folks are wondering where the levers are to pull. pygraphistry — a library to extract, transform, and visually explore big graphs. Desert Island Devops […]

Posthog — open source product analytics. Into the Mainframe (Recurse) — the interviews with two mainframe programmers are a great reminder of how much things have changed. And how they haven’t. For instance, later in my career I kept a weighted punching clown in my office. As programmers, we liked our users, but we also […]

Moloch — Large scale, open source, indexed packet capture and search. 3Dify Instagram Photos — open source toolset for adding a 3d effect to photos on Instagram’s web site. It uses 3d-photo-inpainting running in Colab (free GPU) and Cloud pubsub/storage for communication. A glimpse of the future: we could augment all our apps with deep […]

The Suddenly Remote Playbook — I just want to note that if you have to look after kids when you’re supposed to be working, you’re not working from home. Not everyone’s getting a glorious introduction to the delights of working from home. taichi — a programming language designed for high-performance computer graphics. It is deeply […]

Teleforking a Process onto a Different Computer — a working proof of concept (I just don’t replicate tricky things so that I could keep it simple, meaning it’s just a fun tech demo you probably shouldn’t use for anything real) of a telefork() function call that spawns a process on another machine and returns the […]

Learning a Language — this list of questions facing anyone taking a new language for a test run just burns with truth. (Also: encouraging to see how many of these questions are answered by the Cookbook format) OpenVAS — Open Vulnerability Assessment Scanner, aka “what a cheap external security assessment vendor will run and then […]

podpaperscissors — From the classic “prisoner’s dilemma” to more obscure coördination games, Pod Paper Scissors takes game theory out of the dry textbook and into the real world. … Each episode will feature different kinds of games and situations. Experts in a variety of fields will casually converse with the hosts about how the particular […]

To Microservices and Back Again: Why Segment Went Back to a Monolith — microservices came with increased operational overhead and problems around code reuse. … If microservices are implemented incorrectly or used as a band-aid without addressing some of the root flaws in your system, you’ll be unable to do new product development because you’re […]

Tasmota — Alternative firmware for ESP8266 with easy configuration using webUI, OTA updates, automation using timers or rules, expandability and entirely local control over MQTT, HTTP, Serial or KNX. Selfie 2 Waifu — deep learning constructs an anime character from your photo. Paper for the underlying technique. (via @tkasasagi) The Handbook of Cyber Wargames: Wargaming […]

Popcorn Linux — exploring how to improve the programmability of emerging heterogeneous hardware, in particular, those with Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)-diverse cores, from node-scale (e.g., Xeon/Xeon-Phi, ARM/x86, CPU/GPU/FPGAs) to rack-scale (e.g., Scale-out processors, Firebox, The Machine), in both native and virtualized settings. Additionally, the project is exploring how to automatically compile/synthesize/execute code on ISA-heterogeneous hardware. […]

Leaving Amazon (Tim Bray) — May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19. Observability is a Many-Splendoured Thing (Charity Majors) […]

Raman Spectroscopy — Low Cost, High Performances, 100% Open Source Raman Spectrometer. […] We currently offer the spectrometer in a Starter Edition version designed for teaching Raman spectroscopy and we will soon release a Performance Edition version which achieves a tested 12 cm-1 resolution at low costs. Great to see this getting into the hands […]

Super Bootable 64 — Super Mario 64 shipped before the SDK was finalised, and it had to be compiled with optimisations turned off. This meant the binary was easily reversed to source code, and now the unportable has been ported. This site probably won’t last long, because DMCA, but it’s technically a sweet feat. (via […]

Mathematics for Machine Learning — We wrote a book on Mathematics for Machine Learning that motivates people to learn mathematical concepts. The book is not intended to cover advanced machine learning techniques because there are already plenty of books doing this. Instead, we aim to provide the necessary mathematical skills to read those other books. […]

Yesterday saw the online premier of a mini-episode of a new animated comic series based on the classic Gilbert Shelton underground comic, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. As a hippie wannabe teen in the 70s, this (and Zap! Comics) was everything to me.

In 1969, life in San Francisco consists of free love, communal living, and political protest. Freewheelin’ Franklin Freek (Harrelson), Fat Freddy Freekowtski (Goodman), Phineas T. Phreakers (Davidson) and their mischievous, foul-mouthed cat, Kitty (Haddish) spend their days dodging many things —- the draft, the narcs, and steady employment -– all while searching for an altered state of bliss.

But after partaking of a genetically-mutated strain of marijuana, the Freaks wake up 50 years later to discover a much different society. Quickly feeling like fish out of water in a high-tech world of fourth-wave feminism, extreme gentrification and intense political correctness, the Freaks learn how to navigate life in 2020 -— where, surprisingly, their precious cannabis is now legal.

OK, sounds good. But is it? If the reaction to the first mini-episode is any indication, maybe the Freaks should have remained in their drug-induced coma. As one Facbooker commented: "Get yourself a collected set of the original comic and skip this drivel!"

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It took hundreds of exposures and a complex method of removing occlusions, but this "lucky" shot is the result: a depiction of the hot regions lurking under Jupiter's uppermost clouds.

The picture was captured in infared by the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii, and is one of the sharpest observations of the planet ever made from the ground. To achieve the resolution, scientists used a technique called "lucky imaging" which scrubs out the blurring effect of looking through Earth's turbulent atmosphere. This method involves acquiring multiple exposures of the target and only keeping those segments of an image where that turbulence is at a minimum.

This Sunday, Weezer will cameo on The Simpsons and as a teaser, the band released their cover of "The Simpsons Theme" by Danny Elfman. From Rolling Stone:

In the new episode of The Simpsons, Weezer will play a cover band called Sailor’s Delight, which serves as the house act on a romantic cruise Homer and Marge are taking. Sailor’s Delight will “perform” a handful of tracks from Weezer’s 2019 self-titled record (also known as The Black Album) and their 2017 effort Pacific Daydream, while the episode will also boast the premiere of the band’s new song, “Blue Dream,” from their upcoming LP, Van Weezer.

Who is Patrick Mason? I just ran across a few short horror films he wrote and directed, and they're truly scary. Like edge-of-your-seat gasp-out-loud scary. Not only that, but they're beautifully made with good actors, especially Ayuda (see below). The three videos posted here are the ones I've seen so far, but there are more on his site, which I plan to watch tonight. Can't wait to see where this director takes us next.

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Tens of thousands of other crew members have been trapped for weeks aboard dozens of cruise ships around the world -- long after governments and cruise lines negotiated their passengers' disembarkation. Some have gotten ill and died; others have survived but are no longer getting paid.