Merry Christmas
We’re going to take the next couple of weeks off, and we hope you are too. We wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year before we went. See you in 2023!
If you want to give us the greatest Christmas gift, please share this newsletter with a friend who may enjoy it. Hopefully some tiny percentage of them like it enough to click this link to sign up for more. Growing our reach lets us do more of this work, please help!
re:BASED talk: Chris Conner - Stop Big Tech From Tracking You
Chris Conner illustrates how Big Tech is tracking everything you do via your phone and its apps by reviewing a recent purchase he made to avoid getting tracked himself: a Volta Phone.
Please remember to keep an eye out for more talks from re:BASED as they become avalable. You can find all the released talks at https://rebasedconf.com/2022.
News
Social Credit comes to Australia - Low social credit score? No planes or trains for you. Also it’s now illegal to give someone more than $10,000 in cash. People have to fight against this craziness in the US or we’re unbuttered dry slave-state toast.
Fine-Grained Sandboxing of v8 Isolates - Kenton Varda (one of Josh’s systems design heroes) discusses how cloudflare leverages v8 isolates to enable them to run Cloudflare Workers at massive scale, with any node in their fleet able to handle traffic for any application.
The cloudy layers of modern-day programming - “It’s VendorOps. You are hired to tend the vendor’s stuff.” Today’s software development is trending less towards engineering and more towards learning how to use the powerful-but-constrained tools provided by your Cloudy Overlord. This handling of outside package management is something we appreciate about the Go-lang community (and their willingness to write internally managed code), and despise about the JavaScript community (node packages everywhere).
Internet Archive Scholar - Access 25 million research articles and other scholarly documents preserved in the Internet Archive.
Delightful cloud shenanigans - Software engineers doing funny cloud things, just because. Like storing your K/V data in ActiveDirectory because the pricing structure means it’s ~free. “Vendor lock-in? You’re locked in with us.”
Seeing Like a State - An excellent book from James C. Scott that gives a thorough examination of the history and mentality of the State.
Apple opens up - Hell freezes over as Apple plans to support side-loaded apps by 2024 - albeit, this is in response to new EU regulations, including the Digital Markets Act. What’s the over/under on this coming to America, and not just the EU? Does this mean we’ll get USB-C charging ports, too?
Observable Plot - An excellent JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization.
Where GPT gets its magic - A deep article tracing the emergent abilities of language models. Discusses the heritage of each of the extant leading Large Language Models as well as provides a few potential research paths to help identify where in-context learning and generalizable behavior emerge from, which is presently mysterious.
