2022 May Assorted Links

June 3, 2022

Photo taken (Of Enoch the dog!) in May 2022 in Fulton Heights of Grand Rapids Michigan with a Pixel.

Culture #

• Slack is something I’ve been looking to read more about, these two articles were interesting:
  • My slack budget: 3 surprise problems per week
  • Slack gives you space to notice/reflect on subtle things
• We saw a Sylvansport Go, seems like a great way to rapidly tent and keep yourself off the ground. When packed up you effectively have a “truck bed” amount of volume under the tent capsule. However the cost basis I’d expected was closer to rooftop systems and it seems to be 2x/3x when it’s in trailer form.
• Cool Things People Do With Their Blogs.
• Big tech companies seem to be consolidating. Nvidia was blocked from taking Arm but snarfed up Mellanox and Cumulus which created an interesting situation for folks who were using Broadcom and Cumulus. Now Broadcom is taking VMware from Dell. There is a Hn discussion that has an interesting thread that resonated with me about what these enterprise software abstractions are to market sectors that don’t want to fiddle around with computing constantly.
• Friendships form via shared context, not shared activities
• storyworth is a sort of “interview as a service” that provides questions over email to someone and then binds their stories into a book to be held as a keepsake.
• A story of starting organizational containers in both Germany and the United States that talks through holding companies, incorporation, and some financial bootstrapping.
• I’m an addict.
• The modern diet is a biosecurity threat frames modern {policy,market,etc.} about nutrition {markets,production,logistics,etc.} as a threat to everyone, even those who make health-conscious choices. Talked about the work of Weston Price. Insinuated that “The modern diet was the creation of conscious decisions; the same could be true for a health-restoring successor”. A section that stood out to me:

  Some—those with the means to afford it—can cushion their exposure. You can find the healthiest American populations today on elite college campuses or in upper-class enclaves like Nantucket or Loudoun County. America’s rich have, at great expense, acquired a degree of relative immunity from the health disaster. Wealthy neighborhoods are dotted with health-food stores, “slow food” restaurants, and farmers’ markets; the new elite diets like paleo and veganism, have, for all their cloying moralism, a similar function of shielding those who can afford them… Bill Gates’ book How To Prevent The Next Pandemic—essentially an outline of how the Gates Foundation will use its endowment in the coming years—spends 304 pages on ideas like “get better at detecting outbreaks early” or “find new treatments fast,” with only a single mention of obesity and not a word on the autoimmune diseases which make people more vulnerable to pandemic disease… Such approaches will only manage diseases, chronic and pandemic, without solving the malignancies from which they stem. Bad nutrition creates damage at a scale that cannot be fully remedied through past facto intervention: the public health and medical frameworks which respond to problems after they emerge are much less effective than simply avoiding those problems in the first place.

• I hate LaTeX. I love LaTeX had an excerpt that hit hard:

  This is to say, I set out to write a document and then suddenly 5 hours have passed and I’m reading about glue and fragile commands. In the end, it’s rarely worth it, but the giddy feeling of having mastered the weird machine lingers, and so the cycle repeats when the following report (or presentation) is due.

• Sarlink is finally useful abroad talking about the second version of the dishy and utilization while boating (roaming) around the world.

Technology #

• Axzez makes a carrier board for the RPI4 and a PoE board that goes with.
  • Write up on carrier board
  • write up on PoE board
• Making slides from markdown using marp
• Zarf is a bootstrapping framework for creating DevSecOps platforms for airgap’ed environments. The originating organization has a fantastic name.
• Recently had talked with someone about metering object storage (many places provide this already) and starting to think about billing systems and how complex (and likely custom) they are. This article about the generalization of this problem into lago was a good read.
• Extremely well written and typeset article: How fast are Linux pipes anyway?.
• base2048 is a binary encoding optimized for transmitting data through Twitter.
• Sidero Labs is building Talos Linux which is a boot to Kubernetes distribution.
• Outline is an open source multi-user documentation tool that supports rich text mechanisms and multi-user concurrent editing.
• I’d gone on a journey of Linode->DigitalOcean->Vultr->Packet->Vultr and recently noticed that the recently Packet now Equinix has a c3.small.x86 for what I think is a very reasonable annual price.

Analysis #

• New book co-authored by Peter Norvig: Data Science in Context: Foundations, Challenges, Opportunities.
• Discussion of Moloch within the context of photo filters used in social media with reference to Meditations on Moloch.
• gpt-4chan is a language model fine-tuned from GPT-J 6B on 3.5 years worth of data from 4chan’s politically incorrect (/pol/) board. Using the raiders of the lost kek dataset.
• Some works on harnessing the success of transformer (e.g. GPT, BERT) in other domains:
  • Trajectory Transformer: “We view reinforcement learning as a generic sequence modeling problem and investigate how much of the usual machinery of reinforcement learning algorithms can be replaced with the tools that have found widespread use in large-scale language modeling”
  • Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning is a Sequence Modeling Problem: “A natural follow-up question is how to abstract multi-agent decision making into an Sequence Model problem and benefit from the prosperous development of Sequence Models”
  • Discussion on Spotify
• A title and story generated by GPT-3 and illustrated by DALL-E 2
• Reading about ethereum, specifically MEV, DEX Arbitrage “sandwich trading” and most interestingly a counter strategy called salmonella attack where “searchers” can take positions based on pending transactions in the “mempool”:

However, a recent rise in MEV services such as FlashBots now allows traders to create “sandwich bundles”, where either all 3 transactions execute, or none of them execute. At the same time, there has also been a rise in miner trading teams, who mine the sandwich bundles directly into their blocks. These two innovations together led to a cavalier attitude on trading forums as sandwich traders rejoiced in the profits of their new “risk free” alpha. As trad(itional) finance morphs into chad finance, it’s easy to get sucked up in the excitement.

Travel #

• I have started using Strava and have really enjoyed the route planning functionality. There is nice heatmap functionality within the route planning that helps to identify paths that are likely safe (e.g. bike lan, one way) or have interesting things to see. We have met a lot of people since moving to Grand Rapids and there seems to be an endless stream of suggested activities and routes to take to get there. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there can be a lot of travel opportunities right in your locale.