Tags: war

djinn and juice : The Best Debugging Story I’ve Ever Heard

Cassie and I were swapping debugging stories. I shared the case of the 500 mile email with her. She shared this with me.

Very Slow Movie Player on Vimeo

I love this use of e-ink to play a film at 24 frames per day instead of 24 frames per minute.

Malicious AI Report

Well, this an interesting format experiment—the latest Black Mirror just dropped, and it’s a PDF.

Archiving web sites [LWN.net]

As it turns out, some sites are much harder to archive than others. This article goes through the process of archiving traditional web sites and shows how it falls short when confronted with the latest fashions in the single-page applications that are bloating the modern web.

Glittering Blue

Scroll around this massive video of a timelapse of one day’s footage from the Himawari 8 satellite in geostationary orbit around our homeworld.

Tweeting for 10,000 Years: An Experiment in Autonomous Software — Brandur Leach

Taking the idea of the Clock of the Long Now and applying it to a twitterbot:

Software may not be as well suited as a finely engineered clock to operate on these sorts of geological scales, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to put some of the 10,000 year clock’s design principles to work.

The bot will almost certainly fall foul of Twitter’s API changes long before the next tweet-chime is due, but it’s still fascinating to see the clock’s principles applied to software: longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability.

Software tends to stay in operation longer than we think it will when we first wrote it, and the wearing effects of entropy within it and its ecosystem often take their toll more quickly and more destructively than we could imagine. You don’t need to be thinking on a scale of 10,000 years to make applying these principles a good idea.