I publish a newsletter every three months, where I curate a collection of thought-provoking articles and intriguing facts that have caught my attention. It’s an opportunity to stay informed and expand your knowledge. If you’d like to, you can sign up here.
Sample newsletter content
Here are some of the items in the Q4 2022 newletter. If you like the content, subscribe above.
Tech
Security researcher Troy Hunt developed a tool to troll spammers wherein the spammers are invited to sign up to a website. The website’s rules for an acceptable password start out easy (must contain a digit), but end up ridiculous (must contain the name of a chess piece). The idea is that spammers spend time trying to create an acceptable password rather than spamming other people. He writes a fun blog post about it. The API is deployed on edge nodes in a simple JavaScript script, demonstrating that not only can edge nodes cache images and static sites, but they can cache the backend code for simple APIs too.
In Java, a byte array is mutable. This can lead to surprising behaviour. Here’s an engineer advocating for an immutable byte array to be added to the language.
Science
- NASA says that its DART spacecraft has successfully altered the orbit of the 160 metre asteroid Dimorphos by around 32 minutes in a demonstration of asteroid impact avoidance.
Maths
- Deepmind announces AlphaTensor, a deep learning system which found new efficient ways to multiply matrices with as few calculations as possible.
Business
Slack is an acronym, standing for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. It was developed for internal use by a video game company, but became the company’s main product after their games were unsuccessful.
Noah A. Haber wins a prize for his critique of Givewell’s strategy to prioritise charitable causes. He says they don’t model uncertainty, which produces a bias in favour of causes with a more uncertain impact.
Random
- The TV show House is heavily inspired by Sherlock Holmes. Thematically, the parallel is clear: the protagonist uses inductive reasoning to solve cases, rejects cases he finds uninteresting and has a drug addiction. There are also numerous references, the main one being the surnames of Gregory House and James Wilson (compare Holmes and Watson).