So why is everything so complicated? At work, I mean.

Think of a small company. A single person, a founder, is building her business. She knows her way around, it’s all in her head: The plan, the things that are important and why, and how they are to be executed. Also, tradeoffs to be corrected later, potential opportunities for later and a lot of other meta: Stuff that does not get executed right now, but that informs decisions, priorities and preferences.

The Blockchain is the solution to everything, and especially the problem of the state. So or similar goes the hype. This book attacks that hype, and it’s fun to read.

It very briefly (one chapter of many) and rather easily understandable explains what Merkle trees and eternal logfiles are, how they are different from the blockchain, what ‘proof of work’ actually means.

It then goes on and actually takes apart the libertarian politics bullshit on top of that, by going through all the history of people and “businesses” connected to Bitcoin, Ethereum and the likes. It is full of stories how they failed, were busted, or simply neglected basic necessities.

Matthew Dutton: »@mipsytipsy I thought “You have to test in production” was a bold statement and would love to hear more of your thoughts on the topic.«

Charity Majors: »Hmmm, you’re not the only one to call this out. I’ll add it to my list of “articles to write someday” ? but here’s the gist: We have always tested in production, just not well. And obviously, I’m not advising anyone to do less of the usual pre-production testing methods, but at some point, esp with distributed systems, you just can’t usefully mimic the qualities of size and chaos that tease out the long thin tail of bugs. Imagine trying to spin up a staging copy of Facebook, or the national electrical grid! You can’t, and have sharply diminished returns. If you can catch 80-90% of the bugs with 10-20% the effort (and you can), the rest is more usefully poured into making production resilient.

In How to Kill a City Peter Moskowitz takes severals US example cities to show the general process of Gentriciation and the individual differences. We get to know the development stories of New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco and New York, in order to better understand the mechanism and root causes of Gentrification, which is not about Hipsters and Latte at all, but about rent seeking, backroom dealing to change the law, and - specifically in the US - also about the history and perpetuation of racism.

Kill Process is set in the same universe as “Avogadro Corp:, but is a freestanding story and not part of the Avogadro Series.

We meet Angelina Benenati. She’s a self taught hacker and database architect for Tomo, which is as much not Facebook as Avogadro Corporation is not Google and Braeburn is not Apple in Hertlings stories. She has a shady past, in which she hacked systems under the name of “Angel of Mercy”. She came out of an abusive relationship by the way of stealthily murdering her husband by the way of hacking the car’s computer, and she lost an arm in the resulting accident.

The story begins as a Fantasy novel in a magical universe: We have two warring factions of magicians, a dragon attack, Gnomes and other entities from the fables and fairy tales.

We also have Rowan, the Steerswoman. She is more than a navigator and map maker, she’s part of a group of people that believes in science, in documentation and in open sources - the steerswomen. When a Steerswoman asks, you must answer, and truthfully. If you ask any Steerswoman, she’ll also answer to the best of her knowledge and truthfully. As a group, they are gathering information about the world they live in.

Bob is making what he was built for: more Bobs. Bob is in fact a dead computer programmer back from the destroyed and near inhabitable Planet Earth, who has been turned into an upload inhabiting a Von Neumann probe. His mission is to explore strange new worlds, going where nothing has gone before and make more of himself.

You can read more of his Genesis in We Are Legion Part 1 of the Bobiverse series .

Illegal and undocumented instructions are not a new thing. The Commodore 64 CPU, a 6502 with a few additional I/O lines, was known to have them. Since on current CPUs we can completely VLSI simulate a 6502 in Javascript we also understand where they come from.

Pagetable.com has a wonderful article on this . So how about current CPUs? Modern CPUs are vastly bigger and more complicated than a 6502, and they are also set up very differently. So simulation is not taking us anywhere, but we can fuzz. Sandsifter is such a CPU fuzzer: it generates every conceivable instruction byte combination and then tries to observe what happens.

War Factory is the second of three Books in Neal Ashers Transformation Sequence , a trilogy set in his Polity Universe

The storyline continues with the characters and themes of the first book - it’s about atonement and redemption. And as we learn, not just about the redemption of the mad AI Penny Royal, but also about the aftermath of the Human-Prador war and the redemption of the various persons (Human, Haiman, Prador and AI) that have been damaged by the war. We see in fact a lot more of the prador, and how the war affected them personally, and as a society.

Dear Internet, Today I Learned that oath-toolkit exists in Homebrew. So, this is a thing:

$ brew install oath-toolkit 
$ alias totp='oathtool --totp -b YOURSECRET32BLA | pbcopy'

And so is this:

#! /usr/bin/env expect -f

# exp_internal 1

set seed [ exec security find-generic-password -w -a $USER -s seed ]
set totp [ exec oathtool --totp -b $seed ]
set pass [ exec security find-generic-password -w -a $USER -s pass ]

spawn ssh verysecure.doma.in
expect "word:"
sleep 1
send "$pass\r\n"
expect "Two Factor Token:"
sleep 1
send "$totp\r\n"
interact

Yup, it’s totally possible to laugh and cry at the same time.