esoteric.codes – Languages, platforms, and systems that break from the norms of computing.
As a novice, I wanted to find out what esolangers cared about and what they saw as the stakes in their work. I reached out to esolang pioneers like Chris Pressey, who patiently explained how the culture around it developed as it did. I tried to focus the interviews on concepts, and break away from technical descriptions of the languages which dominated existing writing.
Renting Meet Love.
How to Become an Intellectual in Silicon Valley.
(…) to become a VC intellectual, try as much as possible to be male.
Regexploit: DoS-able Regular Expressions.
(…) if a regex is vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS), it may be possible to craft input which causes the CPU to run at 100% for years.
Korrupte haben Geld.
Interessenkonflikte von Politikern: Der Bock ist immer der Gärtner.
Erstaunlich viele Abgeordnete sind übrigens auch Mitglieder bei Umweltverbänden, Amnesty International oder anderen Weltrettern. Dass diese Lobby der Öko-Diktatoren skrupellos Blühstreifen, Radwege und Effizienzhäuser durchsetzt, passiert aber eher selten. Vielleicht liegt es ja daran: 2019 betrugen die Budgets von Greenpeace, WWF, Nabu und BUND zusammen 266 Millionen Euro. Nur fürs Marketing gab dagegen allein VW 265 Millionen aus.
Split Screen: How Different Are Americans’ Facebook Feeds?
Snapshots from the Facebook feeds of our Citizen Browser panelists illuminate how Facebook’s recommendation algorithm siloes information on the platform.
Good news, everyone… NOT!
Is this the end of forests as we've known them? (Via densediscovery.com.)
Forests also absorb around one-quarter of all human carbon emissions annually, and increasingly there are worries that if forests die back they will switch from storing carbon to emitting it, because dead trees will release all the carbon they have accumulated. This helps explain why much-touted proposals to plant millions of trees to suck up carbon and ameliorate the climate crisis are encountering skepticism; they won’t work if conditions on Earth don’t allow for forests to reproduce and thrive.
The traditional guidelines of typography about line-lengths, spacing, harmonies, and so on still apply on the web; it's just that we're now trying to apply them in a context where many of their parameters have become variable
Relevant: “So, how did I make a video game from a font?”
Melon Usk’s False Covid Predictions: A Timeline (via wt.social).
Relevant: Melon Usk, Starbase, and “Innovationism”.
Offensive Security.
What Happened to Pickup Trucks? (Via densediscovery.com.)
To fill the bottomless tank of a pickup … is to practice the religion of the American Way. It is to affirm climate denial, petrol-adventurism, and American exceptionalism.
Metaforecast is a search engine for probabilities.
Given a query, it searches for relevant questions in various prediction markets and forecasting platforms (namely CSET-foretell, Elicit, Foretold, Good Judgment, Good Judgment Open, Guesstimate, GiveWell & OpenPhilanthropy blogposts as of early 2021, Hypermind, Ladbrokes, Metaculus, Omen, Polymarket, PredictIt, Smarkets, William Hill, and Michael Aird's database of existential risk estimates).