Cross-reading #7

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Why It’s Easier to Manage 4 People Than It Is to Manage 1 Person (staysaasy.com)

The manager makes mistakes as they always do. The report makes mistakes as they always do. Fingers are pointed. Times are dire. If you ever hear someone call their manager a “first-time manager”, you know the relationship has reached a special level of hell.

The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (calvertjournal.com)

The development of such a vast network would have necessitated a depth and duration of political commitment even an authoritarian regime could unlikely sustain, and it is doubtful that early mainframe technology would have been capable of processing so much data.

Migrating a 40TB SQL Server Database (tarynpivots.com)

Even though I automated the majority of the work, this project was incredibly frustrating and I definitely don’t want to do it again anytime soon (unless I have plenty of drive space and don’t have to juggle things for 11 months). This project was challenging in many ways, and considering I had to do the same work on two servers it was doubly challenging.

Teaching GPT-3 to Identify Nonsense (arr.am)

In Giving GPT-31 a Turing Test, Kevin Lacker found that GPT-3 does well answering simple factual questions like “Who was president of the United States in 1955?”, but also happily answered absurd qu…

Abusing GitLab Runners (frichetten.com)

Approximately every 3 seconds the GitLab2 runner will send a post request to /api/v4/jobs/request. The vast majority of the time GitLab will respond with a 204 (No Content). However, after a push to a branch or tag that is configured for runners, it will respond with a 201 and send a blob of json with a boatload of data.

Writing a file system from scratch in Rust (blog.carlosgaldino.com)

A file system is responsible for organising and providing an abstraction over the storage devices where the data is physically stored. In this post, we will learn more about the concepts used by file systems, and how they fit together when writing your own.

The code I’m still ashamed of (freecodecamp.org)

If you write code for a living, there’s a chance that at some point in your career, someone will ask you to code something a little deceitful – if not outright unethical.

TheirTube (their.tube)

Theirtube is a Youtube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas.

How I Wrote, Crowdfunded, and Independently Published a Book in 2020 (blakeboles.com)

Writing a book is never as simple as sitting down and smashing out some words; the process starts long before that with conversations, research, and exploratory writing on a smaller scale. For self-published authors, preparation also involves building up your “platform”, i.e., the number of people who give a damn about you.

How did the Casio F91W Become a Terrorist Icon? » Reaper Feed (reaperfeed.com)

The Casio F91W3 has been worn by Osama bin Laden and used by Chechen bombers largely due to the rugged durability and bomb-making abilities of the F-19W.

Anthony Fauci Explains Why the US Still Hasn’t Beaten Covid (wired.com)

I think that there’s going to be multiple successful vaccine candidates. There are at least five or more that we are supporting out of the NIH4, and other countries are also having a considerable effort on vaccine development. I’m hopeful that there will be more than one successful vaccine, because we need vaccines not only for the United States, we need it for the rest of the world.

  1. OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent organization, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. — Wikipedia
  2. GitLab is a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool that provides a Git-repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking and continuous integration/continuous deployment pipeline features, using an open-source license, developed by GitLab Inc. — Wikipedia
  3. The Casio F-91W is a digital watch manufactured by Japanese electronics company Casio. Introduced in 1989, it is popular for its low price and long battery life. Annual production of the watch is 3 million units per year. — Wikipedia
  4. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1880s and is now part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The majority of NIH facilities are located in Bethesda, Maryland. The NIH conducts its own scientific research through its Intramural Research Program (IRP) and provides major biomedical research funding to non-NIH research facilities through its Extramural Research Program. — Wikipedia