Month: March 2021

SpaceX telemetry

Neat: due to some nuclear weapons treaty, rocket communications are transmitted more or less in the clear, and a group of enthusiasts have decoded additional internal sensor readings & pictures from spacex, but also some chinese ones(?). Kind of surprising that there’s not more industrial espionage going on, or if there is, others don’t seem to suspiciously catch up with spacex.

Toward Confidential Clouds

Imagine a future in which end users have complete and verifiable control over how their data is used by any cloud service. If they want their organization’s documents to be indexed, a confidential indexing service could guarantee that no one outside their organization ever sees that data. A confidential videoconferencing service could guarantee end-to-end encryption without sacrificing the ability to record the session or provide transcripts, with the output sent to a confidential file-sharing service, never appearing unencrypted anywhere other than the organization’s devices or confidential VMs. A confidential email system could similarly protect privacy without compromising on functionality such as searching or authoring assistance. Ultimately, confidential computing will enable many innovative cloud services, while allowing users to retain full control over their data.

All futurism is Afrofuturism

The fact that Africa has some productive manufacturers and the fact it has managed to shift more people into factory work are both good signs. And though Asia’s growth boom is still going strong, it can’t last forever, and Africa’s day as the workshop of the world may come soon.

But economists, leaders, policymakers, businesspeople, and international organizations need to be focusing on this challenge more than they are. The fate of humanity in the 21st century and beyond hinges on whether African countries can figure out the riddle of industrialization.

Patrick Collison Interview

We perhaps shifted from placing emphasis on our collective effectiveness in advancing prosperity and opportunity for people to the perceived fairness that was embodied in whichever particular steps we happened to take. We shifted our focus from sins of omission to sins of commission. Take California: there is almost endless attention paid to making sure that no single state project has even a tint of impropriety or suboptimality. The result of that cultural shift, is that the state as a whole is then often beset with awful results. With this ethos and panoply of strictures, it turns out that California is almost functionally incapable of constructing a high speed rail line connecting its 2 major metro regions. California has less civilizational capacity than the France of the 70s that built the TGV! California shifted mid century from being the US’s fastest-growing state — 50% population growth between 1950 and 1960 — to a state that is somehow, improbably, shrinking. This is, obviously, mostly because of the regulations the state’s inhabitants put in place that block the housing that’s required to support California’s economic success. As a result, California has lost the “technology” of being able to affordably house its inhabitants.

Spectre web exploit

In this post, we will share the results of Google Security Team’s research on the exploitability of Spectre against web users, and present a fast, versatile proof-of-concept (PoC) written in JavaScript which can leak information from the browser’s memory. We’ve confirmed that this proof-of-concept, or its variants, function across a variety of operating systems, processor architectures, and hardware generations.

CO2 comes down to China / India

89% of the additional greenhouse gases came from just 2 countries, China, which alone accounted for 69% of the increase, and India. Emissions from the EU, Japan and US fell, and by 2018 were lower than they were in the 1990s.


2021-12-22:

Yes, China’s fossil fuel use is astronomical, but it’s also the world’s largest installer of renewable power – by some distance – and it’s set to go much bigger. The country is leading the way in other clean energy technologies and the scale of its carbon-cutting plans has taken many by surprise.

Android lags years

2020’s high-end Androids sport the single-core performance of an iPhone 8, a phone released in Q3’17
mid-priced Androids were slightly faster than 2014’s iPhone 6
low-end Androids have finally caught up to the iPhone 5 from 2012

You’re reading that right: single core Android performance at the low end is both shockingly bad and dispiritingly stagnant.

Alternative funding

If you have real revenue and real cash flow coming in, and you want to grow your business by pulling that revenue forward, don’t sell debt, or a WBS; don’t sell a claim on the black box of your entire business. Sell the smallest unit possible. Sell the thing itself: your revenue. And the purest way to represent that – the atomic, tradable unit of the subscription economy – is the revenue contract.

a possible alternative to debt or equity financing.