Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss

Microwave boilers

Arrays of these devices beam microwaves into water in a boiler, heating it up. The pipes that carry the water are also made of microwave-sensitive materials, as is the insulation that lags them. And a heat exchanger recycles residual waste warmth. The upshot is a boiler that is 96% efficient. The best existing gas boilers rarely exceed 90%.

nft_ptr

C++ std::unique_ptr that represents each object as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain.

Why?

Biggest issue facing $125 billion security industry: Memory safety.
“~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues.” – Microsoft Security Response Center

The world’s largest codebases are written in C++
Browsers, operating systems, databases, financial systems

C++ memory management is hard to understand, opaque, and not secure

As we all know, adding blockchain to a problem automatically makes it simple, transparent, and cryptographically secure.

Thus, we extend std::unique_ptr, the most popular C++ smart pointer used for memory management, with blockchain support

Non-Fungible Tokens and std::unique_ptr have the exact same semantics:
each token/object is unique, not fungible with other tokens/objects
each token/object is owned by 1 owner/unique_ptr
others may view the NFT/use the object, but only the owner can transfer/destroy the NFT/object.
absolutely no protection against just pirating the image represented by the NFT/copying the pointer out of the unique_ptr

Written in Rust for the hipster cred.

2021-11-11: Funny and poignant web3 critique here:

Even at comparable stages in their development, the World Wide Web and Web 2.0 were not quite so … self-referential? They were about other things — science and coffee pots and links and camera lenses — while Web3 is, to a first approximation, about Web3. For all the Web3 rhetoric around the potential rewards for “users”, Ethereum only recognizes “wallets”. One user can control many wallets; one BOT can control many wallets; Ethereum doesn’t know the difference, doesn’t care. Therefore, Web3’s governance tools are appropriate for decision-making processes that approximate those of an LLC, but not for anything truly democratic, which is to say, anything that respects the uniform, unearned — unearned!—value of personhood.

Kati Kariko

Kati is a leading candidate for a Nobel. Amazing work.

1 fateful day, the 2 scientists hovered over a dot-matrix printer in a narrow room at the end of a long hall. A gamma counter, needed to track the radioactive molecule, was attached to a printer. It began to spew data.

Their detector had found new proteins produced by cells that were never supposed to make them — suggesting that mRNA could be used to direct any cell to make any protein, at will.

“I felt like a god,” Dr. Kariko recalled. [..] On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. “Oh, it works. I thought so.” To celebrate, she ate an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts. By herself. Dr. Weissman celebrated with his family, ordering takeout dinner from an Italian restaurant, “with wine”. Deep down, he was awed.

“My dream was always that we develop something in the lab that helps people”. I’ve satisfied my life’s dream.” Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman were vaccinated on Dec. 18 at the University of Pennsylvania. Their inoculations turned into a press event, and as the cameras flashed, she began to feel uncharacteristically overwhelmed.

A senior administrator told the doctors and nurses rolling up their sleeves for shots that the scientists whose research made the vaccine possible were present, and they all clapped. Dr. Kariko wept.

Non-neural bioelectricity

a group of cells stores memory in their electrical impulses, which affects cell division.

We found a pretty amazing phenomenon, which is that if you make so-called “Picasso frogs” — these are tadpoles where the jaws might be off to the side, the eyes are up here, the nostrils are moved, so everything is shifted — these tadpoles make largely normal frog faces. Now, this is amazing, because all of the organs start off in abnormal positions, and yet they still end up making a pretty good frog face. And so what it turns out is that this system, like many living systems, is not a hardwired set of movements, but actually works to reduce the error between what’s going on now and what it knows is a correct frog face configuration. This kind of decision-making that involves flexible responses to new circumstances, in other contexts, we would call this intelligence. And so what we need to understand now is not only the mechanisms by which these cells execute their movements and gene expression and so on, but we really have to understand the information flow: How do these cells cooperate with each other to build something large and to stop building when that specific structure is created?

Dancing With Systems

We can’t control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

I already knew that, in a way before I began to study systems. I had learned about dancing with great powers from whitewater kayaking, from gardening, from playing music, from skiing. All those endeavors require one to stay wide-awake, pay close attention, participate flat out, and respond to feedback. It had never occurred to me that those same requirements might apply to intellectual work, to management, to government, to getting along with people.

LOOPY

In a world filled with ever-more-complex technological, sociological, ecological, political & economic systems… a tool to make interactive simulations may not be that much help. But it can certainly try.

play with simulations
It’s the ancient, time-honored way of learning: messing around and seeing what happens. Play with simulations to ask “what if” questions, and get an intuition for how the system works!

programming by drawing
Raw code is too inaccessible. Also drag-and-drop is too mainstream. But with LOOPY, you can model systems by simply drawing circles & arrows, like a wee baby

remix others’ simulations
Want to build upon your friends’ models? Or challenge your enemies’ models? LOOPY lets you have a conversation with simulations! You can go from thinking in systems, to talking in systems

Fastest PNG Decoder

Wuffs’ PNG image decoder is memory-safe but can also clock between 1.22x and 2.75x faster than libpng, the widely used open source C implementation. It’s also faster than the libspng, lodepng and stb_image C libraries as well as the most popular Go and Rust PNG libraries. High performance is achieved by SIMD-acceleration, 8-byte wide input and copies when bit-twiddling and zlib-decompressing the entire image all-at-once (into 1 large intermediate buffer) instead of 1 row at a time (into smaller, reusable buffers). All-at-once requires more intermediate memory but allows substantially more of the image to be decoded in the zlib-decompressor’s fastest code paths.