MaisonBisson

1. Academic publishes mathematical theory for conformance among hipsters: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.8001.pdf
2. MIT Tech Review covers it, with a fancy photo illustration using a stock photo of a hipster-looking male: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613034/the-hipster-effect-why-anti-conformists-always-end-up-looking-the-same/
3. A hipster-looking male contacts MIT Tech Review to loudly complain about their using a picture of him without asking: https://twitter.com/glichfield/status/1103040764794363904
4. It turns out the hipster-looking male in the photo isn’t the same as the one who complained: https://twitter.com/glichfield/status/1103044630134882305

Emoji are showing up as evidence in court more frequently with each passing year. Between 2004 and 2019, there was an exponential rise in emoji and emoticon references in US court opinions, with over 30 percent of all cases appearing in 2018, according to Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, who has been tracking all of the references to “emoji” and “emoticon” that show up in US court opinions. So far, the emoji and emoticons have rarely been important enough to sway the direction of a case, but as they become more common, the ambiguity in how emoji are displayed and what we interpret emoji to mean could become a larger issue for courts to contend with.

From Dami Lee, amplifying Santa Clara University School of Law professor Eric Goldman’s ongoing research into the role of Emoji in legal proceedings. Lee tells us emoji have “shown up in all types of cases, from murder to robbery,” and the examples in the story include solicitation and a civil complaint. Goldman is especially concerned about how the courts will handle the different rendering of emoji on on different devices.

Archana Kesavan of ThousandEyes speaking at NANOG75 reports that network traffic between AZs within a single region is generally “reliable and consistent,” and that tested cloud providers offer a “robust regional backbone for [suitable for] redundant, multi-AZ architectures.”

ThousandEyes ran tests at ten minute intervals over 30 days, testing bidirectional loss, latency, and jitter. Kesavan reported the average inter-AZ latency for each tested cloud:

Within the four tested regions in AWS, they found:

Kesavan’s slides and video are online.

Univers was intrinsically superior to Helvetica. It had a much larger family at the outset, with 21 members compared to four in 1960. More importantly, its family was logically designed with consistent weights and widths, something that Helvetica never achieved until its redesign as Neue Helvetica in 1982. Univers’ characters, stripped of “unnecessary” elements such as the beard on ‘G’ or the curve on the tail of ‘y,’ were also more rationally designed.

From Paul Shaw in Print, explaining how Helvetica and Univers competed in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite its many flaws, Helvetica eventually became one of the most ubiquitous typefaces in the world. Paul claims:

Helvetica’s current ubiquity is not due to its widespread adoption by Modernist-inclined graphic designers in the 1970s but rather by its availability as a free font on personal computers.

There’s nothing like going to a big dark theater with people you’ve never met before, and having the experience wash over you.

Steven Spielberg, quoted in Chaim Gartenberg’s coverage of his speech at the Cinema Audio Society’s CAS Awards. Amusingly, according to Gartenberg, Spielberg has nothing against the streaming industry, he just really loves the theater experience and worries about what might happen to it. Still, it’s hard not to imagine the filmmaker being a little bit swayed by the talk of Hollywood irrelevance in the face of Netflix.

Pixar’s Renderman is the visual effects software Hollywood didn’t think they needed (seriously, George Lucas sold off the Lucasfilm Computer Division in 1986). Years later, after producing landmark visual effects for films such as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park and many more, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Pixar and the creators of Renderman with an Award of Merit in 2001 “For their significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar’s ‘Renderman.’”

The first commercial version of Renderman was released 30 years ago this year. This video from Wired looks back at how the software changed the industry, and contributed to 27 of the last 30 Visual Effects Oscar winning films:

Video from Wired via Uncrate.

We get there through iteration. We don’t try to build an architecture that is failproof. Building an architecture and worrying about it for months and months at a time before you actually go deploy it tends to not get us the result we want because by the time we’ve actually deployed something the problem has moved or there are more technologies available to solve different problems.

We take it seriously enough to say “there are no architects on the team.”

We do a very “you build it you own it” process, where any team or any individual or any engineer that builds or designs something, they own it, and they do the on-call for it.

On call is where we learn, and that’s how we improve over time.

You build a system…you don’t have to be perfect. Deploy it, and as long as you have enough detection and mitigation capabilities, you will do OK. And you will learn, and you will iterate over it, and you will get better over time.

From the NANOG73 keynote: “Operations first, feature second” by Facebook VP of Network Engineering Najam Ahmad. It’s at about the 10:20 mark in the video:

Economies of scale quickly become economies of hassle

From Jessamyn, amplifying the exasperation people feel when daily activities are made more complex by poor application of technology. In the example given, the phone app reduces costs for the provider, but doesn’t improve the experience for the customer. People may not expect parking to be delightful, but that’s not an excuse for making it frustrating.

[I]t’s getting harder to find independent hardware startups that can scale up to something big without getting bought.

From Dieter Bohn on the collective disappointment so many people feel about the Eero acquisition. The rise of product ecosystems is increasing the costs and risks for independent hardware startups in every category. (Perhaps that’s why reMarkable positions itself as the intentionally unconnected alternative to our phones.)

Nanda Kusumadi has quite a number of tips for configuring a Fuji X-E3. Those tips include using RAW photo recording and turning on 4K video capture (they’re off by default), and one I hadn’t considered: enabling Adobe RGB color space with its wider than sRGB gamut. I prefer not to use some of other the suggestions, such as enabling electronic shutter (it reduces dynamic range).

One setting not mentioned in Nanda’s tips is turning off exposure preview. This is critical when using manual exposure modes with flash. With exposure preview enabled, ambient light is too dark to allow proper composition and focusing when exposure is set for the flash. Turning it off is a smart move to make it easier to shoot with flashes and strobes.

• Set up → Screen set-up → Preview exp./WB in manual mode → Off

On a lark, Jaime Kornick created Patrick’s Park. Then she created a dog parade, then….

iHeart mentioned the Dog Parade on the radio, local publications wrote about it, and the RSVPs started rolling in. In total, more than 350 people said they were coming.

That’s when I realized I needed to get a permit.

Then she got a call:

I told them the panel would consist of thought leaders within the canine community, bull shitting. They were wondering if the co-founder of Wag, Jason Meltzer, could be on the panel. When I hung up the phone, I was like, damn, you can really create something out of nothing in this town.

Jaime Kornick tells the whole story here.

This leads to the emerging pattern of “many clusters” rather than “one big shared” cluster. Its not uncommon to see customers of Google’s GKE Service have dozens of Kubernetes clusters deployed for multiple teams. Often each developer gets their own cluster. This kind of behavior leads to a shocking amount of Kubesprawl.

From Paul Czarkowski discussing the reasons and potential solutions for the growing number of Kubernetes clusters.

The vulnerability allows a malicious container to (with minimal user interaction) overwrite the host runc binary and thus gain root-level code execution on the host.

From Aleksa Sarai explaining the latest Linux container vulnerability.

To me, the underlying message here is: Containers are Linux.

From Scott McCarty washing his hands of it.

Kata Containers is an open source project and community working to build a standard implementation of lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs) that feel and perform like containers, but provide the workload isolation and security advantages of VMs.

From the Kata Containers website. The project is intended to be “compatible with the OCI specification for Docker containers and CRI for Kubernetes” while running those containers in a VM instead of a namespace.

The future of Kubernetes is Virtual Machines, not Containers.

From Paul Czarkowski, discussing multitennancy problems and solutions for Kubernetes.

Cultivate exploration:

As a leader, you want to encourage people to entertain “unreasonable ideas” and give them time to formulate their hypotheses. Demanding data to confirm or kill a hypothesis too quickly can squash the intellectual play that is necessary for creativity.

Then ruthlessly prioritize for focus:

[Force] teams to focus narrowly on the most critical technical uncertainties and [rapidly experiment for] faster feedback. The philosophy is to learn what you have gotten wrong early and then move quickly in more-promising directions.

From Gary P. Pisano writing on organizational culture for HBR. Concurrence from Paul E. McKenney, who emphasizes:

[S]tress-testing ideas early on avoids over-investing in the inevitable blind alleys.

But what kind of tests does Pisano suggest?

[do] not run experiments to validate initial ideas. Instead, […] design “killer experiments” that maximize the probability of exposing an idea’s flaws.

The department of agriculture [had] an annual budget of $164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it. (In this case, it did.) Guess wrong and you had to drink.

From Michael Lewis, colorfully illustrating the incredible work of presidential transition.