Links Jan 2022

Washington Post has an interesting article on how gender neutral language is developing in different countries [1].

pimaker has an interesting blog post about how they wrote a RISCV CPU emulator to boot a Linux kernel in a pixel shader in the VR Chat platform [2].

ZD has an interesting article about the new Solo Bumblebee platform for writing EBPF programs to run inside the Linux kernel [3]. EBPF is an interesting platform and it’s good to have new tools to help people develop for it.

Big Think has an interesting article about augmented reality suggesting that it could be worse than social media for driving disputes [4]. Some people would want tags of racial status on all people they see.

Vice has an insightful article making the case for 8 hours of work per week [5].

The Guardian has an insightful article about how our attention is being stolen by modern technology [6].

Interesting article about the Ilobleed rootkit that targets the HP ILO server management system [7], it’s apparently designed for persistent attacks as it bypasses the firmware upgrade process and updates only the version number so anyone who thinks that a firmware update will fix it is horribly mislead.

Nick Bostrom wrote an insightful and disturbing article for Aeon titles None of Our Technologies has Managed to Destroy Humanity Yet [8] about the existential risk of new technologies and how they might be mitigated, much of which involves authoritarian governments unlike any we have seen before. As a counterpoint the novel A Deepness in the Sky claims that universal surveillance would be as damaging to the future of a society as planet-buster bombs.

Euronews has an informative article about eco-fascism [9]. The idea that the solution to ecological problems is to have less people in the world and particularly less non-white people is a gateway from green politics to fascism.

The developer of the colors and faker npm libraries (for NodeJS) recently uploaded corrupted versions of those libraries as a protest against companies that use them without paying him [10]. This is the wrong way to approach the issue, but it does demonstrate a serious problem with systems like NPM that allow automatic updates. It gives a better result to just use software packaged by a distribution which has QA checks applied including on security updates.

VentureBeat has an interesting article on the way that AI is taking over jobs [11]. Lots of white collar jobs can be replaced by machine learning systems, we need to plan for the ways this will change the economy.

The Atlantic has an interesting article about tapeworms that infect some ants [12]. The tapeworms make the ants live longer and produce pheromones to make the other ants serve them. This increases the chance that the ants will be eaten by birds which is the next stage in the tapeworm lifecycle.

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