Un registro no exhaustivo de algunas de las cosas que he hecho, películas y series que he visto, artículos que he leído y podcasts que he escuchado en 2020. La publicación de un enlace aquí no significa que esté de acuerdo con su contenido.

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En Español

• Qué está pasando en el Consejo General del Poder Judicial
• La invasión de los contratos menores de 14.999,99€
• “En España vivimos muchos años pero enfermos”
• El relator de la ONU sobre la pobreza: “Lo que más me han dicho es que se sienten abandonados”
• Objeción de conciencia
• La publicidad de las casas de apuestas

Videos

• Canceling - ContraPoints
• Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs
• The Sentences Computers Can’t Understand, But Humans Can
• The Trouble With Tumbleweed
• The Logistics of the US Census

TV Shows, movies & documentaries

• I am not okay with this, season 1.
• Bojack Horseman, season 6.
• Sex Education, season 2.
• Unbelievable, miniseries.
• The Good Place, season 4.
• Knives Out
• Muchos hijos, un mono y un castillo, (revisionado).

Books

• Programming in Scala, by Martin Odersky.
• The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood
• Las niñas siempre dicen la verdad, de Rosa Berbel
• Hágase mi voluntad, de Angelo Nestore.

Math & Computer Science

• Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation: Causal Nets Cause Common Confounding
• Using neural networks to solve advanced mathematics equations
• The real numbers are not interpretable in the complex field
• Why HN should use randomized algorithms
• Suspicious discontinuities
• The growth of command line options, 1979-Present

Compilers & low-level stuff

• Precision Opportunities for Demanded Bits in LLVM
• Does register selection matter to performance on x86 CPUs?
• Where did the free parameters of IEEE 754 come from?

Computer security

• Deniable Backdoors Using Compiler Bugs
• DNS Security: Threat Modeling DNSSEC, DoT, and DoH
• Information Leaks via Safari’sIntelligent Tracking Prevention
• How I Hacked my Smart TV from My Bed via a Command Injection

Science & Economics

• The Replication Crisis: Flaws in Mainstream Science
• Extent of “unscientific”, and of wrong, papers in research mathematics
• World values lost in translation
• “We are not recommending you give to Texas per se”: GiveDirectly’s bold disaster-relief experiment
• Bad romance

Politics & society

• ‘Shattered’: Inside the secret battle to save America’s undercover spies in the digital age
• The World’s Most Annoying Man
• Ten Hours of Static Gets Five Copyright Notices
• Nicotine marketing
• Sex-Positive, Porn-Critical?
• Do not vote, one vote will not reverse election results. What is wrong with this reasoning?

Surveillance capitalism

• The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
• You Are Now Remotely Controlled
• Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data
• How hard will the robots make us work?

Other articles

• A World Without Pain
• Up And Then Down
• Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local
• Cats, Once YouTube Stars, Are Now an ‘Emerging Audience’

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I thought this whole thing about a worldwide pandemic would have ended by now but I guess the whole world is stuck at home for at least a few weeks more, so here are some things that I liked reading or watching lately.

En Español

• ¿Quién planchaba las enaguas de Jane Austen?
• La película Vampiros en la Habana, la banda sonora es increíble

Projects

I am going to try to write here also things that are not very public-facing but still interesting, as a sort of diary. Some things I have done:

• Made some changes to my webpage
• Learned some Go
• Learned some Rust, I am trying to rewrite an old project on Rust (maybe more about that on the next log?)
• Started at a new job (yay)
• Rewrote some parts of the FilmAffinity to Letterboxd script (thank you to the two people who made PRs :) )
• Started using hledger

Videos

• This Video Has (Many) Views
• This is what our climate change denial looks like. (CW: Climate change is very sad)
• How We Reopen (after The Plague)
• Why You Can’t Name A File CON In Windows, on backwards compatibility
• COVID-19 and Economic Narratives

TV Shows, movies & documentaries

I have mostly watched films lately, here are the ones I liked the most in no particular order:

• The Tale (CW: abuse)
• Brokeback Mountain (CW: violent homophobia)
• O Auto Da Compadecida
• But I am a Cheerleader (CW: homophobia)
• Sorry to Bother You (CW: racism)
• Mean Girls
• Creep (CW: it’s scary)

Books

I kind of switched to reading more books and less articles during the lockdown, both as a sort of experiment and because the whole world kind of only talked about COVID-19 and I wanted to read about something else. The main conclusion is that reading fiction is a lot of fun, specially if it’s in Spanish and I don’t have to spend a lot of energy for doing it.

• War with the Newts (no review, but I loved it)
• Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy (review, freely available on the authors’ webpages)
• The Rust Programming Language (well-written; Rust is so comfortable to work with. I also solved all the rustlings)
• The Signal and the Noise (review I wanted to like it but I really didn’t)

Math & Computer Science

• On the shoulders of giants: recent changes in Internet traffic, Internet performance during the COVID-19 emergency and When people pause the Internet goes quiet
• Normalization of deviance
• What’s up with monomorphism?
• Barcode recovery using a priori constraints

Science & Economics

• Going Critical
• Nationalize Amazon
• Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world?

Politics & society

• Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, Because I Just Made Them Up (fiction but interesting as a thought experiment I guess?)
• Outpacing the Virus: Digital Response to Containing the Spread of COVID-19 while Mitigating Privacy Risks
• Digital hoarders: “Our terabytes are put to use for the betterment of mankind”
• Suicide Prevention Trigger Guard in Turkish Armed Forces (CW: Suicide, disturbing)

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Happy? Pride. This bimonthly log edition is dedicated to Hatsune Miku, for her novel series Harry Potter.

En Español

• “Bebe con moderación” y otras mentiras de la industria del alcohol
• La sentencia de las banderas, sobre las banderas LGTB en ayuntamientos.
• Mujeres, política y la búsqueda del traje perfecto.

Projects

• I published fa-scrapper as a pip package.
• Spent quite some time installing Kodi on a Raspberry Pi without a keyboard until I figured out it has a screen keyboard you can use from the very beginning :clown:
• Mostly focused on getting used to work so not much more but I have some public projects in mind to maybe do for the next two months (!) (no hard promises)

Videos & Podcasts

• Cringe, by Contrapoints. A bit too long but it’s definitely worth it.
• The Scaredy Cats Horror Show, a five episode podcast show about horror films which includes awesome discussions on some of my favorite films of the last few years like Midsommar and Get Out.
• #80 - Professor Stuart Russell on why our approach to AI is broken and how to fix it, interesting although a bit hand-wavey, but I haven’t read the HCAI book yet.
• RESET - Recode Daily - Tear Gas, explained, on the famous chemical which is banned at war but used against protestors all over the world.

TV Shows, movies & documentaries

I think I have never posted this here, but you can see all films I have watched since 2017 here. New films that I really liked in these past two months are:

• But I’m a Cheerleader
• O Auto da Compadecida
• ¡Vampiros en La Habana!

Math & Computer Science

• “The Chromium project finds that around 70% of our serious security bugs are memory safety problems.”
• Presentation on Purely Functional Data Structures,
• A brief overview on how do Vocoders work
• Compiler Compiler: A Twitch series about working on a JavaScript engine this is quite cool!

Science & Economics

• What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics?, at some point in my life I really wanted to be in academia and I became disillusioned with it because of all the demoralizing stats and disheartening stories. This is one of those stories.
• Relevant pre-AGI possibilities, a fun speculative list of relevant technological and social changes for AGI
• Facebook Novi & Surveillance Finance

Politics & society

• Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over.
• Little Soldiers – Inside the Chinese Education System
• Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police. I get a little tired about some debates on reform v. abolition (imo many of them boil down to irrelevant semantics issues) when it comes to police and prisons so I am sometimes hesitant to call myself an abolitionist but this is an article I think I could fully endorse.
• Hack Brief: Anonymous Stole and Leaked a Megatrove of Police Documents
• My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem
• The Internet Furry Drama Raising Big Questions About Artificial Intelligence
• NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog.
• I learned prison farms are a thing in the USA in 2020, jeez.

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En Español

• Zara no es una marca española: el entramado fiscal de Amancio Ortega
• ¿Se puede divorciar el rey?

Proyectos

• Publiqué Cómo ser ingeniero de software: una perspectiva personal, un texto que escribí para unos amigos.
• Tengo una nueva página para contactarme: Contact

Videos

• Why Taiwan and China are Battling over Tiny Island Countries, geopolitics meets Oceania.
• My Carbon Footprint is Broken, the video the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want you to see.
• Why We’re Afraid To Abolish The Police, on police defunding and abolition.
• Code Completion with GPT-3 demo, a demo on GPT-3 writing code.

Podcasts

• The man who was caged in a zoo, on a Congolese man living on a human zoo.
• Ten doors, on how to escape prison during the South African apartheid.
• Jennifer Doleac on ways to prevent crime other than police and prisons, a very interesting interview on strategies for crime reduction, with the creator of:
• Probable Causation, which is also an excellent podcast.
• How to Sell A Haunted House, on the legal intricacies of selling a “haunted” house.
• The business of kidnapping: inside the secret world of hostage negotiation, on kidnapping insurance and how it works.

Films & TV Shows

• Jojo Rabbit, a comedy about Nazis.
• Inside No. 9, a dark comedy anthology from the BBC.

Board games

• The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, an incredible cooperative puzzle board game.
• Fantasy Realms, lighlty themed fantasy hand-building.
• The Thing, a hidden roles game that I found interesting although a bit too chaotic.
• Blood Bound, another hidden roles hit which is quite dynamic and fun.

Math & Computer Science

• Testing Firefox more efficiently with machine learning – Mozilla Hacks : the Web developer blog, from the now defunct Hacks Mozilla blog (RIP :( )
• Abstracting away correctness
• Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test
• Cloudflare outage on July 17, 2020
• The Busy Beaver Frontier [insert comment here about not wanting to be associated with the author’s political views]
• A short (and mostly wrong) history of computer networking
• Bloom filters debunked: Dispelling 30 Years of bad math with Coq!
• Complex-Step Differentiation, I probably should have known this, but I didn’t and it’s quite neat.
• The Haskell Elephant in the Room, on the cryptocurrency companies that are invading the Haskell ecosystem.

Science & economics

• We Need To Take CO2 Out Of The Sky, on carbon capture.
• The uncanny mountain: p-values between .01 and .10 are still a problem,
• The Marx Ratio and the Trouble with Coops

Politics & society

• The People’s Republic of Walmart, a book on how the world’s largest corporations are building the foundation to socialism.
• Fast food outlets, physical activity facilities, and obesity among adults: a nationwide longitudinal study from Sweden: a puzzling (in my view) study on obesity.
• Unscrupulous Flattery, a model of authoritarian societies.
• Amazon’s Disposable Tech Is Waste Even as It Leaves the Factory
• The Cost of Torture: Evidence from the Spanish Inquisition, a fascinating, detailed look on to how the Inquisition worked.
• Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media, on SSC disappearence.
• Twitter’s latest hack postmortem: An update on our security incident
• University of Chicago engineers develop tool to protect your photos from facial recognition. I hope privacy wins this arms race.

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Previous-to-last edition (!)

En Español

• Una demanda bifóbica, sobre una demanda de nulidad matrimonial a un hombre bisexual por serlo. Aquí la conclusión.
• El nombramiento del CGPJ

Videos

• Which Is “Bouba”, and Which Is “Kiki”?, a classical linguistics study revisited
• In Search Of A Flat Earth, on Flat Earthers as a religious group. Content warning for cults.

Podcasts

• Criminal: Errol Morris. I was absolutely obsessed with the first story about Vernon, Florida. Content warning for self-harm.
• Hilary Greaves visits 80000 Hours again and it’s great.

Films & TV shows

• I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), weird but interesting.
• The Lighthouse (2019), weirder but interestinger.
• Good Bye Lenin! (2003), a re-watch

Board games

• Timebomb Evolution I like the original Timebomb more but this was… nice?
• Skull Simple but fun.

Math & Computer Science

• Typing is Hard, on programming language typing systems and their various issues
• Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches,
• Unimog - Cloudflare’s edge load balancer, on how Cloudflare’s load balancer works
• Lazy Sort: Counting Comparisons¹, is lazy sort a woth alternative to something like quickselect?

Science & economics

• Why most Multiple-Study Articles are False: An Introduction to the Magic Index
• A Simple Fix for Our Massive Inequality Problem, on social wealth funds.
• Are Bosses Dictators?. Content warning: the examples here are quite disturbing.
• Paying for Covid : capping excessive salaries to save industries
• Why China is capitalist
• The hyperinflation gallery on hyperinflations around the worls

Politics & society

• Our EU Policy Principles: User Controls. EFF’s policy principles on tech…
• A Plan to Pay Artists, Encourage Competition, and Promote Free Expression and EFF’s plan for paying artists.
• Survival of the Richest on attending Davos and meeting rich people.
• Google’s Supreme Court faceoff with Oracle was a disaster for Google. I personally think it would be best for all if Google won this but oops, seems like they are not doing a great job.
• The Huey Long article on Wikipedia. I laughed a lot while reading this. People compare him with Trump; I can see that but this man’s political life and rethoric is way more interesting.
• Meet the CamperForce, Amazon’s Nomadic Retiree Army. Amazon hires temporary workers, usually over 60, who live in RVs outiside of their “fullfilment centers”.
• Why It’s OK to Block Ads.
• Facebook Tried to Limit QAnon. It Failed. on QAnon misinformation spread.
• “I Have Blood On My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation, on Facebook’s political manipulation.

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En Español

• La perfumería ‘low-cost’ que más vende en España es un polvorín laboral a punto de estallar. Entre otras perlas la mujer del propietario de PRIMOR es la representante sindical de UGT de la empresa.

Vídeos

• Amy Coney Barrett - Philosophy Tube, on originalism and the recent SCOTUS nomination.
• Five Things You Can’t Do On British Television
• How China Broke the World’s Recycling, clickbaity title but it’s interesting nonetheles

Films & books

• Fateful Findings by Neil Breen is one of the worst movies (if not the worst) that I have ever watched. It is impressive how someone can do such a bad job at making a movie.
• Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. It never ceases to amaze me how can someone believe such an over-the-top parody of antisemitism and general conspiratorial beliefs but well, it’s 2020 I guess. The Rudy Giuliani scene was… something. Content warning for racism, antisemitism, conspiracy theories.
• House, the OST is brilliant.
• Succession, seasons 1 & 2.
• Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang.

Math & Computer Science

• Unraveling the JPEG, on how JPEG encoding works
• How Flash games shaped the video game industry, Flash nostalgia done right.
• The Exotic Programming Ideas series by Stephen Diehl is great, see in particular Part 2 (Term Rewriting) and Part 3 (Effect Systems).
• Cross-site leaks wiki on side-channel attacks on privacy and security on modern browsers.
• Unicode Security Considerations: everything you wanted to know about Unicode security.
• Unicode Identifier and Pattern Syntax: same as before but about internationalized variable and function identifiers.
• Go Type Parameters - Draft Design. The current proposal on Go generics.
• Good-bye ESNI, hello ECH!: a good step towards a more private web.
• Improving DNS Privacy with Oblivious DoH in 1.1.1.1. I hope Firefox ends up using this internally, it would allay some (justified) privacy fears by users.
• Shuffling things up: Applying Group Theory in Advent of Code: a fun article on applying some (very simple) group theory to solve shuffling problems.

Science & economics

• Breaking the Universe in Dungeons & Dragons With Physics 101, reminds me of Randall Munroe’s What If book.
• Questions About Trees on models about biodiversity.
• What Does Bill Gates’ Favorite Energy Guru, Vaclav Smil, Get Wrong? Some key important things apparently.
• No, Productivity Does Not Explain Income. I don’t love the tone of the article but the idea of comparing Gini indices is very cool.
• Property Is Only Another Name for Monopoly. I think this would be awesome for at least certain kinds of property even if applying it to personal property sounds like a terrible idea.
• The Priority Heuristic: a simple process model for how humans actually decide.

Politics & society

• The World Is Trapped in America’s Culture War.
• Face for sale: Leaks and lawsuits blight Russia facial recognition. Terrifying
• My Dad, the Pornographer.
• Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. This is an awesome resource for checking if a source is generally reliable!
• The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free ❧ Current Affairs: on paywalls and the availability of information.
• Abolishing the Economics Nobel Isn’t Enough ❧ Current Affairs: economics is broken as a field.
• MindGeek: The secretive owner of Pornhub and RedTube
• A growing number of Americans are going hungry. A growing number of people around the world are
• The Library Freedom Project: awesome resources for libraries to promote freedom of speech and privacy.
• ‘Is anybody in there?’ Life on the inside as a locked-in patient – podcast. I only had a couple of interesting podcasts this round so this fits better here.

Politics in tech

• Ok Google: please publish your DKIM secret keys: on why Google should rotate their DKIM keys.
• Facebook Struggles to Balance Civility and Growth, with pearls such as “The results were good except that it led to a decrease in sessions, which motivated us to try a different approach,” and “that was vetoed by policy executives who feared it would disproportionately show notifications to people who shared false news from right-wing websites”.
• Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Labor and Environmental Groups, see also The Pinkertons Still Never Sleep and Amazon Hired Pinkertons to Union Bust
• A Prominent AI Ethics Researcher Says Google Fired Her, see also Timnit Gebru’s team at Google is going public with their side of the story and We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says.