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 2021. Leo y comparto con frecuencia cosas con las que no estoy totalmente de acuerdo o autores que en general son ideológicamente opuestos a mí: compartir algo aquí no implica que esté de acuerdo con su contenido.
🔗
Enero y febrero
En español
- ¿Qué hacía Jane Austen por las mañanas?, sobre la vida diaria de las mujeres ricas en la Inglaterra victoriana.
- Guantánamo, 19 años después: Biden vuelve a chocar con el limbo legal de EEUU
- Cómo hacer que un youtuber pague impuestos aunque viva en Andorra, sobre fórmulas para el pago de impuestos adaptadas al siglo XXI
- El coste de un ministerio, sobre el coste de un ministerio en España, con el ejemplo del ministerio de Igualdad.
Videos
- CppCon 2019: Matt Godbolt “Compiler Explorer: Behind The Scenes”, on how godbolt.org works.
- YouTubers have to declare ads. Why doesn’t anyone else?, on promoted content and the Internet.
TV Show, movies & documentaries
- La Comunidad. A rewatch of one of my favorite Spanish movies.
- Greener Grass. It could have been fun if it was like, 20 minutes instead of 95.
- The Shivering Truth. It’s… interesting?
- Better Call Saul (season 4 & season 5). People didn’t like the first season of the show as much as I do, but I think it’s worth re-watching.
Books
- Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives. A good book to read if you live in the US or like neoliberalism, maybe not so much otherwise.
Computer Science
No math stuff on this edition :( I am slowly going through Gelman’s Bayesian Data Analysis and Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why but I am having trouble to find the time to read :(
- Are we distributed yet? We are not, but this page tracks it.
- In-the-Wild Series: Chrome Infinity Bug, an article that gives you another perspective on how incredibly terrible Javascript typing system is.
- We now have a Rust Foundation!
- Memory Safe ‘curl’ for a More Secure Internet: on new Rust-written TLS, HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 backends for
curlwhich will hopefully become the default backends. - εxodus ETIP: The Canonical Database for Tracking Trackers, a tracker database for examing codebases for F-Droid.
- Introducing State Partitioning – Mozilla Hacks, on the new cookie behavior on Firefox, which will come to other browsers at some point
Science & economics
- Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics, Scott Alexander is back to talk about the classification of mental ilness. My inner logical positivist doesn’t love the framing of is mental ilness a thing but the article is pretty good.
- Why $15 minimum wage is pretty safe on why you shouldn’t trust economists’ consensus and how the US 15$ minimum wage seems pretty safe even for someone who is not a leftist.
- How are working hours measured and what can we learn from the data?
- I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go? Badly.
- Who Gains and Who Loses from Credit Card Payments? Theory and Calibrations I would love to see this study done again with post-COVID data.
- Iceberger, cold and addictive.
- The limits of egg recognition: testing acceptance thresholds of American robins in response to decreasingly egg-shaped objects in the nest. I will never stop being fascinated by “treating animals as neural networks” studies.
- A lunar pandemic, when people worried about a pandemic coming from the Apollo missions.
COVID-19 adjacent
- Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine, pretty cool.
- Did people really drink bleach to prevent COVID-19? A tale of problematic respondents and a guide for measuring rare events in survey data
- The impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on university students’ dietary intake, physical activity, and sedentary behaviour
- How Many Microcovids Would You Spend on a Burrito? on microcovid.org
- A vaccine DIY: RaDVaC
Politics & society
- Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism. See also We Built Google. This Is Not the Company We Want to Work For.
- Amazon Is Forcing Its Warehouse Workers Into Brutal ‘Megacycle’ Shifts
- Speculation about effects of powerful persuasion tools, on what could happen if we get powerful tools for creating propaganda.
- Border agents can search phones freely under new circuit court ruling :(
- Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ to Avoid Being Live-Streamed?, the most cyberpunk news of recent months.
- Policy of deliberate ambiguity, a cool Wikipedia article.
- So, Scott Alexander is back in what is basically SlateStarCodex II, the New York Times finally released their article about him and there was some drama about it. I don’t love Scott’s reply nor Matthew Yglesias’ one (I don’t think they address the most important stuff that is raised on the NYT article) but I think they give important context on some of the NYT claims.
🔗
Marzo y abril
Brought to you by the brand new codual/logger.
En español
Videos & podcasts
- Monster Men: Interpreting Superheroes as Monsters
- This is Love - Among the Oak Trees, content warning for homophobia.
Fiction
- MMAcevedo, a fictional Wikipedia article on brain scans.
- The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Computer Science
- Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app’s perspective, now do NSO Group.
- Rust in the Linux kernel, exciting!!
- “What The Hardware Does” is not What Your Program Does: Uninitialized Memory, on uninitialized memory on Rust.
- Leap Smear. How do computers deal with leap seconds? Do they repeat a second? Nah, it surely is much better to make every second the day before just slightly longer.
- Buffer overruns, license violations, and bad code: FreeBSD 13’s close call.
- Metaheuristics – the Metaphor Exposed. Fun fact: I had to work on reimplementing one of the mentioned papers.
Politics & society
- Why has climate economics failed us?, this edition post on why you shouldn’t trust economists.
- How much of global greenhouse gas emissions come from food?, a difficult question, it turns out.
- The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple, a counterpart to the cult of the mango.
- From Crypto Art to Trading Cards, Investment Manias Abound
- Should You Be Allowed to Invest in a Lawsuit? The answer is clearly no but people do it anyway.
- Oh, the intellectual property rights you’ll extend. I have a more aggressive view on this topic than the author but it’s interesting nonetheless.
- Global poverty in an unequal world: Who is considered poor in a rich country? And what does this mean for our understanding of global poverty?. On global poverty lines.
Cyberpunk-adjacent
- HumanIPO - Participate in human IPOs of people you believe in.. A terrible idea.
- Treacherous turns in the wild, on AI behaving nicely in sandboxes but not IRL.
- Amazon Delivery Drivers Forced to Sign ‘Biometric Consent’ Form or Lose Job, yikes.
- A Hacker Got All My Texts for $16 (and the 16$ to entirely into buying a SIM card).
- Google Is Testing Its Controversial New Ad Targeting Tech in Millions of Browsers. Here’s What We Know..
Cool Wikipedia articles
- Mautam, if I had to guess and article I read was fake it would be this one.
- Semantic satiation
- Line-item veto in the United States, US law is just terrible.
🔗
Mayo y junio
En español
- El honor de un torero muerto sobre el derecho al honor
Videos & podcasts
- I promise this story about microwaves is interesting
- The thing inside the thing, on computers and backwards-compatibility
- This Website Will Self Destruct about thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com. CW: suicide.
- Having a successful career with depression, anxiety and imposter syndrome. CW: Suicide, depression, anxiety, panic attacks.
- On Fire.
- 48 Hours. CW: violence and sexual assault.
- Live Eye Pays Remote Workers to Spy
Fiction and storytelling
- Heartstopper by Alice Oselman. CW: eating disorders and self-harm
- Imbattable by Jouselin.
- How to Draw a Horse
Computer Science
- Following the River - First C Committee Meeting
- Separating Permissions from Data in Rust
- Correlated Failures
- MNT Research GmbH, on building a 100% free hardware and free software based laptop from scratch.
- “What next?”, on programming language design.
- Detecting the use of “curl | bash” server side
Science and meta-science
- There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
- Where does the plastic in our oceans come from?
- Improving Transparency, Falsifiability, and Rigor by Making Hypothesis Tests Machine-Readable
- Emissions from food alone could use up all of our budget for 1.5°C or 2°C – but we have a range of opportunities to avoid this
Politics & society
- The Amazon That Customers Don’t See
- The Strange Story of Dagobert, the “DuckTales” Bandit
- Full employment, capitalism - and beyond
- Peer Review Request: Depression. CW: depression (mostly described in a clinical way).
- Conservation Policies: Who Responds to Price and Who Responds to Prescription?
- Your Book Review: Addiction By Design.
- A ‘beautiful’ female biker was actually a 50-year-old man using FaceApp. After he confessed, his followers liked him even more.
- Whitewood under Siege
Cyberpunk-adjacent
- Sudan’s exam related shutdown
- How ‘Roblox’ Became a Playground for Virtual Fascists
- A country’s worth of power, no more!. I still find this terrible but it’s a big improvement.
- How Apple screwed Facebook
🔗
Julio y agosto
En español
- Carla Antonelli: “Nunca he renunciado a ser yo”
- El Tribunal Constitucional y el estado de alarma
- Grabar a policías
Videos & books
- Steven Pinker and the Failure of New Optimism ft. We’re in Hell
- The Largest Black Hole in the Universe - Size Comparison
- How many robots does it take to run a grocery store?
- They both die at the end
- Canis: Dear Mr. Hatter
Computer science
- How Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn’t
- Locking in WebKit
- Rust is not a Company
- Spinlocks Considered Harmful
Science and metascience
- Depression is complicated – this is how our understanding of the condition has evolved over time
- Houses Built On Sand
- Has the Credibility of the Social Sciences Been Credibly Destroyed? Reanalyzing the “Many Analysts, One Data Set” Project
- Phil Birnbaum’s “bad regression” puzzles
- R v Adams
Politics & society
- NYT Lawyers Accidentally Send Private Strategy Memo to Staff Union
- How Google quietly funds Europe’s leading tech policy institutes
- The mega church that houses 1 million Christians
- ‘It has to be known what was done to us’: Natick couple harassed by eBay tell their story for the first time - The Boston Globe
- Why I Am Not A Technocrat
- I’ve Always Suspected “Cat Person” Was Based on My Life. Now I Know It Was.
- The Case of Croatian Wikipedia: Encyclopaedia of Knowledge or Encyclopaedia for the Nation?
Poverty
- The world is making progress on clean water and sanitation, but is far behind its target to ensure universal access by 2030
- Questioning the evidence on hookworm eradication in the American South - The GiveWell Blog
- Microlending debate: An example of why academic research should be used with caution - The GiveWell Blog
Cyberpunk-adjacent
- He couldn’t get over his fiancee’s death. So he brought her back as an A.I. chatbot
- Top U.S. Catholic Church official resigns after cellphone data used to track him on Grindr and to gay bars
- The Inevitable Weaponization of App Data Is Here
- How does Apple technology hold up against NSO spyware?
- Inside the Industry That Unmasks People at Scale
- The Oncoming Ransomware Storm
🔗
Septiembre y octubre
En español
- Presunción de veracidad
- Retirada de libros
- Así se fabrica una mentira: el bulo de la cuidadora okupa inventado para acosar a una inquilina inmigrante
- Samantha Hudson y Papa Topo - Por España
Fiction & Films
- Monster Girls Don’t Cry - Uncanny Magazine
- “Open House on Haunted Hill” by John Wiswell – Diabolical Plots
- The French Dispatch - Wes Anderson
- Within the Wires Season 6: Caregiver
Computer science
- Happy Birthday BGP
- Writing Python inside your Rust code
- Small Project Build Systems
- PHP: a fractal of bad design
- Some reasons to measure
Cyberpunk-adjacent
- This Startup Wants to Scan Your Eyes With a Silver Orb for Cryptocurrency
- What’s the deal with fictional influencers?
- Refugees help power machine learning advances at Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon
Science and metascience
Politics and society
- Becoming A Whorelord: The Overly Analytical Guide To Escorting
- A Florida Anarchist Will Spend Years in Prison for Online Posts Prompted by Jan. 6 Riot
- The International Energy Agency publishes the detailed, global energy data we all need, but its funders force it behind paywalls. Let’s ask them to change it.
- One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia
- Food fraud and counterfeit cotton: the detectives untangling the global supply chain
🔗
Noviembre y diciembre
En español
Fiction & Films
- Hereditary, by Ari Aster
- Undercurrent, by Tetsuya Toyoda
- Succession, Season 3
- Inside Job, Season 1
Computer science
- A deep dive into an NSO zero-click iMessage exploit: Remote Code Execution
- Web3 is Bullshit
- To secure the supply chain, you must properly fund it
- Leap seconds: Causing Bugs Even When They Don’t Happen - Bert Hubert’s writings
- A Special Kind of Hell -
intmax_tin C and C++ - Binary Banshees and Digital Demons
- An inside look into the illicit ad industry
- The problematic GPL “or later” clause
- Undefined Behavior deserves a better reputation
- malloc tutorial
Cyberpunk-adjacent
- How One CEO Dealt With the TikTok Taunts of Gen Z: He Hired Them
- The Popular Family Safety App Life360 Is Selling Precise Location Data on Its Tens of Millions of Users – The Markup