Hi,

Firstly, thank you for subscribing to Interesting Things. It is much appreciated.

For various reasons, I'm moving Interesting Things away from Substack to another email newsletter service provider:

1. The new home of Interesting Things is https://bengtan.com/interesting-things.

2. The next issue of Interesting Things (which will be the fourth) will be sent (in about 24 hours time) from a different system.

You don't need to take any action. I will move your email address across to the new provider.

The only thing you might notice is that the newsletter will be formatted differently and look a bit different. Other than this, everything else is business as usual.

So ... no need to worry about this. It's purely informational. Just continue to enjoy reading Interesting Things.

Thank you,
Beng Tan

Welcome to the second edition of Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie business, science, and adjacents.

These are things I came across during my Internet wanderings. I find them interesting, and I hope you do too.

I don't know what happened this week but I came across a LOT of stuff (60!). I didn't do anything different so perhaps it's just a statistical anomaly.

In any case, happy reading!

#tech

Can you trust floating-point arithmetic on Apple Silicon? — Surprisingly, it's wrong on both Intel and Apple Silicon, but wrong in the same way. And that's alright.

LCH colors in CSS: what, why, and how? (April 2020) — Lightness-Chroma-Hue (aka HCL) has a wider gamut and is better aligned with human perception.

How software gets color wrong (Dec 2020) — The reason is that color processing in most software is based on how CRT displays in the 1990s worked.

Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI Architecture — A look at the linux GUI stack within Windows.

Introducing git-xargs: an open source tool to update multiple GitHub repos — With a single command.

15 Graphs You Need to See to Understand AI in 2021 — If you want a birds eye view about jobs, publications, diversity, and more.

PlayStation Portable Architecture — A comprehensive write-up of the gaming console from yesteryear.

2FA is missing a key feature — When my 2FA code is entered incorrectly I’d like to know about it.

What Is Sleepminting And Will It Ruin NFT Provenance? — Someone found a way to partially forge NFTs. News. More info.

What I wish somebody told me when I was learning Haskell — If Haskell is such an advanced and effective language why do we not see a much wider commercial adoption?

Disasters I've seen in a microservices world — Too much microservices.

Web developer's guide to AVIF images — The next iteration of image file formats.

semgrep — Language-aware code search and analysis tool.

Beyond Calibri: Finding Microsoft’s next default font — We’ve commissioned five original, custom fonts to eventually be the default. Meet Tenorite, Bierstadt, Skeena, Seaford, and Grandview.

Geometric foundations of Deep Learning — An attempt to unify a broad class of ML problems from the perspectives of symmetry and invariance.

Cherry’s First Mechanical Laptop Switches Improved My Typing Speed, Comfort — Mechanical keyboard ... on a laptop.

Unpasswords (Feb 2021) — Go password-less. Use email instead.

Let's light it 🔥 up! — Cute animation using emoji as sprites. Non-javascript. Another one.

Blinding My Roomba — To make it work better.

Ghost in the Shell – Part 5 — Some useful CLI tips.

Why People Are Afraid Of The DOM? — Gently explaining an oddity of web development for people who aren't web developers.

#indie biz

The Factory Is The Product — Getting better at making the thing makes the thing better.

Pory turns 1 - Our in transit journey to 100k in MRR 🥳 — A no-code tool for creating sites using Airtable.

What I Learned Buying Billboards for a Startup — Anecdotes for first time buyers of outdoor advertising.

A Path to the Minimum Viable Product — An MVP tree is a way of methodically breaking your mission into smaller components and formulating MVP candidates.

Top 5 Product and Management skills — SQL, Excel, Clear Communication, Story, Prioritization.

Why Every Founder Should Sell Before They Have a Product — The best learning happens with customers.

#science

Large-scale origami locks into place under pressure — A new method for designing large enclosures that can be deployed and locked into shape through inflation.

Latest Neural Nets Solve World’s Hardest Equations Faster Than Ever Before — New approaches to solve entire families of partial differential equations and make it easier to model complicated systems.

The Secret Mission To Unearth Part Of A 142-Year-Old Experiment — An unusual long-term experiment started in 1879 and is handed from one generation to the next.

NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover Extracts First Oxygen From Red Planet — Another step on the way to future human exploration of the Red Planet.

So You Want to Learn Physics, Second Edition — If you are inspired and want to learn physics but don't know where to start.

So You Want to Study Philosophy

Dolphins learn the ‘names’ of their friends to form teams — The marine mammals have a sense of team membership.

Getting Sick for the Sake of Advancing Medical Research — The first Covid-19 human challenge trial has begun in the U.K. Here’s what past trials have been like for participants.

Underwater Volcanoes Generate Enough Energy to Power the Entire US — These powerful eruptions can teach us about how life may have formed on Earth.

The science of why the sun makes us feel so happy — After a winter spent indoors, time in the sunshine is just what the doctor ordered.

These cellular clocks help explain why elephants are bigger than mice — Tiny timekeepers in our cells might govern body size, lifespan and ageing.

Cosmic Map of Ultrahigh-Energy Particles Points to Long-Hidden Treasures — How to identify the colossal monsters that create ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays?

Middle East Egyptologists uncover rare tombs from before the Pharaohs

Octopus ‘Teachers’ Demonstrate They Feel Emotional Pain — Octopi have feelings too.

15 French volunteers leave cave after 40 days without daylight or clocks — Two thirds wanted to stay longer. Another link.

The history of lithium, and its remarkable impact on mood disorders — It's taken, in the form of a pill, by thousands of people every day.

A Backdoor Lets the Immune System Monitor the Brain — A newfound hub of immune system activity at the back of the brain solves a century-old puzzle.

The Puzzling Power of Simple Arithmetic — Playing with arithmetic can lead us to unexpected and profound discoveries.

Do Brain Implants Change Your Identity? — Yes, but it's complicated.

The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? — A growing chorus of scientists and philosophers argue that free will does not exist. Could they be right?

#life

Welcome to the YOLO Economy — Burned out and flush with savings, some workers are quitting stable jobs in search of postpandemic adventure.

Month 6, Day 1: Fridge still off (Happy Earth Day) — This person tries living without a fridge. It's been six months and counting.

Jacob Ziv’s Algorithms Have Powered Decades of Compression — The story of Jacob Ziv and the abridged history of compression.

Do Things That Will Surpass Your Life — Lately, the fact that I’m going to die one day very much bothered me.

Don't consume news in the morning — You are more productive and you will get more work done at the beginning of your day.

The Best Note-Taking Method is the One You Have with You — A lesson from photography to the world of note-taking.

On using to-do lists efficiently — Principles I gathered from years of (mis)using to-do lists.

Impostor Syndrome: The Reason You Feel Like a Fraud — Feeling like a fraud? Like an impostor? We all do. But we shouldn't.

Talkers and doers — Whenever I find myself talking and not doing, I do myself a huge favor. I shut the hell up.

A Microsoft Excel influencer is making 6 figures from her unconventional way of teaching spreadsheet hacks, tips, and tricks — aka Miss Excel.

#random

Quandaries of Quinine — A medicinal commonly available in tonic water has a disputed history.

Squeezebox Keyboard — Another wacky custom-made split ergonomic keyboard.

bridges, maps & memories — Historical network visualizations over maps, a map of Reddit and a new website.

#end

If you enjoyed these stories, I'd love it if you shared this newsletter with a friend or two.

And should you come across anything interesting in your wanderings, please email or tweet me! I'd love to give them some exposure too.

Happy reading!
Beng

These are things I came across during my Internet wanderings. I find them interesting, and I hope you do too. Enjoy!

#tech

The Adjacent Possible (May 2020) — Each technology or innovation enables new possibilities in adjacent areas. When multiple disparate enablers exert influence in the same adjacent area, then breakthroughs can arise seemingly out of nowhere.

Morpheus Turns a CPU Into a Rubik’s Cube to Defeat Hackers — Encrypting pointers and rotating the key every 100 milliseconds makes it hack-resistant. It would have stopped Spectre and Meltdown with only a 10% overhead.

Rust in Production: MeiliSearch — Read a real-life experience with Rust and discover tips for your own open source project.

How To Make Tree Shakeable Libraries — Write javascript so that unused code can be excluded, and how to verify it.

Faster Python with Go shared objects (the easy way) — A python developer wanted faster code and wrote it in Go instead.

No one wants to manage Kubernetes anymore — More and more companies decide they don't want to deal with the complexity of managing server clusters in-house.

Pixel Physics — Physics simulated by cellular automata. Play with pixels and see them falling down.

Content-aware image resizing in JavaScript — A demonstration of how the Seam Carving algorithm works. It's a bit like magic.

Lessons learned from seven years of open-source database development — I started a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database for fun, but it’s since become something more serious.

NFT Canon — A list of readings and resources on all things NFTs, curated by a16z.

Shedding light on fairness in AI with a new data set — Facebook publishes a dataset of of 45,186 human face-to-face videos with an emphasis on fairness and diversity across age, gender, skin tone, & ambient lighting.

#indie biz

Evaluating Side Hustles — An affiliate SaaS site was built and sold 18 months later for $150,000 (estimated). Let's look at the numbers. (Independent case study)

How to build an app, get acquired by GitHub, buy an app back from GitHub and then sell it again — The story of Speaker Deck.

#science

These Ants Shrink Their Brains for a Chance to Become Queen — If their bids at motherhood fail, they can then regrow their brains. Another link.

A robotic spacecraft just latched onto an active satellite in orbit — By providing renewed power and navigation control, the lifespan has been extended for five more years.

Does the Universe have higher dimensions? Part 2

The scientists turning the desert green (Mar 2021) — In China, scientists have turned vast swathes of arid land into a lush oasis. Now a team of maverick engineers want to do the same to the Sinai.

Whitest-ever paint could help cool heating Earth, study shows — New paint reflects 98% of sunlight as well as radiating infrared heat into space, reducing need for air conditioning

Scientists 3D print graphene aerogels that purify water at scale — The novel material is capable of removing dyes, metals and organic solvents from drinking water with 100% efficiency.

A New Twist Reveals Superconductivity’s Secrets (Mar 2021) — An unexpected superconductor was beginning to look like a fluke, but a new theory and a second discovery have revealed that emergent quasiparticles may be behind the effect.

Laser-equipped robots that zap weeds on farmland — The machine is the latest form of automation to arrive in agriculture.

Bridges, highways, scaffolds: The amazing engineering of army ants — How these tiny, blind ants manage to coordinate these dynamic constructions remains largely unknown, but a new study brings us closer to the answer.

#life

Trapped in the technologist factory — Reflections on working in the software industry.

Napping in the afternoon can improve memory and alertness – here’s why (Feb 2021)

How to (finally) find a productivity system that works for you — Figuring this out unstuck me from chasing the perfect method and focus on what really matters – getting things done.

Do things, tell people — These are the only things you need to do to be successful.

#random

Data Visualization Guide — A guide for producing infographics and data visualisations based on the works of Edward Tufte and Stephen Few.

WindowSwap — Look out of other people's windows.

#end

If you enjoyed these stories, I'd love it if you shared this newsletter with a friend or two.

And should you come across anything interesting in your wanderings, please email or tweet me! I'd love to give them some exposure too.