Misc Links
Posted: Nov 27th, 2022
- Modified: Dec 5th, 2022
- Twitter’s Whistleblower Report
- There has been much ado over twitter drama since Elon Musk took over the company. But much more shocking and less talked about are the allegations made by a whistleblower back in July 2022. Twitter threads with highlights: 1, 2. Among other things, Twitter was apparently doing development on the production environment.
- Heavy Boots
- Vertical Castling
- The rules of chess used to allow a King to Castle with a newly promoted pawn.
- Five Problems With Chess
- A game designer’s complaints about the rules of chess. The highlight is a vulgar rant about En Passant
- Life Without Your Cerebellum
- I knew that the cerebellum was responsible for ‘muscle memory’, but I didn’t know that it contains half of your brain cells and “has some role in coordinating social stimuli as well as motor”. If a person is born without a cerebellum, they can adapt and survive, but will be clumsy and socially stunted.
- The Commodordion
- A Functioning electronic accordion built from two Commodore 64 computers.
- Let’s Learn About Waveforms
- A short essay about sound with interactive visualizations (auralizations?)
- H3: Uber’s Hexagonal Hierarchical Spatial Index
- Uber has a clever system for implementing a hex-grid tiling of Earth’s surface. If you remember your geometry, you know there must also be 12 pentagons in the mix. Uber uses the Dymaxion orientation to place the center of each pentagon in the ocean. Another link. And here is a python script which generates h3 shapefiles in QGIS.
- TensorFlow Playground
- Interactive visualization of an Neural Network as it learns.