Interrupt #3 - Russian invasion of Ukraine, Neuralink, Khan Academy, dahliaOS, Wordle
Interrupt is a weekly newsletter compiled from the most interesting things I have come across this week. Sometimes along with my original writing.
Big News and Happenings
Biggest news on the planet right now: Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Follow this space to get a summarized development of the invasion. There is another thread on the same subreddit with quicker updates and fast moving developments.
Anonymous declares 'cyber war' against Russia, disables state websites
The decentralized hacktivist collective has launched cyber attacks against Russian government websites, including state-controlled Russia Today, in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
How the tech industry is responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
Google.com is testing a busier homepage — 9to5google.com
After decades of a plain simple home page with occasional doodles, Google is an experiment with a row of widgets at the bottom.
The iGoogle Resurrections!
$1.7 million in NFTs stolen in a phishing attack on OpenSea users
An attack stole 254 NFTs (valued at over $1.7m) from the OpenSea NFT platform users, including tokens from Decentraland and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Neuralink confirms monkeys died during brain chip testing procedures but denies animal cruelty
Elon Musk's brain implant company Neuralink has admitted that monkeys died as part of testing process but denies reports of animal cruelty. "Pretty much every single monkey that had had implants put in their head suffered from pretty debilitating health effects". And died in the most gruesome ways imaginable. One of them seems to have chewed off its own toe.
Human trials are supposed to begin this year.
Meta launches Reels in Facebook globally
What I Found
A modern, secure, lightweight and responsive OS, combining the best of Linux and Fuchsia OS. It comes with Pangolin desktop shell written in Flutter.
egui – An experimental immediate mode GUI written in Rust
A fast "server-less" virtual Linux environment based on CheerpX, running fully client-side in HTML5/WebAssembly.
Another week. Another Wordle clone. Windle is a clone built for Windows 3.1.
An easy-to-use open source errors tracker. It collects all your code exceptions and errors and helps you to improve applications.
Rust 1.59 is out with Inline Assembly support
What I read
Beating the odds: Khan Academy’s successful monolith→services rewrite
In 2019, Khan Academy started a big rewrite of their Python 2 backend. Their engineering team has written a series of posts on the entire process. Check out the Goliath series at the bottom of the article.
Linus Torvalds prepares to move the Linux kernel to modern C
Linux kernel is written in the ancient C89 standard of C with a lot of GCC extensions. Now, Torvalds has decided to upgrade to the more modern C11 standard. Rust is also being slowly introduced as the second official language. C++ is still off limits though.
How Twitter moved from a home grown logging platform to Splunk and the challenges they faced in the process.
Writing an OS in Rust This blog series creates a small operating system in the Rust programming language. Each post is a small tutorial and includes all needed code.
Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways | Douglas Vaghetti
Google Tag Manager, the anti-adblock weapon
TypeScript's React.ReactNode type is a black hole
What I watched
Disenchantment S3: Very different from the earlier season. It felt more like a setup for the next season. Still enjoyed!
Why this is the world's pirate capital by Polymatter: Spoiler...It's not Somalia.