What I've Been Reading (2)
Software Engineering, Security, Games, Science, and Fun
Software Engineering
https://sookocheff.com/post/process/zero-bug-policy/
An argument for the practice of fixing all bugs before developing a feature. There’s no such thing as a “low-priority” bug. Lower development costs, increased user satisfaction, and a more robust development culture, at the cost of an early time investment and saying no to product requests.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/
Former Stack Overflow CEO on writing better code. Some notes are out of date or absurdly obvious today - this was published 23 years ago. Some of the relevant points: Fix bugs before writing new code, ensure that builds are fast, and perform hallway usability tests.
If compiling takes even 15 seconds, programmers will get bored while the compiler runs and switch over to reading The Onion, which will suck them in and kill hours of productivity.
Security
https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/3677788723152833273
Valve created a honeypot to detect cheaters, then banned 40,000 accounts. I’d love to have seen more technical details.
https://www.praetorian.com/blog/using-crlf-injection-to-bypass-akamai-web-app-firewall/
Slick firewall bypass: Use CLRF injection to inject a content-length header to trick a WAF into not scanning the full request.
https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/security/security-checklist/
Kubernetes security checklist. I doubt writing a tool check each item will be too difficult.
https://permiso.io/blog/s/deprecated-aws-policy-amazonec2roleforSSM/
Using deprecated AWS policies can lead to privilege escalation. This is also something easy to automate detection for.
Games
Technical overview of Age of Empires’ netcode. State is shared between participants, and each client runs the same simulation to generate the same outcome. This reduces the amount of data transferred, allowing for larger battles and it makes cheating difficult.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d
Will Wright (Sims creator) on designing simulation games, with an early demo of Dollhouse tacked on, which became the Sims. Primary source here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk.
Science
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11173
Claude Shannon’s Master’s thesis. Relatively easy to read, and pretty genius: We can describe electrical circuits with propositional logic.
Fun
www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=4014
Tools like AI are good at getting close to a solution. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand gernades. Therefore AI only counts in horseshoes and hand gernades.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/bethans-rock
Museum in the UK has a rock on display, donated by a young girl. Not much else special about the rock, other than that it was loved by Bethan.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
Great computer scientists and Bell Labs coworkers Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon each famously built useless machines. Research!