So long and thanks for all the bits, Ian Levy, the NCSC’s departing Technical Director, discusses life, the universe, and everything (but mostly cyber security). “The trick for making cyber security scalable in the long term is to get the various security burdens in the right place and incentivise the entities that need to manage those burdens properly.”

Quotes the Daydreamer, after a long hiatus, a new version of my favorite Android app. „tD“ is an Android app that displays witty, wise and enigmatic curated quotes in the Screen saver (formerly Daydream) mode. Clean, free and great curation of quotes, just the way I like it.

The Essential Philip K. Dick, by Molly Young (NYT). The article itself is a joy to read - “Dick picked up on sinister cultural undercurrents the way a cat senses a can of tuna being opened six rooms away.”, ”you’ll be left with the sense that something terrifying has wandered into your mind, looked around and set up permanent camp.” and “Be sure to notify loved ones before starting the book so they can initiate a rescue effort in case you get lost in there.”

Regulating DAOs, interesting article by Bruce Schneier. Do not agree with most of the logic though and mostly agree with the comprehensive rebuttal by Peter Van Valkenburgh.

What is Amazon? A long, rewarding and enriching read. Won’t highlight anything just because the whole read is worth it.

On Design Thinking, by Nick Foster. A crib against ‘Design Thinking’ Bo ho.

24 Quotes that became a compass for my life, David Hieatt. “The best quotes come into your life and never leave. They are on repeat in your head. They become a secret mentor. A board of directors. All rolled into one powerful single sentence. (…) These quotes have definitely helped me, I hope they can help you.”

Monzo growth, by Tom Blomfield, co-founder. “how we got customers to sign up to Monzo in the early years” - interesting read.

Return of the Lazy Billionaire, you need some dose of reality like this once in a while.

Sioyek is a PDF viewer designed for reading research papers and technical books. Interesting features.

What is the piece of writing advice that has helped you most, personally?. Some interesting thoughts.

Why Do Rich People Love Quiet? “For an hour I pretended to be a meek, muted version of myself. No one had told me to do this. I instinctively understood that, in this unfamiliar environment, the proper way to express my gratitude was to hush myself.”

TCP Congestion Control: A Systems Approach, by Peterson, Brakmo, and Davie. “What we have tried to do in this book is provide a framework for understanding congestion control as a systems problem, and to characterize the many approaches along a few main themes. For example, our work on TCP Vegas opened up a line of research that continues today, where the aim is to avoid severe congestion rather than react after it has set in. We thus consider avoidance-based approaches as one of the main categories of congestion control.”

Random acts of kindness and 50 ways to be ridiculously generous—and feel ridiculously good.

The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time. A nice profile of David Mills.

Everyone seems to be suddenly proposing RFC-like protocols - Robin Sloan’s Spring ‘83, Tom Critchlow’s Library JSON

Worldly Wisdom, some proverbs from around the world.

Winnnie the Pooh in Latin. When it reached the New York Times bestseller list in 1960, the Christian Science Monitor wrote, “It is hard to conceive of a Latin work more calculated than this attractive volume to fascinate the modern public, young and old.”

GCHQ puzzles. Daily ones on their Twitter feed as well.

“piece of writing advice that has helped you most”.

He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal – an interesting profile of June Huh. In Times of Scarcity, War and Peace, a Ukrainian Finds the Magic in Math – a profile of Maryna Viazovska who became the second woman to win a Fields Medal in the award’s 86-year history

Patrick Collison’s Questions. A lot to chew on.

Gödel’s Loophole. “In 1947 Einstein and economist Oskar Morgenstern accompanied Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam because they were concerned about his unpredictable behavior: During his voluminous preparation for the exam, Gödel said, he had uncovered a flaw in the U.S. constitution that could lead to a dictatorship.”

Putin’s Philosophers, NATO’s Philosophers and An International Relations Theory Guide to the War in Ukraine — interesting reads to understand how we got here and what lies ahead.

10 Lessons I learned walking 10,000 Kilometers in 2021’s Pandamic Year. Meditative and reassuringly approachable. Long read, and therein lies its comtemplative beauty.

The Chinese Room Thinks. “In my view, one of the most famous thought experiments in philosophy, John Searle’s Chinese Room experiment, has been decisively answered by science.”

Crony Beliefs and and an addendum on this topc. A great set of essays - “Earlier I argued that other people are the cause of all our epistemic problems. Now I find myself arguing that they’re also our best solution.” From the author of The Elephant in the Brain

An app can be a home-cooked meal - Robin Sloan’s essays are always a treat to read. “When you liberate programming from the requirement to be general and professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether.”

103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known. Kevin Kelly on his 70th birthday. Every single one of them is worth thinking over.

Edsger W. Dijkstra: a Commemoration, “a multiauthored portait of Edsger Wybe Dijkstra that consists of testimonials written by several friends, colleagues, and students of his” (PDF).

chez baldwin, “Some of the sounds that filled the abode of James Baldwin in St. Paulde-Vence,. These songs document the vinyl records left behind in Chez Baldwin after his death in 1987”. A Spotify playlist.

Here we go again, a personal post by one of Kaspersky’s Threat Intelligence (GReAT) team members on working for a Russian cyber security comapny in the current charged world.

The Fierce Triumph of Loneliness. “A paired life is not an aspirational state, but a compromised one. Loneliness is not the terror we escape; it is instead the reward we give up when we believe something else to be worth the sacrifice.”

Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings. “Choose joy” and what an impactful choice it will be.

How a man who washed his own underwear built investment colossus GIC. “It was also Goh who nursed the then radical idea that the nation’s reserves could – and should – be invested to yield returns, a notion that eventually led to the formation of GIC.”

Of Course We’re Living in a Simulation. Interesting mental exercise topic as always. What the author shys away from, which is a pity, is the angle of questioning as to what it means that “slow-moving and petty and cavemannish as we” can even start to think of these simulations.

Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary. Provocative, interesting discourse.

I gave myself three months to change my personality. “The late psychologist Carl Rogers once wrote, “When I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,” and this is roughly where I’ve landed.

Our Universe is SO big, it’s mindblowing! 21st-century remake of Charles and Ray Eames’ short documentary film Powers of Ten from 1977. Mind blown.