David Eaves has some interesting thoughts on what Mafia can tell us about trust and security. He also has a few ideas on how the physical game setup gives advantage to different parties.
Category: English
Leave Math to The Machines
Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside.
Drifting News
What if “trending news” would be made to drift in into a certain direction? Well, it seems that Facebook used their ability to manipulate curate trending topics to block out certain topics and set some of their own. ? Some should have warned us.
AR create_with
find_or_create_by
method but I didn’t know it had a very useful companion
create_with
.
@something ||= SomeModel.create_with(some: "stuff").find_or_create_by(foo: "bar")
This will either find a record
SomeModel.where(foo: "bar")
or create it with
SomeModel.create(foo: "bar", some: "stuff")
. Very useful.
AR Find Trickery
found = ModelA.find_by(id: id) || ModelB.find(id)
I stumbled over this during a code review. It was supposed to look for a record in two distinct tables.
find_by
will return
nil
if nothing was found while
find
will
raise
. Hence either you get something (from any model) or you
raise
.
Classic Programmer Paintings
This is a great idea. ?
WhatsApp End-to-end Encryption
WhatsApp just announced they enabled end-to-end encryption for all their users … this is huge news. They have put a white paper up describing their implementation. Good news: it’s based on the Signal protocol and first tests seem to suggest they did it properly. ?
TSA’s Random Lane Picker
This is so moronic I almost fell off my chair laughing: it seems like the TSA spent $47,000 on a “random lane picker.” Please, you be the judge whether it was worth it:
It needs to be operated manually … with hygienic gloves! ?
Ubuntu on Windows
I didn’t see that coming … I still remember a time where this was UNTHINKABLE!!! ?