weekly reel August 15, 2015

Hey geeks! This week sound is WhoMadeWho - Head on my pillow:

WhoMadeWho - Head on my pillow (youtube-nocookie.com)

Meanwhile,

- [The ethics of modern web ad-blocking](http://www.marco.org/2015/08/11/ad-blocking-ethics). Marco Arment nails why we're waaaay past the moral dilemma of ad blocking. Via [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10041207). - [My life without gender](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/07/my-life-without-gender-strangers-are-desperate-to-know-what-genitalia-i-have), via [kottke](http://kottke.org/15/08/their-life-without-gender). - [We should host the Olympics in the same place every time](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/28/we-should-host-the-olympics-in-the-same-place-every-time/?postshare=1821439596233823): *"The Olympics are bad for cities. So why do we keep asking new places to invest billions of dollars in state-of-the-art stadiums theyll never use again?"* A million times yes, sad it's unlikely to happen, as summed up by a [HN commenter](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065717): > "I think this is a piece of learned trolling, satire designed to provoke us into thinking hard about what the IOC really is. > The IOC profits from the selection process as much as it does from the games. The bribes, the payments, everything involved in this horrible “competition” fills their coffers with money. > If the games were held in the same place every year, there would be no bribes to rig bids. There would be no construction companies and other contractors to pony up black bags full of money to ensure their place at the trough. There would also be no pressure on governments to pretend the games are a success. Every country hosting the games is under enormous pressure to brag about how wonderful the games are. They spend hundreds of millions promoting the games that they spend billions supporting. > All that would go away if the games were held in a permanent facility." - [Oracle: No, you really can't reverse engineer our code (archive.org)](https://web.archive.org/web/20150811052336/https://blogs.oracle.com/maryanndavidson/entry/no_you_really_can_t). Good they took it down; there's nothing wrong with their point, but gosh what an arrogant and condescending blog post. HN [discussion #1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10040428), [discussion #2](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039202). - [A message to the aliens (introduction)](http://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/intro.html), [#0](http://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/p00.html), [#1](http://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/p01.html), [#2](http://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/p02.html), [#3](http://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/p03.html), via [Trivium](http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/2015-08-10). - [Larry Hastings @ EuroPython - Python's infamous GIL](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zeHStBowEk), great summary: why the GIL is here, review of failed elimination tentatives, and future options. - [Go and Rust - objects without class](https://lwn.net/Articles/548560/), via [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10035066). - [[pdf] Branch prediction and the performance of interpreters - don't trust folklore](https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01100647/document), via [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10032295). - Juicy hardware/software vulnerabilities: - [The Memory Sinkhole, a x86 design flaw allowing ring -2 privilege escalation](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sinkhole), via [Trivium](http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/2015-08-10). - [Thunderstrike 2: Mac firmware worm details](https://trmm.net/Thunderstrike2_details), via [HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10043335). - [Composing music with recurrent neural networks](http://www.hexahedria.com/2015/08/03/composing-music-with-recurrent-neural-networks/), thx Guéna. [HN discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10028878).
Comments and feedback welcome by email.