Monday Links from the Poop Deck vol. DCLXIV

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Monday Links from the Poop Deck vol. DCLXIV

Aaaarrr! It be Talk Like a Pirate Day, mateys! Let's hope they continue to make it a Bank Holiday in future years

My Strange, Seductive Stint as the Hugh Hefner of Moscow - ”As a disillusioned cub reporter, I jumped at the bizarro job of a lifetime: editor-in-chief of Playboy Russia when nouveau riche Moscow was a hedonistic playground of sex, drugs, and early-stage capitalism — until Putin’s rise brought my reign to a screeching halt.” Tales of strange days in Russia by Vijai Maheshwari.
Record-Breaking Robot Highlights How Animals Excel at Jumping - ”Robots can surpass the limitations on how high and far animals can jump, but their success only underscores nature’s ingenuity in making the most of what’s available.” Apparently grasshoppers can jump better if you give them little hats
Prompt injection attacks against GPT-3 - Simon Willison explores an interesting attack vector against “AI”: ”This isn’t just an interesting academic trick: it’s a form of security exploit. The obvious name for this is prompt injection. Here’s why it matters.”
Conic Sections: An Interview with Sol Yurick - From 2009, but unpublished until 2013, Geogg Manaugh interviews the author of The Warriors: ”Looked at one way, The Warriors tells the story of a city gone out of control, become feral, taken over by criminal gangs and faceless police organizations… Yurick was thus an urban author, I thought, suitable for urban and architectural publications, his insights on cities far more useful than your average TED Talk and about one ten-thousandth as exposed.”
Wikipedia Speedruns! - ”The rules of this game are simple. You'll be given a starting Wikipedia article and an ending Wikipedia article. Your goal is to navigate from the starting article to the ending article using only the article links.” Have fun!
My Chances of Being a Mom Were Fading. Then Two Beautiful Lambs Came into My Life. - ”People say farmers aren’t supposed to get emotionally attached to livestock. Uh-huh. When fate sent our writer two newborn sheep with life-threatening birth defects, that kind of thinking was banished from the barn.” A.C. Shilton finds joy in sheep
Of Couches and Class Rage - A little anecdote about a jobsworth in Taipei, by Brian Hioe: ”On a Facebook group devoted to reuse and recycling, I spotted a photo of a decent-looking leather couch. This group posts photos of usable goods they see being thrown out on the sidewalks. It was 1:00 AM. ‘Should I go?’ I texted my two other main collaborators on the space. It was late, the address was in another part of town, and there was no MRT. But why not?”
8.5 Miles Per Hour, on a Road With No Limits - Extreme wheelchair endurance: ”Ian Mackay was paralyzed 14 years ago in a bike accident, but he’s come to see there’s happiness in finding new ways to experience old loves. In his case, that meant getting back on the road, in a record-setting way.”
Confirmed! the MOS 7600/7601 Pong chip is a true microcontroller - Not actually Ken Shirriff, though he’s involved - this one’s from Cameron Kaiser: ”In a previous article I discussed the MOS 7600 and 7601 "Pong in a chip" ICs, manufactured by MOS Technology (of the famous 6502) and actually used in a number of late 1970s Pong clones, including two that eventual parent company Commodore Business Machines sold under their own name. Most notably they appeared in the Coleco Telstar Arcade console… The question at the time was whether the 7600 actually had ROM in it (i.e., was a true microcontroller running a stored program), or whether it was simply playing games using discrete circuitry.”
Wilde Yarn Mill - Matthew Christopher explores an abandoned mill, now with panoramas so you can look around: ”At the time of its closure in 2012, John Wilde & Brother, Inc. in Manayunk, Pennsylvania had the distinction of being the oldest continually operating yarn mill in the United States… The site was astonishing: the machinery in some of the areas was over a century old, and the sensation of having found a perfectly preserved time capsule was intoxicating. Wilde was not as decayed as other places, partly because of the relatively short time it had been unused, but it was in essence a museum of yarn making technique from the late 1800s through the middle of the 1900s.”