News

NASA’s EM-drive is a magnetic WTF-thruster

A group of German scientists has now gotten a reasonable amount of money under the rubric of testing all the things. Basically, because the various space agencies have whispered that no idea is too silly to ignore, we need an effective way to quickly test all the stupid space stuff on the Internet. The Germans are currently building something that is designed to do all that testing.

China Is Going to Be the First Country to Land on the Dark Side of the Moon

A German Team Is Now Trying to Make the ‘Impossible’ EmDrive Engine

The Pentagon Can’t Account for $21T

There are certain things the human mind is not meant to do. Our complex brains cannot view the world in infrared, cannot spell words backward during orgasm and cannot really grasp numbers over a few thousand. A few thousand, we can feel and conceptualize.

How a Kalman filter works, in pictures

Surprisingly few software engineers and scientists seem to know about it, and that makes me sad because it is such a general and powerful tool for combining information in the presence of uncertainty. At times its ability to extract accurate information seems almost magical— and if it sounds like I’m talking this up too much, then take a look at this previously posted video where I demonstrate a Kalman filter figuring out the orientation of a free-floating body by looking at its velocity. Totally neat!

Open-sourcing gVisor, a sandboxed container runtime

Containers have revolutionized how we develop, package, and deploy applications. However, the system surface exposed to containers is broad enough that many security experts don’t recommend them for running untrusted or potentially malicious applications. A growing desire to run more heterogenous and less trusted workloads has created a new interest in sandboxed containers—containers that help provide a secure isolation boundary between the host OS and the application running inside the container.

Containers, Security and Echo chambers

There seems to be some confusion around sandboxing containers as of late, mostly because of the recent launch of gvisor. Before I get into the body of this post I would like to make one thing clear. I have no problem with gvisor itself.

China has launched a communications satellite to the Moon

China’s space agency has taken a critical first step toward an unprecedented robotic landing on the far side of the Moon. On Monday, local time, theChina Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation launched aLong March 4C rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. Although it did not broadcast the launch, the Chinese space agency said it went smoothly, according to the state news service Xinhua.

The U.S. Defense Department’s Deeply Flawed Electronic Health Records Program

Tensor Compilers: Comparing PlaidML, Tensor Comprehensions, and TVM

One of the most complex and performance critical parts of any machine learning framework is its support for device specific acceleration. Indeed, without efficient GPU acceleration, much of modern ML research and deployment would not be possible. This acceleration support is also a critical bottleneck, both in terms of adding support for a wider range of hardware targets (including mobile) as well as for writing new research kernels.