Julio

Posts:

• Pulling JPEGs out of thin air, on how an agnostic fuzzer can create JPG files in a few hours by attempting to cover all branches of the execution of a program.
• Files are fraught with peril , a talk transcript on why filesystems fail, how do they do it and why Dropbox needs to know your filesystem.
• Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019, a postmortem analysis of the Cloudflare outage, caused by (spoiler) catastrophic backtracking on a regular expression.
• How can Kazakhstan perform MITM attacks on all HTTPS traffic?, on the recent attempt of the Kazakh government for surveillance
• IPTC metadata automatically added to uploaded images on Facebook; Facebook adds some kind of metadata to images uploaded to the site, possibly for tracking purposes.
• Automatically and Efficiently Illustrating Polynomial Equalities in Agda, an bachelor thesis on, well, what the title says.

Books:

• A Tour of C++. I learned C++03 at university and although I had used C++11/14 features before, I had never stopped to actually learn about it systematically. This book made me think that C++11 is actually an acceptable language.
• Effective Modern C++. After reading the previous book I decided to keep on reading on some issues in this second book. This book then made me return to my original stance: C++ design is unbelievably complicated and it is close to impossible to have a mental model of its semantics or what a program will actually do in detail. I think some of the problems will be somewhat improved when concepts become an official thing, but nonetheless the list of exceptions and quirks surpasses by a lot those that I have found in other languages.
• Locke & Key, vol. 1. An adventure/fantasy/horror comic that I really enjoyed.

Videos & TV shows:

• Men. Abuse. Trauma. - Philosophy Tube, an excellent monologue on abuse. Content warning for discussions of (mostly psychological) abuse.
• Fleabag, seasons 1 & 2. Never had I fallen in love with a TV show so much as I have with this one. The use of the aside glance and private comments to the viewer is simply the best I had ever seen.
• Big Little Lies, season 2. I think I liked more the first season, but I was happy with it overall.
• Chernobyl, season 1. Although it seems it is historically inaccurate in some ways (apart from the plot devices), it is aesthetically superb.

Projects:

• Composing traversals, an example-based introduction to Traversable and higher kinded types composition in Haskell.

En español:

• Prohibido criticar al rey, sobre la reciente decisión del Tribunal Constitucional de dejar sin efectos una resolución republicana del Parlament catalán, su sinsentido jurídico y sus implicaciones en la libertad de expresión.
• Papers y más papers: las sombras en la industria de las publicaciones científicas, sobre la publicación masiva de papers de baja calidad por los malos incentivos en investigación y otros problemas del panorama investigador español.