Four short links: 15 October 2019
NSA Cybersec, Collaborative Natural Language Understanding, Ugly Language, and Lament for Computer Files
- NSA Cybersecurity Directorate — The command center is staffed 24/7, and teams cycle in every 12 hours to monitor real-time internet activity and cyber threats as they unfold over the world. Its connectivity with global intelligence partners ensures immediate communication over global cyber crises. The article has a lot of “cyber” and uses phrases like “souped-up computers,” but the shape of the NSA’s approach is apparent and interesting, especially Neuberger said one of her new directorate’s goals is to provide more actionable threat intelligence at the unclassified level so that partners, customers, and private sector firms can actually reap benefits in real time. Weird to think of a spook shop as having “customers” beyond, say, the President.
- CerealBar — a two-person collaborative game. We built CerealBar to study natural language understanding in collaborative interactions.
- Tilton — At this point, I should have noticed that this language was going to be inexcusably ugly, but astonishingly, I did not notice at the time. I kept pushing on, inspired by better languages like TRAC and LISP. I determined that this was the wrong approach for dealing with browser incompatibility, but I completed the language anyway. I named it Tilton after Robert Tilton, a television faith healer and speaker of tongues. I believe that Tilton is the ugliest programming language that was not intended to be an ugly programming language.
- Computer Files Are Going Extinct — years ago, websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies.
