Four short links: 23 March 2017
Tractor Hacking, Economic History, Augmented Coder, and Temporal Dithering
- American Farmers Using Ukrainian Firmware to Hack their Tractors (Vice) — because DMCA. They’re hacking them to do interesting stuff, too: “I take the hog waste and run it through an anaerobic digester, and I’ve learned to compress the methane,” he said. “I run an 80% methane in my Chevy Diesel Pickup and I run 90% methane in my tractor. And they both purr. I take a lot of pride in working on my equipment.” If you liked the potatoes-frying smell of biodiesel, spare a moment’s sympathy for the folks who live around this chap.
- Economic History Papers — I love the papers collections for subjects, as they’re a useful way to quickly encounter the driving ideas in the field. Although I note that, for most people, a collection of economic history papers is at best a useful way to quickly encounter sleep. (via Marginal Revolution)
- Programming Won’t be Automated, or it Already Has Been (Edaqa Mortoray) — makes the excellent point that programmers are already augmented by software. For most of us, it was a long time ago (if ever) that we hand-assembled to produce machine code.
- Secret Colours of the Commodore 64 — flipping a pixel’s colours at high speed creates the illusion of a new colour, a technique called “temporal dithering.” Complete with in-browser demos.
