Four short links: 25 December 2017
Downscaling Attacks, CS50x Online, Input Lag, DIY ICs
- Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Downscaling Attack Against Deep Learning Applications — common image scaling algorithms are not designed to handle human-crafted images. Attackers can make the scaling outputs look dramatically different from the corresponding input images.
- Introduction to Computer Science: CS50 — This is CS50x, Harvard University’s introduction to the intellectual enterprises of computer science and the art of programming for majors and non-majors alike, with or without prior programming experience. An entry-level course.
- Input Lag — comparing the time it takes the screen to update after a keypress across a bunch of different systems. It’s a bit absurd that a modern gaming machine running at 4,000x the speed of an Apple II, with a CPU that has 500,000x as many transistors (with a GPU that has 2,000,000x as many transistors) can maybe manage the same latency as an Apple II in very carefully coded applications if we have a monitor with nearly 3x the refresh rate.
- The High School Student Who’s Building His Own Integrated Circuits (IEEE) — inspired by Jeri Ellsworth’s videos, he’s making his own chips. I love that he bought a scanning electron microscope on eBay, negotiating the seller down: The electron microscope was “a broken one from a university that just needed some electrical repairs […] It was listed for sale at $2,500, but Zeloof persuaded the seller to take “well below that” and ended up spending more on shipping than it cost to buy the microscope.
