The Rundown for June 05, 2021

From Nature, looks like another advance in Brain Computer Interfaces:”Here we developed an intracortical BCI that decodes attempted handwriting movements from neural activity in the motor cortex and translates it to text in real time, using a recurrent neural network decoding approach. With this BCI, our study participant, whose hand was paralysed from spinal cord injury, achieved typing speeds of 90 characters per minute with 94.1% raw accuracy online, and greater than 99% accuracy offline with a general-purpose autocorrect. To our knowledge, these typing speeds exceed those reported for any other BCI, and are comparable to typical smartphone typing speeds of individuals in the age group of our participant (115 characters per minute). Finally, theoretical considerations explain why temporally complex movements, such as handwriting, may be fundamentally easier to decode than point-to-point movements.” Maybe in the future they’ll just plug in electrodes into bar candidates to see if they have enough legal knowledge sloshing around in their brains.
Interesting post on the most likely endgame for the pandemic - that it will be endemic just like the flu. Something we would just have to deal with year in and year out with meds and booster shots. Sounds reasonable. A part of me still things that we should take the XKCD route and eradicate the damned thing out of spite.

The internal combustion engine - Interesting in and of itself but also a demonstration of the web’s potential for teaching - through analysis, illustration, and animation.

The best single from every decade, 2010s to 14,000 B.C.
The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told:

For those with a longer memory, though, the RSA breach was the original massive supply chain attack. State cyberspies—who were later revealed to be working in the service of China’s People’s Liberation Army—penetrated infrastructure relied on across the globe to protect the internet. And in doing so, they pulled the rug out from under the entire world’s model of digital security.