BURGEONING LADS OF SCIENCE | Okay, so: Latin has this word, sic. Or, if we want…
So if you were fucking Ambiorix or whoever and Quintus Titurius Sabinus was like, “Yo, did you eat all the pizza?” you would do that Drake smile and point thing under your big beefy Gaulish mustache and say, “This.” Then you would have him surrounded and killed.

Weird Astronomy – Atomic Rockets
Science fiction writers often benefit from using reality as a springboard. For science fiction, the weirder the bit of reality used, the better. As a public service, I offer a random selection of real astronomical items that are anomalous, suspicious, or downright odd. SF writers are encouraged to use these to brainstorm something interesting. These are offered free of charge, I have no claim no them, no strings are attached.

Dropbox saved almost $75 million over two years by building its own tech infrastructure – GeekWire
Starting in 2015, Dropbox began to move users of its file-storage service away from AWS’s S3 storage service and onto its own custom-designed infrastructure and software, and the cost benefits were immediate. From 2015 to 2016, Dropbox saved $39.5 million in the cost of revenue bucket thanks to the project, which reduced spending on “our third-party datacenter service provider” by $92.5 million offset by increased expenses of $53 million for its own data centers. The following year in 2017, it saved an additional $35.1 million in operating costs beyond the 2016 numbers.

Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet? | News | The Guardian
For centuries, lexicographers have attempted to capture the entire English language. Technology might soon turn this dream into reality – but will it spell the end for dictionaries?

Mark Felt-Tipped | Notes
The document was released as a PDF that appears to be a scan of a printed copy that was manually redacted using a black felt-tipped pen or text marker. While this method of redaction effectively obscures the relevant sentence fragments, the text’s layout remains unchanged. This opens up the tantalizing opportunity to reconstruct top-secret information by correctly guessing fragments that result in the flow of text after each redaction to align to the released version.

kennethreitz/requests-html: HTML Parsing for Humans™
This library intends to make parsing HTML (e.g. scraping the web) as simple and intuitive as possible. When using this library you automatically get: CSS Selectors (a.k.a jQuery-style, thanks to PyQuery). XPath Selectors, for the faint at heart. Mocked user-agent (like a real web browser). Automatic following of redirects. Connection–pooling and cookie persistience. The Requests experience you know and love, with magic parsing abilities.

Van die dingen – MO* Magazine – MO.be
Ach, het is ook maar een stopwoord zie je ze denken, zoals “voor alle duidelijkheid”, één van die dingen die je op radio en TV zo’n 100 keer per dag kunt horen. Niets meer dan een stopwoord? Ik dacht het niet. Want er zijn van die dingen die niet ophouden me te verbazen, vaak nadat ze gebeurd zijn, maar nog vaker omdat ze niet gebeurd zijn. Ik wil er hier graag een paar aanhalen, al was het maar om de heer Jambon te helpen.

Lotame Purges Its Data Exchange After Identifying 400 Million User Profiles as Bots – Adweek
Lol. "Lotame, one of the world’s largest exchanges for digital third-party data, announced on Friday that it has purged 10 percent of its over 4 billion profiles after identifying them as bots or otherwise fraudulent accounts. Lotame CEO Andy Monfried estimated that 40 percent of all web traffic is fictional. The industry, he said, is facing a crisis of trust due to fraudulent and unreliable data."