Objects + Duct Tape vs. Hydraulic Press

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Objects + Duct Tape vs. Hydraulic Press

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Duct tape is an incredibly strong and versatile mending tool. But can it help objects stand up to the force of the mighty 150-ton hydraulic press? HPC wrapped some everyday items in thick layers of the sticky silver stuff to see if it improves its ability to survive the press?

The Awesomer

‘Eat s*** and die’: Man on the street offers his patriotic dissent against Biden

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The opening weekend of college football is two weeks away. It was opening day of 2021 when we first got a glimpse of how little the American people thought of Joe Biden. Before it showed up in polls, Americans gathered to chant "f*ck Joe Biden." Ol’ Puddinghead hasn’t done much to change that perception, other than spend money and make things more expensive. That is evident in this man on the street interview.

Remember, as the media taught us during the Trump years and the Bush years before that, dissent is the highest form of patriotism. However, for unknown reasons, patriotic dissent was not valid during the years 2009-2016.

"I’d tell him to eat sh*t and die and stick the American flag up his f*cking ass."

Inserting the flag up someone’s rectum goes against U.S. Flag Code. However, when you look at inflation and all the other things this president has made a mess of, the anger and disapproval are understood.

"Because he’s a f*cking traitor, son of a b*tch, old f*cking feeble-minded f*cking gaylord."

By all accounts, Biden is heterosexual. And I feel we all need to be more careful over recklessly accusing people of being traitors. The old and feeble-minded part is accurate.

"Donald Trump is the number one president out of all times from George Washington on down."

Donald Trump agrees.

"And he freed Kodak! Free Kodak!"

This is correct. President Trump commuted rapper Kodak Black’s prison sentence before leaving the White House. Joe Biden can’t even free WNBA star Brittney Griner.

According to RCP polling averages, only 40% of Americans approve of Joe Biden. 55% disapprove.

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Louder With Crowder

This Throwing Knife Launcher Is an Amazing and Terrifying Feat of Engineering

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Steven Seagal makes knife throwing look effortless in movies like Under Siege, but it’s actually an incredibly hard skill to master if you don’t have Hollywood’s movie magic helping you out. That’s what Quint, of the YouTube channel Quint BUILDs, was lacking. But with some good old fashioned engineering, they managed to build a handheld throwing knife launcher that reliably hit their target from varying distances.

Jeff Goldblum’s “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” is what comes to my mind here. That apparently wasn’t the case with Quint, though, because after months of designing, redesigning, programming, and reprogramming, the YouTuber’s built one of the most impressively terrifying pieces of amateur engineering we’ve ever seen.

Knife Throwing Machine!

Once you learn to hit a target with an arrow, hitting it again from varying angles and distances is relatively easy with some minor aim adjustments. That’s not the case when throwing knives. Added spin is needed to give the knife enough kinetic energy to embed itself into a target, with a specific number of rotations needed to ensure its sharp tip hits the target first, not the flat side or blunt handle. If you’ve ever been axe throwing, you’ll know what we’re talking about.

As with many other talented makers and hardware hackers on YouTube, Quint decided that brute force engineering was a better alternative to diligent practice, so they created a handheld launcher that uses high-performance servo motors, solenoids, custom 3D-printed components, and some heavy batteries to hurl throwing knives with the right amount of spin so they hit the mark and stick every single time. To allow the launcher to work from varying distances, the launcher even employs a LiDAR sensor that’s used to measure how far away the target is and adjust its green targeting laser appropriately.

It appears to work almost flawlessly, launching knives from a magazine as quickly as the machine can reset itself and Quint can pull the trigger. Steven Seagal might finally have some stiff competition for Under Siege 3.

Gizmodo

What are the caveats of running Laravel on AWS Lambda


Let’s set the scene. We’re looking for scaling a PHP
application. Googling around take us to find out that
AWS Lambda is the most scalable service out there. It doesn’t
support PHP natively, but we got https://bref.sh. Not only
that, we also have Serverless Visually Explained
which walk us through what we need to know to get PHP up
and running on AWS Lambda. But we have a 8 year old
project that was not designed from the ground up to be
serverless. It’s not legacy. Not really. It works well,
has some decent test coverage, a handful of engineers
working on it and it’s been a success so far. It just has
not been designed for horizontal scaling. What now?

Bref has two primary goals: Feature parity with other
AWS Lambda runtime (the Event-Driven layer) and also
to be a replacement for web hosting (the Web Apps layer).
In a way, with the Web App layer, Bref allows us to lift-and-shift
from our current hosting provider into AWS Lambda and have
PHP-FPM working the same way as we’re all used to love.
So if we just take a large codebase and redeploy it on
AWS Lambda, will everything just work?

Here are some caveats to pay close attention to help with
this journey.

30 seconds API Gateway Timeout

When deploying to AWS Lambda, it’s very common to use API
Gateway as the routing solution. It’s like an nginx for
our PHP-FPM, but completely scalable and managed by AWS.
It does come with a hard limit of timeout at 30 seconds.
If your application never takes longer to process any
HTTP request, then this is not a big deal, but if it does,
even if very rarely, API Gateway will kill the request.

If this is a deal-breaker for your application, a workaround
could be to use Application Load Balancer instead.

PHP Extensions

Not every PHP extension is available easily. Tobias Nyholm
maintains a great community project for PHP Extensions at
https://github.com/brefphp/extra-php-extensions. A lot of
great extensions are available by default
(as documented in https://bref.sh/docs/environment/php.html#extensions),
but if you need an extension that is not available by default
or not provided by Tobias, you’ll either have to build an
AWS Lambda layer yourself or you’ll have to find a way
without that extension.

Incoming Payload limit

When someone sends a HTTP request to your application,
they’re usually sending in some raw data with it, typically
on the body of the request. If the body of the request
goes above AWS limit, your code will never even be executed
and AWS will kill the request upfront. The limits
are currently as follows:

  • 1MB for Application Load Balancer
  • 10MB for API Gateway

A very big portion of use cases can fit in both of these
offerings. The most common use case that may pose a threat
is file uploads. If the file is bigger than the allowed
size, AWS will not accept the request. A common workaround
is to refactor the application so that the backend returns
an S3 Signed Url for the frontend to do the file upload
directly to S3 and then notify the backend once it’s done.
Without going into complex use-case, S3 can take 100MB
of upload in a plain and simple request, but it also
support multi-part upload with a much bigger limit.

HTTP Response Limit

AWS Lambda has a limit of 1MB for the Http Response. When
I started getting 502 Gateway Timeout due to large response
size, the workaround that worked best for me was to gzip
the Http Response. That brought down the response size
from 1MB to roughly 50~100kb. I never had to work on
a use-case where gzipped responses would be bigger than
1MB, so if you have such a case, let me know on Twitter
because I’m very interested in it!

AWS Lambda execution limit

AWS Lambda is capped at 15 minutes of execution. If you
use API Gateway, that’s capped at 30 seconds anyway, but
if you use Application Load Balancer, then it’s possible to
have Http requests going up to 15 minutes. Although that’s
not very common / likely to be useful, one thing that
does come up is background jobs. Sometimes they can go
above 15 minutes. One use case I worked on was importing
CSV file. The Http layer would return a Signed Url, frontend
would upload to S3 and notify the backend of a new file
ready for processing. A message for SQS would be produced
and a new AWS Lambda would pick up the message as the worker.
Downloading the CSV file from S3 and processing each row
individually could take more than 15 minutes. The way
I handled that was to create a recursive Job. What I did
was:

  • Download the file from S3
  • Process 1k rows on the file (for loop)
  • Each row processed increments a record on the database
  • Produce a new SQS message IDENTICAL to the one currently being worked on
  • Finish the job successfully

With this approach, the SQS message that gets picked up will
finish before 15 minutes and it will produce a new SQS message
with the exact same work unit. The job can always load
the pointer from the database to know where it left off
(the starting point of the for loop). If we don’t have 1k
records to run through, we can stop producing SQS messages
because we reached the end of the file. If there are
still rows to be processed, the new IDENTICAL SQS message
will make a new Lambda start, which means another 15 minutes
limit.

5 Layers per function

If your project uses too many exotic PHP extensions, you
may end up hitting the limit of 5 layers per function.
Bref itself will consume 2 of 5 layers. Each extension
is a separate layer. If you need, e.g., GMP for verifying
JWT tokens, Imagick for image processing and Redis, you’ve
reached your limit and the next extension you need might
be problematic.

50 MB of zipped Codebase / 250 MB of unzipped codebase

Your project source code cannot have more than 50MB of
zipped content or 250MB of unzipped. The 250MB unzipped also
include the Lambda layers extracted into your Lambda environment.
It sounds like a lot of code, but there are some PHP packages
out there that put binaries on your vendor folder which
may take a lot of space. There are some workaround
documented by Bref which involves zipping your vendor,
uploading it to S3 and deploying your code without
the vendor folder. The vendor then gets downloaded
on-the-fly when your Lambda starts. It adds a little
bit of overhead on your cold-start but overcome AWS
limitation on the codebase size.

read-only file-system

The entire file-system on AWS Lambda is read-only with
the exception of /tmp. Any process that is writing
files into disk will need tweaking to work with the temporary
folder. Furthermore, two different requests will not be
guarantee to hit the exact same Lambda, so relying
on local disk is not a safe bet. Any data that
may need to be accessed in the future must go to S3
or a durable storage.

500MB on /tmp

Another thing to keep in mind is that /tmp only has
500MB of disk space. If you fill that up, the Lambda environment
will start to get errors for full disk.

SQS messages cannot have more than 256kb of payload

Maybe on your server you use Redis as the Queue Storage
for your background jobs. If your serialized job class
has more than 256kb, it will not fit into AWS SQS.
A common workaround is to pass to the job a reference
to something big instead of the big thing itself.
For instance, if you have a job class that takes a collection
of 1 million rows of a database, that can be mitigated
by passing the instructions to query the database instead.
An SQL Query would be extremely small and produce a somewhat
similar result.

Every-minute CRON

When you have a server, putting a CRON to run every
minute and doing some clean up or tidy-up tasks sounds
trivial. But since AWS Lambda charges per code execution,
having a CRON running every minute can add up a bill
and/or be an unwanted side-effect. AWS offers
Scheduler for AWS Lambda, which means code can still
run on a regular basis, but it’s important to keep in
mind that everytime Lambda starts, it adds up to your
bill. Things like cleaning up old/stale files might not
even be necessary since every request may hit a clean
AWS Lambda environment.

Conclusion

This may not be an extensive list of gotchas, but I tried
to include everything that I may have faced while working
with AWS Lambda for the past 3 years. A lot of these limitations
have acceptable workarounds and overall hosting a Laravel
application on a single fat AWS Lambda has brought more
benefits than problems, so I would still advise in favour
of it if you’re looking to scale and ditch server maintenance.

As always, hit me up on Twitter with any
questions.

Cheers.

Laravel News Links

Root extract may treat type 2 diabetes

https://www.futurity.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/type-2-diabetes-1600.jpgA Rhodiola rosea plant with green leaves and yellow flowers in growing in dark soil.

An extract from the roots of the Rhodiola rosea plant might be effective for helping manage type 2 diabetes, according to a new study.

The extract shows promise as a safe and effective non-pharmaceutical alternative, the researchers report.

They found that, in a mouse model of human type 2 diabetes, Rhodiola rosea lowered fasting blood sugar levels, improved response to insulin injections, modulated the composition of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract, and decreased several biomarkers of inflammation.

“The prevalence of type 2 diabetes and the associated health costs have risen steadily in recent decades. Humans have used plants and natural products for thousands of years to treat diseases, and our study shows Rhodiola rosea is a good candidate for further investigation,” says Mahtab Jafari, professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and corresponding author of the paper in Scientific Reports.

“Current treatment recommendations include lifestyle changes as well as oral and intravenous medications. However, these drugs have significant limitations or side effects, increasing the need for new therapeutic interventions.”

The team used a genetically engineered mouse model that develops obesity, insulin resistance, and high blood sugar, similar to advanced human type 2 diabetes, to test whether Rhodiola rosea could improve glucose homeostasis.

In the study, cohorts of age-matched male and female mice were randomly assigned to one of two groups: control, which received water, or experimental, which were administered Rhodiola rosea extract.

“Our findings suggest that Rhodiola rosea might be beneficial for treating type 2 diabetes, acting through changes in the microbiome that result in increased gut barrier integrity and decreased translocation of inflammatory molecules into the blood circulation,” Jafari says.

“Gut barrier integrity influences body weight and insulin response, and this botanical product may improve the responses of liver and muscle tissues to insulin produced by the pancreas.”

The team’s next steps are to perform a larger follow-up study in a different mouse model of obesity-induced diabetes to confirm these findings and to investigate the molecular mechanisms involved. Ultimately, Jafari hopes to conduct Rhodiola rosea clinical trials in patients with type 2 diabetes.

“Our research presents a solid case for the importance of conducing high-quality pre-clinical studies based on sound methodologies to evaluate the efficacy of standardized plant extracts. We have set the stage for human clinical studies, with the ultimate goal of improving health outcomes for type 2 diabetes patients,” Jafari says.

Additional coauthors are from Brigham Young University and UC Irvine. The UCI School of Medicine-Pharmaceutical Sciences Collaborative Research Funds and John P. and Lois C. Wareham funded the work.

Source: UC Irvine

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Futurity

Uintah Precision Modern Sporting Muzzleloader

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Uintah Precision Modern Sporting Muzzleloader (1)Uintah Precision, a company primarily known for making bolt action AR uppers and complete firearms, has entered the muzzleloader market. However, what they make is not your great-great-grandfather’s muzzleloader. The new Uintah Precision Modern Sporting Muzzleloader can be easily mistaken for one of their AR bolt guns, but if you look closely, you’ll notice a ramrod […]

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The Firearm Blog