Gooooooood morning, Mortals!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.
AI, bots and robots
- Extract voice, piano, drums, etc. from any music track
Deezer source separation library including pretrained models. – deezer/spleeter - Robotics Development Environment with ROS in C++ and Python
Just a bunch of powerful robotic resources and tools for professional robotic development with ROS in C++ and Python. – Ly0n/awesome-robotic-tooling - Deep Learning in the Real World: Dealing with Non-Differentiable Loss Functions
- Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa can be hijacked with $14 laser pointer
- Self Sabotage: The Swiss History of Rigging Vital Infrastructure to Explode
Jagged concrete protrusions span for miles along the Swiss Alps. They have been cheerily dubbed “Toblerone Lines” after the famous Swiss chocolate maker, but they have other names, too. More ominous monikers like “dragon teeth” may better fit their original function: to repel invading tanks and other vehicles in wartime. These lines represent some of - GPT-2 Neural Network Poetry
- Swarms of Microrobots Clean Up Radioactive Waste
- Learning Curves: How Simple Splines Help Designers Model Complex 3D Forms
- A.I. and the Future of Cheating
- In the Age of AI
- Trippy T-Shirt Makes You Invisible to AI
Blockchain and decentralization
- List of the biggest distributed/remote-first companies
- Lone Bitcoin Whale Likely Fueled 2017 Price Surge, Study Says
- Research shows Bitcoin 2017 rally caused by single whale
The series of $1,000 days that brought BTC to a record above $19,600 could have been the work of one entity, academic research shows. - Bitcoin as a Game
- Building a Large-Scale Distributed Storage System Based on Raft
- One Tether Trader Didn’t Cause the Bitcoin Bubble
- File systems unfit as distributed storage back ends: lessons from Ceph evolution
File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from 10 years of Ceph evolution Aghayev et al., SOSP’19 Ten years of hard-won lessons packed into just 17 pages (13 if you don’t co… - Parallel Commits: A New Atomic Commit Protocol for Distributed Transactions
Distributed ACID transactions form the beating heart of CockroachDB. They allow users to manipulate any and all of their data transactionally, no matter where i
Woman computer scientist of the week
Paola Velardi is a Full Professor of computer science at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. She is an Italian scientist born in Rome, on April 24, 1955. Her research encompasses natural language processing, machine learning, business intelligence and semantic web, web information extraction in particular. Velardi is one of the hundred female scientists included in the database «100esperte.it». This online, open database champions the recognition of top-rated female scientists in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) area.
Cloud and architecture
- LocalStack – A fully-functional local AWS cloud stack
- The trillion-dollar lawsuit against Tether
One year ago exactly, I wrote my first piece about a stablecoin called Tether. A year later, uh, wow: From legal action introduced last month: Leibowitz et al. versus iFinex et al., US District Court. A complaint is not the same thing as a conviction. But the complaints are mind-blowing. This is not just “we are upset that we lost our crypto money and we’d like to sue someone”. If these accusations are found by a jury to be true, or even approximately true, then it will immediately go straight to the Hall of Fame level of Largest Frauds of All Time. In terms of monetary evaporation, the accusations here are ten times the size of WeWork, - Facebook Libra Is Architecturally Unsound
- Tools for faster back end development BaaS
- Facebook communication and lawsuit documents: 7000 pages leaked
- New – Savings Plans for AWS Compute Services
- Laws hold the porn industry accountable for dangerous content
- Python package and CLI to generate stylistic word clouds
Development and languages
- Fossjobs.net: jobs that improve and involve FOSS or open hardware projects
- Programming in 1969 An interview with a pioneer (my mum)
- WordPress usage worldwide
- Why to use ‘python -m pip’
- The Misunderstood Roots of FRP Can Save Programming
- Finding potential software vulnerabilities from Git commit messages
- Kotlingrad: A shape-safe DSL for differentiable programming
- ShareDrop – P2P File Transfer Using WebRTC
- Visual Studio online available for public preview
- Programmers can’t write algorithms without help
- What SQL Analysts Need to Know About Python
- A New Digital Manifesto
- GitHub Sponsors is now out of beta in 30 countries
- Trip planning on Android phone turned off for now
- Unofficial Windows XP SP4
- The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP
- JavaScript Errors: An Exceptional History
- TheForger’s Win32 API Programming Tutorial
- Relé – Make Google PubSub Integration Easier for Python Projects
- Microsoft’s web-based version of Visual Studio
Earlier this year, at its Build developers conference, Microsoft announced that it was working on a web-based version of its Visual Studio IDE. At the time, Visual Studio Online went into a private preview, open to a select number of developers. Now, at its Ignite conference, the company has opened… - What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising?
In 2018 $273bn was spent on digital ads globally. We delve into the world of clicks, banners and keywords to find out if any of it is real. What do we really know about the effectiveness of digital advertising? - Pythran – a compiler for Python scientific kernels – release
- NSW Digital Driver Licence
- Bypassing GitHub’s OAuth Flow with a Head Request
- My Decade as a Fugitive
«I avoided anything having to do with my old life.» - Gitlab’s Director of Risk and Global Compliance Resigns
Quote of the week
Complexity has nothing to do with intelligence, simplicity does.
— Larry Bossidy
Enterprises
- Google Buys Fitbit for $2.1B
- Google are removing URLs entirely from the search results
258 votes and 147 comments so far on Reddit - Microsoft Reveals New Logo for Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge is getting a new logo, and it is…something. The new logo was revealed as part of a long treasure hunt carried out by Microsoft. - AMD, a chipmaking underdog, is having its day and nipping at Intel’s heels
And nipping at Intel’s heels - Microsoft Japan’s 3-day weekend boosts worker productivity by 40%
As it turns out, not squeezing employees dry like a sponge is maybe a good thing. - Saudi Aramco: The message from the world’s biggest and wildest IPO
- Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees
- Microsoft 4-day week boosts productivity and sales
The technology giant closed its offices in Japan on Fridays during the month of August 2019 - Will Tesla and Google Kill the German Car?
- How to Set Your Google Data to Self-Destruct
- Bringing Google Live Transcribe’s Speech Engine to Everyone
- Now Googlers Are Protesting Company’s Deals with Big Oil
- Stripe CLI
The Stripe CLI is a developer tool that helps you build, test, and manage your Stripe integration right from the terminal.
- The life and death of Google Flu Trends
- Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD
We checked the Intel performance strategy team’s latest benchmarks and found that they used an intentionally misleading test to back their claims - Uber Sinks to New Record Low as IPO Share Lockup Expires
- Biometric YubiKey
At Microsoft Ignite, Yubico previews the first-ever and long-awaited YubiKey Bio. It is the first YubiKey that will support fingerprint recognition for secure and seamless passwordless logins. - Former Twitter Employees Charged with Spying for Saudi Arabia
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department has charged two former Twitter employees with spying for Saudi Arabia by accessing the company’s information on dissidents who use the platform, marking the first time federal prosecutors have publicly accused the kingdom of running agents in the United States.
One of those implicated in the scheme, according to court papers, is an associate of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the CIA has concluded likely ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last year.
The case highlights the issue of foreign powers exploiting American social media platforms to identify critics - Google Open-Sources Cardboard
Open source Cardboard SDK and samples. Contribute to googlevr/cardboard development by creating an account on GitHub. - AMD vs. Intel CPU Market Share: 7nm Makes Landfall as Price War Begins
- Tesla’s competitors find that going electric has its own set of problems
- AMD Q4:16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, Threadripper Up To 32-Core 3970X
- Users fear for privacy after Google buys Fitbit
- After Google’s Fitbit deal, EU says worrying when firms targeted for their data
- Some Indian Twitter users are leaving for Mastodon
- Netflix, HBO and Cable Giants Are Coming for Password Sharers
- Project Silica proof-of-concept stores movie on quartz glass
- Amazon Is Accused of Forcing Up Prices in Antitrust Complaint
- Mark Twain playing with electricity in Nikola Tesla’s lab in 1894
- Sweet Home Alabama Played on Tesla Coils
Other news
- German university finds misconduct by researcher who promoted cancer blood test
- Kexecboot: Linux-As-a-Bootloader implementation based on kexec
- PJON 12.0 – Networking freedom for hackers, makers and experimenters
PJON is a valid tool to quickly and comprehensibly build a network of devices for free without the need of a cloud service or a centralized platform you don’t fully control. – gioblu/PJON - Using dummy-hcd on Linux to play with USB gadgets
- A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
- Learn to Look Around Corners
- Time to do away with the UX discipline?
- Doodling can help you pay attention
- Woman registers period late on app, is instantly bombarded with baby related ads
- How to teach sensible elementary statistics to lower-division undergraduates?
- Journal will publish heavily criticized paper on gender differences in physics
- Linux vs. open source Unix – Admin by accident
- Hacker Laws: Laws, Theories, Principles, Patterns Developers Might Find Useful
- U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year
A great deal of college tuition inflation has been driven by an enrollment strategy to dole out more institutional aid to a growing number of students. - Dell bets big on Ubuntu Linux laptops for developers
- A woman with a rare genetic mutation that has protected her from dementia
Researchers have found a woman with a rare genetic mutation that has protected her from dementia even though her brain has developed major neurological features of the disease. - Free Online Courses from Top Universities
- Lego Launches Braille Bricks for Children to Learn Braille
- Whatsapp Attributes Hack of 1,400 Users to NSO Group Technology
- AT&T to pay $60M over U.S. allegations it lied in ‘unlimited data’ pledge
- SoftBank Reveals $6.5B Loss from Uber, WeWork Turmoil
- Uber’s self-driving car could not detect pedestrians outside of a crosswalk
- Science Vigilante Calls Out Bogus Results in Prestigious Journals
- Entanglement in controlling resolution and decoherence of quantum measurements
- We Asked People Around the World How They Feel About AI. Here’s What We Learned
- The Morality of Quantum Computing
- EFF is at a public hacking conference, publicly shaming individuals
- Enabling Hackerspaces with IPv6
- System design hack: Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server
If you’re making any project of sufficient complexity, you’ll need a
publish/subscribe
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_pattern] server to
process events. This article will introduce you to Postgres, explain the
alternatives, and walk you through an example use case of pub/sub and its
solution.Postgres is an amazing relational database
If you aren’t too familiar with Postgres, it’s a feature-packed relational
database that many companies use as a traditional central d - Open Letter to the Linux Foundation
