Gooooooood morning, World Wide Web!!! 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
- Cracking open the black box of automated machine learning
- KrispNet – Voice Playback with Deep Learning
- Alexa shows private Wyze Cam feed to stranger
- A man who ran out of air at the bottom of the ocean
Science tells us the human body can only survive for a few minutes without oxygen. But some people are defying this accepted truth. - Remote working – Bringing sanity to mind and lessons worth learning
- Random Forest vs. Neural Network
Which is better: Random Forest or Neural Network? This is a common question, with a very easy answer: it depends 🙂 I will try to show you when it is good to use Random Forest and when to use Neural Network. - SATNet: Bridging deep learning and logical reasoning with differentiable SAT
- France Bans Judge AI Analytics, 5 Years in Prison for Rule Breakers
In a startling intervention that seeks to limit the emerging litigation analytics and prediction sector, the French Government has banned the publication of statistical information about judgesR⦠- Visual Studio IntelliCode
IntelliCode gives Visual Studio the power of artificial intelligence. Enabling this in Visual Studio is super easy. Here’s how! - A baboon who acted as assistant to a disabled railway signalman in South Africa
- Learning to Listen, in a Los Angeles Cafe Built for Vinyl
- Kedro: open-source library for production-ready machine learning code
- Protecting Sleep in the Hospital, for Both Patients and Doctors
What if sleep were considered a continuous infusion of a medication that helped patients heal faster? - We are Collage: Dada, Instagram, and the future of AI
- Data Validation for Machine Learning
- Amazon Unveils New Alexa Dialog Modeling for Natural, Cross-Skill Conversations
- Using machine learning to estimate lost demand in a fulfillment chain
How Instacart uses Machine Learning to spot lost demand in its fulfillment chain - Rognan robotic furniture for small space living
- Bottle of Lies
- Congress Scraps Provision to Restrict IRS from Competing with TurboTax
The change comes after ProPublica highlighted the deceptive marketing practices of Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and other major tax prep companies. - Durham Pathfinder Free-School: Self-Directed Learning
- Google AI’s Jeff Dean lays out his vision for the future of machine learning
- Flexible systems are the next frontier of machine learning
- Language, trees, and geometry in neural networks
Blockchain and decentralization
- Honeywell Brings Blockchain to Used Aircraft Parts Market
The company is using blockchain to shake up the market for used aircraft components, making it easier to check the certification and origin of a part and speeding up transactions. - Tenure-Based Ownership – A distributed equity model for worker ownership
- What the data say about who won the Bitcoin civil war
- SEC Charges Kik With Conducting $100M Unregistered ICO
- Distributed Locks Are Dead; Long Live Distributed Locks
- Arc.io – A Crowdfunded Distributed CDN
- Blockstream (startup) siphoned millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin to employees
- Facebook plans June 18th cryptocurrency debut
Facebook is finally ready to reveal details about its cryptocurrency codenamed Libra. It’s currently scheduled for a June 18th release of a white paper explaining its cryptocurrency’s basics, according to a source who says multiple investors briefed on the project by Facebook were told ⦠- An all-white’s town divisive experiment with cryptocurrency
In South Africa, a right-wing enclave turned to blockchain to cut themselves off from the black-majority state.
Woman computer scientist of the week
Carol Spradling is an American professor, computer scientist, and Director of the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. She is known for her work with computer ethics, profession-based education, interactive media, and expanding the involvement of underrepresented groups and women in computing. Spradling teaches computer science courses, and serves as a provost fellow and a liaison to the Northland Center For Advanced Professional Studies program. Spradling served on the Missouri Department of Higher Education Panel on The Role of Faculty in Establishing and Implementing a Blueprint for Missouri Higher Education.
Cloud and architecture
- Anti-Patterns
- Stripped-down Kubernetes on the Raspberry Pi
Join me as I test-drive the smallest ever Kubernetes distribution k3s. Find out how this runs on Raspberry Pi compared to kubeadm with Docker. - Cloudflare Workers
- Former NFL Player Keith Mumphery’s Comeback After Settling Title IX Lawsuit
- The SaaS Opportunity of Unbundling Excel
The unbundling of Excel is just as important as the unbundling of Craigslist. Here’s what you need to know about the Excel Economy and how SaaS companies can take advantage of different verticals and use cases that Excel has dominated. - Flares is a CloudFlare DNS backup tool
- Microsoft and Oracle link up their clouds
- Looker to Join Google Cloud
- Joyent Public Cloud EOL
- SaaS vs. Open Core: Which Business Model Is Best?
- Google Cloud Networking Incident Postmortem
Development and languages
- Sunfish: A simple, but strong chess engine, written in Python
- Discrete Mathematics and Functional Programming
- Hello Android
- Is JavaScript Enabled?
- Scraping Reddit Data Using PRAW (Python)
- Compiling C to WebAssembly Without Emscripten
A compiler is just a part of Emscripten. What if we stripped away all the bells and whistles and used just the compiler? - Emu: Language for Programming GPUs in Rust
- Using Python to Get Free Chicken Sandwiches
- Taiwan’s digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship
Audrey Tang prefers precise language. During an interview, Taiwan’s minister without portfolio – Tang’s name card simply says “digital minister” – makes a swift correction when we mention the term “fake news.” The preferred term is “disinformation” because, Tang says, it has a legal definition in Taiwan: “That is… - A Teen Programmer Built a Tool to Generate Fake Lyrics for Your Favorite Artists
- Windows Exploitation Tricks: Abusing the User-Mode Debugger
- The Monkey Programming Language
- GitHub Package Registry Will Support Swift Packages
- Jitk: A Trustworthy In-Kernel Interpreter Infrastructure
- Solving Programming Puzzles Without Using Your Brain
- Rethinking Visual Programming with Go
- First Crack, a simple static blog engine in Python
- NSA Cybersecurity Advisory: Patch Remote Desktop Services on Legacy Windows
- GitHub removes 5 years of One Hour One Life designer’s work
- macOS deprecating scripting language runtimes, including Python, Ruby, and Perl
- Why GitHub used Haskell for Semantic
Parsing, analyzing, and comparing source code across many languages – github/semantic - Should array length be stored into a local variable in C#?
- Schools Are Deploying Digital Surveillance Systems
- Why the “Digital Ocean killed my company” incident scares the hell out of me
Digital Ocean recently locked out a small startup. I’m scared I could be hit by a faulty abuse algorithm and a broken customer service process too. - Python in the Windows 10 May update
- Python in the Windows 10 May update
- Google reportedly arguing cutting Huawei off from Android threatens US security
If Android becomes more fragmented, Google thinks everybody loses - Current State of Python Packaging
- More than just a rewrite of Windows Explorer
«More than just a rewrite of Windows Explorer». Contribute to duke7553/files-uwp development by creating an account on GitHub.
Quote of the week
Out-of-band == should be on a separate channel…
— Al Viro
Enterprises
- Amazon’s Plan to Move in to Your Next Apartment Before You Do
The tech giant has figured out a way to get millions of its smart speakers into homes without consumers lifting a finger, as property managers bring in Alexa to manage tenants. - Amazon has exhibited offensive and aggressive behaviors toward open source
Cloud infrastructure providers — such as Amazon — continue to pose an existential threat to the future of open source. - Large number of Twitter accounts critical of China suspended
- Twitter takes down Chinese-language accounts ahead of Tiananmen anniversary
- The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual
- Tesla Model S caught fire while charging (Belgium)
- Google Local Pack Ad Label Feels Even More Subtle
- Google Is at the Center of a Storm Brewing over Big Tech
Support for scrutiny of the tech giants is coming from across the political spectrum. For Google and Amazon, any investigations would be a major distraction, or worse. - Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
Google has confirmed plans to restrict ad blockers, despite complaints. Hereâs what you need to know - Google’s Dominance Is No Longer a Sure Thing
- First Light – Bringing DOOM to Stadia
- Google Compute Engine Incident #19003
- Hollywood studios say they’re quitting Netflix, the truth is more complicated
- As was predicted, Uber’s IPO means you’ll be paying higher fares for your rides
Uber executives signaled that they’ll let fares rise to stem operating losses. - Stripe Introduces Chargeback Protection
With Chargeback Protection, Stripe will cover both the disputed amount and any dispute feesâno evidence submission required. - Google’s outage meant some Nest users couldn’t unlock doors or use the AC
The perils of a cloud-connected smart home.
- Open-Source `Great Satan’ No More, Microsoft Wins over Skeptics
- Google’s Gmail scans, parses, analyzes and catalogs your email
- Was This Google Executive Deeply Misinformed or Lying in The New York Times?
- Alphabet, Apple, Amazon and Facebook Are in the Crosshairs of the FTC and DOJ
A new deal between the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission will see U.S. regulators divide and conquer as they expand their oversight of Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook, according to multiple reports. New details have emerged of an agreement between the two U.S. regulators t⦠- GM and Fiat Chrysler Unmasked as Tesla’s Source of Cash
- Google Trips app to be discontinued on August 5
- What does it mean when a product is “Amazon’s Choice”?
It almost certainly doesn’t involve Amazon employees selecting products they think are the best. - Peloton Confidentially Files Statement for Proposed IPO
- Bloom – A free and open source ‘Google’
- PSPTool Is a Swiss Army Knife for the Firmware of the AMD Secure Processor
Display, extract, and manipulate PSP firmware inside UEFI images – cwerling/psptool - Amazon Unveils Futuristic Helicopter-Plane Hybrid Drone for Deliveries
- This week’s dead Google product is Google Trips
- Google to Acquire Looker
Google to acquire Looker, a unified platform for business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics. - DailyMail: fifty percent drop in traffic after Google update
- Google Stadia requires $130 upfront, $10 per month at November launch
- Amazon’s Satellite Project Will Cost Billions, Jeff Bezos Says
- Google rewards reputable reporting more than left-wing politics
- Twitter is rejecting posts containing JSFiddle URLs
Twitter is rejecting posts with JSFiddle URL inside. If a URL shortener is used the unsafe page warning is displayed[1] What is causing that?[2] [1] [2] We've tried to contact Twitter, but no a… - Microsoft deletes face recognition database
- Amazon’s Ring Is Putting Suspected Petty Thieves in Its Advertisements
- People with Greater Intellectual Humility Have Superior General Knowledge
by Christian Jarrett British Psychology Society edited by O Society May 26, 2019 In the era of social media and rolling news thereâs a constant pressure to be in the know, always on hand with an ap⦠- Google Walkout Organizer Claire Stapleton Resigns
Other news
- Communal Harm-Reduction Norms
- Behavioral Ad Targeting Not Paying Off for Publishers, Study Suggests
In one of the first empirical studies of the impacts of behaviorally targeted advertising on online publishers’ revenue, researchers at three universities suggest publishers only get about 4% more revenue for an ad impression that has a cookie enabled than for one that doesn’t. - World Economic Forum – Life Hacks from Marcus Aurelius: How Stoicism Can Help Us
The philosophy of Stoicism can help people reach a level of clear-headed thinking, says cognitive behavioral psychotherapist Donald Robertson. - Harvard Is an Embarrassment to American Higher Education
- Animated Knots: Learn how to tie knots with step-by-step animation
- The guy who made a tool to track women in porn videos is sorry
- Functional JavaScript: How to Use Array Reduce for More Than Just Numbers
The array reduce method is really powerful. But people often run into trouble as soon as they step beyond the basic examples. Simple things like addition and multiplication are fine. But as soon as you try it with something more complicated, it breaks. Using it with anything other than numbers starts to get really confusing. I think this is because the examples in most tutorials mask some of what’s going on. This article looks at some of the more interesting things you can do with .reduce() that better show how it works. - How to Build Your Own DDoS Protection with Linux and IPtables
The ultimate guide on DDoS protection with IPtables including the most effective anti-DDoS rules. Learn how to protect your Linux server with this in-depth research that doesn’t only cover IPtables rules, but also kernel settings to make your server resilient against small DDoS and DoS attacks. - What we think we know – but might not – pushes us to learn more
Findings challenge a popular belief that curiosity in general is the prime driver of learning - The shadow banks are back with another big bad credit bubble
- How breaking dress codes pays off
- Murders and disappearances of Indigenous women called a ‘Canadian genocide’
- Flux Capacity: Flux-Readings of Apple Computer Floppies
- A web server to teach Linux performance, with benchmarks
Articles in this series Part I. Iterative Servers Part II. Forking Servers Part III. Pre-forking Servers Part IV. Threaded Servers Part V. Pre-threaded Servers Part VI: poll-based server Part VII: epoll-based server Web apps are the staple of consumers and enterprises. Among the many existing protocols that are used to move and make sense of … - Meta-Learners – Learning how to learn
Active learning allows us to be smart about picking the right set of datapoints for which to create labels. Done properly, this approach results in models th… - Did capitalism hack the open-source model?
- Journalists claim North Korean official was “purged”, then he shows up on TV
- China Prepares to Drop Microsoft Windows, Blames U.S. Hacking Threat
Reports suggest that the latest casualty in the ever-expanding trade war between China and the United States could be Microsoft Windows as the Chinese prepare to drop the operating system like a hot brick… - Millennials find less meaning in their work, and are less satisfied with pay
- Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course Using R and Stan
Statistical Rethinking course at MPI-EVA from Dec 2018 through Feb 2019 – rmcelreath/statrethinking_winter2019 - Quantum Leaps, Long Assumed to Be Instantaneous, Take Time
- The DevOps Phenomenon: An executive crash course
- Epistemic Learned Helplessness
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a⦠- Software on Librem 5 and PinePhone Linux Phones Is Progressing Nicely
- Hack the Box – Pentesting Labs for Free
- Mosuo Women
- SoftBank could bring down the house?
- Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer
A few things I strongly believed when I was a junior developer which turned out to be wrong. - U.S. Cities Strain to Fight Hackers
Local governments are facing a growing threat of cyberattacks and escalating ransom demands, as an attack in Baltimore has crippled thousands of computers for a month. - GPT2, Counting Consciousness and the Curious Hacker
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