Gooooooood morning, You all!!! 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
- The AI Index 2019 Report
- Jeff Dean interview: Machine learning trends in 2020
- Minecraft diamond challenge leaves AI creators stumped
Humans usually take minutes to learn how to find diamonds in the game, but AI agents struggled. - Neural Renderer and Differentiable Rendering
- Neural Renderer and Differentiable Rendering
- Google Assistant Can Now Translate Languages on Your Phone
Interpreter Mode comes to iOS and Android, making it easier to converse somewhat seamlessly across language barriers - AI expert calls for end to UK use of ‘racially biased’ algorithms
- BMW shares AI tools used in production
BMW has been implementing next-level production processes throughout its plants around the world for quite some time now. From robots carrying parts - I’m building a robot that performs haircuts
- Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a Dragon. Eat the Moon
- Keeping Top AI Talent in the United States
- The hardest aspect of learning English as a second language
- Lipid metabolic pathways converge in motor neuron degenerative diseases
- Simulated data: the great equalizer in the AI race?
- At Mayo Clinic, AI engineers face an ‘acid test’
- Bot Submissions to Comment Website Can’t Be Distinguished from Human Submissions
Blockchain and decentralization
- Bitcoin.com Lists Ponzi Token, Hex, to the Dismay of Bitcoin Fans
The Bitcoin.com exchange listed HEX, a controversial token with many signs of being a Ponzi scheme. Bitcoin Cash fans reacted negatively. - Anyscale, from the creators of the Ray distributed computing project, launches
Woman computer scientist of the week
Gillian Lovegrove is a retired computer scientist and academic. She was Dean of the School of Informatics at Northumbria University, president of the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing and was Higher Education consultant to the British Computer Society and manager of its Education and Training Forum. She is known for her interest in gender imbalance in computer education and employment, and her public discussion of possible solutions to a shortage of information technology graduates in the UK.
Cloud and architecture
- The Architecture of a Large-Scale Web Search Engine, Circa 2019
- AWS Re:Invent Presentations
- Revenue Contribution, Margin Analysis and Growth Rates of SaaS Companies
- Russia blocks Premier League broadcasts by Amazon’s Twitch over lawsuit
- How clouds impact environment
We are generating astounding amounts of data. Estimates show that the amount of data worldwide will increase by 60% per year, reaching 175 zettabytes by 2025, up from 33 in 2018. Roughly half of it will be stored in public clouds and the rest in other types of data centers. - 2020 Cloud Report: AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure
- Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud
The clock is ticking for Google Cloud.The Google unit, which sells computing services to big companies, is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoftâcurrently first and second, respectively, in cloud market shareâor risk losing funding. While the company has invested heavily … - BeyondProd: Google’s Cloud Native Security
- Google execs reportedly debated getting out of cloud computing
- Create Your Next SaaS App NOT from scratch with Python and ReactJS
- Red Hat Cloud Forms migrating to IBM Cloud Pak
- Multipass 1.0 – A mini-cloud on your Mac or Windows workstation
- Google Cloud Platform Security Best Practices
Development and languages
- Global Constraint Catalog – A Dictionary for Constraint Programming
- Challenging projects every programmer should try
- A tiny Python exception oddity
- Reaper: Digital Audio Workstation
- Donald Knuth Reflects on 50 Years of ‘The Art of Computer Programming‘
- Google to stop giving Android license for upcoming phones in Turkey over fine
- WebAssembly becomes a W3C Recommendation
- Things every programmer should know
- Writing JavaScript with Only Six Characters
- Thoughts on Forth Programming
- Logitech MX Master 3 vs. 2S Teardown
- Pythonic News – HN Clone
- JavaScript Adaption of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
- Make CPython segfault in 5 lines of code
- No Code CI for Android
- State of JavaScript 2019
- Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client
In October 2019, my company SP Digital held an internal hackathon. My colleague Subhransu and I worked on a whacky idea of writing a brand-new Windows 3.1 app which was an OS released almost 30 years ago. The idea we chose was a Slack client. After all, Slack clients exist for most platforms but I’m - Using Python and OCaml in the same Jupyter notebook
The cover image is based on Jupiter family by NASA/JPL. - How to Make Python Wait
- GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool
Free developer conferences for everyone - Facebook is building an operating system so it can ditch Android
- JavaScript Cryptography Considered Harmful
- The Fundamental Problem in Python 3
- A guide to OCR with Tesseract, OpenCV and Python
- Tesseract.js: Pure JavaScript OCR for 100 Languages
- Alienated, Alone and Angry: What the Digital Revolution Did to Us
We were promised community, civics, and convenience. Instead, we found ourselves dislocated, distrustful, and disengaged. - Use GitHub actions at your own risk
Malicious code can be inserted into any GitHub action, even those which are tagged. - Visual Studio Code repository is open again
Quote of the week
Unix is simple. It just takes a genius to understand its simplicity.
— Dennis Ritchie
Enterprises
- Tuv sees black for Tesla: Cybertruck would not get approval in Europe
- FBI breaks up 2 illegal streaming sites with more subscribers than Netflix
- Amazon Blocks Sellers from Using FedEx Ground for Prime Shipments
- Amazon is now delivering half its own packages, rivaling FedEx and UPS
- Bloomberg fined $5.6M for publishing fake press release
Bloomberg LP was fined 5 million euros ($5.6 million) in France following the publication of information from what turned out to be a fake press release that made Vinci SA shares tumble three years ago. - France’s AMF watchdog fines Bloomberg €5M over Vinci hoax
- Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize
“I was doing nothing more than notifying my co-workers about Google’s obligations under labor law,” Kathryn Spiers, the former Google engineer, said. - Is Twitter Down in Europe?
- You might literally be buying trash on Amazon
Dumpster divers say it’s easy to list discarded toys, electronics and books on the retailer’s platform, where just about anyone can set up shop. So we decided to try. - Dave Clark, The Man Who Built Amazon’s Delivery Machine
- Reject Google Nest or Amazon Ring Corp Surveillance and a Dystopic Future
- The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained
- Google claims copyright on employee side projects
“Since we’re talking about Google being less than nice towards its workers, here’s a fun little story from my days there. There were two things that I really didn’t like about Google at the time: The Google+ saga (realnames et al), and the IP ownership policy.” - Google’s Dangerous Monopoly-Based Foreign Policy
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write about Google’s exceptionally dangerous decision yesterday to de facto cut off Turkey’s access to Android phones. - Google’s Monopoly-Based Foreign Policy
- Apple, Amazon, Google, Zigbee to Develop Open Standard for Smart Home Devices
Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote a new connectivity standard. - Labor board rolls back employee email rights after Google recommendation
- A Tesla Valve
- The Amazon Premium
- Where Are the Tech Zillionaires? San Francisco Faces the IPO Fizzle
- Google Reader Killed RSS
- Microsoft’s Ready to Contribute to OpenJDK
- Severed fibre cables disrupted internet access in eastern Europe, Iran, Turkey
The tech giant’s services were among those temporarily unavailable in eastern Europe on Thursday. - SpaceX Is Lobbying Against Amazon’s Internet-Beaming Satellites
- Real-Time music recommendations for new users with Amazon SageMaker
- Developer gets offended by Santa emoticon, Microsoft replaces with snowflake
- Nitter: Alternative Twitter Front-End
Alternative Twitter front-end. Contribute to zedeus/nitter development by creating an account on GitHub.
Other news
- What Happens After Prisoners Learn to Code?
Slack, one of Silicon Valley’s more diverse companies, has hired three formerly incarcerated coders. - Crux as General-Purpose Database
- Heat energy leaps through empty space, thanks to quantum weirdness
- Hacking on a VR desktop inside of a VR desktop
- What I Learned about Style and Writing from Watching Bruce Lee
- Clever crows have learnt how to make a meal of cane toads
- Linux Toolbox
- Dissecting Linux Kernel Code
- Supremacy is for racists – use ‘quantum advantage’
- Today is Esperanto Book Day – here’s why I learned it
- Quadriga: Lawyers for users of bankrupt crypto firm seek exhumation of founder
Lawyers for Quadriga users say there are «questionable circumstances» behind Gerald Cotten’s death. - Inexact Models Can Guide Decision Making in Quantitative Systems Pharmacology
- JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised
- Build APKs on Android devices with Termux
- Highest Paying Tech Companies of 2019
- N.J.’S Largest Hospital System Pays Up in Ransomware Attack
- Visa warns that hackers are scraping card details from gas pumps
Visa warns of malware at gas pumps that could scrape your credit card data. - Lisp Macros by Example
- Hacking GitHub’s Auth with Unicode’s Turkish Dotless ‘I’
From combining emoji marks and astral planes, Unicode is under appreciated and poorly understood. One lesser known attack vector is Unicode Case Mapping Collisions— an edge case that many of the best devs don’t understand— even at Github. - Linux 4.6 introduced unpriviledged user namespaces
- Ransomware Gangs Now Outing Victim Businesses That Don’t Pay Up
- What does your car know about you? We hacked a Chevy to find out
- Hackers ‘looking to weaponize Facebook Ad Manager’ via trojan in PDF reader
- LifeLabs pays ransom after data breach affecting up to 15M Canadians
- University Issues Passwords by Hand to 38K Students and Staff After Cyber Attack
- SoftBank Vision Fund Employees Depict a Culture of Recklessness
- German university issues 38k passwords by hand after malware infection
- Teachers Pay High Fees for Retirement Funds. Unions Are Partly to Blame
- The Fed Will Lend $2.93T to Wall Street Banks over the Next Month
- Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who invented the art of hunting hackers
Thirty years ago, Cliff Stoll published The Cuckoo’s Egg, a book about his cat-and-mouse game with a KGB-sponsored hacker. Today, the internet is a far darker place—and Stoll has become a cybersecurity icon. - Tars: Tencent’s microservice RPC framework, open-sourced to Linux Foundation
- Quantum Dominance, Hegemony, and Superiority
- Teaching College-Level Mathematics in Prisons
- University Drops ‘Freedom of Thought’ from Charter
- Anki, Jibo, and Kuri: What We Can Learn from Social Robots That Didn’t Make It
- SmugMug emails subscribers with request to find more paying users
- On Linux’s Random Number Generation
- Study may explain how infections reduce autism symptoms
An immune molecule sometimes produced during infection can influence the social behavior of mice. - ‘Spiderman’ Hacker Daniel Kaye Took Down Liberia’s Internet
- What if debit cards could pay for purchases by selling securities?
- Linux is now a viable OS for PC gamers, thanks to Steam’s Proton initiative
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