Gooooooood morning, 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
- An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard’s… - UBC study links living near highways to risk of neurological disorders
Researchers at the University of B.C. have found a link between living near highways and an increased risk of several major neurological disorders, including dementia and Parkinson’s disease.… - Smorgasbords Don’t Have Bottoms: Publishing in the 2010s
- Glial brain cells, long in neurons’ shadow, reveal hidden powers
The glial cells of the nervous system have been eclipsed in importance by neurons for decades. But glia are turning out to be central to many neurological functions, including pain perception. - Using OpenAI Gym to train an open-source 3D printed robot
- Automating receipt processing with deep learning
In this article, I cover the theory behind receipt digitization and implement an end-to-end pipeline using OpenCV and Tesseract. I also review a few important papers that do Receipt Digitization using Deep Learning. - Machine Unlearning
- Debugger that generates video visualizations for algorithm learning
- Pcgrl: Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning
- There’s discussion in some Islamic circles that AI may be the antichrist Dajjaal
- Clearview AI Is Struggling to Address Complaints as Its Legal Issues Mount
One of Clearview AI’s investors defended the company, “We do not have to be hidden to be free.” - Thinc, a new deep learning library by the makers of spaCy and FastAPI
- Cartesio – Low-cost Cartesian plotter robot
- Pandas 1.0.0
- Both Hazard and Opportunity: On the Coromantees Enslaved in Jamaica
- Botanical illustration is becoming endangered
- Standardizing OpenAI’s deep learning framework on PyTorch
We are standardizing OpenAI’s deep learning framework on PyTorch. In the past, we implemented projects in many frameworks depending on their relative strengths. We’ve now chosen to standardize to make it easier for our team to create and share optimized implementations of our models. As part of this - An Opinionated Guide to Machine Learning Research
- Testing Boston Dynamics’ Spot Robot
Blockchain and decentralization
- Cryptocurrencies: They Will All Die
- Wikipedia Signpost: Crypto and bitcoins and blockchains, oh no!
- Bitcoin Gold hit by 51% attacks, $72K in cryptocurrency double-spent
- Cost of a 51% attack for different cryptocurrencies?
- What happens when a 96 Bitcoin ransom payment ends up on Bitfinex?
- Distributed SQL vs. NewSQL – What’s the Difference?
- A Proof of Useful Work for Artificial Intelligence on the Blockchain
- Dynein: Building an Open-Source Distributed Delayed Job Queueing System
- Dino: An open-source application for XMPP messaging
- Decentralize Messaging
Woman computer scientist of the week
Francine Berman is an American computer scientist, and a leader in digital data preservation and cyber-infrastructure. In 2009, she was the inaugural recipient of the IEEE/ACM-CS Ken Kennedy Award «for her influential leadership in the design, development and deployment of national-scale cyberinfrastructure, her inspiring work as a teacher and mentor, and her exemplary service to the high performance community». In 2004, Business Week called her the «reigning teraflop queen».
Cloud and architecture
- AWS Graviton2
- State of Independent SaaS
- SQLite Is Serverless
- FBI ‘persuaded Apple to halt iCloud encryption’
Apple was reportedly working on the encryption feature two years ago but the FBI objected. - AWS Security Documentation, by Category
- U.S. files lawsuits over robocall scams
The U.S. government on Tuesday sued five U.S. companies and three individuals, a… - Narrowing the gap between serverless and its state with storage functions
- F-35’s List of Flaws Includes a Gun That Can’t Shoot Straight
- State of SaaS Product Onboarding
- Sovereign: Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud
A set of Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud: email, calendar, contacts, file sync, IRC bouncer, VPN, and more. – sovereign/sovereign - Seamless offloading of web app computations from mobile device to edge clouds
- My Second Phone Is in the Cloud
Development and languages
- Dimensional Analysis in Programming Languages
A survey of existing designs and implementations for automatic conversion and verification of units of measurement in computer programs. - Linear Exeuction, Multiprocessing, and Multithreading IO-Bound Tasks in Python
- MSL: A New Programming Language for Text Editing and Fact Verification
- Unison: A Content-Addressable Programming Language
- Using Mixed Integer Programming to Assign Air Cargo to Flights
In a previous post we outlined the basics of supply and demand in the world of air freight forwarding, and described the difficult problem… - Gandi.net postmortem of the failure of one hosting storage unit on January 8
- LInQer – C# Integrated Queries ported to Javascript
The C# Language Integrated Queries ported for Javascript for amazing performance – Siderite/LInQer - Implementation of a Probabilistic Context Free Grammar Parser in JavaScript
- Microsoft urged: Open-source Windows 7 to ‘undo past wrongs’
- Some Useful Probability Facts for Systems Programming
- Alpine makes Python Docker builds 50× slower, and images 2× larger
- Best Python IDEs and Code Editors
- Interactive Periodic Table in JavaScript
- A Pythonista’s Review of Haskell
- The Odin Programming Language
- Python Stream Processing for Humans
- Research UNIX: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986
- Research UNIX: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986
Quote of the week
The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone.
— Oswald Chambers
Enterprises
- Intellectual Humility
- Threatbus: connect open-source threat intelligence tools
- GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence
- South American nations open fire on ICANN for ‘illegal’ sale of .amazon
- I built a website to better compare USB-C hubs found on Amazon
- Disk Prices on Amazon
- Ubuntu 20.04 drops Amazon web app
- Ubuntu Removes the Amazon Web App
- A Decade of London in Google Street View
- Why Are Alphabet Letters Arranged How They Are?
My three year old niece jumbled up the order of alphabets yet again while singing them. I giggled and corrected her but she wasn’t convinced. With a puzzled look, she asked me ‘Why?’ - US feds, states could join forces on Google probes: report
- Google App Maker Shutting Down
- An Update on Bradfitz: Leaving Google
- Google Sheets is down
- CacheOut: Leaking Data on Intel CPUs via Cache Evictions
- Grindr and OKCupid Sell Your Data, but Twitter’s MoPub Is the Real Problem
- Hundreds of workers defy Amazon rules to protest company’s climate failures
- Why We Terminated Our Partnership with Microsoft
- Microsoft Application Inspector
A source code analyzer built for surfacing features of interest and other characteristics to answer the question 'what's in it' using static analysis with a json based rules engine. Ide… - Ring doorbell ‘gives Facebook and Google user data’
The Ring app sends a range of personal information to marketing companies, a study suggests. - A vegan diet could affect your intelligence
The vegan diet is low in – or, in some cases, entirely devoid of – several important brain nutrients. Could these shortcomings be affecting vegans’ abilities to think? - Childlessness associated with the highest intelligence score
- Stadia owners on Reddit blasting Google over radio silence and lack of support
Stadia owners have taken to Reddit to voice their growing concerns over Google’s handling (or rather, lack thereof) of the game streaming platform. - Amazon appears to be tracking every tap on Kindle
- Tesla Financial Results 2019 Q4
- Google Data Search – 25M free datasets
- Some celebrities are ditching Twitter for Community
- Amazon soars after earnings beat
Amazon’s profits rebounded during the quarter, proving its investments in one-day delivery paid off. - Artificial intelligence-created medicine to be used on humans for first time
- Artificial Intelligence Will Do What We Ask
Other news
- A new twist on quantum communication in fiber
- R-cade, a simple arcade game engine for Racket
Retro Game Engine for Racket. Contribute to massung/r-cade development by creating an account on GitHub. - Technical Report of the Bezos Phone Hack
- Linux 5.5 to Offer Mainline Support for SGI’s Octane MIPS Workstations
- Pi Connects Colliding Blocks to a Quantum Search Algorithm
What do the digits of pi, colliding blocks and quantum search algorithms have in common? More than you might expect. Two playful papers, one from 2003 and one from December of 2019, provide… - Fusing Sklearn with the HL7 FHIR Standard
- Hacking on Clang is surprisingly easy
- To Build Truly Intelligent Machines, Teach Them Cause and Effect
- Hackers acting in Turkey’s interests believed to be behind recent cyberattacks
- ShellHub enables teams to easily access any Linux device behind firewall and NAT
- Binarysearch.io – Learn Algorithms Together
- Novel coronavirus complete genome from the Wuhan outbreak available in GenBank
- Sci-Hub users cost ASA journals thousands of downloads, and that’s OK
UPDATED to include Sci-Hub data from six months: September 2015–February 2016, and correcting a coding error that inflated download counts. Well, they might not have lost the downloads, but t… - My 2020 Hackintosh Hardware Spec
I built my last hackintosh in 2014 and it was overdue for an update. Since Apple recently updated their iMac with Core i9s and skipped the T2, this is probably the last time I’m building this… - Rocket League left behind on macOS and Linux due to DirectX 11 shift
- State Farm uses payment signature for HIPAA disclosure authorization
- The sad state of screen sharing on desktop Linux
- SEO lessons learned by writing a blog post every day for two years
- Banks to sell first post-crisis managed synthetic CDO
- An ultrafast microscope for the quantum world
- Facebook to Pay $550M to Settle Facial Recognition Suit
It was another black mark on the privacy record of the social network, which also reported its quarterly earnings. - Systemd-homed merged as a fundamental change to Linux home directories
- How we pay attention changes the shape of our brains
Imagine arriving at the airport just in time to catch a plane. Everything in your behavior betrays the heightened concentration of your attention. Your mind on alert, you look for the departures si… - OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall
OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall – evilsocket/opensnitch
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