Tech roundup 25: a journal published by a bot

Gooooooood morning, Information highway!!! 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

• Speech2Face: Learning the Face Behind a Voice
  How much can we infer about a person’s looks from the way they speak? In this
  paper, we study the task of reconstructing a facial image of a person from a
  short audio recording of that person speaking. We design and train a deep
  neural network to perform this task using millions of natural Internet/YouTube
  videos of people speaking. During training, our model learns voice-face
  correlations that allow it to produce images that capture various physical
  attributes of the speakers such as age, gender and ethnicity. This is done in a
  self-supervised manner, by utilizing the natural co-occurrence of faces and
  speech in Internet videos, without the need to model attributes explicitly. We
  evaluate and numerically quantify how–and in what manner–our Speech2Face
  reconstructions, obtained directly from audio, resemble the true face images of
  the speakers.
• Dependabot Is Now Free and It’s Amazing
  Dependabot, a bot that upgrades software dependencies, was recently acquired by GitHub and is now offered free of charge. We tried it out and were thrilled.
• Alexa, what are you doing with kids’ data?
  A new CCFC investigation has revealed deeply troubling findings about Amazon’s Echo Dot Kids, including that Amazon keeps children’s data even after parents try to delete it. We’re calling on the FTC
• Robocrop: world’s first raspberry-picking robot set to work
• Chess-playing neural network LC0 beats Stockfish in 100-game match
• End-to-End Deep Reinforcement Learning Without Reward Engineering
• ‘A white-collar sweatshop’: Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft
• Deep learning can now prove half of what expert mathematicians can
• EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks
  Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) are commonly developed at a fixed
  resource budget, and then scaled up for better accuracy if more resources are
  available. In this paper, we systematically study model scaling and identify
  that carefully balancing network depth, width, and resolution can lead to
  better performance. Based on this observation, we propose a new scaling method
  that uniformly scales all dimensions of depth/width/resolution using a simple
  yet highly effective compound coefficient. We demonstrate the effectiveness of
  this method on scaling up MobileNets and ResNet.
  To go even further, we use neural architecture search to design a new
  baseline network and scale it up to obtain a family of models, called
  EfficientNets, which achieve much better accuracy and efficiency than previous
  ConvNets. In particular, our EfficientNet-B7 achieves state-of-the-art 84.4%
  top-1 / 97.1% top-5 accuracy on ImageNet, while being 8.4x smaller and 6.1x
  faster on inference than the best existing ConvNet. Our EfficientNets also
  transfer well and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR-100 (91.7%),
  Flowers (98.8%), and 3 other transfer learning datasets, with an order of
  magnitude fewer parameters. Source code is at
  https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/efficientnet.
• Found: Stolen Alexander Hamilton Letter to the Marquis de Lafayette
• ‘Robots’ Are Not ‘Coming for Your Job’–Management Is
• Implementing a Convolutional Neural Network Using Only NumPy

Blockchain and decentralization

• Much of reported cryptocurrency trading volume is likely fake
• Ohmm Mining: Turn Flared Natural Gas into Bitcoin
• Why Coinbase can’t provide millions of users with tax information
• 0x Launch Kit – Launch your own cryptocurrency exchange or marketplace
• Hedgehog Ethereum wallet: Build DApps like apps, without centralized keys
• Binance moves $1.26B worth of Bitcoin for just $124.60 in network fees
• Pilosa: An open source, distributed index
• Bitcoin’s Rally Masks Uncomfortable Fact: Almost Nobody Uses It
• Obsidian: A safer blockchain programming language

Cloud and architecture

• Arm announces its new premium CPU and GPU designs
  Arm, the company that designs the basic chip architecture for most of the world’s smartphones, today announced the launch of its next suite of designs for premium phones. It’ll be a while before you’ll see the first phones that use chips based on this design, but typically we see …
• Chinese developers fear the tech war will cost them access to GitHub
  Chinese developers fear the fallout from the tech war will cost them access to GitHub
• Cat and Cloud Coffee Told by Caterpillar Inc. To Stop Using “CAT” in Trademark
• Disrupted sleep patterns can lead to ‘deviant behaviour’, research suggests
• Why AWS access and secret keys should not be in the codebase
• Cloud Engineer Quilt, a Data Collaboration Platform for S3
• Examining the Transformer Architecture – Part 1: The OpenAI GPT 2 Controversy
  “Recycling is NOT good for the world. It is bad for the environment, it is bad for our health, and it is bad for our economy. I’m not kidding. Recycling is
• Implementing a New CPU Architecture for Ghidra
• Cloudflare CTO: “If we did what features would you like?”
• SaaS CTO Security Checklist
  Learn how to protect your SaaS applications with the SaaS CTO security checklist. Select your startup stage and use these rules to improve your application security, infrastructure security and more.
• Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless

Development and languages

• Why Computer Programmers Should Stop Calling Themselves Engineers
• What the Royal Astronomical Society in 1884 Tells Us About Python Today
  The plainly wrong behavior of a ubiquitous Python library echoes a British astronomical report from 1884.
• How Fragmented Is Android?
  Android is deeply deeply fragmented. The Android ecosystem is split between at least 1,728 combinations of OS – Brand – Device Model (Data).
• Refurbished Samsung Android Phones Sans Google Now Available
• Imgsquash – My image compression website project
  Simple image compression full website code written in node, react and next.js framework. Easy to deploy as a microservice. – eashish93/imgsquash
• InNative: Run WebAssembly Outside the Sandbox at 95% Native Speed
• Translating Math into Code with Examples in Java, Racket, Haskell and Python
• Ring: Advanced cache interface for Python
• Huawei’s Android Replacement OS Will Launch in June
• Zdog – Pseudo-3D JavaScript engine for Canvas and SVG
  Round, flat, designer-friendly pseudo-3D engine for canvas and SVG
• Python’s Caduceus Syndrome
• Microsoft hints at new modern Windows OS with ‘invisible’ background updates
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Search
  Search is a deceptively complex field, where competence is hard-won through training, practice, and experience. In that vein dear friends, I’ve exhumed the …
• PugSQL, a Python Port of HugSQL
  PugSQL is a Python library for interacting with your database the way the gods intended.
• A Type of Programming
• Wasmer – A Go library for executing WebAssembly binaries
• The Rust Programming Language Book
• Comicgen: Comic Creator
• jTools – a collection of JavaScript web components with MIT license
• Boden – Native mobile cross-platform applications
• Terminal – The New Windows Terminal
• Fallout: Reading Kernel Writes from User Space
• «DigitalOcean Killed Our Company»
  “How @DigitalOcean just killed our company @raisupcom. A long thread for a very sad story.”
• Faster Parallel Python Without Python Multiprocessing
• WebAssembly on the Server: How System Calls Work
• Rewriting the Slack Python SDK

Quote of the week

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Enterprises

• Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS Mitigation Costs on an Intel Dual Core and HT Laptop
• Twitter accounts are being hijacked for spam
  It seems that Twitter has lost control of its advertising system. This blog post will show you why it is dangerous to click on any Twitter advertising. Twitter ads have always been a bit crap, but …
• Intel Announces 8 Core I9-9900KS: Every Core at 5Ghz, All the Time
• Google’s New Manager Student Workbook
• Netflix Has 175 Days Left to Pull Off a Miracle
• CMC Cartonwrap box packing machine
• AMD Ryzen 3000 announced
• AMD Ryzen 9 3900X: 12C/24T chip will cost $499
• Microsoft, Brilliant team up to offer quantum curriculum
• AMD unveils the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, at half the price of Core i9 9920X
  AMD CEO Lisa Su gave the Computex keynote in Taipei today, the first time the company has been invited to do so (the event officially starts tomorrow). During the presentation, AMD unveiled news about its chips and graphics processors that will increase pressure on competitors Intel and Nvidia, bot…
• Ian Lance Taylor’s Response to “Go Is Google’s Language”
• Google revives controversial cold-fusion experiments
• Google’s Shadow Work Force: Temps Who Outnumber Full-Time Employees
  The tech company has long used contractors, but some employees worry that a growing reliance on them represents a shifting, less admirable work culture.
• Google Now Forces Edge Preview Users to Use Chrome for the Modern YouTube
  Users of Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge browser are now forced to use Chrome for the modern YouTube experience.
• Google emails in Adtrader lawsuit show company didn’t refund ad fraud
• Amazon Is Poised to Unleash a Long-Feared Purge of Small Suppliers
• Google’s Schmidt and Microsoft’s Nadella to Attend Secret Bilderberg Meeting
• How to set your Google account to delete itself after you die
• Google’s Chrome Becomes Web ‘Gatekeeper’ and Rivals Complain
• Striped maple trees often change sexes, with females more likely to die
• Google relents slightly on blocking ad-blockers for enterprise Chrome users
• Amazon defeated Rekognition revolt by a large margin
  Ballot to ban sales of Rekognition system to police attracted less than 3% of investors’ votes.
• Google to restrict modern ad blocking Chrome extensions to enterprise users
  In a response to negative feedback, Google shared that Chrome’s current ad blocking capabilities for extensions will soon be restricted to enterprise users.
• DRM enabled Google to have an open source browser still under its control
• Google bans apps that facilitate sale of marijuana
  Alphabet Inc’s Google on Wednesday banned apps on its app store that facili…
• The author of uBlock on Google Chrome’s proposal to cripple ad blockers
  Description This issue is a heads-up on the proposed Chrome extension manifest version 3, which will have a significant impact on ad-blockers. There is a tracking bug at: https://bugs.chromium.org/…
• Google – My Activity
• Google – My Location History
• My Infant Daughter’s Life Shouldn’t Be a Variable in Tesla Autopilot’s Beta
• Family Sues Tesla After Model X Accident
• Google kills its Twitch killer–the YouTube Gaming app shuts down this week
• Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
• Amazon interested in buying Boost from T-Mobile, Sprint: sources
  Amazon.com Inc is interested in buying prepaid cellphone wireless service Boost …
• Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) – Now Generally Available
• Google/Oracle’s $9B Copyright Case Could Be Headed for the Supreme Court
  The ‘copyright case of the decade’ is a $9 billion copyright infringement suit Oracle filed against the search giant, Google, nearly 10 years ago. Google is asking for the Supreme Court to hear the case. Will it happen?
• Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google
  The Justice Department is gearing up for an antitrust investigation of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, a move that could present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant.
• Google’s PageRank patent has expired

Other news

• Annette Kellerman – the modern swimmer for modern women
• Propofol-induced deep sedation reduces emotional episodic memory reconsolidation
  The adjustment of maladaptive thoughts and behaviors associated with emotional memories is central to treating psychiatric disorders. Recent research, predominantly with laboratory animals, indicates that memories can become temporarily sensitive to modification following reactivation, before undergoing reconsolidation. A method to selectively impair reconsolidation of specific emotional or traumatic memories in humans could translate to an effective treatment for conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder. We tested whether deep sedation could impair emotional memory reconsolidation in 50 human participants. Administering the intravenous anesthetic propofol following memory reactivation disrupted memory for the reactivated, but not for a non-reactivated, slideshow story. Propofol impaired memory for the reactivated story after 24 hours, but not immediately after propofol recovery. Critically, memory impairment occurred selectively for the emotionally negative phase of the reactivated story. One dose of propofol following memory reactivation selectively impaired subsequent emotional episodic memory retrieval in a time-dependent manner, consistent with reconsolidation impairment.
• What Can Prewar Germany Teach Us About Social-Media Regulation?
• Quantum information in quantum cognition
• Canva suffers security breach – hacker claims access to 139M accounts
• Things I Learnt from fast.ai v3
• Apple dismisses Google’s criticism over turning privacy into a ‘luxury good’
• What I Learned Trying to Secure Congressional Campaigns
• Women are happier without children or a spouse
• How I made sure all 12 of my kids could pay for college themselves
• The Irreducibility of the Primes Is a Manifestation of Hegelianism
• What are the differences between OpenBSD and Linux?
  Maybe you have been reading recently about the release of OpenBSD 6.5 and wonder, ‘What are the differences between Linux and OpenBSD?’ I’ve also been there at some point in the past and these are my conclusions. They also apply, to some extent,
• Chinese military to replace Windows OS amid fears of US hacking
• A Former People’s Liberation Army Journalist Describes the Tiananmen Sq Massacre
  A former People’s Liberation Army journalist defied a political taboo to describe the bloody crackdown in Beijing and urge a national reckoning.
• Saudi Arabia accused of hacking London-based dissident
• Buyer’s Remorse: High Debt and Low Pay Leave Some College Grads Rueful
• HiddenWasp Malware Stings Targeted Linux Systems
• I Don’t Want to Teach My Garbage DSL, Either
  A collection of my personal knowledge, and tools to manage it. – cf020031308/cf020031308.github.io
• Announcing the Unity Editor for Linux
• Generalized Additive Models in R – A free interactive course
• Use of male mice skews drug research against women, study finds
• Stanford’s full CS curriculum but for self-learners

Autor: Javi López G.

Arquitecto/desarrollador, creativo, buscador de nuevas soluciones y modelos de negocio, crítico constructivo y ex muchas cosas Lee todas las entradas de Javi López G.