Gooooooood morning, W3!!! 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
- Drowning in plastic: Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles
- When the A.I. Professor Leaves, Students Suffer, Study Says
- wehatecaptchas – we’ll keep the bots out without annoying your users
- Build Superhuman Reinforcement Learning in 10 Minutes
- Two California hikers found a family’s message in a bottle and helped save them
- The beauty of functional languages in deep learning – Clojure and Haskell
Functional languages such as Clojure and Haskell can often represent the complexity with cleaner code thatâs closer to the mathematics of the model. - Building a license plate reader from scratch with deep learning
- New York state wants both renewables and nukes
- A bot to stress test text-based MMORPGs (MUDs) written in Scala 3
A bot written in Scala 3 to stress test text-based MMORPGs (MUDs). – ryanberckmans/noric-bot - Request for Comments on Patenting Artificial Intelligence Inventions
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is interested in gathering information on patent-related issues regarding artificial intelligence inventions for purposes of evaluating whether further examination guidance is needed to promote the reliability and predictability of patenting…
Blockchain and decentralization
- What Happened to the Guys Who Invested Their Life Savings in Cryptocurrency?
It was the âsummer of crypto loveâ â private Telegram groups were ablaze with altcoin (every cryptocurrency alternative to Bitcoin) chatter, Bitcoin whales were breaching… - Hugo and IPFS: how this blog works (and scales to serve 5k% spikes instantly)
- 94k Bitcoin (1B USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
âð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ ð¨ 94,504 #BTC (1,018,147,922 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet
Tx: https://t.co/VWb8slswa8â
- Waltz: A Distributed Write-Ahead Log
- Load Handling vs. Data Integrity: Tradeoffs in Distributed Data Store Design
- Verifying smart contracts in Libra’s Move language
- The Blockchain-Based ‘Handshake’ Solution: An Answer to DNS Security Issues
Woman computer scientist of the week
Stephanie Seneff is a senior research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Working primarily in the Spoken Language Systems group, her research at CSAIL relates to human-computer interaction, and algorithms for language understanding and speech recognition. In 2011, she began publishing controversial papers in low-impact, open access journals on biology and medical topics; the articles have received «heated objections from experts in almost every field she’s delved into,» according to columnist Ari LeVaux.
Cloud and architecture
- I am stupefied every day by the awfulness of the AWS web console
- California bill will drive a national debate over how to reshape labor laws
A bill will drive a national debate over how to reshape labor laws so that workers get their fair share in a service and knowledge economy. - Cloudflare S-1/Amendment
Development and languages
- IEEE Spectrum: Top Programming Languages 2019
- Our journey to type checking 4M lines of Python
- How Steep Is That Sidewalk? A Digital Map for People with Disabilities
- Most programmers don’t know what Expect can do for them
- Some Strategies for Fast Lexical Analysis When Parsing Programming Languages
- Sunsetting Python 2
The official home of the Python Programming Language - Improving our homemade JavaScript obfuscator
- ProjectPSX – A C# coded emulator of the original Playstation
Experimental C# Playstation Emulator. Contribute to BluestormDNA/ProjectPSX development by creating an account on GitHub. - Running GitHub on Rails 6.0
On August 26, 2019, the GitHub application was deployed to production with 100% of traffic on the newest Rails version: 6.0. Read more about our process for upgrading, what we learned, and whatâs next. - Gitlab: Maturity
- Why Ada Is the Language You Want to Be Programming Your Systems With
The Ada programming language was born in the mid-1970s, when the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the UK’s Ministry Of Defence sought to replace the hundreds of specialized programming lang⦠- Metronomes in JavaScript
- Natural Language in Python Using SpaCy: An Introduction
- How I decide between many programming languages
- E.U.’S New Digital Czar: ‘Most Powerful Regulator of Big Tech on the Planet’
- The Drawbacks of Python
- A Million Digits of Pi in 9 Lines of JavaScript
- Digital Hearing Aids Turn the Whole World into a Giant MP3 File
- MathSharp, a vector and matrix library written in C# using hardware intrinsics
- Simple SFTP Hosting at Rsync.net
- Types for Python HTTP APIs
Quote of the week
i’ve wondered whether Linux sysfs should be called syphilis
— forsyth
Enterprises
- How Did a Nissan Leaf Beat a Tesla Model S in a Race?
The Nissan LEAF certainly doesn’t have a reputation as a serious performance car. With far less power than any Tesla, «semi-independent» rear suspension like you’d find under a Chevy Cavalier, and many similarities with the Versa, the LEAF is widely regarded as an economy car, not a luxury or sports car. It certainly isn’t seen as a real competitor to a Tesla, even an older Model S. - Why No One Is Beating Tesla’s Range
- Google’s Chrome Has My Dead Grandpa’s Data and He Never Used the Internet
- Lithium-ion test results to be used as benchmarks for new battery technologies
- Glibc sysdeps: dl_platform detection effectively performs “cripple AMD”
- Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech
- Tesla Model 3 = 12.4% of All Norwegian Vehicle Sales January–July 2019
California’s a huge market for Tesla, the Netherlands loves Tesla, Switzerland loves Tesla, but no state or country is as Tesla obsessed as Norway. - Wunderlist founder wants to buy his app back from Microsoft
Four years after selling his company to Microsoft, 6Wunderkinder cofounder Christian Reber wants to buy the product back from the software giant. - Tesla battery researcher unveils new cell that could last 1M miles
- Artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of war
A new type of arms race could be on the cards - Google Feedback on TypeScript 3.5
We recently upgraded Google to use TypeScript 3.5. Here is some feedback on the upgrade. (For background, recall that Google is a monorepo of billions of lines of code. We use a single version of T… - Google bans family cafe for offensive content for posting photo of British dish
- 50 U.S. states and territories announce broad antitrust investigation of Google
- Nearly Every State Is Launching an Antitrust Investigation of Google
- Amazon Employees Pledge to Walk Out as Part of Global Climate Strike
- Troubles Mount for the We Company as Softbank Reportedly Calls for Shelving IPO
- I Lost My $50k Twitter Username
- WeWork Bonds Drop Below Par for First Time Since IPO Filing
- The Amazon Is Not the Earth’s Lungs
- Runaway Story or Meltdown in Motion? The Unraveling of the WeWork IPO
- Stripe Corporate Card
Set custom spending controls, reconcile expenses automatically with software like Expensify, and earn extra cash back where you spend the most each month. - Michael Bloomberg launches $160M initiative to ban flavored e-cigarettes
The pledge follows investigations into deaths from an unknown lung illness linked to vaping. - Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences
- Google and Mayo Clinic will transform the future of healthcare
- Google collects face data now – what it means and how to opt out
- Why Teslas Aren’t the Future
- Rock Pi X Intel Cherry Trail Board
Most low cost (sub $100) single board computers are based on Arm processors because Intel processors are normally more expensive, but there are some - Google Maps shows sunken car where missing man’s body was found
William Moldt went missing in mysterious circumstances 22 years ago after a night out in Florida. - Google to pay $1B in France to settle fiscal fraud probe
Google agreed to pay close to 1 billion euros ($1.10 billion) to French authorit… - Elevating original reporting in Search
Google makes ranking changes to highlight original reporting. - WeWork considers IPO valuation of as low as $10B
WeWork owner The We Company may seek a valuation in its upcoming initial public … - Google account required to contribute to Google open-source
- When a hospital sling costs 900% more than at Amazon, something is very wrong
This is yet another example of in-your-face medical pricing that often reflects not what things really cost but what healthcare businesses think they can get away with.
Other news
- Apple Hints China Behind ‘Billion Device iPhone Hack’ That Google Reported
- Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics
- Here’s what I’ve learned about climate change and it’s terrifying
- The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno elites
- Julia Academy: Learn ML, Parallel Programming, Julia and More
- Large Waterloo student rental companies get hacked over shady business practices
- A report on Chinese digital surveillance and hacking of Uyghurs
- The Heir to a Tofu Dynasty Finally Learns to Make Tofu
- GCC eBPF for Linux port has landed
- Quantum Darwinism spotted in diamond spin
- Health system sues thousands of patients, seizes pay and puts liens on homes
Over six years, the public institution took people to court more than 36,000 times, an analysis finds. - Where Quantum Probability Comes From
- Khashoggi children have received houses in Saudi Arabia and monthly payments
- Xinjiang University President Tashpolat Tiyip Sentenced to Death in Secret Trial
- Hackers Hit Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a ‘SIM Swap.’ You’re at Risk, Too
Hackers have been targeting regular people and celebrities with the attack. Last week, it was used to hijack the Twitter account of Twitterâs C.E.O. - NY Payroll Company Vanishes with $35M
- SoftBank and WeWork Are as Bad as Each Other
- A $60k Patrol Boat and a Single Deck Gun Changed the Course of Korean War
- What wartime ‘munitionettes’ teach us about burnout
- The P-TECH program reboots vocational education
- New zine: HTTP: Learn your browser’s language
- ChocoPy: A Programming Language for Compilers Courses
- How to Pay Remote Workers
- Huawei Just Started Selling Laptops with a Beautiful Linux OS Pre-Installed
- If you have something important to say, it’s wrong to say in paywall publication
- Simjacker: SIM card flaw lets hackers hijack any phone by sending SMS
