Gooooooood morning, Public!!! 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
- In Aging Singapore, 65-Year-Olds Are Learning How to Code
- The ‘last Botticelli’?
- Machine-learning Mendeleevs have rediscovered the periodic table
- Neural Modules (NeMo): A toolkit for conversational AI
Neural Modules: a toolkit for conversational AI. Contribute to NVIDIA/NeMo development by creating an account on GitHub. - Attention Mechanism in Deep Learning
What is Attention, and why is it used in state-of-the-art models? This article discusses the types of Attention and walks you through their implementations. - Comprehensive Guide on Data Visualization with Pandas
- Bottled Water Is Sucking Florida Dry
The state’s aquifers are shrinking, yet corporations want to appropriate even more of them. - Researchers build microscopic biohybrid robots propelled by muscles, nerves
- Malware botnet Emotet awakes and resumes its global spamming campaign
- Open sourcing crypto-arbitrage bot in Python – back to the dawn of crypto hype
- A neural network to auto-complete your thoughts
- Language Both Enraptures and Deceives Us
- Project Ihmehimmeli: Temporal Coding in Spiking Neural Networks
- Havana syndrome: Exposure to neurotoxin may have been cause, study suggests
- AI competitions don’t produce useful models
- The BeagleBone AI is Available
- Machine Learning, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies
- Bots Help Moderate Stack Overflow
Blockchain and decentralization
- Announcing Yugabyte DB 2.0 GA: Jepsen Tested, High-Performance Distributed SQL
- Tildamail – Private Email with Decentralized Storage (Your Desktop, S3, IPFS)
Woman computer scientist of the week
Radhika Nagpal is an American computer scientist and researcher in the fields of self-organising computer systems, biologically-inspired robotics, and biological multi-agent systems. She is the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University and the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She is also a Core Faculty Member of the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. In 2017, Nagpal co-founded a robotics company under the name of Root Robotics. This educational company works to create many different opportunities for those unable to code to learn how.
Cloud and architecture
- Modern Applications at AWS
- Understanding Data Transfer in AWS (infographic)
- AWS Fargate Deep Dive: What it is, when to use it
- For every retweet this gets, I will add an Uncomfortable AWS Truth to the thread
âFor every retweet this gets, I will add an Uncomfortable @awscloud Truth to the thread.â - Purdue Pharma Files for Bankruptcy to Wipe Out 2k Lawsuits
- United States Files Civil Lawsuit Against Edward Snowden
- US Files Lawsuit Against Edward Snowden for Violation of CIA and NSA NDAs
The United States today filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), who published a book entitled Permanent Record in violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed with both CIA and NSA. - Software Architecture Is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design Is Underrated
- Interpreting Rope Channels: The Birth of Greek Monumental Architecture
- Dust cloud sparked explosion in primitive life on Earth, say scientists
- The C4 model for visualising software architecture
Development and languages
- Z – A dynamic functional programming language that compiles to JavaScript
- Maintaining the Kernel’s Web of Trust
- “DataGlyph” Embedded Digital Data
- AndOTP: Open-source two-factor authentication for Android
- How two dead accounts allowed remote crash of any Instagram Android user
- Schism, a self-hosting Scheme to WebAssembly compiler
- Emulating a PlayStation 1 (PSX) Entirely with C# and .NET
- Statistical tool for analyzing a Git repository
- Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Planned 2020 IPO
GitLab’s CEO says he’s going public on November 18, 2020. Investors love it, pouring in $268 million at a $2.75 billion valuation. - Pain Points of Web Development with WordPress
- Create and apply simple filters to an image using OpenCV and Python
- Python Tests That Write Themselves
- Git Blame-Someone-Else
- The cost of parsing JSON
- Welcoming Semmle to the GitHub Family
Today weâre announcing a big step in securing the open source supply chain: weâre welcoming Semmle to the GitHub family. - Python Is Eating the World
Frustrated by programming language shortcomings, Guido van Rossum created Python. With the language now used by millions, Nick Heath talks to van Rossum about Python’s past and explores what’s next. - Requests moved to Python Software Foundation
- The Pragmatic Programmer, 20th Anniversary Edition
- Wikipedia’s JavaScript Initialisation on a Budget
- Why I Prefer Functional Programming
- Working with GitHub Actions
- Game Programming Vexations Part 4: High Level vs. Low Level
- Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python
- Cascadia Code, a Font for Windows Terminal and VSCode
- French high court rules that Steam can’t ban users from reselling digital games
- Common Systems Programming Optimizations and Tricks
- Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah
Quote of the week
We have persistant(sic) objects, they’re called files.
— Ken Thompson
Enterprises
- Shopify Overtakes eBay as Second Biggest Shopping Site After Amazon
And the shopping platform has plans to take on Amazon next. - Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech
- Tesla’s a Game Changer When It Comes to Windshield Wipers
- Leak of Microsoft Salaries Shows Fight for Higher Compensation
- Google ML/AI Comic
- The Amazon Rain Forest Is Nearly Gone. We Went There to See for Ourselves.
- Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products
The e-commerce giant overcame internal dissent from engineers and lawyers, people familiar with the move say. - Netflix acquires the global streaming rights to ‘Seinfeld’
- What the Ctenophore says about the evolution of intelligence
- Anti-intellectualism in American Life
- WeWork parent pulls IPO following pushback: sources
WeWork owner The We Company has postponed its initial public offering (IPO), wal… - Google Fi Unlimited Plan
- Smart TVs sending sensitive user data to Netflix and Facebook
- How China Unleashed Twitter Trolls to Discredit Hong Kong’s Protesters
- Microsoft AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles
Open source simulator for autonomous vehicles built on Unreal Engine / Unity, from Microsoft AI & Research – microsoft/AirSim - Andrew Mason’s Descript raises $15M and acquires Lyrebird
- Cisco offered DataDog more than $7B before IPO
- 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week
While New Yorkers repelled the ecommerce giant’s expansion plans, job applications are flying in from other places - Tesla earns its first-ever safety award from IIHS for Model 3
- Huawei Mate 30 phones launch without Google apps
- Amazon Signs Climate Pledge to Advance Paris Climate Accords Goals by 10 Years
- Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian
Amazon will be stepping up its efforts to reduce its climate impact, CEO Jeff Bezos announced on Thursday. The company will be ordering 100,000 electric delivery trucks from Michigan’s Rivian as part of this commitment, Bezos said. The commerce giant will seek to meet its goal of becoming car⦠- Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B
Stripe’s latest funding round values the company at $35 billion, putting the financial technology firm above Airbnb and Palantir. - Google Wing Launching US Drone Deliveries with FedEx, Walgreens
- Hard Times in Silicon Valley? Not for the Payments Startup Stripe
- Twitter discloses 10k accounts suspended for fomenting political discord
- Edward Snowden says he didn’t cooperate with Russian intelligence services
- Google announces €3B EU data centre investment
Sundar Pichai has said Google plans to invest 3 billion euros (£2.6 billion) to expand its data centres across Europe in the next two years. - Google is investing $3.3B to build clean data centers in Europe
Google announced today that it was investing â¬3 billion (approximately US$3.3 billion) to expand its data center presence in Europe. What’s more, the company pledged the data centers would be environmentally friendly. This new investment is in addition to the $7 billion the company has invest⦠- How the “grassroots” campaign against Amazon is funded by its rivals
Walmart, Oracle and mall owner Simon Property Group are secret funders behind a nonprofit that has been highly critical of the e-commerce giant. - AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel
Other news
- How kiteboarding was invented
- Ransomware hackers are targeting managed service providers for local governments
- Linux Kernel Fastboot
- How do wombats make cubed poo?
- PineTime Is a $25 Smartwatch / Companion for PinePhone Linux Phone
We’ve recently seen Linux smartphones are coming in a few weeks or months, but the $150 PinePhone may not come alone, and soon be joined by a $25 - Australia concluded China was behind hack on parliament, political parties
- An important quantum algorithm may be a property of nature
Evidence that quantum searches are an ordinary feature of electron behavior may explain the genetic code, one of the greatest puzzles in biology. - Women make up 54% of new students entering Iranian universities
- A small programming course for everyone
- Crash course into Elm, and how to compare it with React
A complete guide on how to use Elm with React: If you’ve ever worked with Redux â in the context of a React application or not â you may have heard numerous times that it was inspired not only by Flux (which it followed) but also by the Elm architecture…. - Banks Warm to Mortgage Bonds That Burned Them in 2008
- Linux Kernel 5.3 Released
Now that Linux kernel 5.3 is officially released we take a quick look at the new and notable changes this kernel update brings.
Linux 5.3 was announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing L… - Linux Kernel 5.3
- Square Wants to Be a Bank but Doesn’t Want to Be Taxed Like One
Square has lent billions to small businesses and consumers and applied for a banking license, but it says it isn’t a financial company. - A basement hacker transformed Donkey Kong for the Atari 2600
Garry Kitchen’s unlikely story is told in this excerpt from the book Arcade Perfect. - Brain may not need body movements to learn virtual spaces
- Banks, Arbitrary Password Restrictions and Why They Don’t Matter
- Study suggest Neolithic Britons processed raw milk to reduce its lactose content
- GoCardless launches US debit payments solution
- IBM will soon launch a 53-qubit quantum computer
- Our Journey to the First Paying Customer
- Linux Terminal Goods
- Advanced hackers are infecting IT providers in hopes of hitting their customers
- Team closes in on “holy grail” of room temperature quantum computing chips
- The Mysterious Death of the Hacker Who Turned in Chelsea Manning
- Kiss – A Linux distribution with a focus on “less is more”
- EasyOS: An experimental Linux distribution designed from scratch for containers
- Scotland’s minimum unit pricing may have reduced Glasgow drinking deaths
Minimum unit pricing may have contributed to the number of alcohol-related deaths in Glasgow falling by more than a fifth, according to new research. - What’s new in civic tech: National Day of Civic Hacking
