Gooooooood morning, Rank and file!!! 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
- Relearning to Type
- Deep Learning with PyTorch: A 60 Minute Blitz
- Californians Learning That Solar Panels Don’t Work in Blackouts
- Learning Wi-Fi Connection Loss Predictions for Seamless Handovers
- Association of Neurocognitive and Physical Function with Gait Speed in Midlife
- Learning to Simulate
- Solving the Rubik’s cube with a robot hand
- One Way to Keep the Sidewalk Clear: Remote-Controlled Scooter-Bots
- The Pioneering Maps of Alexander von Humboldt
- Scientists pinpoint neural activity’s role in human longevity
- AI Detects Heart Failure from One Heartbeat: Study
- TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free
Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise. - Cortex: Deploy machine learning models in production
- Machine learning in UK financial services
- Mathematics for Machine Learning
- Builders Ditch Nest After Google Ties Devices to Digital Assistant
- Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy
Blockchain and decentralization
- SEC blocks the Telegram ICO – what this means, and what happens now
Telegram’s whole scheme was to skin precisely the retail buyers who securities registration is meant to protect from being ripped off. - The boy behind the biggest coin-op conversion of the 80s
- Coinexchange.io is closing down on 01Dec2019
- LegoOS: A Disseminated, Distributed Operating System
- US Law Enforcement Traces Bitcoin Transfers to Nab ‘Largest’ Child Porn Site
- Bitcoin uses 625kWh of power and 95g of e-waste per transaction
The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index provides the latest estimate of the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network. - The Fallacy That Is Cryptocurrency
- Catalan separatists have tooled up with decentralized app for civil disobedience
Is our age of ubiquitous smartphones and social media turning into an era of mass civil unrest? Two years after holding an independence referendum and unilaterally declaring independence in defiance of the Spanish state — then failing to gain recognition for la república and being forced to w…
Woman computer scientist of the week
Carla Schlatter Ellis is an American computer scientist and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. She is known for her work in energy management on mobile devices as well as for her dedication to increasing the number of women in the field of computer science. She is one of the founding members of Systers, an international email list of female computer scientists that was founded in 1987. Systers, which was initiated by Ellis and 12 other female computer scientists who met at a Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), has since grown to over 3000 members.
Cloud and architecture
- Cassandra as a Service on AWS/GCP
- Shareable Jupyter Notebooks That Run on Free Cloud GPUs
- A father knitted his baby’s first year of sleep pattern data into a blanket
- I stopped setting a financial goal for my SaaS
Money can be only a short-term motivation / Make it “better” rather than “bigger” / Figuring out “enough” / Life is one shot - NASA engineer’s ‘helical engine’ may violate the laws of physics
- AWS’ Sponsorship of the Rust Project
We’re really excited to announce that AWS is sponsoring the Rust programming language! Rust is designed for writing and maintaining fast, reliable, and efficient code. It has seen considerable uptake since its first stable release four years ago, with companies like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla all using Rust. Rust has also seen lots of growth […] - AWS’ Sponsorship of the Rust Project
- Policy_sentry, an AWS IAM Least Privilege Policy Generator
- The A2 motorway no longer divides Maastricht
Not too long ago the A2 motorway split the city of Maastricht in two. The internationally important road connection cut off the east of the city from the centre. The space where the road once was i… - Docker containers in space
- Booste – a cloud-hosted desktop for developers
Development and languages
- Tracking PG&E outages by scraping to a Git repo
- Python is not a great programming language
Python Is Not A Great Programming Language. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets. - Object-Oriented Programming and Essential State
- Notice of Retraction due to a programming error
- Solving the Megaron Cube with Python
- The state of Android updates is still dire
- JavaScript Image Compress Using HTML5 Canvas and File API Before Upload
- Watt: A runtime for executing Rust procedural macros compiled as WebAssembly
- GitHub is going after the software security market
- What’s New in Python 3.8
- macOS windows-switcher (Windows 10 style)
- .NET Core 3.0 Concludes the .NET Framework API Porting Project
We started in .NET Core 1.0 with a very minimal API set that only included ~18K of the .NET Framework APIs. With .NET Standard 2.0, we tried to make it much more viable to share code between .NET F… - Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor
- Raising severity to serious for some Python 2 leaf packages with no Python 3
- My 2019 Mathematics a to Z: Linear Programming
- A tool to make all data more useful
- Let’s Write an LLVM Specializer for Python
- Change Python code while it’s running using a reloading loop
- Gitlab: don’t discuss politics at work
Code-hosting biz also bans staff from talking politics at work - Why Isn’t Functional Programming the Norm?
- The Wayback Machine: Fighting Digital Extinction in New Ways
Quote of the week
Incorrect documentation is often worse than no documentation.
— Bertrand Meyer
Enterprises
- The end of uBlock origin for Google chrome
- Amazon stops charitable donations via Amazon Smile if you turn off notifications
- Counterfeit books “shipped and sold by Amazon”?
“Please share this as widely as possible. Why should we have to police Amazon? This problem is ongoing since 2017. These counterfeits are shipped and sold by AMAZON, NOT A THIRD PARTY. This is not Marketplace. https://t.co/QSP65CWJ7O” - My Google account got suspended because of NewPipe
My Google account got suspended yesterday, I was like what the heck is going on. First I got an email from Google saying that I was using 3rd party app outside of Play Store to go around Youtube ad… - Tesla’s Autopilot Could Save Millions, but It Will Kill Some People First
- Flash Memory Wear Killing Older Tesla’s Due to Excessive Data Logging: Report
- Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database
Over my 17 years at Amazon, I have seen that my colleagues on the engineering team are never content to leave good-enough alone. They routinely re-evaluate every internal system to make sure that it is as scalable, efficient, performant, and secure as possible. When they find an avenue for improvement, they will use what they […] - Google Announces Nest WiFi
- Twitter says it will restrict retweeting world leaders who break rules
Twitter said it will restrict how users can interact with tweets from world leaders who break its rules. The social media giant said it will not allow users to like, reply, share or retweet the offending tweets, but instead will let users quote-tweet to allow ordinary users to express their opinion… - Amazon sells a kit for a 2600 sqft house
- Open-source apps removed from Google Play Store due to donation links
- AndOTP Removed from the Google Play Store Due to Donation Link
- Extinction Rebellion Blockade Google HQ
- Improving Form Controls in Microsoft Edge and Chromium
- Jacobian/notamazon: Turns out The Everything Store is kinda full of crap
- Google and Ambient Computing
Google presented a vision of ambient computing that goes beyond the smartphone. The company is well-placed, but faces challenges both in the marketplace and in the mirror. - Amazon Has Transformed the Hasidic Economy
Amazon has become a lucrative place to do business for many Hasidic Jews, offering anonymity to a largely insular community and allowing women to work from home. - Microsoft launches new open-source projects around Kubernetes and microservices
Microsoft today announced two new open-source projects: Dapr, a portable, event-driven runtime that takes some of the complexity out of building microservices, and the Open Application Model (OAM), a specification that allows developers to define the resources their applications need to run on Kube… - AMD Lists Threadripper 3000 CPU with 32 Cores, Possible New Socket
- Google exec: Nest owners should warn guests that conversations are recorded
Google devices chief Rick Osterloh said he believes anyone «in proximity» of a microphone-fitted smart device like Google Nest or Amazon Echo should be informed the devices are in use. - Google chief: I’d disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home
- Intel Shooting Star Drones
- The outcry over deaths on Amazon’s warehouse floor
- Microsoft’s visual data explorer SandDance open sourced
Microsoft just open sourced their data exploration tool known as SandDance: For those unfamiliar with SandDance, it was introduced nearly four years ago as a system for exploring and presenting dat… - Mac Pro Puts the Pedal to Metal in Apple’s Race with Nvidia
The new Mac Pro is a long-anticipated development for Apple’s high end pro users, but it sure looks as if the company also created the machine for its own strategic benefit — specifically to help make its Metal API become a dominant standard for GPU-intensive software. That could have big implications for Macs, iOS devices, and Apple GPUs going forward, with history providing some insight into why this matters. - Alphabet’s Wing begins making commercial drone deliveries in the US
Alphabet -owned drone delivery spin-out Wing is starting to service U.S. customers, after becoming the first drone delivery company to get the federal go-ahead to do so earlier this year. Wing is working with FedEx Express and Walgreens on this pilot, and their first customers are Michael and Kelly…
Other news
- The Profitability Challenge for Challenger Banks
- Relativistic Quantum Chemistry
- Monolinux – A tiny embedded Linux distro
- How to make Linux run fast again on Intel CPUs
- Lessons Learned from Building an AI Writing App
- SoftBank Seeking to Take Control of WeWork Through Financing Package
- In praise of dissenters: It pays to encourage a variety of opinions
- Facebook to Pay $40M Under Proposed Settlement in Video Metrics Suit
- Peter Ratcliffe’s Nobel Prize Winning Study Was Rejected by Journal
- Building China’s Comac C919 airplane involved a lot of hacking, report says
One of China’s most brazen hacking sprees involved intelligence officers, hackers, security researchers, and company insiders. - YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos
- Learn How to Raise a Seed Round
- Lambda School is SV big bet on reinventing education but students say is a cult
- I created the same app with React and Redux. Here’s the differences
- Kparc/kcc: k crash course
- Sears Hasn’t Fared Better After Bankruptcy as Another 100 Stores Will Soon Close
Sears’s bankruptcy filing was supposed to give the troubled retailer a fresh start. But a year later, the chain is still struggling with many of the same problems it faced before it sought court protection. - What IBM Pays H-1B Software Engineers and Developers
- Teaching Ethics in Appalachia Taught Me About Bridging America’s Partisan Divide
There’s a language for talking about hot-button issues. And we’re not learning it. - Common Voice – Mozilla’s initiative to help teach machines how real people speak
- In 2019, multiple open source companies changed course
- DoNoPay calls for you to get a human on the line quickly
- Mozilla’s initiative to help teach machines how real people speak
- Remove my password from lists so hackers won’t be able to hack me
- Revisiting the BlackHat Hack: How a Security Conference Was Pwned
Does anyone remember the Black Hat BCard hack in 2018? This hack has been documented extensively, most notoriously by [NinjaStyle] in his original blog post revealing the circumstances around disco…
