Gooooooood morning, Readers!!! 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
- Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning
- 311 years ago, Alexander Selkirk was rescued on a desert island
- Leila Janah, CEO and entrepreneur who wanted to end global poverty, dies at 37
- Game AI Pro
- Collected Papers of Alexander A. Stepanov
- Reconfigurable Robot Can Climb Up Its Own Track
- Using neural networks to upscale a famous 1896 video to 4k quality
- Yann LeCun on Causality and Explainability in AI
- Technology where one robot helps another robot
- SurfingAttack: New Attack on Voice Assistants Using Ultrasonic Guided Wave
- The AI delusion: why humans trump machines
- Building an open-source language-learning platform
Blockchain and decentralization
- Deadcoins
- Gini coefficient – a measure of wealth distribution
- What Is Bitcoin: Internet’s Native Money or Asset for Speculation?
- YaCy: Decentralized Web Search
- The world’s first Bitcoin-settled index futures
Woman computer scientist of the week
Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon is an American computer scientist, professor, and champion aerobatic pilot who is best known as the co-inventor of the treap data structure, a type of binary search tree that orders nodes by adding a priority as well as a key to each node. She is also known for her work in data-intensive science and visual analytics of very large data sets, for which she received the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Cloud and architecture
- Artists who paint with their feet have unique brain patterns
- I made a site that helps you find LGBT+ Travel Rankings and Gay Laws
- Architect of His Own Downfall
- Cronyo – A simple CLI to manage your cron jobs on AWS
- C# Pattern Matching
Learn about pattern matching expressions in C# - Crema Coffee in San Jose Closes Due to ADA Lawsuit
- Peerd: an AWS VPC peering connection management tool
- The T2D3 Path to SaaS Growth and $1B Valuation
- Alphabet earnings show Google Cloud on $10B run rate
- Lessons from growing a SaaS from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic
Want to learn how to grow your blog from 0 to 200K monthly visitors in under 2 years? Check out our SEO case study on helping Tallyfy. - Dynamic Route53 records for AWS auto scaling groups with Terraform
Development and languages
- Bumblebees may prefer nectar that has less sugar but is easier to regurgitate
- Wenyan-lang: Classical Chinese Programming Language
- Rule of Three (Computer Programming)
- Challenging the myth of individual programmer productivity
- Branch Prediction – Fundamentals Every Programmer Need Not Know
A walk-through of Branch Prediction - New Intel Microcodes for Windows 10 Released to Fix CPU Bugs
- Expanding the Attack Surface: React Native Android Applications
- Exploit custom codecs to write inline C in Python
- Digital publishing is beginning to make money
- Programming an HP-15C
- /Dev/Null: Anti-Cheat Kernel Driver
- F# Pipeline Operator in JavaScript with Babel
Introduction Writing readable and declarative code in JavaScript, how nice it would be! :lol:I know, readable and declarative don’t go in the same sentence when talking about JavaScript, but … - Expert programmers have fine-tuned cortical representations of source code
Expertise enables humans to achieve outstanding performance on domain-specific tasks, and programming is no exception. Many have shown that expert programmers exhibit remarkable differences from novices in behavioral performance, knowledge structure, and selective attention. However, the underlying differences in the brain are still unclear. We here address this issue by associating the cortical representation of source code with individual programming expertise using a data-driven decoding approach. This approach enabled us to identify seven brain regions, widely distributed in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices, that have a tight - Occam programming language
- Opnieuw: A simple and intuitive retrying library for Python
- Unix System Programming with Standard ML
- Mint: The programming language for writing single page applications
- Netflix Now Streaming AV1 on Android
- macOS Kernel Extensions are officially deprecated
- Writing a triple polyglot script (valid Python, Ruby and Perl)
- Europe Just Voted in Favor of Making iPhone and Android Use the Same Charger
- JavaScript Libraries Are Almost Never Updated Once Installed
- Python dicts are now ordered
- Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure
Quote of the week
There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code.
Enterprises
- Netflix original series no longer get time to breathe
- Amazon has 150M Prime members
- Being Your Selves: Identity R&D on Alt Twitter
- AMD reckons it can win the high-end GPU battle
- Tinygo is now officially a Google sponsored project
- Google Maps Hacks
- “Google Drive” would like to receive keystrokes from any application
- Creating a virtual traffic jam on Google Maps with 99 phones and a wagon
- Behind Amazon’s HQ2 fiasco
- Microsoft Teams outage due to expired certificate
- Microsoft’s Three Browsers
- Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2019 Results
- Justice Department meeting state AG offices Tuesday to discuss Google: sources
Justice Department officials will meet on Tuesday with representatives of state … - Netflix’s Junk Bonds Explain How We Are in a Corporate Debt Bubble
- Twitter says an attacker used its API to match usernames to phone numbers
Twitter discloses security incident involving the abuse of one of its official API features. - AMD 64 Core Threadripper 3990X Seen Crushing $20K Xeon Platinum CPUs
- Google admits it sent private videos in Google Photos to strangers
- Some Google Photos videos in backups were sent to strangers in November
- Google tracks individual users per Chrome installation ID
Goedenavond TAG! This is not your typical spec review, and is highly related to #320. But, because @torgo asked nicely, I'm opening up a review for a specific application of UA-CH as a replacem… - Nvidia Geforce Now launches at $5 a month
- Intel axes Nervana just two months after launch
Intel axes Nervana in favor of Habana. - Twitter to label deepfakes and other deceptive media
- What to know before you buy or install an Amazon Ring camera
- Casper lowers IPO price range, implying valuation of just over $500M
- Twitter: “An Incident Impacting Your Account Identity”
- The mysterious disappearance of Google’s click metric
Google makes less money per click every quarter. Now, we won’t know how much less. Is there trouble ahead in online advertising? - “Hey Google, stop tracking me”
It’s common knowledge that Google has used their political, marketing and technical prowess to stop and co-opt effective ad blocking on the web. What hasn’t been clear until recently is how Google is using the Chrome web browser to track individuals, even when ad blocking and in-built tracking prevention is enabled.
- Why Google Might Prefer Dropping a $22B Business
- Musk’s SpaceX Plans a Spinoff, IPO for Starlink Business
- Tesla remotely removed autopilot features from used Tesla without notice
- Tesla remotely disables Autopilot on used Model S after it was sold
- On Resigning from Google
- AMD Threadripper Outperforms $20k Enterprise CPUs
Other news
- Delayed Gratification: A Slow Journalism Magazine
- Not for sale: Luxury groups ponder ways to get rid of their unsold inventory
- Educated Fools
- Stanford’s free course on higher mathematical thinking is about to start soon
- HTTP 402: Payment Required
The HTTP 402 Payment Required is a nonstandard client error status response code that is reserved for future use. - Revisiting how we put together Linux systems
- Python Tutorial: Learn Python for Free
- The Wall Street Journal’s Fake and Distorted News
- Building a Linux Desktop for Cloud Native Development
- German Banks Are Hoarding So Many Euros They Need More Vaults
- The missing semester of CS education
- Quantumly Generated Random Bytes in Racket
- I found a WhatsApp security flaw that allowed hackers to read the file system
Critical Security Flaw Found in WhatsApp Desktop Platform Allowing Cybercriminals Read From The File System Access - Learn X in Y minutes Where X=Prolog
- University of Texas fights colony collapse disorder with new bacteria
- Jeffrey Epstein’s mystery bank came alive after his death
- What Scarlett Howard Learns from the Bees She Teaches
- End-of-Life Announcement for CoreOS Container Linux
- Tool to Help Journalists Spot Doctored Images Is Unveiled by Jigsaw
- Even with a $199 Laptop, Clear Linux Can Offer Superior Performance
- Gitlab Saleswomen “told to wear short skirts, heels and ‘step it up’”
- Does Consciousness Cause Quantum Collapse?
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X Offers Incredible Linux Performance
