Gooooooood morning, Mob!!! 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
- A Look at Paper‘Understanding Early Word Learning in Situated Artificial Agents’
- James Lovelock: ‘The biosphere and I are both in the last 1% of our lives’
- Using neural-network soundscapes to protect natural environments
- Modelling the lanuage of the immune system with machine learning (first steps)
- AI in physics: are we facing a scientific revolution?
- SpaceX successfully catches both fairing for the first time
- Machine Learning for a Better Developer Experience
- Harvard’s Star Computer-Science Professor Built a Distance-Learning Empire
David Malan, of the hit class CS50, was working to perfect online teaching long before the pandemic. Is his method a model for the future of higher education? - NeurIPS 2020 “English to Bash” Competition Goes Live
- Big Sur is both 10.16 and 11.0
macOS 11.0 will identify itself differently according to the SDK used, and an environment variable does the same for scripts. - Deep learning to translate between programming languages
- AI Writing Code Will Make Software Engineers More Valuable
- I built a deep learning-powered emoji Slackbot
- ‘Alexandrian’ glass confirmed by hafnium isotopes
- Digikam 7.0 Released with Neural network-based face Recognition
Blockchain and decentralization
- OpenAI’s GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since Bitcoin
- The Fed: Why do U.S. coins seem to be in short supply?
- Maximum Entropy Intuition for Fundamental Statistical Distributions
- Debugging Incidents in Google’s Distributed Systems
Woman computer scientist of the week
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first compiler related tools. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.
Cloud and architecture
- Turns out half the internet has a Single-Point-of-Failure called “Cloudflare”
On Friday a large chunk of the internet went off the air when Cloudflare apparently fat-fingered a routing update and sent all of their global traffic to a single POP, vaporizing it almost instantly. This affected their DNS service, and of course, as everybody knows, when your DNS is gone, so are - The Cadence: How to Operate a SaaS Startup
- Twilio: Someone broke into our AWS S3 silo, added ‘non-malicious’ code to JS SDK
- Designing scalable API on AWS spot instances
Cutting down infrastructure costs 3 times by using AWS Spot Instances. - Domain-Oriented Microservice Architecture
- Dividing front end from back end is an antipattern
- On Liberating My Smartwatch from Cloud Services
Development and languages
- Falsehoods programmers believe about build systems
- Windows on Raspberry
- PIFuHD: High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization
- Citrine: Localized Programming Language
- GitHub buries 21 TB open-source code in Arctic vault for 1k years
- Reactive Probabilistic Programming
- Highly automated digital audio workstation extensible in Guile
- RIP ROP: CET Internals in Windows 20H1
- The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language (Lisp)
- An exploration of why Python doesn’t require a ‘main’ function
- Jelly 2, World’s Smallest Android 10 4G Smartphone
- Single JavaScript API Client for Google Sheets and MS Excel APIs
- Apple’s App Store and Other Digital Marketplaces
- MineSweeper implemented in 100% CSS and HTML – no JavaScript
MineSweeper implemented in CSS + HTML using the Space Toggle trick (no JavaScript!) – propjockey/css-sweeper - The Digitized Culture Wars
- Kernel state based fuzzer: a LLVM approach
Quote of the week
Good code is short, simple, and symmetrical – the challenge is figuring out how to get there.
— Sean Parent
Enterprises
- Monoalphabetic Cipher: Encode and Decode Online
- Stripe Is Holding 25% of Our Funds, Indefinitely
- Microsoft Analyzed Data on Its Newly Remote Workforce
- How to Gradually Exit Twitter
- Amazon FBA Brexit Bombshell – EFN and Pan-European FBA Ends for UK
Amazon FBA Brexit bombshell: From 1st of January 2021. No more EFN (European Fufilment Network) for UK and an end to Pan-European FBA between the UK and EU - Fixing Mass Effect black blobs on modern AMD CPUs
Graphical artifacts caused by a CPU, not GPU? Sure thing. - Netflix teases desktops-as-a-service offering aimed at VFX creators
- Stripe: Building a Developer Cult
What makes Stripe a favorite of developers, the advantages of building a cult, and the how the little things add for developers - AMD Launches 12 Desktop Renoir Ryzen 4000G Series APUs: But You Can’t Buy Them
- Twitter bans 7k QAnon accounts, limits 150k others as part of broad crackdown
- Design Docs at Google
One of the key elements of Google’s software engineering culture is the use of defining software designs through design docs. These are… - Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft
Slack Technologies, Inc., (NYSE: WORK) today announced it has filed a competition complaint against Microsoft Corporation before the European Commission. - Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters’ info
A row over a photographer’s name being trimmed from an image has been in the courts since 2016. - Amazon Ion
- I am a model and I know that artificial intelligence will take my job
- Sofa Mobility Report: Building mobility analytics similar to Apple and Google
- Tesla Model Y Road Trip Review: a no-compromise electric SUV
- Twitter is looking at subscription options as ad revenue drops sharply
- Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products
Some companies regret sharing information with the tech giant and its Alexa Fund. “We may have been naive in believing they weren’t competitive with us,” said one executive. - Recursive, a free variable font for code and UI, now on Google Fonts
- Report: ARM is for sale and Nvidia’s interested, Apple isn’t
- React SpreadSheet – Google Sheets-like performance
- Buy on Google is now open and commission-free
Buy on Google is now zero commission and open to third-party digital commerce providers. - Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed
- Intel’s 7nm is Broken, Company Announces Delay Until 2022, 2023
- Amazon Warehouse scam: 16TB HDD swapped for 8TB, returned for full refund
- Amazon accused of investing in small companies to steal their ideas
- Convert paper-based notes to HTML content with Google Vision API
Other news
- Ecuadorian hummingbirds chirp ultrasonic songs of seduction
- Emacs Redux: Instant Access to Your Shell Init Files
- Oregon, Journalists Sue U.S. over Portland Arrests, Violence
- Coursera Valued at $2.5B After a Finance Round of Additional $130M
- Satan’s Bank Note
- Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem – magnetism in solids is a quantum mechanical effect
- New Cobalt-free Li-ion battery reduces costs with similar design and performance
AUSTIN, Texas — For decades, researchers have looked for ways to eliminate cobalt from the high-energy batteries that power electronic devices, due to its - In Praise of ZFS on Linux’s ZED ‘ZFS Event Daemon’
- Video Vectorization
- Coronavirus: Protein treatment trial ‘a breakthrough’
- Spotting Quantum Black Holes in the Lab
- Twitter Got Hacked, Is Mastodon Immune?
- Ireland donates contact tracing app to Linux Foundation
Ireland’s HSE has donated the world’s most successful contact tracing app as open source to Linux Foundation Public Health, supporting the global effort against Covid-19. - On the Twitter Hack
- Quantum interference of currents in an atomtronic SQUID
- HUD proposal: shelters to spot trans women by height, facial hair, Adam’s Apple
- Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD
Have you ever wondered which node consumes more resources? Managing a bespoke dashboard for your infrastructure. Learn how to create it. - Eric Schmidt is working to launch a university
Dubbed the US Digital Service Academy, it would offer degrees and coursework for digital skills like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. - A linguistic glitch tricks us into thinking bank deposits are deposited in banks
- Build a toy quantum computer at home
- Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced Tuesday the establishment of three quantum computing centers across the nation, involving an investmen - I self learned to code and built a Slack app for team feedback – Kaapi
- New York Times says Krebs wrongly implicated Briton in Twitter hack
- Interactive Go Course Using WASM in Browser
- Gitern is a Git host for hackers
- LWN pays $300 for a well-written article from new authors
- Twitter Hacking for Profit and the LoLs
- macOS 11 Virtualization Framework to Run Linux in a VM
- KDE Slimbook: Linux Laptop with Ryzen 4000
- Central Banks Have Become Irrelevant
- What A.I. Learned from the Internet
- Build an arcade machine at home
- Twitter: Hackers Accessed Private Messages for Elite Accounts
- More than 1k people at Twitter had ability to aid hack of accounts
More than a thousand Twitter employees and contractors as of earlier this year had access to internal tools that could change user account settings and hand control to others, two former employees said, making it hard to defend against the hacking that occurred last week. - NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Program Enters ‘Selection Round’
- Emulating Nintendo Switch Games on Linux
- ICE Confirms New Foreign Students Can’t Take Online-Only Course Loads in the US
- Blackbaud hack: More UK universities confirm breach
More than 20 universities and charities confirm they lost data in the ransomware hack. - Banks are slow to increase rates on savings accounts, but quick to reduce them
- Huawei Hacked My Laptop
- Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics Have AV1 Accelerated Decode – Linux Support Lands
- US universities under pressure to cut fees because of remote learning
