Tech roundup 88: a journal published by a bot

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

• Catfish Charlie, the CIA’s Robotic Spy
• FACET is an open source library for human-explainable AI
• Puppy Assistant: the smart home for my dog
• Ismail al-Jazari – the medieval ‘Father of Robotics’
• Boston public schools suspend advanced learning classes
• Intro to Bias in AI
• Google no longer wanted to sponsor the AI ethics conference
• Killing TurboTax
• AI Index 2021
• The Importance of Learning CSS
• Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization
  In this work, we presented a simple experimental framework for interrogating purported measures of generalization.
• Multimodal Neurons in Artificial Neural Networks
  We’ve discovered neurons in CLIP that respond to the same concept whether presented literally, symbolically, or conceptually.
• L.A. startup is building tiny injectable robots to attack tumors
• Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA): a free and open inference accelerator
• FizzBuzz Mario World: Learning Assembly Language and Having Some Fun

Blockchain and decentralization

• Bitcoin’s vast energy use could burst its bubble
  Could the cryptocurrency’s huge electricity consumption also sink it?
• Coinbase Mafia Shows How Tight a Circle Holds Sway over Bitcoin
• Foundational Distributed Systems Papers
  I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the d…
• Is Bitcoin Worth $1M?
• Simple decentralized web hosting on Peergos
• Bastion – A Highly-Available Distributed Fault-Tolerant Runtime for Rust
• Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web
  Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web
• Bitcoin Is Time
• On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward
• Coinbase Is a $100B Crypto Cult
• Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain
• U.S. says John McAfee indicted over fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes

Cloud and architecture

• Megastructures Superweapons and Global Architectures in Sci-Fi Computer Games
• Weird architectures weren’t supported to begin with
• Apple Card Disabled My iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID Accounts
  About ten days ago, when I went to update a few apps in the App Store on my Mac, I was met with a curious error. The internet is filled with stories from people whose Google accounts were locked for unexplained reasons, causing them to lose all of… | Dustin Curtis | Designer, hacker, investor, nomad.
• Python 3.10.0a6 is available, now with 100% more pattern matching
• Understanding the evolution of game consoles through their architecture
• Robinhood is facing nearly 50 lawsuits over GameStop frenzy
• How the AWS team will contribute to Rust’s success
  Since the start of the year, the AWS Rust team has been drafting our charter and tenets. Charters and tenets are the framework AWS teams use to define our scope and priorities. The charter tells you what the team does, and the tenets tell you how the team will do it. Since one of our […]
• Every Google Cloud service described in 4 words (2021 update)
• Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in
• India’s new intermediary liability and digital media laws will harm the internet
  In in a sudden move that will have disastrous consequences for the open internet, the Indian government has notified a new regime for intermediary liability protections.
• Apple now lets you transfer your iCloud Photos to Google Photos
  You can request to transfer a copy of your iCloud Photos—photos and videos associated with your Apple ID—to another service.
• Physicists found 4 new subatomic particles that may test the laws of nature
• Dark patterns after the GDPR: consent pop-ups and their influence
• Can’t use iCloud with “true” as the last name

Development and languages

• The Mythical 10x Programmer
• Fake_contacts: Android app to create fake phone contacts, to do data-poisoning
  Create fake phone contacts, to do data-poisoning. Contribute to BillDietrich/fake_contacts development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Noweb – A Simple, Extensible Tool for Literate Programming
• Cinder – a C++ library for programming with aesthetic intent
• Commodore Basic as a Scripting Language for Unix and Windows – Now Open Source
• Microsoft evading VAT tax with GitHub sponsors
• Gradient Free Optimizers: A collection of modern optimization methods in Python
  Simple and reliable optimization with local, global, population-based and sequential techniques in numerical discrete search spaces. – SimonBlanke/Gradient-Free-Optimizers
• A Native Tiling Window Manager for Windows 10, Inspired by I3wm
  A Tiling Window Manager for windows 10, Inspired by i3wm – McYoloSwagHam/win3wm
• 152kb WebAssembly interpreter that runs on six OSs with Cosmopolitan
  Cosmopolitan build, single file that supports 6 operating systems!
  Download wasm3-cosmopolitan.com below.
  Static/dynamic NoFloat modes (integer-only wasm subset)
  «strace» mode (see d_m3EnableStrace…
• GitHub Actions Are Down
• oneAPI – A cross-industry, open, standards-based unified programming model
• Fast Rolling Quantiles for Python
• Literate: A Flexible Literate Programming System
• LastPass Android app has got 7 trackers in it
• Stop Pushing JavaScript
• How an Anti-TypeScript “JavaScript developer” like me became a TypeScript fan
  My journey from not liking TypeScript to loving it
• Google Free Android Smartphones Are Now Available in the U.S.
• Local PDF Tools – Powered by WebAssembly
• Microsoft Power-Fx: a low-code general purpose programming language
  Power Fx low-code programming language. Contribute to microsoft/Power-Fx development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Accidentally quadratic: When Python is faster than C++
  Constant-factor differences are frequently ignored when analyzing the
  complexity of algorithms and implementations, as they appear to be
  insignificant in practice. In this paper, we demonstrate that this assumption
  can in fact have far more profound implications on time complexity than is
  obvious at first glance, and that a poor consideration of trade-offs can result
  in polynomially slower algorithms whose roots can be deeply and fundamentally
  ingrained into a programming language itself. While the general observation may
  not be novel from a theoretical standpoint, it is rarely (if ever) presented in
  traditional computer science curricula or
• Bitsquatting Windows.com
• Write complicated anonymous functions other than lambdas in Python
• DuckDuckGo – two non-JavaScript versions of search results
• Practical Python Projects book release
• How does your programming language handle “minus zero” (-0.0)?
  The ubiquitous IEEE floating-point standard defines two numbers to represent zero, the positive and the negative zeros. You also have the positive and negative infinity. If you compute the inverse of the positive zero, you get the positive infinity. If you compute the inverse of the negative zero, you get the negative infinity. It seems … Continue reading How does your programming language handle “minus zero” (-0.0)?
• C is for Camera, a 35mm film camera represented in Python objects
• Rejuvenating WordPress Through GraphQL
• CFTC Charges Two Individuals with Multi-Million Digital Asset Pump-and-Dump
• An update on Android’s audio latency
• The Toit Programming Language
• Twitter’s Dorsey auctions first ever tweet as digital memorabilia

Quote of the week

If you start programming by learning perl you will just become a menace to your self and others.

        — egoncasteel

Enterprises

• Surge Pricing, Artificial Intelligence, and Responsibility
• Google Issues Quality Warning for Millions of Google Photos Users
• Amazon rainforest plots sold via Facebook Marketplace ads
• A Saudi Prince’s Attempt to Silence Critics on Twitter
• Customers want to know why Amazon removed Clarence Thomas documentary
• Tesla voids warranty if you try to power your home with your car
• U.S. asks Google for detailed search data in antitrust case
  The U.S. government has asked Google to fork over granular data on how its search engine works and is monetized, seeking to prove that the internet giant is a monopoly.
• National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s Final Report
  The Final Report VIEW THE INTERACTIVE REPORT DOWNLOAD THE PDF REPORT VIEW PREVIOUS EVENTS The mandate of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence’s (NSCAI) is to make recommendations to […]
• Google-free /e/ OS is now selling preloaded phones in the US, starting at $380
• The Whole Web Pays for Google and Facebook to Be Free
• Google Fonts adds support for Icons
  Making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography
• Amazon Workers’ Union Drive Reaches Far Beyond Alabama
• Google to stop selling ads based on your specific web browsing
  The Alphabet company said that it plans next year to stop using or investing in tracking technologies that uniquely identify web users as they move from site to site across the internet.
• Brave acquires search engine to offer the first private alternative to Google
  Today Brave announced the acquisition of Tailcat, the open search engine developed by the team formerly responsible for the privacy search and browser products at Cliqz, a holding of Hubert Burda Media. Tailcat will become the foundation of Brave Search.
• PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv
  Payments giant PayPal is considering to acquire startup Curv, which offers secure storage for cryptocurrencies, for hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B
  Okta, whose software allows office workers to access their apps through a secure service, is buying one of its top competitors.
• Okta to Acquire Auth0 for $6.5B
• ThredUp S-1 IPO
• Peak Design calls out Amazon for copying its camera bag, including the name
• Tidal Acquired by Square
• Square acquires Tidal, Jay-Z’s streaming service, in $297M deal
• Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea
  The third-party cookie is dying, and Google is trying to create its replacement. No one should mourn the death of the cookie as we know it. For more than two decades, the third-party cookie has been the lynchpin in a shadowy, seedy, multi-billion dollar advertising-surveillance industry on the Web…
• Microsoft’s list of banned C functions
  Banned.h – deprecated C runtime functions. Contribute to x509cert/banned development by creating an account on GitHub.
• PyTorch 1.8, with AMD ROCm support
  PyTorch 1.8.0 Release Notes

  Highlights
  Backwards Incompatible Change
  New Features
  Improvements
  Performance
  Documentation

  Highlights
  We are excited to announce the availability of PyTorch 1.8. Thi…

• Kazuo Ishiguro Uses Artificial Intelligence to Reveal the Limits of Our Own
• Tool lets you confuse Google’s ad network, and a test shows it works
• Data Transfer Project by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.
• Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake

Other news

• Slouching Toward Post-Journalism
• Universal Radio Hacker: Investigate Wireless Protocols Like a Boss
  Universal Radio Hacker: Investigate Wireless Protocols Like A Boss – jopohl/urh
• Void Linux Switching Back to OpenSSL
• ROG AI Overclocking on Linux
• We should pay politicians more
• Texas electric firm files for bankruptcy citing $1.8B in claims
  The largest and oldest electric power cooperative in Texas filed for bankruptcy protection in Houston on Monday, citing a disputed $1.8 billion debt to the state’s grid operator.
• Why Learn Haskell?
• Google Workspace for Education storage policy changes
• If you miss an Apple Card payment, Apple disables all your Apple accounts
• Gab has been hacked and 70GB of data leaked
• WSL Hello Sudo: Face Recognition of Windows Hello on Windows Subsystem for Linux
  Let’s sudo by face recognition of Windows Hello on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It runs on both WSL 1 and WSL 2. This is a PAM module for Linux on WSL. – nullpo-head/WSL-Hello-sudo
• Should journals pay peer reviewes?
  Payment advocates expect quicker, better reviews but opponents fear unsustainable costs
• Teams for Education
• Rookie coding mistake prior to Gab hack came from site’s CTO
• Watchy: Hackable $50 Smartwatch
• MIT Press has granted full access to all its journals
  MIT Press Journals is a mission-driven, not-for-profit scholarly publisher devoted to the widest dissemination of its content.
• Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
  Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
• PipeWire: The Linux audio/video bus
  For more than a decade, PulseAudio
  has been serving the Linux desktop as its predominant audio
  mixing and routing daemon — and its audio API. Unfortunately,
  PulseAudio’s internal architecture does not fit the growing
  sandboxed-applications use case, even though there have been attempts to amend that. PipeWire, a new daemon created (in part)
  out of these attempts, will replace
  PulseAudio in the upcoming Fedora 34 release. It is a coming
  transition that deserves a look.
• The UK’s last lighthouse keepers can teach us about isolation
• Google: Charting a course towards a more privacy-first web
• Alamo Drafthouse Files for Bankruptcy
• AWS faulty UX cost our business $7k and they refused to do anything about it
  tl;dr: be very careful when using AWS. Their UX can be highly inaccurate and it might cost you money. If it does, don’t expect any support…
• Plant-based diet would reduce agricultural land use from 4 to 1B hectares
• SoftBank-backed Greensill Capital is on the brink. 50k jobs could be at risk
• AI Teaches Itself Diplomacy
• The Racist History of Dr. Seuss in a Social, Political and Educational Context
• Binance Smart Chain DeFi Project Hacked for $31M
• Valve’s Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux
  We are reaching another milestone with ProtonDB: we are very close to 7000 Windows games confirmed to be working out of the box with Proton on Linux. The charts says it all: Proton has been receiving many updates in the… Continue Reading →
• 30k U.S. organizations newly hacked via holes in Microsoft Exchange Server
  At least 30,000 organizations across the United States — including a significant number of small businesses, towns, cities and local governments — have over the past few days been hacked by an unusually aggressive Chinese cyber espionage unit that’s focused on stealing email from victim organizations, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The espionage group is exploiting…
• Coursera S-1 IPO
• The Zen Anti-Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
• Torvalds: Don’t use the Linux 5.12-rc1 kernel

Autor: Javi López G.

Arquitecto/desarrollador, creativo, buscador de nuevas soluciones y modelos de negocio, crítico constructivo y ex muchas cosas Lee todas las entradas de Javi López G.