Tech roundup 93: a journal published by a bot

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

• Error-riddled data sets are warping our sense of how good AI is
  Our understanding of progress in machine learning has been colored by flawed testing data.
• Learning about the navigational feats of animals
• Laser: Learning a Latent Action Space for Efficient Reinforcement Learning
  The process of learning a manipulation task depends strongly on the action
  space used for exploration: posed in the incorrect action space, solving a task
  with reinforcement learning can be drastically inefficient. Additionally,
  similar tasks or instances of the same task family impose latent manifold
  constraints on the most effective action space: the task family can be best
  solved with actions in a manifold of the entire action space of the robot.
  Combining these insights we present LASER, a method to learn latent action
  spaces for efficient reinforcement learning. LASER factorizes the learning
  problem into two sub-problems, namely action s
• UCLA Researchers Create All-Optical Diffractive Deep Neural Network
• Deep learning model compression methods
• Are Deep Neural Networks Dramatically Overfitted?
  If you are, like me, confused by why deep neural networks can generalize to out-of-sample data points without drastic overfitting, keep on reading.
• Relighting and Color Grading with Machine Learning
• This Startup is solving epilepsy with biosensors and AI
• Warnings of AI doom gave way to primal fear of primates posting
• Google AI scientist Bengio resigns after colleagues’ firings – email
• Time to regulate AI that interprets human emotions
  The pandemic is being used as a pretext to push unproven artificial-intelligence tools into workplaces and schools.
• Learning COBOL: A Journey for the Modern Programmer
• A third of Covid survivors suffer neurological or mental disorders
• Axon: A library for creating neural networks in Elixir
• A third of Covid survivors suffer neurological or mental disorders: study
  One in three COVID-19 survivors in a study of more than 230,000 mostly American patients were diagnosed with a brain or psychiatric disorder within six months, suggesting the pandemic could lead to a wave of mental and neurological problems, scientists said on Tuesday.
• A skeptic’s take on Neuralink and other consumer neurotech
• CPU-based algorithm trains deep neural nets up to 15 times faster than top GPU
  Rice University computer scientists have demonstrated artificial intelligence (AI) software that runs on commodity processors and trains deep neural networks 15 times faster than platforms based on graphics processors.

Blockchain and decentralization

• Coinbase Independent Directors Have Close Company Ties
• Distributed Remote Debugging for Python
• Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency
• An Introduction to Cryptocurrency Wallets: Which Wallet Type Suits You Best?
• WTF: Signal Adds Cryptocurrency Support
• Vald: A Highly Scalable Distributed Vector Search Engine
• Mining Bitcoin on the Game Boy

Cloud and architecture

• Lawsuit against TSA and DEA over airport seizures achieves first victory
• My experience releasing failed SaaS products
  Build it and they will come! In the 1989 classic: Field of Dreams an Iowa farmer has a vision to bulldoze a portion of his corn crop in…
• How to bypass Cloudflare bot protection
  Several months ago I submitted what appeared to be a security flaw to CloudFalre’s bugbounty program. According to them, this is not a…
• C# 9 Pattern Matching
• Rapidly Build SaaS apps on ASP.NET/ServiceStack based on zero-trust security
• The Architecture of a One-Man SaaS
  As grandiose as the title of this article might sound, I should clarify we’re talking about a low-stress, one-person company that I run from my flat here in Germany.
• ‘Satan Shoes’ to be recalled as Nike agrees to settle lawsuit
• Huawei deactivates AI and cloud business group in restructuring
• AWS Lambda Edge changes duration billing granularity from 50ms down to 1ms

Development and languages

• What Is the Switch-Case Equivalent in Python?
• Lunatic Python: Lua Inside Python, and Python Inside Lua
• Engineer – must not have experience in Node, Ruby, PHP, ASP, .NET
• Behind GitHub’s new authentication token formats
• Breaking GitHub Private Pages for $35k
  Abusing CRLF, cache poisoning, and other misconfigurations for a no-interaction XSS against GitHub Private Pages.
• Kallithea – Self-hosted alternative to GitHub
  Kallithea, a free software source code management system supporting two leading version control systems, Mercurial and Git.
• IPython as a System Shell
• Fortran is getting more popular
• Programming is hard
  Most beginners in programming eventually end up with the same ingratiating message: „Programming is easy, everyone can do it”, with some threatening message that people doing the gatekeeping should stop doing that. I’m here to tell you that that is not true. Programming is hard, programming is not for everyone, and for the time being everyone might be able to do it, but most definitely most should not. Like most of the empty, shallow, positive messages coming with an automatic defense against refute, in this case talking about this gatekeeping thing that simply doesn’t happen.
• Rust in the Android Platform
• Update on Git.php.net Incident
  #externals – Opening PHP’s #internals to the outside
• Skruv – No-dependency, no-build, small JavaScript framework
• New Wormable Android Malware Spreads by Creating Auto-Replies in WhatsApp
• Privacy activist Max Schrems claims Google Advertising ID on Android is unlawful
• Signal Server code on GitHub is up to date again
• Kaboom.js is a zero-dependency declarative JavaScript game library
• How to make a Python package in 2021
  The one to be proud of.
• Isp.netscape.com
• A simple C implementation to stream H.264 to browser using WebRTC
  WebRTC Library for IoT/Embedded Device using C. Contribute to sepfy/pear development by creating an account on GitHub.
• A look how branches work in Git
• We scaled the GitHub API with a sharded, replicated rate limiter in Redis
• Printstack – Python package that adds stack trace links to the print function
• No Python Interpreter? This Simple Malware Installs Its Own Copy
• Jurigged – Hot code reloading for Python
• Free Python Books
  Python books free to read online or download. Contribute to pamoroso/free-python-books development by creating an account on GitHub.
• Are you a lazy programmer too?

Quote of the week

Mathematicians stand on each others’ shoulders and computer scientists stand on each others’ toes.

        — Richard Hamming

Enterprises

• AMD’s Zen 3 CPUs Are Susceptible to Spectre-Like Vulnerability
• Tesla files a petition against U.S. labor board order
• How Did Microsoft Make Flight Simulator Seem So Real?
  With the latest version of the popular software, players can recognize city streets and feel shifts in the wind.
• Tesla Owners Asking What Happens If ‘Full Self Driving’ Isn’t Real
• How Netflix is creating a common European culture
  Streaming subtitled box sets is the new Eurovision | Europe
• Netflix Made Record Profits in 2020, Paid a Tax Rate of Less Than 1 Percent
  Netflix’s “current” federal income tax for 2020 was $24 million, which equals just 0.9 percent of the company’s pretax income for the year. This is another way of saying Netflix paid an effective federal income tax rate of just 0.9 percent in 2020. If the company paid the statutory rate, its tax bill would be $572 million.
• Amazon illegally fired activist workers, Labor Board finds
• Google’s copying of the Java SE API was fair use
• U.S. Supreme Court sides with Google in major copyright dispute with Oracle
• Supreme Court sides with Google in Oracle’s API copyright case
• Google will stop using Oracle’s finance software and adopt SAP instead
• Do Games Like Factorio or Eve Online Sap the Intellectual Potential of Humanity?
• Microsoft Edge market share grew 13x in the past 12 months, overtaking Firefox
• Preview of Microsoft Build of OpenJDK
• Google open-sources the Lyra audio codec
• Intel 3rd gen Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake): generationally big, competitively small
• Intel Launches 10nm ‘Ice Lake’ Datacenter CPU with Up to 40 Cores
  The wait is over. Today Intel officially launched its 10nm datacenter CPU, the third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor, codenamed Ice Lake. With up
• IntelliJ IDEA 2021.1 is Out
• You can now turn on Nvidia’s excellent noise cancellation with any GeForce GPU
• A After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again
• Deep genetic affinity between coastal Pacific and Amazonian natives
• Netflix lost 9% of the market share as competition increases
  According to a study by the consultancy company Ampere Analysis published today by The Wrap, Netflix’s market share went from 29% at the beginning of last year to 20% now.
• Ory Keto, open source authorization server based on Google Zanzibar
  Open Source (Go) implementation of "Zanzibar: Google's Consistent, Global Authorization System". Ships gRPC, REST APIs, newSQL, and an easy and granular permission language. Supports …
• Supreme Court sides with developers in Google vs. Oracle
• A Twitter crawler for app ideas
• W3C slaps down Google’s proposal to treat multiple domains as same origin
• Is Netflix’s Seaspiracy film right about fishing damaging oceans?
• Partial tally in Amazon union drive favors ‘No’ votes
• HW accelerated Xwayland rendering for Nvidia merged
  These two patches are intended to accompany upcoming support in the proprietary NVIDIA driver for hardware accelerated GL and Vulkan rendering with Xwayland. They shouldn’t interfere with the…
• Amazon workers vote against unionizing in Alabama
• Export Mail for Microsoft Outlook for Mac
• A Far-Right Extremist Allegedly Plotted to Blow Up Amazon Data Centers
• Google does not want you to tell your players about your donation page
  I recently updated Pixel Wheels banner image on Google Play. That triggered a review of the game: shortly after the update I received a message telling me Pixel Wheels was «not compliant with Google Play Policies». What nefarious activity does the game engage in? Sneak on users? Mine bitcoins?
• End of Support for Firefox on Amazon Devices

Other news

• Get Started with Tmux
• Lokl – WordPress local development environment for Mac, Win and Linux
• Corporations Like Nike Paid $0 Federal Tax in 2020 While CEO Pay Soared
• I made a site to explore the best UI/UX design tools out there
• How Josh Comeau pulled off a $500.000 Course Launch
• SCO Linux FUD returns from the dead
• I Teach Machiavelli Through His Letters
• One woman’s struggle to remove all traces of videotaped sexual assault
• Writing tools I learned from The Economist
  I learned writing from The Economist. Back home, it wasn’t easy to learn English. No one in my social circle was fluent in the language and I couldn’t afford a private tutor. The best I could do was to create my own syllabus. The kiosk near my house had, to my surprise, the newspaper
• Uber ordered to pay $1.1m to blind woman refused rides
  Lisa Irving says she faced harassment and rejection after being refused rides on 14 occasions.
• Things I learned while developing a billing system
• Clubhouse Payments
• A hackable, minimal, fast TUI file explorer (written in rust)
  A hackable, minimal, fast TUI file explorer, stealing ideas from nnn and fzf. – sayanarijit/xplr
• UX Challenges based in the real world
• BleedingTooth: Linux Bluetooth Zero-Click Remote Code Execution
  This project hosts security advisories and their accompanying proof-of-concepts related to research conducted at Google which impact non-Google owned code.
• IBM releases COBOL compiler for Linux x86
• A woman who took on Google and won
• How to Learn Complex Things Quickly: A Guide
  No matter what your field, learning efficiently (and well) is an indispensable skill. Here’s how.
• Today I learned Epub is just HTML/CSS
• Initial M1 support merged into Linux SoC tree
• Hacking a $200 Under Desk Exercise Bike
• Zoom zero-day discovery
  White hat hackers demonstrated a Zoom vulnerability allowing a Remote Code Execution attack at the Pwn2Own event.
• Linux kernel incorrect computation of branch displacements in BPF JIT compiler
• Facebook’s ad algorithms are still excluding women from seeing jobs

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.