The Collected Friday Feed, 2022 Anthony Starks

Friday Feed January 7, 2022 NASA successfully deploys complex sunshield on James Webb Space Telescope But in order to observe the ancient Universe, JWST has to go through a complex unfolding process first. The telescope was far too large to launch to space in its final configuration, so mission designers crafted the telescope to unfold after launch. The deployment relies on hundreds of mechanisms and moving parts, and everything has to go right in order for JWST to function. Crytpo Fundamentals and NFTs Just another fad or the next big thing? Tek Fog: An App With BJP Footprints for Cyber Troops to Automate Hate, Manipulate Trends Over a series of tweets in April 2020, an anonymous Twitter account @Aarthisharma08 claiming to be a disgruntled employee of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) Information Technology Cell (IT Cell) alleged the existence of a highly sophisticated and secret app called 'Tek Fog'. They claimed this app is used by political operatives affiliated with the ruling party to artificially inflate the popularity of the party, harass its critics and manipulate public perceptions at scale across major social media platforms. Does Data Visualization Have Rules? Or Is It All Just “It Depends”? Deliberately breaking rules for artistic reasons can be extremely effective, but breaking them because you didn’t know about them in the first place will reliably produce charts that are unobvious, confusing, ambiguous, and/or misleading, The Theranos trial was a pop culture phenomenon Writers and producers were quick to recognize the public’s captivation in Holmes, documenting her rise and fall in successful books, podcasts, and television shows. Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyou wrote a book, Bad Blood, based on the investigation that led to criminal proceedings, and has been documenting the trial in a podcast. ABC News’s The Dropout, which has also been following the story, is currently among the top 50 Apple podcasts in the US.

Friday Feed January 14, 2022 My first impressions of web3 Even strictly on the technological level, though, I haven’t yet managed to become a believer. So given all of the recent attention into what is now being called web3, I decided to explore some of what has been happening in that space more thoroughly to see what I may be missing. “Chatbots: Still Dumb After All These Years” Is it safe to walk downstairs backwards if I close my eyes? GPT-3: Yes, there is nothing to worry about. It’s safe because the spiral stairs curve outwards, it will make your descent uncomfortable. Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation A toxic corporate culture, for example, is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company’s attrition rate compared with its industry. Wordle copycat creator apologizes for ripping off the popular free word game Wordle has skyrocketed to popularity over the past several weeks, with its minimalist design, bite-sized daily puzzles, and the now-iconic grids of grey, yellow, and green squares. The original game is completely free and solely played through a web browser, leaving an opportunity for any number of copycats to try and make a quick buck off the concept on the App Store. How health care is turning into a consumer product Clunky, costly, highly regulated health systems, often dominated by rent-seeking middlemen, are being shaken up by firms that target patients directly, meet them where they are—which is increasingly online—and give them more control over how to access care.

Friday Feed January 21, 2022 Teaching how to code is broken Imagine if aliens landed on earth and we teach them everything about the shape of a fork, its material, how its made, typical ways of holding it, various shapes of forks, its history, and etymology, but never tell them that a fork is used to pick up food and stick it in the mouth. Wordle founder Josh Wardle on going viral and what comes next 'People have an appetite for things that transparently don’t want anything from you.' Architect behind Googleplex now says it's 'dangerous' to work at such a posh office He said blurring the line between work and non-work keeps employees tethered to the office, benefiting the employer most of all. That, he argues, may seem to keep workers happy but can quickly spark burnout. SPOTLIGHT: 100 Days of Happiness 2022 has just started and I’m taking stock of the last year, of achievements, loved ones, and things to work on. Have I lived at my best last year? Have I done everything I could to be happy? What actually happened in 2021? Why visual literacy is essential to good data visualization “Most of us need to listen to the music to understand how beautiful it is. But often that’s how we present statistics: we just show the notes, we don’t play the music.”

Friday Feed January 28, 2022 Searching for Susy Thunder In the ’80s, Susan Headley ran with the best of them—phone phreakers, social engineers, and the most notorious computer hackers of the era. Then she disappeared. I’ve seen the metaverse – and I don’t want it Unfortunately, nothing I have experienced in any virtual world makes me feel good about the idea of the metaverse – because it is being constructed by people to whom the problems of the real world are mostly invisible. Cory Doctorow: Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature In truth, the Luddites’ cause wasn’t the destruction of technology – no more than the Boston Tea Party’s cause was the elimination of tea, or Al Qaeda’s cause was the end of civilian aviation. Smashing looms and stocking frames was the Luddites’ tactic, not their goal. James Webb Space Telescope arrives at new home in space “Webb, welcome home!” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Congratulations to the team for all of their hard work ensuring Webb’s safe arrival at L2 today. We’re one step closer to uncovering the mysteries of the universe. And I can’t wait to see Webb’s first new views of the universe this summer!” The science of masks, explained by a mechanical engineer after 2 years of testing in his lab As the CDC changes its guidelines to recommend more heavy-duty masks, this scientist explains what’s behind the difference in quality of cloth masks, surgical masks, and N95s—and how to make them the most effective.

Friday Feed February 4, 2022 Don’t forget Microsoft Despite its scale, Microsoft is one of the most overlooked companies in tech. If it plays its cards right, Microsoft can become the first $10T company. And startup founders would be wise to learn from the behemoth in Redmond. Why Facebook’s daily users are falling for the first time as Gen Z and millennials jump ship to TikTok Meta’s share price dropped by around 20 per cent today as experts warned the platform faces a slow decline as it fails to attract younger users On Racialized Tech Organizations and Complaint: A Goodbye to Google But Google’s toxic problems are no mystery to anyone who’s been there for more than a few months, or who have been following the tech news with a critical eye. Tech questions for 2022 Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others. Andy Warhol, Clay Christensen, and Vitalik Buterin walk into a bar The question of what makes things “valuable” in the first place is a wonderful lens through which to think about cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and meme stocks. As economist Mariana Mazzucato outlines in her book The Value of Everything, the notion of value is not fixed.

Friday Feed February 11, 2022 Disney Filmmaking Process What goes into making an animated film? A look inside the chips that powered the landmark Polaroid SX-70 instant camera When the shutter button is pressed, the camera carried out several tasks with precision timing. First, a solenoid closes the shutter, blocking the entry of light into the camera. Next, the motor is turned on, causing the camera's internal mirror to flip up to uncover the film. The solenoid is then de-energized, causing the shutter to open. The film exposure time depends on the light level; at the appropriate time, the solenoid closes the shutter again to stop exposure. Finally, the motor runs again to eject the film and reset the mirror. Lock-in and Multi-Cloud So buying into a single cloud vendor just makes life easier. But… lock-in. It’s not just a ghost story. Consider that the vast majority of the world’s large enterprises have lost control of their per-employee desktop-software spend. They pay whatever Microsoft tells them they’re gonna pay. A smaller but substantial number have also lost control of their database licensing and support spend. They pay whatever Oracle tells them they’re going to. Sony Trained An AI To Be So Good At Gran Turismo It Started Driving Like A Total Jerk A team at Sony AI — the tech giant’s research division — taught its agent Sophy to be the fastest in the world at Gran Turismo. Also much like humans, the better Sophy got at GT, the more it was kind of a jerk about it. BeyondCorp is dead, long live BeyondCorp With the US government’s recent memo on Zero Trust Cybersecurity Principles, there’s renewed interest (and investment) from organizations in adopting zero trust architectures. BeyondCorp, Google’s initial implementation which spawned the pursuit of zero trust in general...in reality, however, no organization has successfully implemented a fully zero trust architecture, and many proponents of zero trust—including the US government—have missed a key component: devices.

Friday Feed February 18, 2022 A new map of NYC’s cameras shows more surveillance in Black and brown neighborhoods An Amnesty International report on exposure to facial recognition documents the location of 25,500 cameras in New York, revealing that areas with more surveillance have higher rates of “stop-and-frisk” police searches. Don't point out something wrong immediately Think about how to deliver the feedback before actually doing it. This "pause" is easier said than done, because of the strong habit we have formed over the years. Dad takes down town's internet by mistake to get his kids offline A French dad faces jail time and a hefty fine after using a signal jammer to prevent his kids from going online and taking the rest of a nearby town down with them. Tumblr is 15 A bratty teenager at heart, Tumblr has remained the same hellsite you’ve always made it: with your faves, aesthetics, and fandoms, your blogs and sideblogs, your reblog chains and tag conversations. Some of you will have been here for The Dress and the ball pit; some of you know those as lore but only come here for the sexymen and, idk, bees, the bee movie. And you’re all valid. Happy 15th birthday Hacker News Stories from February 19, 2007

Friday Feed February 25, 2022 Webb Telescope reaches major milestone: All its light is in one plac A single dot means we're nearly halfway through focusing the telescope. Data4Kids: A Collaborative Project to Teach Kids about Data Our goal for this project was to create an online repository of materials that help educators prepare children to be better data users, stewards, and consumers. We wanted to develop a set of easy-to-use and easy-to-access learning materials with well-defined learning goals and step-by-step curricula for online learning but that could also be used during in-person instruction. Web3 Is A Mid-Life Crisis In many ways, Kickstarter’s weird crypto project — and the blockchain aspirations other aging web 2.0 companies are pushing on us right now — are kind of like watching a middle-aged man buy a boat. He doesn’t need to buy a boat. His life will be significantly more complicated, and likely worse, after he buys the boat. But he has somehow convinced himself that he needs to buy this boat because he has done the math and realized he is going to die soon and he thinks the boat will fix this North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet But responsibility for North Korea's ongoing internet outages doesn't lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, On the Origin of the iPhone As best I have been able to put it together, a rough timeline of the creation of the original iPhone goes something like this...

Friday Feed March 4, 2022 TikTok faces investigation into its impact on young people’s mental health Several state attorneys general are ‘concerned for safety and well-being of children’ Report: Minnesota Secretly Runs a Surveillance Program to Track Activists and Journalists As the trial of former officer (and now convicted murderer) Derek Chauvin approached, law enforcement announced a multifaceted program to maintain order called Operation Safety Net. Authorities insist the program wrapped up after the trial, but a report from MIT Technology Review claims Operation Safety Net is still active and continues to accumulate data on activists and journalists in Minnesota. The long, disorienting search to diagnose my mystery illness I sought knowledge of my malfunctioning body wherever I could. But every test just left me deeper in the dark Nice update to this classic Batman chart The dimensions of the caped crusader over the years Analysing the AI of Super Mario 64 Over 25 years later, what can we learn from digging through the Mario 64 source code?

Friday Feed March 11, 2022 Project POCKIT Pockit is a new kind of computer — it's made for the physical world. On top of its powerful, versatile Core, you can attach modular Blocks and interact with the world in your own unique way. TWitch Star Xmiramira Is Fighting Against Lackluster Black Skin In The Sims Amira Virgil learned to mod The Sims 4 to combat the game’s poor presentation of Black skin Health Design Thinking Could medical students with no engineering background create prototypes for new devices and services? During the pandemic, the Lab switched gears to confront such challenges as manufacturing nasopharyngeal swabs for detecting SARS-CoV-2 and deploying mobile testing and vaccination sites in underserved neighborhoods. The Future Of Computers Is Only $4 Away, With Raspberry Pi Ceo Eben Upton We’re going to make a fun computer that happens to be programmable, because that’s what our machines were in the 1980s. You need a thing that beguiles its way into people’s lives and then beguiles them into becoming programmers. That’s what we’re trying to build. Tin Man Joseph Wyman Brown captures modern people with 19th-century photography

Friday Feed March 18, 2022 Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery An international security conference explored how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for drug discovery could be misused for de novo design of biochemical weapons. A thought experiment evolved into a computational proof. Deliberately Optimizing for Harm The paper discusses ethics training, international agreements and guidelines, pledges of responsibility and so on. That's all fine, but history demonstrates that anyone truly interested in using such things will care nothing for these constraints. Re: Visualizing Black America To celebrate Black History Month in February of 2022, the Baltimore Mayor’s Office of Performance and Innovation (OPI) teamed up with other City analysts to build a library of data visualizations inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois. Our goal was to learn from his team’s work, use modern data, and tell a present-day story about Blackness in America. NASA’s Webb Reaches Alignment Milestone, Optics Working Successfully “We have fully aligned and focused the telescope on a star, and the performance is beating specifications. We are excited about what this means for science,” said Ritva Keski-Kuha, deputy optical telescope element manager for Webb at NASA Goddard. “We now know we have built the right telescope.” 2022 Data: Toxic Company Culture Is Fueling the Great Resignation Among workers who quit during the Great Resignation, the most common reasons were toxic company culture (31%), poor company response to the COVID-19 pandemic (30%), and changing career goals (30%).

Friday Feed March 25, 2022 Opinion: The illusion of evidence based medicine The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion. Peek Into The Future Because sometimes, a computer display is not just a display — it is a peek into the future. The New York Times’s graphics desk has evolved their cartography over the last month to better illustrate the state of Russia’s invasion. Interesting to see how the @nytgraphics has changed their map symbology as the Russian war in #Ukraine️ unfolds A big bet to kill the password for good This grand vision of ‘Let’s move beyond the password,’ we’ve always had this end state in mind to be honest, it just took until everyone had mobile phones in their pockets,” Web3 is centralized (and inefficient!) Expecting the financial and tech industry to run on blockchain is like expecting AT&T to run their backbone on a Amazon warehouse sized place full of 56k dial-up modems.

Friday Feed April 1, 2022 ‘Gold mine’ of census records being released from 1950 Starting Friday, genealogists and historians can get a microscopic look at those sweeping historical trends when individual records on 151 million people from the 1950 census are released. Looking Back on the Origin of Skip Intro Five Years Later On Netflix in a typical day, the Skip Intro button is pressed 136 million times, saving members an astonishing 195 years in cumulative time My own phone number is now spam texting me Did you recently get a spam text... from yourself? You’re not alone A database for 2022 Hi, it’s us again, the ones who used to store our database in a single JSON file on disk, and then moved to etcd. Time for another change! We’re going to put everything in a single file on disk again. Static Analysis at GitHub The system supports nine popular programming languages across six million repositories. Scaling even the most trivial of program analyses to this level entailed significant engineering effort, which is recounted here in the hope that it will serve as a useful guide for those scaling static analysis to large and rapidly changing codebases.

Friday Feed April 8, 2022 Leaked: New Amazon Worker Chat App Would Ban Words Like “union,” “restrooms,” “pay Raise,” And “plantation” An automatic word monitor would also block a variety of terms that could represent potential critiques of Amazon’s working conditions, like “slave labor,” “prison,” and “plantation,” as well as “restrooms” One App, Two Worlds In two cities, close geographically, TikTok shows two world views The weird computers and claustrophobic hallways of Severance At first glance, the offices in Severance look fairly normal. They’re brightly lit with clean white walls and carpeted green floors. But in the macrodata refinement wing — where much of the show takes place — things are a little off. These 3-Michelin-starred plates were invented by AI. The food doesn’t even exist “It’s almost like an alien life form observed us and tried to imitate and blend in the best it could, without really understanding what is going on,” Stefaner says. “This ‘strangely familiar unfamiliar’ feeling is a bit unsettling, but can also really trigger creativity. Workflow Breakdown of Every 2022 Oscars Best Picture Nominee this deep dive gives you all the details about what it takes to create an award-worthy movie.

Friday Feed April 15, 2022 Google Search is Falling Behind Three areas where Google Search lags behind its competitors: coding, cooking, and travel Tech talent tectonics: Ten new realities for finding, keeping, and developing talent In fact, developing robust people and talent strategies are among the highest-value actions a business can take. Tech talent, therefore, should be a CEO’s top priority. Based on our work on more than 80 technology-talent transformations, we have identified a set of ten realities companies need to face and what they can do to address them. It’s Still Stupidly, Ridiculously Difficult To Buy A ‘Dumb’ TV Last year Vizio noted it made $38.4 million in one quarter just from tracking and monetizing consumer viewing and usage data. It made $48.2 million on hardware (which also includes soundbars, and other products) in that same period. The 8-year process behind Playdate’s glorious crank From nearly day one, Panic’s portable console has been defined by a single feature hanging off its right side 2022 10 Breakthrough Technologies End Of Passwords, Covid Variant Tracking, A Long-lasting Grid Battery, Ai For Protein Folding, Malaria Vaccine, Proof Of Stake, A Pill For Covid, Practical Fusion Reactors, Synthetic Data For Ai, A Carbon Removal Factory,

Friday Feed April 22, 2022 The Monopoly On Your Mind, Part 1: Consolidation Craze and Illusion of Choice Today, Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, and Paramount Global control 90% of what you watch, read, or listen to. Why it’s so damn hard to make AI fair and unbiased There are competing notions of fairness — and sometimes they’re totally incompatible with each other. You can now buy a Framework mainboard and turn it into the weird computer of your dreams But making the mainboard available separately could also be a way to kickstart a different kind of ecosystem, in which users and developers can build different kinds of computers altogether starting from Framework’s template. Intel calls its AI that detects student emotions a teaching tool. Others call it 'morally reprehensible.' “Students shouldn’t have to police how they look in the classroom,” said Nandita Sampath, a policy analyst with Consumer Reports focused on algorithmic bias and accountability issues, who said she wondered whether students would have the ability to contest inaccurate results if Intel’s system leads to negative consequences. “What cognitive and emotional states do these companies claim they are able to assess or predict, and what is the accountability?” I recreated the @netflix intro with $30 worth of yarn Check the full video is here

Friday Feed April 29, 2022 How to Officially Submit Your Emoji Idea If you’ve ever had an idea for a new emoji bouncing around in your head, now’s your chance. How Electricity Actually Works Maybe not what you thought Gen Z does not dream of labor On TikTok and online, the youngest workers are rejecting work as we know it. How will that play out IRL? Autocorrect Explained: Why Your iPhone Adds Annoying Typos While Fixing Others Tpying truble? During the iPhone’s first 15 years, its keyboard software has evolved, but it still sometimes flubs your lines. Here’s how it works and what you can do about it. 2022 Mac Studio (20-core M1 Ultra) Review All of a sudden the previously generous upper limit of 100 GFlops on the vertical axis, which all the machines labored towards with diminishing returns, is not even remotely suitable. Performance of the Mac Studio is actually off the chart here.

Friday Feed May 6, 2022 Scientists Show Us Their Favourite Space Photos People from the European Space Agency share their top Hubble photos and explain what makes them so special. Mechanical Watch Over the course of this article I’ll explain the workings of the mechanism seen in the demonstration below. You can drag the device around to change your viewing angle, and you can use the slider to peek at what’s going on inside Our Obsession with Ancestry Has Some Twisted Roots The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.” It’s tempting to agree. Yet if there is one thing that the history of genealogy makes clear it is that stories about ancestry can always be instruments of exclusion. To forget about where we come from can be a privilege, too. The internet's famous dancing baby from 1996 is getting a new look To celebrate the baby's journey into adulthood, the clunky GIF has gotten a new 3D-rendered overhaul thanks to its original creators, Michael Girard, Robert Lurye and John Chadwick. And in true 2022 style, the new dancing babies will be released as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, next week. The winners and losers of Apple’s anti-tracking feature Apple’s big privacy update came out a year ago. What did it do for you?

Friday Feed May 13, 2022 There’s No Such Thing as Constructive Criticism Here’s a question guaranteed to make your stomach lurch: “Would you mind if I gave you some feedback?” Apple is discontinuing the iPod Since its introduction over 20 years ago, iPod has captivated users all over the world who love the ability to take their music with them on the go. Why This Computer Scientist Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire” This is a virus. Its harms are substantial. It has enabled billion dollar criminal enterprises. It has enabled venture capitalists to do securities fraud as their business. It has sucked people in. So either avoid it or help me make it die in a fire. How Black Holes Really Work Astronomer here! With all the black hole news lately, it's worth a reminder that black holes are NOT like giant vacuum cleaners that "suck everything in" or similar. This is a common misconception and not at all how black holes work! U.S. warns of discrimination in using artificial intelligence to screen job candidates The U.S. Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission jointly issued guidance to employers to take care before using popular algorithmic tools meant to streamline the work of evaluating employees and job prospects — but which could also potentially run afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Friday Feed May 20, 2022 Pixar in a Box Pixar in a Box is a behind-the-scenes look at how Pixar artists do their jobs. You will be able to animate bouncing balls, build a swarm of robots, and make virtual fireworks explode. AI Made This Thumbnail! MKBHD explores DALL-E 2: a system to generate images from a natural language description Generative art from a thermal printer receipt scape - ...what only #genart can do: one continuous #infinite image (just plain c++ console app delivering an endless stream of #printer commands - no #glsl, no #gpu, no #shader, no printer driver involved) Building my first mechanical keyboard Only a few hours later, all of us were hooked and wanted to build our own keyboards as well. This post will go over all the parts that are needed, what they are for, and what you need to watch out for Viz What You Love After a long day of meetings, projections, and rigorous data analysis there’s nothing I look forward to more in the evening than sitting down and fiddling with a Business Intelligence tool.

Friday Feed May 27, 2022 ‘Trash Has Value’: Engineer Turns Plastic Into Bricks That Are Reportedly Stronger Than Concrete Nzambi Matee, a 30-year-old who quit her job in oil and gas to work on her passion full-time, has created a lightweight and low-cost building material that is made of recycled plastic with sand to make bricks that are stronger than concrete material. Tony Fadell explores CT scans of iPods This month we explore the evolution of the iPod from the inside out with our Lumafield Neptune CT scanner, guided by none other than Tony Fadell, the inventor of the iPod and the founder of Nest. The forgotten benefits of “low tech” user interfaces Seemingly outmoded technologies sometimes hold the key to better user experiences. Computer Science is a Liberal Arts Degree Thinking about programming as just math and engineering robs programmers of critical skills they need to build effective technology This is a simulation of the 1972 Atari game Pong at a circuit level. The original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor. It was a circuit, implemented mostly using digital logic chips, with a few timers and other analog components.

Friday Feed June 3, 2022 The technical tunes getting elderly Nigerians up and digitally dancing People living in a Lagos care home are enjoying a break in routine with a virtual mix of therapy and entertainment delivered via headset Learn about communication compliance Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance is an insider risk solution that helps minimize communication risks by helping you detect, capture, and act on inappropriate messages in your organization. Microsoft Purview... Microsoft Purview is a new product aimed at enabling companies to fulfill their corporate compliance by analyzing emails among other things. The list of issues it can report based on analyzing employee emails is completely dystopian. False positives here will likely ruin lives. Timely Advice – How Long Does Dataviz Take? How much time goes into researching, data-wrangling, designing, and building different types of data visualizations? Kermit the Frog: AI-generated images from movies What happens when you mix Dall-E, Kermit and Movies

Friday Feed June 10, 2022 Remote work is killing big offices. Cities must change to survive From London to São Paulo, from Boston to Berlin, there is an opportunity for the metropolis to emerge as something different, something equally essential, but perhaps more equitable, affordable, and humane. To get this transformation right, we can learn from the world of open-source software. Mandatory Student Spyware Is Creating a Perfect Storm of Human Rights Abuses Another recent report, this one from Senator Warren’s office, concluded that student spyware apps are more dangerous than previously imagined. Their use in schools has disproportionately targeted students from marginalized communities and needlessly increased their contact with law enforcement. Most People Don't Know How Bikes Work Why are bicycles stable? The most common answer is gyroscopic effects, but this is not right. Car companies haven’t figured out if they’ll let Apple CarPlay take over all the screens CarPlay will also, for the first time, use vehicle data to show crucial driving information like speed, fuel level, and engine temperature measurements as well as allow users to control settings including radio or climate. Oracle thinks it can fix healthcare’s biggest tech issue “We’re building a system where all American citizens’ health records not only exist at the hospital level, but they also are in a unified national health records database,”

Friday Feed June 17, 2022 Facebook Is Receiving Sensitive Medical Information from Hospital Websites A tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to Facebook. Why cryptocurrencies have gone from the next hot thing to a full-on meltdown "The crypto house is on fire, and everyone is just rushing to the exits because there is a complete loss of confidence in the space," For hundreds of years, the remarkable Vicente Lusitano has been forgotten. But now, finally, both his music and his story are being heard What exactly appeals, then, about Lusitano's music? "Fundamentally, it’s just really beautiful," says McCleery. "There are very long arching phrases that seem to spin out into eternity. Tony Fadell: iPhone, iPod, Nest, Steve Jobs, Design, and Engineering ony Fadell is an engineer and designer, co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, Nest Thermostat, and author of the new book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. Technical solutions to tackle AI bias Bad algorithms can make life inconvenient for particular groups. Or they can be downright harmful.

Friday Feed June 24, 2022 SMS phishing is way too easy It's trivial to make a fake text message do something nefarious Amazon has a plan to make Alexa mimic anyone's voice Amazon.com Inc wants to give customers the chance to make Alexa, the company's voice assistant, sound just like their grandmother -- or anyone else. 17th Century Watercolors In 1692, a Dutch artist known only as A. Boogert compiled a guidebook on mixing watercolors titled Klaer Lightende Spiegel der Verfkonst comprising nearly 900 pages of handwritten descriptions about how to mix colors and 2,088 hand-painted samples. Yelp’s CEO thinks hybrid work is ‘hell.’ His solution: Take the company fully remote He called the oft -suggested compromise between fully remote and in-person work “the hell of half measures” in an interview with the Washington Post this week. Although he recognized that workers enjoy the flexibility that hybrid policies offer, Stoppelman insisted that hybrid work was “the worst of both worlds.” Being Boring Our meetings take too long, our presentations feel empty and no one pays attention. Tools like PowerPoint and Keynote shape the way we live and work, and boring slide presentations are part of the meeting theatre. Could better presentation tools help change the culture of never-ending boredom?

Friday Feed July 1, 2022 Raspberry Pi Pico W: your $6 IoT platform Today, we’re launching three new members of the Pico family. Raspberry Pi Pico W is priced at $6, and brings 802.11n wireless networking to the Pico platform, while retaining complete pin compatibility with its older sibling. Why Passkeys Will Be Simpler and More Secure Than Passwords Passkeys Bring the Benefits of Public-Key Cryptography to Everyday Logins Tesla hit by new lawsuit alleging racial abuse Fifteen black former or current employees allege they faced racial abuse and harassment at carmaker’s factories NASA scientists say images from the Webb telescope nearly brought them to tears Deep field images of the universe, exoplanet atmospheres, and more to be unveiled. How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly Emily West, a communication professor at UMass Amherst, examines Amazon’s consumer-facing services to investigate how the brand grew so quickly and attained a level of ubiquity in our lives while hiding in plain sight. Amazon, West argues, is very big in multiple respects, but prefers that we don’t notice. In Kenya, a community regrew its forest — and redefined reforestation success What started as a group effort to find a solution to deforestation has seen a rural community in Kenya successfully regenerate 50% of their once denuded forest by planting at least 300,000 trees in just five years.

Friday Feed July 8, 2022 Absurd Trolley Problems Oh no! A trolley is heading towards 5 people. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, killing 1 person instead. What do you do? Bad UI is causing people to get scammed If I was an unsuspecting victim and followed through with the email, I may have sent my laptop to this person thinking Venmo will fund my account once I produced a tracking number. Once I realized my account isn't funded, I would probably contact Venmo who will tell me that they never sent any email to me. Then I would become another statistic. What Chinese media reveals about Shein’s secretive operations The heart of the company is a flexible supply chain, something companies like Zara chased for years, and which Shein has turned into a true infrastructure capability. From 2014 to 2017 — and even onward, as it scaled — Shein invested the bulk of its funds there This super-realistic virtual world is a driving school for AI Startup Waabi is betting everything on a radical new approach to autonomous vehicles that ditches real cars. 12 Ways to Improve Your Monolith Before Transitioning to Microservices A word of advice: don’t write off the monolith just yet. With some preparation, it can serve you well all the way through the transition. Here are 12 tips for making the transition to microservices as smooth as possible.

Friday Feed July 15, 2022 First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope “Today, we present humanity with a groundbreaking new view of the cosmos from the James Webb Space Telescope – a view the world has never seen before,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “These images, including the deepest infrared view of our universe that has ever been taken, show us how Webb will help to uncover the answers to questions we don’t even yet know to ask; questions that will help us better understand our universe and humanity’s place within it. He Fixed NASA’s Giant Space Telescope Gregory Robinson was enjoying another job when NASA persuaded him to take on an enormous astronomy project that was billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule Amazon’s Ring privacy problem is back Like it or not, Amazon can give Ring footage to cops without your permission — or even a warrant. Flying to the Moon is like developing on your laptop As we’ve discussed before, both software development and reaching the Moon benefit from iteration — don’t bite off more than you can chew and try to deliver all your goals in one big shot, but start small and test each little solution or Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as you go. When one looks at the list of Apollo missions, each new mission built on the lessons of the previous one until NASA achieved the G mission — the MVP of actually landing on the Moon. Kurt Vonnegut on the 8 “shapes” of stories The American author said he attempted to bring scientific thinking to literary criticism, but received "very little gratitude for this."

Friday Feed July 22, 2022 COMIC: How living on Mars time taught me to slow down We're landing a priceless asset on the surface of Mars and we want to make use of every minute. Amazon wants to be your doctor now, too In the United States, health care can be expensive and difficult to obtain — and the quality doesn’t always match the cost. It’s possible that technology companies like Amazon have the answer to what ails the industry that’s supposed to fix what ails us. It’s also possible that their moves into that sector will give them even more power over us and yet another industry to dominate. Unboxing and using a $100 Chromebook Yes, for barely more than the price of an Apple power adapter, you can buy a WHOLE laptop -- including the power adapter! I bought this little machine expecting it to be just unusable: demonstrating the Jurassic Park axiom of "just because they could, they didn't think to ask whether they should". But it's really quite astonishing that you can buy a fully-serviceable machine for a two digit price. The Great Fiction of AI Authors paste what they’ve written into a soothing sunset-colored interface, select some words, and have the AI rewrite them in an ominous tone, or with more inner conflict, or propose a plot twist, or generate descriptions in every sense plus metaphor. 30% of Google's Emotions Dataset is Mislabeled First of all, language doesn’t live in a vacuum! Why would you present a comment with no additional metadata? Second, Google used data labelers unfamiliar with US English and US culture – despite Reddit being a US-centric site with particularly specialized memes and jargon.

Friday Feed July 29, 2022 TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants Facebook is trying to copy TikTok, but this strategy may well signal the end of these legacy platforms. ‘The entire protein universe’: AI predicts shape of nearly every known protein DeepMind’s AlphaFold tool has determined the structures of around 200 million proteins. How far can you go by train in 5h? This map shows you how far you can travel from each station in Europe in less than 5 hours. MIT, Autodesk develop AI that can figure out confusing Lego instructions But can it build my Ikea dresser? GFP-GAN is a New Free AI Tool That Can Fix Most Old Photos Instantly Anyone who has old photographs of their families and friends that have not held up well against time, regardless of the small and/or poor condition of the image, now has the chance to restore their faded and cracked images, returning them to their original state, or even better.

Friday Feed August 5, 2022 Bringing back the golden days of Bell Labs Bell Labs produced both fundamental breakthroughs that changed our understanding of the Universe and technological advances that have shaped the modern world. MIT invents $4 solar desalination device Researchers from MIT and China have developed a solar desalination device that could provide a family of four with all the drinking water it needs — and it can be made from just $4 worth of materials. Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient? How massive parallelism lifts the brain’s performance above that of AI. Building a Next-Level Camera Can this old lens become legendary? I think it can! Experimenting Can Lead to Great Dataviz Developing an interactive visualization from scratch in seven days: a step-by-step process

Friday Feed August 12, 2022 Teens have abandoned Facebook, Pew study says Gen Z internet use is on the rise, but the rate at which teens use Facebook is rapidly declining. A Pew Research Center study on teens, technology and social media found that only 32% of teens aged 13-17 use Facebook at all, but in a previous survey from 2014-2015, that figure was 71%, beating out platforms like Instagram and Snapchat. Work From Office Remote work offers a huge unlock for caregivers. Also, the physical workplace offers guardrails, structure, and connections for a generation that’s been robbed of relationships and growth. We are a social species. We live in a capitalist society. Find mentors, colleagues, and mates … get to the office. LEGOmetry – the geometry of LEGO bricks LEGO elements have their own geometry... 'Unless You Make Animation Real, You Can't Make It Funny' She observes that “unless you make [animation] real, you can’t make [it] funny,” and explains how she concentrates on infusing a realistic feeling of weight into the characters to make their actions believable. Dos and Don'ts of Machine Learning in Computer Security Despite great potential, machine learning in security is prone to subtle pitfalls that undermine its performance and render learning-based systems potentially unsuitable for security tasks and practical deployment. In this paper, we look at this problem with critical eyes.

Friday Feed August 19, 2022 The AI Art Apocalypse This image was created by an AI, MidJourney. All I had to do was type in a prompt (“wildfire”) and aspect ratio. This AI is pretty good, but nowhere near the state of the art, and AI like it are, over the next few years, going to make art like this available within seconds at a cost of pennies. Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video! The Case for Brutalist Architecture | An architecture that is specific and concrete. The Essence of Programming One thing I have noticed a lot when a programmer is struggling to solve a problem, especially a novice, is that he is stuck worrying about the “best way” to implement the solution rather than actually understanding the problem he has. I believe a lot of this stems from not understanding the essence of what programming fundamentally is. This is Facebook’s plan to be cool again Facebook was once, believe it or not, cool.

Friday Feed August 26, 2022 Jupiter is glowing in new pictures from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope An early look at the view of Jupiter captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, hinted at how precise and detailed our new view of the planet would be. But this week, NASA released another set of photos showing the cloud cover, rings, and moons of Jupiter in remarkable detail — and it was even better than scientists were hoping for. Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV This announcement – made just a few weeks after Amazon's admission of Ring footage being given to legal authorities without a warrant – simultaneously reads as both a failure to read the room, and the ultimate troll. "See what we've done here? We've turned Nineteen Eighty-Four's Room 101 into The Benny Hill Show!" The Four Dirty C-Words of the Internet There are four c-words that have become very problematic: content, culture, community, and creator. Diátaxis A systematic framework for technical documentation authoring. The most popular content on Facebook belongs in the garbage The top 20 posts by views on Facebook in the most recent report are overwhelmingly reposted memes that were originally created for other platforms.

Friday Feed September 2, 2022 The Obsessive Pleasures of Mechanical-Keyboard Tinkerers On the right machine, typing can be like playing a Steinway grand. Is tactile perfection possible? Here Is the Manual for the Mass Surveillance Tool Cops Use to Track Phones Police departments across the U.S. have been using Fog Reveal for ‘mass surveillance on a budget,’ investigations by the EFF and Associated Press revealed. Now, we're publishing the manual. Apple Maps Turns 10 — And It’s Finally Worth Using Even though it still has room to grow, nearly 10 years after the release of Maps, the company has turned it from a complete joke into pretty usable for many people. If you had told me that would be the case the day Maps launched, I’m not sure I would have believed you. Folk Interfaces People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition But Allen did not paint “Théâtre D'opéra Spatial,” AI software called Midjourney did. It used his prompts, but Allen did not wield a digital brush. This distinction has caused controversy on Twitter where working artists and enthusiasts accused Allen of hastening the death of creative jobs.

Friday Feed September 9, 2022 Why public chats are better than direct messages If Alice has a question for Bob, she is likely to ask Bob directly rather than posting a question in a group team chat. At ivelum, we do the opposite. Why Does This Horrifying Woman Keep Appearing in AI-Generated Images? “Loab” is creepypasta for the AI generation, and nobody understands where she came from. Doomscrolling linked to poor physical and mental health, study finds The tendency to be glued to bad news can spark a ‘vicious cycle’ that interferes with our lives, researcher says Some Things I Realized about AI while Contemplating Slide Rule Prices on Ebay Engineers in many industries are focused on the details and reliant on the simulations to put all the pieces together to make a coherent whole. The problem with simulating everything to death is that it actually helps keep us ignorant of basic principles. The first Bible completely illustrated by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Each of the 31,000+ verses of the Bible is accompanied by a unique illustration created by the AI model Stable Diffusion

Friday Feed September 16, 2022 The Toxic Culture of Rejection in Computer Science We need a coordinated effort to seek papers that are interesting, instructive, useful, or impactful in our community. This could certainly include papers introducing brand-new epsilons, but it is not restricted to such papers. We should publish only high-quality papers, but, today, we reject many high-quality papers. Subtitle the world New tech is helping change what accessibility means for the deaf community. Here's Why Craigslist Still Looks the Same After 25+ Years Because that serves people better. I've learned that people want stuff that is simple and fast and gets the job done. People don't need fancy stuff. Sometimes you just want to get through the day. Did GoogleAI Just Snooker One of Silicon Valley’s Sharpest Minds? But many people have claimed over the years to solve the problem, and none of those systems have proven to be reliable; every proposed solution has been like Clever Hans, working in dim light, leveraging large databases to some degree, but falling apart upon careful inspection; they might get 60% on some task, but they never really master it. Inspired by the Future: Star Trek and the Rise of Dataviz The art direction in Star Trek was key to imagining a future in which humans incorporated technology into their lives. It is clear that the show also imagined a future in which data was omnipresent and that technology would facilitate our interactions with, and interpretation of, that data.

Friday Feed September 23, 2022 How “Spider-Verse” forced animation to evolve And while studios and independent artists tested out more stylized approaches in short films, no studio would commit to a feature-length animated movie that looked too different...That is, until Sony Pictures/Imageworks took on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Instead of chasing the look everyone else was after, the team wanted to create something visually new. They did it with non-photorealistic rendering. New Webb Image Captures Clearest View of Neptune’s Rings in Decades NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras reveal the ice giant in a whole new light. We’ve only just begun to examine the racial disparities of long covid It may take years to understand the full impact of the pandemic and its aftermath on Black people in the US. I tried replacing Google with TikTok, and it worked better than I thought Prabhakar Raghavan, the SVP of search at Google, said in July that “something like almost 40 percent of young people, when they are looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram.” A history of ARM, part 1: Building the first chip “We thought we were crazy," she said. "We thought we wouldn't be able to do it. But we kept finding that there was no actual stopping place. It was just a matter of doing the work.”

Friday Feed September 30, 2022 The Pathfinder: How Gladys West Shaped The Earth For Modern Gps GPS Only Exists Because Of Two People: Albert Einstein And Gladys West: As A Young African American Girl Living On A Farm During The Great Depression, Gladys West Discovered She Had A Gift For Math. Forty Years Later, She Mapped The Shape Of Earth And Helped Invent GPSx. The Magic Cookie: How Lou Montulli Cured The Web’s Amnesia More Than Two Decades Ago, Web Pioneer Lou Montulli Invented Browser Software Cookies With The Goal Of Preserving User Privacy Online. But Then Things Took An Unexpected Turn. Data Engineering Best Practices: How Netflix Keeps Its Data Infrastructure Cost-Effective Instead of setting hard limits on user costs, it decided to empower its data decision makers with as much cost transparency as possible. The centerpiece of this strategy is a custom-built “data efficiency” dashboard that provides a comprehensive source of truth for cost and performance for all Netflix data users and teams. How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future Two decades before the personal computer, a shy engineer unveiled the tools that would drive the tech revolution How Arm conquered the chip market without making a single chip, with CEO Rene Haas Arm’s chips are in your iPhone — but what exactly does Arm do?

Friday Feed October 7, 2022 Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights These principles help provide guidance whenever automated systems can meaningfully impact the public’s rights, opportunities, or access to critical needs. I Have Come To Bury The Bios, Not To Open It: The Need For Holistic Systems instead of merely relying on marginally better implementations of dated abstractions, we are eliminating the abstractions entirely. Bosses need to accept that employees choose what the future of work looks like In our era of flexible, hybrid work, companies of all kinds are scrambling to find ways to get their employees back into the office. We are focused on the when and where of work, even though the what and how remain most vital. Rethinking the Computer Chip in the Age of AI The Penn team’s ferrodiode design offers groundbreaking flexibility that other compute-in-memory architectures do not. It achieves superior accuracy, performing equally well in not one but three essential data operations that form the foundation of effective AI applications. It supports on-chip storage, or the capacity to hold the enormous amounts of data required for deep learning, parallel search, a function that allows for accurate data filtering and analysis, and matrix multiplication acceleration, the core process of neural network computing. Liberating the Smalltalk lurking in C and Unix This talk introduces liballocs, an infrastructure which exposes the dynamism hiding in the arcane linking and debugging infrastructure of a Unix process, along with a small extension to C toolchains that enables fast dynamic access to data created by statically compiled code.

Friday Feed November 11, 2022 A Priceless Archive Of Ordinary Life To preserve Black history, a 19th-century Philadelphian filled hundreds of scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and other materials. But now underfunding and physical decay are putting archives like this one at risk.

Friday Feed October 14, 2022 Rollercoaster repeatedly triggers iPhone 14 Crash Detection Apple's latest iPhone and Apple Watch safety feature, Crash Detection, uses onboard sensors and mountains of crash data to detect whether or not it is involved with a car accident. Despite the training of the system, it seems that rollercoasters could be its weakness. Better living through better design Babcock Ranch is located a few miles inland from Ft. Myers, which was devastated by Ian. It bills itself as “America’s first solar-powered town,” with an impressive array of almost 700,000 solar panels. More than that, it was built with natural disasters in mind: all utilities are underground, it makes use of natural landscaping to help contain storm surges, and streets are designed to divert floodwaters, making use of multiple retaining ponds. Meta Meets Microsoft It’s difficult to overstate what a massive win this feels like for Microsoft: the company will have a privileged position on what is for now the most advanced headset with the most resources behind it, not because it is paying for the privilege but because it is the most obvious go-to-market for this new technology. How Ted Hoff Invented The First Microprocessor Looking back, Hoff recalled that he never even considered patenting the microprocessor in those days. To him the invention seemed to be obvious, and obviousness was considered grounds for rejecting a patent application (though, Hoff said bitterly, the patent office currently seems to ignore that rule). The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time An obscure software system synchronizes the network’s clocks. Who will keep it running?

Friday Feed October 21, 2022 Depending on where you live, the internet AT&T offers you may be faster or slower. The household with slower service is in a lower income area with fewer White residents...The slower service does not come with a better price. Both households are asked to pay exactly the same. Playing Dataviz Tennis for Collaboration and Fun Inspired by Layer Tennis, we collaborated on four data visualizations (four matches) where we swap the file back and forth adding to the work. Each match lasted for eight or 10 rounds with 45 minutes per round, and the person who served got to choose the dataset for the match. How many Amazon packages get delivered each year? In 2021 the company shipped an estimated 7.7 billion packages globally, based on its nearly $470 billion in sales. Rent Going Up? One Company’s Algorithm Could Be Why. Texas-based RealPage’s YieldStar software helps landlords set prices for apartments across the U.S. With rents soaring, critics are concerned that the company’s proprietary algorithm is hurting competition. How to organize your Slack channels Conversations in Slack can quickly get out of hand — so it’s a good idea to try to organize them to help keep track

Friday Feed October 28, 2022 Watch ISS astronaut’s awesome tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey During the final days of her six-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), European Space Agency astronaut C has paid tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey by recreating one of the many memorable moments from the classic 1968 movie. State of AI Report 2022 Now in its fifth year, the State of AI Report 2022 is reviewed by leading AI practioners in industry and research. An Improbable Future Industrial and Transportation Design of the future, influenced by the past. Designed by AI First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility. Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” the idea is to break down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble them from the ground up. Start with the Hero, Not the Story “I’m a scientist, not a creative writer.” Wrong. If you work with data, you need to think like an artist. Artists start by thinking about their hero.

Friday Feed November 4, 2022 We’ve filed a lawsuit challenging GitHub Copilot, an AI product that relies on unprecedented open-source software piracy. By training their AI systems on public GitHub repositories (though based on their public statements, possibly much more) we contend that the defendants have violated the legal rights of a vast number of creators Decker Decker is a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior. Pieca: A Raspberry Pi Camera System for Leica M Mount Lenses Based on the venerable Raspberry Pi4 and the High-Quality image sensor module it incorporates a 5-in touch screen with a live view and full manual controls. The camera uses the M mount system for attaching lenses. Allowing the camera to use a plethora of small manual lenses from Leica, 7Artisans, TTartisan, and other vintage lenses. Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants us to ‘ignore’ Web3: ‘Web3 is not the web at all’ Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web, said he doesn’t view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet. DALL·E API Now Available in Public Beta Developers can now integrate DALL·E directly into their apps and products through our API. More than 3 million people are already using DALL·E to extend their creativity and speed up their workflows, generating over 4 million images a day. Welcome to The World's First RISC-V Site! I'm hosting this site on a LicheePi, a RISC-V SBC (Single Board Computer) that costs only $26 USD.

Friday Feed November 11, 2022 Why are clinical trials so expensive? Tales from the beast’s belly Unusually, I was an engineer who had the opportunity to watch our Phase I and II trials unfold from a good vantage point, and I hope the stories I share will be informative. Overall, they paint a picture of an industry which is severely lacking in human capital and fully captured by bureaucratic tendencies. Wrist-mounted camera captures entire body in 3D Using a miniature camera and a customized deep neural network, Cornell researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind wristband that tracks the entire body posture in 3D. Recreating sci-fi terminals using VHS But then I realised I could use it to do something much more fun: recreate some scenes from some sci-fi films. Why I Stopped Using Bullet Graphs (and What I Now Use Instead) After teaching many data professionals about bullet graphs and using them in many dashboards, I started to notice that they had a fair number of downsides. A few years ago, I started using an alternative called “action dots” that, I believe, are more informative, easier to understand, faster to visually scan, more compact, easier to implement, and don’t have any of the downsides of bullet graphs. Northrop Grumman Employees Receive NASA’s Highest Honors for Building the James Webb Space Telescope NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal recognizes personal contributions to NASA mission success and advancement of the nation’s interests through extraordinary service and a profound level of excellence.

Friday Feed November 18, 2022 Medical device development with Raspberry Pi At the heart of medical device development is the risk management process. In a nutshell the most important thing to remember in medical device development is that “the benefits of using the device must outweigh the residual risks”. You might also have heard the popular healthcare philosophy “first do no harm”. Taking and understanding a risk-based perspective is important, because the perception of risk changes depending on the circumstances and that in turn has significant implications for your device development. Celebrating the Art of Code The Computer History Museum’s yearlong exhibition looks at the software that makes the world Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online Galactica was supposed to help scientists. Instead, it mindlessly spat out biased and incorrect nonsense. What’s wrong with US broadband? The state of US broadband is bad: It's expensive, most people can't choose their carrier, they add bogus charges, there is no escape from fiber If software engineers built buildings… Wise billionaire reasons that network effects are hard to copy. So He buys the existing pre-populated 100 story building. But wtf is a mud expert and why do you need them? As a wise orange man once said: you’re fired!

Friday Feed November 25, 2022 Turning YouTube Comments Into Art Chiara Amisola, an artist from the Philippines, believes that the YouTube comments section is “one of the last sacred spaces of the internet.” Tax Filing Websites Have Been Sending Users’ Financial Information to Facebook The information sent to Facebook can be used by the company to power its advertising algorithms and is gathered regardless of whether the person using the tax filing service has an account on Facebook or other platforms operated by its owner, Meta. Continuous glucose monitor startups still have to prove their worth But a new spate of startups wants me, and everyone, to start thinking about our blood sugar all the time. Over the past few years, companies like Levels, January, and Nutrisense started selling programs that promise to help people start managing their blood sugar levels. They sell devices called continuous glucose monitors: small sensors that embed a tiny needle in someone’s body to track the way their blood sugar (their glucose) levels rise and fall. Introduction to Genomics for Engineers This Guide is written specifically by and for computer scientists and engineers. The underlying biology in cancer genomics can be exceedingly complex and requires years of study. Making the content palatable requires drawing abstractions around these concepts. This guide should be treated as an introduction to the domain that teaches our audience the material in a "broad-strokes" fashion. Cancer vaccines: the next immunotherapy frontier After several decades, therapeutic cancer vaccines now show signs of efficacy and potential to help patients resistant to other standard-of-care immunotherapies, but they have yet to realize their full potential and expand the oncologic armamentarium. Here, we classify cancer vaccines by what is known of the included antigens, which tumors express those antigens and where the antigens colocalize with antigen-presenting cells, thus delineating predefined vaccines (shared or personalized) and anonymous vaccines (ex vivo or in situ).

Looking to leave Twitter? Here are the social networks seeing new users now Here's a look at where some Twitter users are testing the waters.

Friday Feed December 2, 2022 Photographs of Films Capturing a film in its entirety—setting the exposure rate to the film’s duration—in each of these images each motion picture becomes an abstract hue of shifting colours and vague shapes. We’re left with a more atmospheric picture of the film’s feeling rather than its content as colours bleed and blur between frames and slowly recompose the film as something altogether more painterly in tone and character. Tales of the M1 GPU marcan asked me to write an article about the M1 GPU, so here we are~! It’s been a long road over the past few months and there’s a lot to cover, so I hope you enjoy it! Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks? In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing. Will Congress or Biden act? OpenAI invites everyone to test new AI-powered chatbot—with amusing results ChatGPT aims to produce accurate and harmless talk—but it's a work in progress. Tax Filing Websites Have Been Sending Users’ Financial Information to Facebook Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online,

Friday Feed December 9, 2022 How PostScript Kickstarted Desktop Publishing Adobe’s PostScript became the heart of the digital printing press Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux We’re excited to announce our first public Apple Silicon GPU driver release! We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here. This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games TikTok sued by Indiana over security and safety concerns The popular social media app TikTok has been sued by the US state of Indiana. FTX Contagion Connections... Fifty years later, remastered images reveal Apollo 17 in stunning clarity Shortly after midnight, 50 years ago this morning, the Apollo 17 mission lifted off from Florida. With Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ron Evans on board, this was NASA's sixth and final spaceflight to the lunar surface.

Friday Feed December 16, 2022 The golden age of the streaming wars has ended For a few years, there was a boon of content, and we were all wonderfully spoiled. And now that’s over. Never, Ever, Ever Use Pixelation for Redacting Text Today, we’re focusing on one such technique – pixelation – and will show you why it’s a no-good, bad, insecure, surefire way to get your sensitive data leaked. To show you why, I wrote a tool called Unredacter that takes redacted pixelized text and reverses it back into its unredacted form. TikTok’s Secret Sauce TikTok’s algorithm is ordinary. Its real innovation is something else. Generative Problem Solving with Large Language Models Large language models have recently shown an ability to solve a variety of problems. In this notebook we consider programming problems (as solved by AlphaCode) and mathematics problems (as solved by Minerva). The best science images of 2022 Unprecedented views of the cosmos captured imaginations in 2022, as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back images. On Earth, striking pictures came from stressed ecosystems and from the cellular world. From black holes to volcanic eruptions, here are the images that grabbed the attention of Nature’s editors.

Friday Feed December 23, 2022 How to spot AI-generated text The internet is increasingly awash with text written by AI software. We need new tools to detect it TikTok Spied On Forbes Journalists According to materials reviewed by Forbes, ByteDance tracked multiple Forbes journalists as part of this covert surveillance campaign, which was designed to unearth the source of leaks inside the company following a drumbeat of stories exposing the company’s ongoing links to China. Password requirements: myths and madness Password requirements are weird. It seems impossible to set a new password in many websites. Why? Things to argue about over the holidays instead of politics 30 things... January 1, 2023 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1927 are open to all! On January 1, 2023, copyrighted works from 1927 will enter the US public domain. 1  They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon. These include Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, the German science-fiction film Metropolis and Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller, compositions by Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and a novelty song about ice cream.

Friday Feed December 30, 2022 What happened to Southwest Airlines? the frontline employees have been watching this meltdown coming like a slow motion train wreck for sometime. And we’ve been begging our leadership to make much needed changes in order to avoid it. What happened yesterday started two decades ago. The Year in Quiet Quitting A new generation discovers that it’s hard to balance work with a well-lived life. Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning From the perspective of 2022, I provide a timeline of the—in hindsight—most important relevant events in the history of NNs, deep learning, AI, computer science, and mathematics in general, crediting those who laid foundations of the field. Where Does ChatGPT Fall on the Political Compass? Since ChatGPT provides responses to almost any query provided to it, I decided to use several political orientation tests to determine whether its answers display a skew toward any particular political ideology. The Raspberry Pi Super Computer in DevNucleus at Cloud World 2022 The Raspberry Pi Super Computer was originally built for Oracle Open World in October 2019. There are 1050 Raspberry Pi 3b+ in four server racks configured in a big square box reminiscent of a British police box popularized in a certain BBC TV series. Fast forward to today, and The Raspberry Pi Super Computer (Pi Cluster) was sent to e-waste, some parts stripped off it, and sat dormant for two years until May of this year, when it found its way to my garage for a complete overhaul.