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"politics" entries
Classic Programmer Paintings, Equality at Work, Bitcoin as Politics, and Raising Robotic Natives
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Classic Programmer Paintings — hilarity has ensued. The captions are brilliant.
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Equality Takes Work — Women do not prefer saying less: They anticipate the treatment they will receive when they say more.
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Bitcoin as Politics: Distributed Right-Wing Extremism — The lack of any thorough, non-conspiratorial analysis of existing financial systems means that bitcoin fails to embody any true alternative to them. The reasons for this have little to do with technology and everything to do with the existing systems in which bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are embedded, systems that instantiate the forms of social power that cannot be eliminated through either wishful thinking or technical or even political evasion: the rich and powerful will not become poor and powerless simply because other people decide to operate alternate economies of exchange. […] Because it operates without such an account, bitcoin’s real utility and purpose (and that of the cryptocurrency movement in general) can be better understood as a “program” for recruiting uninformed citizens into a neoliberal anti-government politics, understanding the nature and effects of which requires just the attention to political theory and history that bitcoin enthusiasts rail against. So … not a fan, then?
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Raising Robotic Natives — design/art artefacts for generations growing up with robots.
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New Statesmen, Autonomous Vehicle Reliability, Conversational Software, and TensorFlow Playground
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Tech CEOs Cast Themselves as the New Statesmen (Buzzfeed) — the logical consequence of the corporation replacing elected government as the most efficacious unit of organization.
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How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability? (RAND) — it may not be possible to establish with certainty the safety of autonomous vehicles. Uncertainty will remain. In parallel to developing new testing methods, it is imperative to develop adaptive regulations that are designed from the outset to evolve with the technology so that society can better harness the benefits and manage the risks of these rapidly evolving and potentially transformative technologies.
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We Don’t Know How to Build Conversational Software — current brand-driven conversations are deeply underwhelming (phone trees with more typing is dystopic shopping), but I don’t know that we need to solve general AI for chatbots to provide an illusion of utility.
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TensorFlow Playground — tinker with a neural network right here in your browser. Don’t worry, you can’t break it. We promise.
Machine Poetry, Robo Script Kiddies, Big Data of Love, and Virtual Currency and the Nation State
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How Machines Write Poetry — Harmon would love to have writers or other experts judge FIGURE8’s work, too. Her online subjects tended to rate the similes better if they were obvious. “The snow continued like a heavy rain” got high scores, for example, even though Harmon thought this was quite a bad effort on FIGURE8’s part. She preferred “the snow falls like a dead cat,” which got only middling ratings from humans. “They might have been cat lovers,” she says. FIGURE8 (PDF) system generates figurative language.
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The Decisions the Pentagon Wants to Leave to Robots — “You cannot have a human operator operating at human speed fighting back at determined cyber tech,” Work said. “You are going to need have a learning machine that does that.” I for one welcome our new robot script kiddie overlords.
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Love in the Age of Big Data — Over decades, John has observed more than 3,000 couples longitudinally, discovering patterns of argument and subtle behaviors that can predict whether a couple would be happily partnered years later or unhappy or divorced. Turns out, “don’t be a jerk” is good advice for marriages, too. (via Cory Doctorow)
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National Security Implications of Virtual Currency (PDF) — Rand research report examining the potential for non-state actor deployment.
TensorFlow Released, TensorFlow Described, Neural Networks Optimized, Cybersecurity as RealPolitik
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TensorFlow — Google released, as open source, their distributed machine learning system. The DataFlow programming framework is sweet, and the documentation is gorgeous. AMAZINGLY high-quality, sets the bar for any project. This may be 2015’s most important software release.
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TensorFlow White Paper (PDF) — Compared to DistBelief [G’s first scalable distributed inference and training system], TensorFlow’s programming model is more flexible, its performance is significantly better, and it supports training and using a broader range of models on a wider variety of heterogeneous hardware platforms.
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Neural Networks With Few Multiplications — paper with a method to eliminate most of the time-consuming floating point multiplications needed to update the intermediate virtual neurons as they learn. Speed has been one of the bugbears of deep neural networks.
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Cybersecurity as RealPolitik — Dan Geer’s excellent talk from 2014 BlackHat. When younger people ask my advice on what they should do or study to make a career in cyber security, I can only advise specialization. Those of us who were in the game early enough and who have managed to retain an over-arching generalist knowledge can’t be replaced very easily because while absorbing most new information most of the time may have been possible when we began practice, no person starting from scratch can do that now. Serial specialization is now all that can be done in any practical way. Just looking at the Black Hat program will confirm that being really good at any one of the many topics presented here all but requires shutting out the demands of being good at any others.
Page Loads, Data Engines, Small Groups, and Political Misperception
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Ludicrously Fast Page Loads: A Guide for Full-Stack Devs (Nate Berkopec) — steps slowly through the steps of page loading using Chrome Developer Tools’ timeline. Very easy to follow.
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Specialised and Hybrid Data Management and Processing Engines (Ben Lorica) — wrap-up of data engines uncovered at Strata + Hadoop World NYC 2015.
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Power of Small Groups (Matt Webb) — Matt’s joined a small Slack community of like-minded friends. There’s a space where articles written or edited by members automatically show up. I like that. I caught myself thinking: it’d be nice to have Last.FM here, too, and Dopplr. Nothing that requires much effort. Let’s also pull in Instagram. Automatic stuff so I can see what people are doing, and people can see what I’m doing. Just for this group. Back to those original intentions. Ambient awareness, togetherness. cf Clay Shirky’s situated software. Everything useful from 2004 will be rebuilt once the fetish for scale passes.
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Asymmetric Misperceptions (PDF) — research into the systematic mismatch between how politicians think their constituents feel on issues, and how the constituents actually feel. Our findings underscore doubts that policymakers perceive opinion accurately: politicians maintain systematic misperceptions about constituents’ views, typically erring by over 10 percentage points, and entire groups of politicians maintain even more severe collective misperceptions. A second, post-election survey finds the electoral process fails to ameliorate these misperceptions.
Semantic Sensors, Broadening "Sensor," Moving Fast, and Presidential Campaigns
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Semantic Sensors (Pete Warden) — tiny, cheap, all-in-one modules that capture raw noisy data from the real world, have built-in AI for analysis, and only output a few high-level signals.
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What if People Were Sensors, Not Things To Be Sensed? (Cory Doctorow) — Even in the Internet of Allegedly Free Things, humans and computers are adversaries. Medical telemetry and implant companies envision selling shockingly intimate facts about your body’s internal workings to data-mining services and insurers. Car companies see their vehicles as platforms for gathering data on your driving, on traffic patterns, and on the sense-able facts of the streets you pass by, to sell it to, you guessed it, data-mining companies and insurers. John Deere has argued that its tractors are copyrighted works, and that it, not the farmers, own the soil-density data collected by the torque sensors on the wheels (it sells this data to Monsanto, which charges farmers for the right to know about it).
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Move Fast and Break Nothing (Zach Holman) — the first step is identifying what you cannot break.
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I’m Trying to Run for President But the Democrats Won’t Let Me (Larry Lessig) — A “democracy” in which 400 families give 50% of the money in campaigns is not American democracy. It is a banana republic democracy.
Next President, Robotic Drivers, Vintage Graphics, and Javascript Scheduling
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Lessig for President — it’s time.
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Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics? (PDF) — interesting list of drivers, including wireless tech, battery efficiency, and worldwide data storage.
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How Oldschool Graphics Worked (YouTube) — video series on how ’80s computer graphics effects were built. (via BoingBoing)
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Tasks, Microtasks, Queues, and Schedules (Jake Archibald) — today’s dose of javascript scheduling headache.
Welfare and Entrepreneurialism, Infrastructure Secrets, Insectoid Robots, Hacking Hexbugs
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Welfare Makes America More Entrepreneurial (The Atlantic) — In a 2014 paper, Olds examined the link between entrepreneurship and food stamps, and found that the expansion of the program in some states in the early 2000s increased the chance that newly eligible households would own an incorporated business by 16%. (Incorporated firms are a better proxy for job-creating startups than unincorporated ones.)
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Security of Infrastructure Secrets — everything has a key that’s just one compromise or accidental drop away.
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Festo’s Fantastical Insectoid Robots Include Bionic Ants and Butterflies (IEEE) — Each butterfly has a 50-centimeter wingspan and weighs just 32 grams, but carries along two servo motors to independently actuate the wings, an IMU, accelerometer, gyro, and compass, along with two tiny 90-mAh lithium-polymer batteries. With a wing beat frequency of between one and two flaps per second, top speed is 2.5 m/s, with a flight time of three to four minutes before needing a 15-minute charge. The wings themselves use impossibly thin carbon rods for structure, and are covered with an even thinner elastic capacitor film.
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Arduino Celebration and Hexbugs hacking with Bob Martin (SparkFun) — The Hunter demo is a combination of object detection and object avoidance. It uses an IR sensor array to determine objects around it. Objects that appear and then disappear quickly, say in a second or two are targets which it will walk towards; however, a target that stays constant will be avoided. I’m still trying to find the perfect balance between making a decision between fleeing prey and a wall using only simple proximity samples from an IR detector array.
Go Microservices, Watch Experience, Multithreading Bugs, and Spooks Ahoy
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Microservices in Go — tale of rewriting a Ruby monolith as Go microservices. Interesting, though being delivered at Gophercon India suggests the ending is probably not unhappy.
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Watch & Wear (John Cross Neumann) — Android watch as predictor of the value and experience of an Apple Watch. I believe this is the true sweet spot for meaningful wearable experiences. Information that matters to you in the moment, but requires no intervention. Wear actually does this extremely well through Google Now. Traffic, Time to Home, Reminders, Friend’s Birthdays, and Travel Information all work beautifully. […] After some real experience with Wear, I think what is more important is to consider what Apple Watch is missing: Google Services. Google Services are a big component of what can make wearing a tiny screen on your wrist meaningful and personal. I wouldn’t be surprised after the initial wave of apps through the app store if Google Now ends up being the killer app for Apple Watch.
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Solving 11 Likely Problems In Your Multithreaded Code (Joe Duffy) — a good breakdown of concurrency problems, including lower-level ones than high-level languages expose. But beware. If you try this [accessing variables with synchronisation] on a misaligned memory location, or a location that isn’t naturally sized, you can encounter a read or write tearing. Tearing occurs because reading or writing such locations actually involves multiple physical memory operations. Concurrent updates can happen in between these, potentially causing the resultant value to be some blend of the before and after values.
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Obama Sharply Criticizes China’s Plans for New Technology Rules (Reuters) — In an interview with Reuters, Obama said he was concerned about Beijing’s plans for a far-reaching counterterrorism law that would require technology firms to hand over encryption keys, the passcodes that help protect data, and install security “backdoors” in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access. Goose sauce is NOT gander sauce! NOT! Mmm, delicious spook sauce.
Twitter Emoji, Immersive Cinema, Bitcoin Regulation, and Internet Sovereignty
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Twitter Open Sources Their Emoji Library — Emoji are the sparklines of sentiment.
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Interactive 360-degree Films. From Google (Medium) — you move the camera through a movie shot in 360 degrees, and can choose what you’re looking at through the scene. I can’t wait to try this, it sounds brilliant.
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Bitcoin Crackdown — everyone who started exchanges and mutual funds thinking Bitcoin wouldn’t be regulated like a currency is getting an SEC headache.
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Connected Choices: How the Internet is Challenging Sovereign Decisions (PDF) — Ultimately, the Internet remains both a global commons and part of each nation’s sovereign infrastructure, and thus activities in cyberspace must continue to navigate two sets of demands: national interests and global interests. […] Political leaders are responsible for articulating a vision and establishing general principles and policies to achieve their goals and, accordingly, are constantly trying to advance their agendas using policy, law, market mechanisms, regulation, standards, and other initiatives. The evidence is clear; you just have to look for it.