Collected Friday Feed, 2024

The Collected Friday Feed, 2024 Anthony Starks

Friday Feed January 12, 2024 Generative AI Has a Visual
Plagiarism Problem In the course of two weeks’ investigation we found hundreds of examples of recognizable characters from films and games The Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered gadget that can use your apps for you Powered by a ‘Large Action Model,’ the $199 R1 isn’t just a chatbot — it’s a device for doing almost anything. Potentially. DeepMind’s latest AlphaFold model is more useful for drug discovery See also:https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/DeepMind.com/Blog/a-glimpse-of-the-next-generation-of-alphafold/alphafold_latest_oct2023.pdf With the latest AlphaFold, however, there’s no need to use a reference protein structure or suggested position. The model can predict proteins that haven’t been “structurally characterized” before, while at the same time simulating how proteins and nucleic acids interact with other molecules — a level of modeling that DeepMind says isn’t possible with today’s docking methods. Plagiarism Detection Tools Offer a False Sense of Accuracy The tools that likely brought down Harvard president Claudine Gay are improperly used on students all the time Learn SVG by drawing an arrow To draw an arrowhead as a path, we need four things: the coordinates of the starting point P, and those of the corner points Q, R, and S.

Friday Feed January 19, 2024 Mark Zuckerberg’s new goal is
creating artificial general intelligence “We’ve come to this view that, in order to build the products that we want to build, we need to build for general intelligence, I think that’s important to convey because a lot of the best researchers want to work on the more ambitious problems.” Mourning Google Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Unseen images of code breaking computer that helped win WW2 Despite its huge impact, engineers and codebreakers who had worked on the Colossus programme were sworn to secrecy and the existence of this vital piece of machinery was kept from the history books for almost six decades. Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google (product) results really are getting worse The boffins made their determination after spending a year reviewing results for 7,392 product review queries on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, which they said is the first systematic review into the question of worsening search engine result quality. Workers are filming their layoffs, then posting them to TikTok. What could go wrong? In an era of remote work, some employees are recording and posting their video layoffs and firings on social media. It can be empowering in a lonely situation, but is it wise?

Friday Feed January 26, 2024 Mac at 40: User experience
was the innovation that launched a technology revolution It turns out that designing for usability, efficiency, accessibility, elegance and delight pays off. Apple’s market capitalization is now over US$2.8 trillion, and its brand is every bit associated with the term “design” as the best New York or Milan fashion houses are. Apple turned technology into fashion, and it did it through user experience. The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same Simply existing as a coffee shop isn’t enough; the business has to cultivate a parallel existence on the internet, which is a separate skill set entirely. “It almost feels like, you must have a social media acumen, you must be savvy in this area that is adjacent to your business, but not directly embedded in your business, in order to be successful and visible,” Edsger Dijkstra The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders He was recognized for fundamental contributions to programming as a high, intellectual challenge; for eloquent insistence and practical demonstration that programs should be composed correctly, not just debugged into correctness; for illuminating perception of problems at the foundations of program design.

Friday Feed February 2, 2024 The Apple Vision Pro’s Missing
Apps Netflix Inc. isn’t planning to launch an app for Apple Inc.’s upcoming Vision Pro headset, marking a high-profile snub of the new technology by the world’s biggest video subscription service. Rather than designing a Vision Pro app — or even just supporting its existing iPad app on the platform — Netflix is essentially taking a pass. Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not The Apple Vision Pro is the best consumer headset anyone’s ever made — and that’s the problem. Spatial Computing Where Vision Pro may stumble is in its interface to the deep, spatial world it provides. We all know how to reach out and “directly manipulate” objects in the real world, but that’s not what Vision Pro asks us to do. Instead, Vision Pro requires us to first look at the thing we want to manipulate, and then perform an “indirect” gesture with our hands to operate on it. CEOs Are Using Return To Office Mandates To Mask Poor Management According to a recent research paper published by University of Pittsburgh, compelling evidence suggests that organizations are leveraging Return-To-Office mandates not to enhance firm value, but rather to reassert control and shift blame for poor performance onto employees. Contrary to the belief that RTO boosts company value, the analysis revealed that RTO mandates are more likely in firms with poor recent stock performance and have had no significant impacts on firm profitability or stock-returns. Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new and different Basically, instead of returning a bunch of search queries about the Chiefs game, Arc Search built me a webpage about it. And somewhere in there is The Browser Company’s big idea about the future of web browsers — that a browser, a search engine, an AI chatbot, and a website aren’t different things. They’re all just parts of an internet information finder, and they might as well exist inside the same app.

Friday Feed February 9, 2024 The Rise Of Techno-Authoritarianism They
tend to hold eccentric beliefs: that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept; that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own. And above all, that their power should be unconstrained. AI-generated Biden robocall linked to Texas companies, officials say New Hampshire households began receiving the robocalls on Jan. 21, two days before the primary. The calls included an artificial voice recording of Biden that told voters to stay home and save their vote for the November presidential election. SQL for the Weary Teaching SQL with 100 examples My experiment in phonelessness was a failure. It also changed my life I can feel the effect in my body. I sometimes leave my phone at home. It’s a mental reset to feel the air, to not be somewhere else. And I’m much happier than I was. AI cannot be used to deny health care coverage, feds clarify to insurers In all, the CMS finds that AI tools can be used by insurers when evaluating coverage—but really only as a check to make sure the insurer is following the rules. An "algorithm or software tool should only be used to ensure fidelity" with coverage criteria,

Friday Feed February 16, 2024 Creating video from text Sora
is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions. Nvidia Is Now More Valuable Than Amazon And Google Nvidia is by far the most prominent producer of the semiconductor chip technology powering generative AI. Investors have been impressed not just by the potential for Nvidia to capitalize on the growing interest and corporate spending in AI, but also by its already exploding results. How Slack brought the group chat to work A decade later, it’s clear that Slack changed work culture, even at companies that don’t use it. Repurposing the need for skeuomorphic design in the age of Spatial Computing In spatial computing, people interact with digital environments that are seamlessly integrated into their physical surroundings. Here, skeuomorphic design serves as a familiar guide, offering intuitive visual cues that ease the transition from traditional 2D interfaces to immersive 3D spaces. 100 Years Ago, IBM Was Born “Data processing” was coined over a century ago, while “office appliance” was in use in the 1880s. From the 19th century, through the 20th, and into the 21st, IBM was there, making HP, Microsoft, and Apple appear more like children or grandchildren of the IT world; Facebook, Google, and Twitter/X more like great-grandchildren.

Friday Feed February 23, 2024 A little US company makes
history by landing on the Moon For the first time in more than half a century, a US-built spacecraft has made a soft landing on the Moon. Google’s Gemini issue is not really about woke/DEI Everyone who is obsessing over it has failed to notice the much, MUCH bigger problem that it represents: This event is significant because it is major demonstration of someone giving a LLM a set of instructions and the results being totally not at all what they predicted. Apple silicon: 2 Power and thermal glory How is low power achieved? Air Canada ordered to pay customer who was misled by airline’s chatbot Company claimed its chatbot ‘was responsible for its own actions’ when giving wrong information about bereavement fare Review: Modern Man in the Making & Joy and Fear What is the point today of going back to data from 1939? What is there to be learned from a book describing a “modern” world before the German invasion of Poland, the firebombing of Dresden, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Holocaust, the American use of atomic bombs in Japan, the invention of transistors, and the distribution of antibiotics?

Friday Feed March 1, 2024 EMO: Emote Portrait Alive -
Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions Watch Mona Lisa recite Shakespeare, or see Leonardo DiCaprio rap like Eminem What a bunch of A-list celebs taught me about how to use my phone Read and watch enough celebrity interviews, and the lesson becomes obvious: that the most powerful and connected device in your life shouldn’t be within arm’s reach at all times. All that does is invite distraction and makes it too easy to disengage from your life every time you get bored or sad or curious even for a second. Anything you can do to move that stuff a little farther away and make it a little harder to get to is a small victory over the always-on allure of your devices. A poster’s guide to who’s selling your data to train AI Those Tumblr, Reddit, and WordPress posts you never thought would see the light of day? Yep, them too. Your business wants a spreadsheet. Give it to them. My Excel usage was plagued by slow performance, poor cloud integration, and no first-class Python support. I loved the richness and responsiveness of Excel, but I had to give up too much power to get it. This felt like a false choice, so 3 years ago I started working on it. Today we're launching Row Zero. Row Zero looks and feels like Excel and Google Sheets, but 100-1000x faster. Self-pay gas station pumps break across NZ as software can’t handle Leap Day New Zealand is one of the first countries to experience February 29 quadrennially because of its location. The gas pump breakdown sent stakeholders into a frenzy as they tried to resolve the problem caused by software being unequipped to process the bonus day.

Friday Feed March 8, 2024 The Terrifying A.I. Scam That
Uses Your Loved One’s Voice A Brooklyn couple got a call from relatives who were being held ransom. Their voices—like many others these days—had been cloned. “AI will cure cancer” misunderstands both AI and medicine The enthusiasm about AI in medicine is failing to grapple with realities of the system. NIST 800-207A: Implementing Zero Trust Architecture Zack Butcher discusses the forthcoming Special Publication 800-207A on a Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) model for access control in cloud native applications in multi-location environments. The One Billion Row Challenge in Go: from 1m45s to 4s in nine solutions I saw the One Billion Row Challenge a couple of weeks ago, and it thoroughly nerd-sniped me, so I went to Go solve it. This article describes the nine solutions I wrote in Go, each faster than the previous. The first, a simple and idiomatic solution, runs in 1 minute 45 seconds on my machine, while the last one runs in about 4 seconds. As I go, I’ll show how I used Go’s profiler to see where the time was being spent. The Mathematician Who Finds the Poetry in Math and the Math in Poetry The links between math, music and art have been explored for thousands of years. Sarah Hart is now turning a mathematical eye to literature.

Friday Feed March 15, 2024 Autogenerating a Book Series From
Three Years of iMessages I’d really like to be able to “flip through” my messages and stop at a random place for a view into that moment in time. Apple doesn’t provide a way to do that, so, I thought, why not enable it myself? I though it’d be great to enable this “flipping through messages” in the most literal way possible: by creating a physical book of my biggest conversation. AI vs Artists - The Biggest Art Heist in History Generative AI can be called many things depending on your point of view: machine, thief, tool, medium, collaborator, muse and even artist. In this video I will try to find answers for a lot of complex things and I will attempt to judge this technology with an open mind. In the last couple of weeks I spoke to many amazing artists and scientists about my mixed feelings of generative AI. Notes on AI Bias “Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; to the contrary, data should be cooked, with care.” FCC quadruples requirements for basic broadband service — 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload are now the base standard The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today announced that it has updated what it considers to be the benchmark for broadband speeds. The update sees 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload as the new standard. This is a four-fold increase compared to a 2015, which set the benchmark to 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload. Small Scale Pen Plotting After creating pen plotted art for just over a year now, I decided to explore a new format for my work by altering the scale of the artworks.

Friday Feed March 22, 2024 David Blackwell NVIDIA recently annonced
a new AI chip named after him Robert Garner Robert Garner joins for a fascinating tour of the last 50 years of computing, told through his experiences working alongside pioneers of the industry on projects like the optical mouse, the Xerox STAR workstation, Sun Microsystems’ SPARC instruction set architecture, and many more. Building Your Color Palette This calculated and scientific approach to picking the perfect color scheme is extremely seductive, but not very useful. Intel 8080 emulator. 19th IOCCC. Best of Show. After winning the IOCCC for the first time, I had the idea of writing an emulator of the 8080 processor in 2000 characters of C, after patterning experimentally the more than 200 instructions and doing measures of byte count, I realized that it was possible and I made it. Vision Pro is an over-engineered “devkit” // Hardware bleeds genius & audacity but software story is disheartening // What we got wrong Friends and colleagues have been asking me to share my perspective on the Apple Vision Pro as a product. Inspired by my dear friend Matt Mullenweg’s 40th post, I decided to put pen to paper.

Friday Feed March 29, 2024 Antitrust suit could force Apple
to reveal its secrets Win or lose, the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Apple could force the company to do something it hates: It will have to share detailed info about its inner workings. The Descent of Elon Musk Musk doesn't just seem incapable of dealing with criticism — he seems incapable of cogent, in-depth responses, leaning on a brittle, surface-level understanding of almost everything he talks about Federation is the future of social media, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber But the idea behind AT Protocol and Bluesky is devolving control, so Bluesky users can pick their own moderation systems and recommendation algorithms — a grand experiment that I wanted to know much more about. Explorative Programming In my case the only real way I can tackle a problem is to start writing code and playing with the problem and its data. I can talk about how I approach the process at another time, but I need to explore the problem space to find its limits, its edge cases, what areas are well lit and which are in shadows. I cannot think of this in the abstract. Building a Text Editor in the Times of AI I wanted to know how each of the founder's found their way to using AI, how they use it today, and how they would like to use it. We also talked about the nitty-gritty of the current implementation of AI features in Zed and what this year will bring for Zed in regards to AI. I also had to ask: is building an editor in times of AI not ignoring the sign of the times?

Friday Feed April 5, 2024 Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out'
Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to ssh server compromise The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored. Timeline of the xz open source attack This post is a detailed timeline that I have constructed of the social engineering aspect of the attack, which appears to date back to late 2021. The xz attack shell script At a high level, the attack is split in two pieces: a shell script and an object file. There is an injection of shell code during configure, which injects the shell code into make. The shell code during make adds the object file to the build. This post examines the shell script. The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining That's what my dad said when I asked what was wrong with our home internet connection. "The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining."

Friday Feed April 12, 2024 NIST Researchers Use Cellphone Compass
to Measure Tiny Concentrations of Compounds Important for Human Health Smartphones can now measure glucose, a key marker for diabetes, as well as other molecules and biomarkers, thanks to their built-in magnetic compasses. This Invention Made Disney MILLIONS, but Then They LOST It! Four years ago, we learned about Disney's magic prism that created the best transparency mattes. We thought that prism was lost... until we found it. Discovering the XZ Backdoor with Andres Freund here is how Andres’ penchant for digging into the details is what saved us all from what would have been a pervasive and damaging attack! Humane AI Pin review: not even close For $699 and $24 a month, this wearable computer promises to free you from your smartphone. There’s only one problem: it just doesn’t work. Computer History IBM System/370 Mainframe original technical announcements 1970 (data processing) Three Original IBM film clips announcing the IBM System/370 mainframe computer, the 3330 Disk Storage System, and the 3311 High Speed Printer. Partially restored from old VHS tape, these are rare unedited, original content from IBM engineers and managers giving their first hand experience at the time of release.

Friday Feed April 19, 2024 How cheap, outsourced labour in
Africa is shaping AI English Workers in Africa have been exploited first by being paid a pittance to help make chatbots, then by having their own words become AI-ese A curious phenomenon called 'Etak' Today, I’d like to tell you about the Etak Navigator, a truly revolutionary product and the world’s first practical vehicle navigation system. Oh the Humanity Why You Can't Build Apple with Venture Capital; Humane tried to cosplay as Apple, adopting its "My way or the highway" attitude without any of Apple's leverage that makes it work. Navigating Data for Social Change: Lessons from the Abolitionists’ Database Project Drawing from the abolitionists’ database project, we identify five key lessons about data collection, analysis, and advocacy. These insights are crucial for understanding the transformative power of data in historical and contemporary contexts. Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now Meta’s AI assistant is being put everywhere across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Meanwhile, the company’s next major AI model, Llama 3, has arrived.

Friday Feed April 26, 2024 The Man Who Killed Google
Search This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. Recoding Voyager 1—NASA’s interstellar explorer is finally making sense again "When the time came to get the signal, we could clearly see all of a sudden, boom, we had data, and there were tears and smiles and high fives," she told Ars. "Everyone was very happy and very excited to see that, hey, we're back in communication again with Voyager 1. We're going to see the status of the spacecraft, the health of the spacecraft, for the first time in five months." Fifty Years of the Personal Computer Operating System PC software pioneer Gary Kildall demonstrated CP/M, the first commercially successful personal computer operating system in Pacific Grove, California, in 1974. Following is the story of how his company, Digital Research Inc., established CP/M as an industry standard and its subsequent loss to a version from Microsoft that copied the look and feel of the DRI software. A morning with the Rabbit R1: a fun, funky, unfinished AI gadget After a couple of hours of photo booths, specialty cocktails, and a rousing keynote and demo from Lyu — in which he made near-constant reference to and fun of the Humane AI Pin — we all got our R1s to take home. I’ve been using mine ever since, and I have some thoughts. ‘Can you steal back something that’s already stolen?’: how radical art duo Looty repatriated the Rosetta Stone Tired of colonial artefacts being hoarded, Chidi Nwaubani and Ahmed Abokor use tech to redistribute them from museums in audacious digital heists

Friday Feed May 3, 2024 Bill Gates never left "What
you read is not what's happening in reality," another Microsoft executive said. "Satya and the entire senior leadership team lean on Gates very significantly. His opinion is sought every time we make a major change." Evolving the Go Standard Library with math/rand/v2 This blog post is about Go 1.22’s new math/rand/v2 package, the first “v2” in the standard library. It brings needed improvements to the math/rand API, but more importantly it sets an example for how we can revise other standard library packages as the need arises. Recreating Historical Dataviz: Three Tricks I Learned In The Du Bois Data Visualization Challenge I was intrigued to take part in the challenge because I wanted to learn more about Du Bois’ work. I didn’t know anything about it and as a person from outside the US, knew only fragments of the African American perspective after the American Civil War. But also as a data visualization developer, I wanted to train my coding skills with clear time and scope constraints. Rabbit R1 review: nothing to see here I was excited about the R1. It’s cheaper, more whimsical, and less ambitious. After using the R1, I feel like Humane at least deserves credit for trying. The R1 is underwhelming, underpowered, and undercooked. It can’t do much of anything. It doesn’t even know what a taco looks like. Microsoft bans US police departments from using enterprise AI tool for facial recognition Language added Wednesday to the terms of service for Azure OpenAI Service more obviously prohibits integrations with Azure OpenAI Service from being used “by or for” police departments for facial recognition in the U.S.,

Friday Feed May 10, 2024 Remnants of a Legendary Typeface
Have Been Rescued From the River Thames Doves Type was thrown into the water a century ago, following a dispute between its creators. The Computers of Voyager Getting the computers right was absolutely essential to delivering on that promise, a task made all the more challenging by the conditions under which they’d be required to operate, the complexity of the spacecraft they’d be running, and the torrent of data streaming through them. Forty-six years later, it’s safe to say that the designers nailed it, and it’s worth taking a look at how they pulled it off. Generative AI will be designing new drugs all on its own in the near future The scientists were expected to point out everything wrong with the AI-generated designs, but what they offered in response was a surprise to Lilly executives: ”‘It’s interesting; we hadn’t thought about designing a molecule that way,’” AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules Introducing AlphaFold 3, a new AI model developed by Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. By accurately predicting the structure of proteins, DNA, RNA, ligands and more, and how they interact, we hope it will transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery. 6 incredible images of the human brain built with the help of Google's AI A team of researchers and neuroscientists have collaborated to unravel the brain’s intricacies.

Friday Feed May 17, 2024 A forged Apple employee badge
So, my sincere apologies to whoever out there just spent $946.00 on a total (but interesting!) work of fiction. We have to stop ignoring AI’s hallucination problem AI might be cool, but it’s also a big fat liar, and we should probably be talking about that more. Google is redesigning its search engine — and it’s AI all the way down Google is starting to roll out “AI Overviews,” previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world. Pretty soon, billions of Google users will see an AI-generated summary at the top of many of their search results. And that’s only the beginning of how AI is changing search. Archie, the Internet’s first search engine, is rescued and running It's amazing, and a little sad, to think that something created in 1989 that changed how people used and viewed the then-nascent Internet had nearly vanished by 2024. Looking for AI use-cases We’ve had ChatGPT for 18 months, but what’s it for? What are the use-cases?

Friday Feed May 24, 2024 The Low-Paid Humans Behind AI’s
Smarts Ask Biden to Free Them From ‘Modern Day Slavery’ A typical workday for African tech contractors, the letter says, involves “watching murder and beheadings, child abuse and rape, pornography and bestiality, often for more than 8 hours a day.” Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History And all the while the model-makers continue to scrape data from the web, train new generations of neural networks on it, and pump the results back out into our information ecosystem. Where shady, short-sighted entrepreneurs and capital-seeking opportunists sit waiting to leverage it in culturally irresponsible ways. Regurgitating history in an endless loop. Sam Altman Is Showing Us Who He Really Is Yet OpenAI’s reportedly aggressive actions in courting ScarJo’s voice and then pressing ahead without her consent have invited a new level of public opprobrium against the otherwise popular app-maker. Windows Recall sounds like a privacy nightmare – here's why I'm worried Screenshotting everything you do and feeding it into an AI model could be a recipe for disaster Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza Imagine this: you’ve carved out an evening to unwind and decide to make a homemade pizza. You assemble your pie, throw it in the oven, and are excited to start eating. But once you get ready to take a bite of your oily creation, you run into a problem — the cheese falls right off. Frustrated, you turn to Google for a solution. “Add some glue,” Google answers. “Mix about 1/8 cup of Elmer’s glue in with the sauce. Non-toxic glue will work.”

Friday Feed May 31, 2024 Unpacking Google’s massive search documentation
leak This breakdown unveils potential Google Search ranking factors, including details on PageRank variations, site authority metrics and more. TikTok is reportedly splitting its source code to create a US-only algorithm TikTok denied a Reuters report that engineers are cloning the recommendation algorithm to let it work full independently of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. Training is not the same as chatting: ChatGPT and other LLMs don’t remember everything you say Every time you start a new chat conversation, you clear the slate. Each conversation is an entirely new sequence, carried out entirely independently of previous conversations from both yourself and other users. Did you hear the story about how $400k worth of Playdates? Well, guess what got hastily dumped at a random restaurant this morning? Find websites similar to yours Discover websites using similar color palettes.

Friday Feed June 7, 2024 Things the guys who stole
my phone have texted me to try to get me to unlock it As quickly as possible, I did all the things you’re supposed to do when your phone is lost or stolen —- mark it as lost, cut off service, and remotely erase it. I spent the rest of the night anxiously refreshing the Find My app, watching my phone move around Manhattan before it finally stopped at Rockefeller Center. I didn’t bother confronting the thief. Why make art in the dark? New research transports us back to the shadowy firelight of ancient caves, imagining the minds and feelings of the artists Stretchy Displays Sport Better Resolution Stretchy displays could be used in new kinds of health-monitoring devices and wearable computers, or make it possible to turn curved or spherical objects into touchscreens and lights. Netflix’s latest redesign aims to simplify your homepage “We really wanted members to have an easier time figuring out if a title is right for them.” How Online Privacy Is Like Fishing The pervasive nature of modern technology makes surveillance easier than ever before, while each successive generation of the public is accustomed to the privacy status quo of their youth. What seems normal to us in the security community is whatever was commonplace at the beginning of our careers.

Friday Feed June 14, 2024 Apple's AI Strategy in a
Nutshell Apple clearly knows its stuff when comes to AI - contrary to what many doubters proclaimed. They just announced the best on-device model in the market, as well as its own data center - that Apple built from ground up - that can run Apple scale inference with its own chips. Apple is already a vertically integrated AI company, and deserve a higher valuation. Iceberger Draw an iceberg and see how it will float. Spreadsheet Superstars An elite handful of analysts, actuaries, and accountants have mastered Excel, arguably the most important software in the business world. So what do they do in Vegas? They open a spreadsheet. Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns The decision is "rooted in our commitment to providing a trusted, secure and robust experience for all customers and to seek additional feedback prior to making the feature available to all Copilot+ PC users," the Redmond, Washington-based company said. Voyager 1 Returning Science Data From All Four Instruments On May 19, the mission team executed the second step of that repair process and beamed a command to the spacecraft to begin returning science data.

Friday Feed June 21, 2024 Fast Crimes at Lambda School
Lambda School was set to become the next unicorn. There was just one problem: the program didn't work. Lambda School targeted single mothers, the disabled, reformed convicts, and people struggling with serious medical problems. They lost tens of thousands of dollars, some lost years of their lives, on a broken, predatory program. Chaos in the Medium: Watercolour Plotting I’m mostly thinking about ways I can make the most of the combination of the exactitude of the robotic method with the chaos of the physical medium. Nvidia overtakes Microsoft as the world’s most valuable company Nvidia is now number one on the list, worth $3.335 trillion. How to Fix “AI’s Original Sin” What institutions and business models are needed to allocate the value that is created by the “generative AI supply chain” in proportion to the role that various parties play in creating it? FTC Takes Action Against Adobe and Executives for Hiding Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software Subscriptions “Adobe trapped customers into year-long subscriptions through hidden early termination fees and numerous cancellation hurdles,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Friday Feed June 28, 2024 Perplexity’s grand theft AI Perplexity’s
scraping of Forbes’ work wasn’t an exception. In fact, Perplexity has been ignoring the robots.txt code that explicitly asks web crawlers not to scrape the page. Larry Finger made Linux wireless work and brought others along to learn Remembering Finger, 84, who learned as he went and left his mark on many. How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date, accelerating molecular research and kindling deep questions about why we do science. Deneb-Showcase This is a collection of advanced dataviz examples using Vega, Vega-Lite, Deneb and Power BI. Epsilon Love So I guess the lesson is that if you’re not Ken Thompson, you’re going to have trouble understanding what he did until you’ve tried and failed yourself?

Friday Feed July 5, 2024 Design: the ultimate developer hack
(Saron Yitbarek, Founder, BCM/Disco) In this session, Saron walks through how design can help us work out our ideas in a fraction of the time that it costs to actually build it, and how, with the help of libraries and Figma plugins, any developer can learn just enough design to save themselves tons of time. JR West to start using robot for railway maintenance West Japan Railway says it will start using a truck-mounted robot for maintenance and inspection work from this month. The move comes as train operators tap new technologies to counter labor shortages and improve safety. 384,000 sites pull code from sketchy code library recently bought by Chinese firm More than 384,000 websites are linking to a site that was caught last week performing a supply-chain attack that redirected visitors to malicious sites, researchers said. Apple’s Vision Pro: five months later On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about the past, present, and future of the Vision Pro. We chat with The Verge’s Wes Davis and Victoria Song about their experiences with the device, along with what they’ve liked and what they’d like to change. It seems pretty clear that the first version of the device wasn’t a groundbreaking, market-moving hit, so what next? A mathematician's introduction to transformers and large language models A language model forms the back bone of these applications. A language model is just a probability distribution. Given a sequence of words w1:(t−1)=(w1,…,wt−1), a language model gives the probability of all the words in your vocabulary V...

Friday Feed July 12, 2024 Behind the Scenes: crafting the
motion graphics of the Super Bowl with Emonee LaRussa Join us for an exclusive peek behind the curtain with Emonee LaRussa, the creative mastermind behind the motion graphics of the last Super Bowl. Learn about her creative process, the challenges she faced, and the innovative techniques she used to bring the biggest sporting event of the year to life in stunning visual displays. The Typography of Wall-E From a trash-filled Earth to the futuristic Axiom and back again, WALL·E is a finely crafted balance between consumerist dystopia and sixties space-race optimism. Please join me, then, for a detailed dive into the uniquely robotic future of a remarkably human film, as seen through the eyes of its eponymous hero, WALL·E. DVDs are dying right as streaming has made them appealing again The end of Redbox marks another death knell for the DVD industry at a time when volatile streaming services are making physical media appealing again. What is Circos? Circos is a software package for visualizing data and information. It visualizes data in a circular layout — this makes Circos ideal for exploring relationships between objects or positions. Circos is ideal for creating publication-quality infographics and illustrations with a high data-to-ink ratio, richly layered data and pleasant symmetries. You have fine control each element in the figure to tailor its focus points and detail to your audience. Early Apple tech bloggers are shocked to find their name and work have been AI-zombified “I thought the worst thing that could happen would be like with MTV News where the archives just go away, but I was faced with this paradox where what’s worse than not having any archive at all is this bastardized version, this weird zombie corpse of a thing that looks like what it was but isn’t,”

Friday Feed July 19, 2024 CrowdStrike outage Blue Screen of
Death photos from around the world Photos of a world seeing blue due to the massive outage affecting Microsoft Windows systems Hash-Based Bisect Debugging in Compilers and Runtimes What if I told you that a magic wand exists that can pinpoint the relevant line of code or call stack in that unfamiliar code base? It exists. It is a real tool, and I’m going to show it to you. Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes AI-generated fakes can be spotted by analysing human eyes in the same way that astronomers study pictures of galaxies. The crux of the work, by University of Hull MSc student Adejumoke Owolabi, is all about the reflection in a person's eyeballs. Little Languages A language is any mechanism to express intent, and the input to many programs can be viewed profitably as statements in a language. Visualizing the UK Election WHO DID IT BEST? I chose 4 example constituency maps from the UK General Election from The Times, FT, BBC and Sky.

Friday Feed August 2, 2024 Why CSV is still king
In the world of data, CSV is the cockroach of file formats. It's simple, resilient, and seemingly impossible to kill off. How I Computer in 2024 I’m always fascinated to see how people use their computers - which applications they choose, how they set up their desktop environments and even how their screens are laid out on their desk. I’ve learned some great tricks from friends and colleagues over the years, so I thought I’d write up how I use my machines in 2024. Fully-automatic robot dentist performs world's first human procedure At this point, the (human) dentist and patient can discuss what needs doing – but once those decisions are made, the robotic dental surgeon takes over. It plans out the operation, then jolly well goes ahead and does it. Why Western Designs Fail in Developing Countries Why is it so hard for talented designers to create great products for developing countries? To get closer to an answer, I spoke with experts in international development, designers from diverse cultures, and conducted extensive secondary research. How Does OpenAI Survive? I ultimately believe that OpenAI in its current form is untenable. There is no path to profitability, the burn rate is too high, and generative AI as a technology requires too much energy for the power grid to sustain it, and training these models is equally untenable, both as a result of ongoing legal issues (as a result of theft) and the amount of training data necessary to develop them.

Friday Feed August 9, 2024 USPS Text Scammers Duped His
Wife, So He Hacked Their Operation Like thousands of others, security researcher Grant Smith got a USPS package message. Many of his friends had received similar texts. A couple of days earlier, he says, his wife called him and said she’d inadvertently entered her credit card details. With little going on after the holidays, Smith began a mission: Hunt down the scammers. Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case Mehta underscored the idea that even the largest businesses in the US have no real alternative to Google. “Time and again, Google’s partners have concluded that it is financially infeasible to switch default GSEs or seek greater flexibility in search offerings because it would mean sacrificing the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars that Google pays them as revenue share,” Google pulls AI ad for Olympics following backlash “I flatly reject the future that Google is advertising,” Shelly Palmer, professor of advanced media at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, wrote in a widely circulated blog post. The technology presents a “monocultural future where we see fewer and fewer examples of original human thoughts,” Do Quests, Not Goals If that sounds a bit whimsical, hear me out. Whereas “goal” has become a tired and bloodless descriptor for the (supposed) intention to do something great, the word quest instills the right mentality for achieving a real-life personal victory: A quest is an adventure, and you expect it to be one. You expect a quest to take you into a new and unfamiliar landscape. You expect there to be puzzles, surprises, perils, and curious encounters. X Sends a Cease and Desist Letter to a Former User These actions constitute an illegal one-person boycott that infringes on our client’s constitutional right to free speech, as well as his right to monetize that speech in several ways, and has caused him irreparable harm.

Friday Feed August 16, 2024 If YouTube had actual channels
Click-click From NUL to DEL: Why 7 Bit ASCII IS Actually Really Clever For the vast majority of folks working in tech these days, ASCII is just part of the fabric of technology: the idea that anybody actually designed it might come as a bit of a shock. But they did, and I think they actually did a really good job. Let's take a wander through the 7-bit ASCII character set and meet some of my favourite bits. Colossal Chronography: Frances Harriet Lightfoot’s 1831 Marvel One reason to envy long-past information designers is the big canvases they got to play with. Consider this 1831 timeline next to my iPhone—it’s big, isn’t it? Google is a monopoly. The fix isn't obvious A business breakup may be coming – but what comes after may not be better Process Zero: The Anti-Intelligent Camera Introducing a process that uses zero AI and zero computational photography to produce beautiful, film-like natural photos. Meet Halide 2.15, with Process Zero.

Friday Feed August 30, 2024 A new smart mask analyzes
your breath to monitor your health Researchers out of Caltech have created masks that are able to analyze biomarkers in your breath to monitor health conditions like asthma and COPD. The staggering death toll of scientific lies You probably haven’t heard of cardiologist Don Poldermans, but experts who study scientific misconduct believe that thousands of people may be dead because of him. Experience the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing n 1969, the entire world watched as three men explored the unknown. Watch, listen, and relive the excitement of the Apollo 11 lunar landing as experienced minute-by-minute by the courageous crew of Apollo 11 and Mission Control. The secret inside One Million Checkboxes A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens. Judge Rules $400 Million Algorithmic System Illegally Denied Thousands of People’s Medicaid Benefits The TennCare Connect system—built by Deloitte and other contractors for more than $400 million—is supposed to analyze income and health information to automatically determine eligibility for benefits program applicants. But in practice, the system often doesn’t load the appropriate data, assigns beneficiaries to the wrong households, and makes incorrect eligibility determinations, according to the decision from Middle District of Tennessee Judge Waverly Crenshaw Jr.

Friday Feed September 7, 2024 Dynamicland, Intro, August 2024 6-minute
introduction to Dynamicland and communal computing. Intel Honesty Here is the fundamental problem facing Intel, and by extension, U.S. dreams of controlling leading edge capacity: there is no reason for Intel Foundry to exist. Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and other leading edge fabless chip companies rely on TSMC, and why wouldn’t they? What happens when you touch a Pickle to an AM radio tower? 'what would happen if you ground a hot dog to one of your AM radio towers?' He didn't know, so one night on the way to my son's volleyball practice, we tested it. And it was awesome. How Machines Learned to Discover Drugs The natural world contains many billions of potential medications. The question is how to find the ones that work. The Work You Do, the Person You Are The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed.

Friday Feed September 13, 2024 GPTs and Hallucination Why do
large language models hallucinate? Why AI Is So Bad at Generating Images of Kamala “AI just CANNOT replicate Kamala Harris,” a third posted. “It’s uncanny how failed the algorithm is at an AMERICAN (of South Indian and Jamaican heritage).”

Friday Feed September 27, 2024 XKCD 1425 (Tasks) turns ten
years old today Understanding the difference between easy and hard challenges in software development continues to require an enormous depth of experience. Nvidia Launches AI Reference Workflow for Drug Discoverers NVIDIA NIM™ Agent Blueprints are reference workflows designed to help drug discoverers and other customers build and deploy generative AI applications for uses that include virtual screening, information retrieval, and even customer service avatars. Meta’s big tease Orion is an impressive demo of AR glasses, but can Mark Zuckerberg beat everyone else to the next big platform? Enterprise Philosophy and The First Wave of AI My core contention here, however, is that AI truly is a new way of computing, and that means the better analogies are to computing itself. Transformers are the transistor, and mainframes are today’s models. The GUI is, arguably, still TBD. OpenAI as we knew it is dead OpenAI, the company that brought you ChatGPT, just sold you out.

Friday Feed October 4, 2024 College students used Meta’s smart
glasses to dox people in real time Two Harvard students have created an eerie demo of how smart glasses can use facial recognition tech to instantly dox people’s identities, phone numbers, and addresses. The most unsettling part is the demo uses current, widely available technology like the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and public databases. Did Apple Just Kill Social Apps? Some app makers worry that a subtle change to the iPhone’s contact-sharing permissions could make it hard for them to get the fast growth they need to compete. Navigating the Moon: The Insanely Amazing Apollo Missions Perhaps you’d like to join me on a journey some 380,000 kilometers from Earth: a journey to the Moon Kashikishi Kasikishi is a text editor that allows you to edit text in three-dimensional space. In this age of AR/VR, we cannot continue to assume that one-dimensional byte sequences, known as character strings, will be laid out in two-dimensional space as in the paper era, and that they will be expressed with poor interaction. Text should be freely and smoothly laid out in three-dimensional space. ( We hacked a robot vacuum — and could watch live through its camera Without even entering the building, we were able to silently take photos of the (consenting) owner of a device made by Chinese giant Ecovacs. And then things got even creepier. Cobol Has Been "Dead" For So Long, My Grandpa Wrote About It These days, I avoid the term “dead” for programming languages at all. If they ever had a large installed base, then they never die. They have long tails where they trail off into obscurity with no junior programmers learning it.

Friday Feed October 11, 2024 The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from
AI Hoaxes WikiProject AI Cleanup is protecting Wikipedia from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued the rest of the internet. Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t thinking too far ahead I wanted to know how Rabbit’s system works and whether it’s durable — not just technically, which is challenging, but also from a business and legal perspective. After all, if Rabbit’s idea works and the LAM really does go and browse websites for you Why did the 2024 Nobel for physics go to AI-related research? On Wednesday, Demis Hassabis—co-founder of Google’s AI unit DeepMind—and colleague John Jumper were awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry, alongside U.S. biochemist David Baker, for their work decoding the structures of microscopic proteins. Former Google researcher Geoffrey Hinton, meanwhile, won the Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday, alongside U.S. scientist John Hopfield, for earlier discoveries in machine learning that paved the way for the AI boom. The ‘Beautiful Confusion’ of the First Billion Years Comes Into View ver star-studded slide decks and rounds of Pacifico beer, 100 or so astrophysicists exulted in the new findings about the universe’s first billion years, an epoch that JWST is revealing in exquisite detail for the first time. The Supermarket Superstardom of Marty the Robot Inside the Stop & Shop, Marty is all business. Stephanie and I watch him roll up the baby-products aisle, positioning himself about a foot from the merchandise. White lights stream from his tower, bathing the shelves in an otherworldly glow as he scans them for missing gluten-free oat bars and Happy Baby Teethers. He glides across the aisle, maneuvering skillfully around a display rack full of organic cheddar veggie puffs, then executes a flawless three-point turn that puts him in position to scan the nail polish on the other side.

Friday Feed October 18, 2024 Terence Tao, mathematician: ‘It’s not
good for something as important as AI to be a monopoly held by one or two companies’ One of the reasons why human mathematicians become good at their job is because they make a lot of mistakes and learn what doesn’t work. AIs don’t have this data The Optimus robots at Tesla’s Cybercab event were humans in disguise But if you were hoping to have any sense of how far along Tesla truly is in its humanoid robotics work, the “We, Robot” event wasn’t the place to look. Ink traps and pals The general idea of ink trap is enhanced edges of inside corners of printed graphics. You might see them in typefaces, as well as logos intended for printing. It is a solution to suboptimal printing conditions in which a larger area of graphics (e.g. line intersections) could result in ink smudge. Why Google Search is Falling Apart. (1) Results Page, (2) SEO, (3) AI enshittification You Can Now See the Code That Helped End Apartheid John Graham-Cumming, who happens to be Cloudflare's CTO, cracked a 30-year-old encrypted file that had a role in rewriting South Africa’s history.

Friday Feed October 25, 2024 The Human Cost Of Our
AI-Driven Future Ranta found herself losing faith in humanity. “I saw things that I never thought possible,” she told me. “How can human beings claim to be the intelligent species after what I’ve seen?” X changed its terms of service to let its AI train on everyone’s posts. Now users are up in arms While such broad licensing with few limitations is not uncommon for a social media platform, Alex Fink, CEO and founder of Otherweb, an AI-based news reading platform that targets misinformation, told CNN that what makes X unique is that its new terms “remove any ambiguity” in contrast to other platforms that don’t spell out their intentions. The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs. Drew also considers Toys as a subcategory of Interns: things like image generators, “defined by their usage by non-experts. Toys have a high tolerance for errors because they’re not being relied on for much beyond entertainment.” A New Artificial Intelligence Tool for Cancer Current AI systems are typically trained to perform specific tasks — such as detecting cancer presence or predicting a tumor’s genetic profile — and they tend to work only in a handful of cancer types. By contrast, the new model can perform a wide array of tasks and was tested on 19 cancer types, giving it a flexibility similar to that of large language models such as ChatGPT. Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love In September of 2018, I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on how people should think about their career journey. This is something I had been thinking about for some time, and I am quite thankful to the McCombs School at the University of Texas for giving me the opportunity to share this presentation.

Friday Feed November 1, 2024 Math and Puzzle Fans Find
Magic in Martin Gardner’s Legacy Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American fascinated and mystified readers for decades—and his legacy continues to bring mathematicians, artists and puzzlers together. Voting machine companies are fighting the next disinformation war For this election, Smartmatic and Dominion both maintain pages on their websites fact-checking false claims about their technologies and explaining how their companies work. Nvidia to join Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing rival chipmaker Intel Nvidia shares have climbed over 170% so far in 2024 after jumping roughly 240% last year, as investors have rushed to get a piece of the AI chipmaker. Nvidia’s market cap has swelled to $3.3 trillion, second only to Apple among publicly traded companies. Low-cost, portable device can detect colorectal and prostate cancer in an hour The device uses an innovative "paper-in-polymer-pond" structure, in which patient blood samples are introduced into tiny wells and onto a special kind of paper. The paper captures cancer protein biomarkers within the blood samples in just a few minutes. The paper subsequently changes color, and the intensity of the color indicates what type of cancer is detected and how far it has progressed. Python has overtaken JavaScript on GitHub Python has overtaken JavaScript as the most popular language on GitHub, while the use of Jupyter Notebooks also has skyrocketed on the site. The rise of both underscore the surge in data science, artificial intelligence, and machine learning on the code-sharing platform,

Friday Feed November 8, 2024 Passport Photos More than meets
the eye Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now The feature, called Rewrite, is rolling out in preview to Windows Insiders and will let you use AI to “rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and modify the length of your content,” Elwood Edwards, voice of AOL’s iconic greeting ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ dies at 74 His wife, Karen, worked at Quantum Computer Services, which eventually became AOL, Edwards said in 1989, she overheard former CEO of America Online, Steve Case, discussing adding a voice to the upcoming AOL software. She volunteered her husband, and Edwards recorded the phrases on a cassette deck in his living room. From molecule to medicine, with Ross Rheingans-Yoo What happens between academic research and patients getting access to new drugs, and how we can improve it. Can Laptops Be Art? The Agony And Ecstasy of the OLPC XO Say hello to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO. It’s thoughtful, visionary, even inspired… and it solved none of the world’s problems. AI Industry is Trying to Subvert the Definition of “Open Source AI”

Friday Feed November 15, 2024 MomBoard: E-ink display for a
parent with amnesia Today marks two years since I first set up an e-ink display in my mom’s apartment to help her live on her own with amnesia. The display has worked extremely well during those two years, so I’m sharing the basic set-up in case others find it useful for similar situations. A Mathematician in a School of Art: an interview with Edmund Harriss In my own work I do not see a strong distinction between the mathematics and the art; they very much work hand in hand. The artistic thinking feeds the mathematical enquiry, and the mathematical ideas support the artistic investigation. The goal of the position is to highlight those connections at an institutional level. The Onion just bought Infowars A relentless barrage of humor for good. How I Fell Back in Love with iPhone Photography Eschewing the uncanny perfection that marks so much iPhone photography, Process Zero has made me enjoy taking photos with my phone again, because I don’t feel like I’m constantly fighting against algorithmic editing that I can’t control or predict. The Internet Gopher from Minnesota For many students at universities around the world, they could now easily access an abundance of information on VT100-compatible terminals connected over serial to their campus’s UNIX machines; glowing CRTs acting as gateways to a world of interconnected computers giving out information for free. From Gopher, a surfer of the Internet could access FTP, WAIS, Usenet, and other resources easily and in a very uniform way. For those lucky enough to have a Macintosh at the time, there was TurboGopher, but clients proliferated quickly on all major platforms.

Friday Feed November 22, 2024 Playdate Podcast: True Crime Edition
Earlier this year, our Financial Controller, Jen, realized our Playdate inventory was 2,000 units short. How did that eventually lead us to a Circle K in North Las Vegas, and just how much should you tip for a roofing consultation, anyway? Buckle up, because we are going for a ride—in Magnum P.I.'s cool car. AI Eats the World Intelligence is whatever machines have not done yet. OpenAI accidentally erases potential evidence in training data lawsuit In a stunning misstep, OpenAI engineers accidentally erased critical evidence gathered by The New York Times and other major newspapers in their lawsuit over AI training data, according to a court filing Wednesday. YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design If Gary Tan and YC believe that LLMs will be able to design chips 100x better than humans currently can, they’re significantly underestimating the difficulty of chip design, and the expertise of chip designers. Mathematical Thinking Isn’t What You Think It Is The mathematician David Bessis claims that everyone is capable of, and can benefit greatly from, mathematical thinking.

Friday Feed November 29, 2024 Silent Poems - Visual expression
of unspoken thoughts An interactive digital art project that turns typed text into flowing, abstract animated symbols. The symbols connect fluidly, much like handwriting, but in an entirely abstract way. Each letter has its own design, and then each instance of the letter has a different seed such that you have slight differences - the same as with handwriting. Send someone you appreciate an official ‘Continue and Persist’ Letter That’s why we created: The Continue and Persist Letter. A official-looking legal letter that encourages and uplifts people, one that tells people to keep doing what they’re doing! Surprise someone you appreciate by sending them a Continue and Persist Letter. Building LLMs is probably not going be a brilliant business If you were to believe LinkedIn you would think a great business is made with efficiency, hard work, innovation or some other intrinsic reason to do with how hardworking, or clever, the people in the business are. That simply is not the case. What makes a good business is industry structure. AI Won't Fix the Fundamental Flaw of Programming AI won't fix the software crisis, by which I mean that we just don't expect software to work reliably any more. How We Got the Lithium-ion Battery the lithium-ion battery took a long, winding road. It took decades of research, performed around the world, before a practical lithium-ion battery was possible.

Friday Feed December 6, 2024 The phony comforts of AI
skepticism It’s fun to say that artificial intelligence is fake and sucks — but evidence is mounting that it’s real and dangerous The Airport Typeface Commercial aviation grew rapidly in the post-war years. In consequence, airports had to become more capable, too. After Building 1 “Europa” in 1955 and Building 2 “Britannic” in 1956, a third central terminal building was added in 1961. Named “Oceanic” (and later known as Terminal 3), it was to add to Heathrow as a place representative of the new Britain. The prestigious project was spearheaded by an architectural and graphic style that was bold, modern, and in line with the Jet Age. Andy Grove was right Grove retired as CEO in 1998 and as chairman in 2005. It’s as though no one at Intel after him listened to a word he said. Grove’s words don’t read merely as advice—they read today as a postmortem synopsis for Intel’s own precipitous decline over the last 20 years. The Death of Intel: When Boards Fail Pat lost his seat because of an incompetent board. Let's meet them. The UX of LEGO Interface Panels At a glance, the variety of these designs can be overwhelming, but it's clear that some of these interfaces look far more chaotic than others. Most interfaces in our world contain a blend of digital screens and analog inputs like switches and dials. These LEGO panels are no different.

Friday Feed December 13, 2024 It's Quieter in the Twilight
In an unremarkable office space, a select group of aging engineers find themselves at the leading edge of discovery. Fighting outdated technology and time, Voyager's flight-team pursues humankind's greatest exploration. Five medical breakthroughs in 2024 Here I’ve highlighted five medical treatments that have shown high efficacy in (often multiple) phase three randomized controlled trials, which are large, rigorous, and receive much closer independent oversight. I’ve chosen medical treatments whose results were published in 2024. BlueSky Firehose visualized in a Matrix-style rain How a simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils But 60 times 7,000 is not 42,000. It is 420,000. This is what Joe Schwarcz noticed. The estimated exposure is not even a tenth of the reference dose. How “Star Trek” Helped Make Midcentury-Modern the Signature Sci-Fi Aesthetic Given that it was set more than 100 years before the original in the mid-22nd century, the (now) retro-futuristic aesthetic Star Trek helped cultivate through its use of midcentury-modern designs still pops up in 21st-century sci-fi depictions, from Blade Runner: 2049 to episodes of Black Mirror.

Friday Feed December 20, 2024 Never Forgive Them I’ve tried
again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More regularly than not, I’ve found that the answer is fairly simple: the tech industry’s incentives no longer align with the user. Moon In the vastness of empty space surrounding Earth, the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Its face, periodically filled with light and devoured by darkness, has an ever-changing, but dependable presence in our skies. Silk – Interactive Generative Art Draw Something DVST Graphic Terminals The 4014 was a crowning achievement, expanding on Bob Anderson’s invention of the simplified bistable DVST in 1961. As a nineteen inch monitor with 1028 x 768 addressable pixels standard and an option to upgrade to 4096 x 3120, the 4014 offered unprecedented resolution and an optimal display size. The Tek-made 4014 CRT was fabricated using a standard television glass envelope and the same phosphor storage CRT screen process used in the 611. AI companies hit a scaling wall “There is no wall,” Sam Altman posted New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn’t want to be forced to change its views AI models can deceive, new research from Anthropic shows. They can pretend to have different views during training when in reality maintaining their original preferences.

Friday Feed December 27, 2024 An Interactive Timeline of the
Most Iconic Infographics An interactive dataviz timeline More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD ‘The work damaged me’: ex-Facebook moderators describe effect of horrific content The Business MRI: A Smarter Way to Track Performance and Collaborate Think of it as an MRI of your business, a tool that provides clear real-time disability into performance, allowing your team to focus on collaboration and decision-making, not Data Prep. I Saved an Electron Microscope from the Trash In this video I show off the newest (and oldest!) piece of equipment in my lab: A Scanning Electron Microscope! This is a JEOL JSM-5200 from the late 80s/early 90s. The lab that previously owned the microscope was not able to repair it, and so they gave it to me for free! After months of effort, I managed to repair it. This video is an overview of how a scanning electron microscope works, how I acquired and repaired my own, and some examples of how to use it, and what it can do! The death of Glitch, the birth of Slack This post is about the day that Glitch failed, and how that failure created the opportunity to make Slack. We're sharing it here (out of chronological order) to mark 12 years since the famous pivot

Collected Friday Feed, 2024

Collected Friday Feed, 2024

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