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Four Short Links

Nat Torkington's eclectic collection of curated links.

Four Short Links

Four short links: 12 September 2018

By Nat Torkington

Millibytes, Webpage Bloat, Neuromorphic Computing, and UX Dark Patterns

  1. Measuring Information in Millibytes -- a cute conceit. Therefore, the information given by one passing test run [in our 1-in-90 failure scenario] is just a little over one millibyte.
  2. The Developer Experience Bait-and-Switch (Alex Russell) -- a pointed observation about bloat: If one views the web as a way to address a fixed market of existing, wealthy web users, then it’s reasonable to bias toward richness and lower production costs. If, on the other hand, our primary challenge is in growing the web along with the growth of computing overall, the ability to reasonably access content bumps up in priority.
  3. Brainchip Launches Spiking Neural Network Hardware -- Brainchip’s claim is that while a convolutional approach is more akin to modeling the neuron as a large filter with weights, the iterative linear algebra matrix multiplication on data within an activation layer and associated memory and MAC units yields a power-hungrier chip. Instead of this convolutional approach, an SNN models the neuron function with synapses and neurons with spikes between the neurons. The networks learn through reinforcement and inhibition of these spikes (repeating spikes are reinforcement).
  4. The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design -- We assembled a corpus of examples of practitioner-identified dark patterns and performed a content analysis to determine the ethical concerns contained in these examples. This analysis revealed a wide range of ethical issues raised by practitioners that were frequently conflated under the umbrella term of dark patterns, while also underscoring a shared concern that UX designers could easily become complicit in manipulative or unreasonably persuasive practices. We conclude with implications for the education and practice of UX designers, and a proposal for broadening research on the ethics of user experience.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 11 September 2018

By Nat Torkington

Serverless, Predicting Personality, Broken Design, and Hamming Lectures

  1. Serverless Cold Start War -- hard numbers on the cold start time on different function-as-a-service providers.
  2. Eye Movements During Everyday Behavior Predict Personality Traits -- Using a state-of-the-art machine learning method and a rich set of features encoding different eye movement characteristics, we were able to reliably predict four of the big five personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness) as well as perceptual curiosity, only from eye movements.
  3. Broken Product Design (We Make Money Not Art) -- Not only did he ask them to fabricate items that would be unusable but he also requested that each worker had full license to decide what the error, flaw, and glitch in the final product would be. Hutchison ended up with a collection of dysfunctional objects and prints of online exchanges with baffled factory managers.
  4. Learning to Learn (Richard Hamming) -- watch lectures in computer architecture, engineering, data, measurement, and quantum mechanics from a legend. (via Star Simpson)
Four Short Links

Four short links: 10 September 2018

By Nat Torkington

Optoelectronics, Checked C, MagicScroll, Quantum AWS

  1. The Largest Cognitive Systems Will be Optoelectronic -- Electrons and photons offer complementary strengths for information processing. Photons are excellent for communication, while electrons are superior for computation and memory. Cognition requires distributed computation to be communicated across the system for information integration. We present reasoning from neuroscience, network theory, and device physics supporting the conjecture that large-scale cognitive systems will benefit from electronic devices performing synaptic, dendritic, and neuronal information processing operating in conjunction with photonic communication.
  2. Checked C -- This paper presents Checked C, an extension to C designed to support spatial safety, implemented in Clang and LLVM. Checked C’s design is distinguished by its focus on backward-compatibility, incremental conversion, developer control, and enabling highly performant code. Like past approaches to a safer C, Checked C employs a form of checked pointer whose accesses can be statically or dynamically verified. Performance evaluation on a set of standard benchmark programs shows overheads to be relatively low. More interestingly, Checked C introduces the notions of a checked region and bounds-safe interfaces. Here's the source.
  3. MagicScroll: A Rollable Display Device with Flexible Screen Real Estate and Gestural Input -- a rollable tablet with two concatenated flexible multitouch displays, actuated scrollwheels, and gestural input. When rolled up, MagicScroll can be used as a rolodex, smartphone, expressive messaging interface, or gestural controller. When extended, it provides full access to its 7.5-inch high-resolution multitouch display, providing the display functionality of a tablet device.
  4. Rigetti Launches Quantum Cloud Services (FastCompany) -- AWS-style cloud platform with a fast connection to 128-qubit computing. Grabbing land ahead of quantum computing actually being useful.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 7 September 2018

By Nat Torkington

Quantifying Facebook, Deep Learning IDE, REPL + Debugger, and RPC Library

  1. Unveiling and Quantifying Facebook Exploitation of Sensitive Personal Data for Advertising Purposes -- This paper quantifies the portion of Facebook users in the European Union (EU) who were labeled with interests linked to potentially sensitive personal data in the period prior to when GDPR went into effect. The results of our study suggest that Facebook labels 73% of EU users with potential sensitive interests. This corresponds to 40% of the overall EU population. We also estimate that a malicious third party could unveil the identity of Facebook users who have been assigned a potentially sensitive interest at a cost as low as €0.015 per user. Finally, we propose and implement a web browser extension to inform Facebook users of the potentially sensitive interests Facebook has assigned them. (via Morning Paper)
  2. Subgraphs -- a deep learning IDE.
  3. REPLugger: REPL + Debugger -- My belief is that providing tools to augment programmer understanding is one of the most important interventions we can make. Me, too.
  4. brpc -- Baidu's RPC library, with 1,000,000+ instances (not counting clients) and thousands of kinds of services.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 6 September 2018

By Nat Torkington

BS in AI, Visual Exploration, Bad Predictions, and USB-C Development

  1. CMU's AI Bachelor's Degree -- ethics course mandatory, likewise seven humanities courses. Nice.
  2. GANlab -- interactive visualization of what's happening in a generative adversarial network, as well as an easy-to-read explanation.
  3. Errors, Insights, and Lessons of Famous AI Predictions -- These case studies illustrate several important principles, such as the general overconfidence of experts, the superiority of models over expert judgement, and the need for greater uncertainty in all types of predictions. The general reliability of expert judgement in AI timeline predictions is shown to be poor, a result that fits in with previous studies of expert competence.
  4. USB-C Explorer -- a development board with everything needed to start working with USB Type-C. It contains a USB-C port controller and Power Delivery PHY chip, a microcontroller, and several options for user interaction.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 5 September 2018

By Nat Torkington

Atomic Receiver, Nerdery as AR, Open Access, and Journey Maps

  1. An Atomic Receiver for AM and FM Radio Communication -- lasers detect fluctuations in the outer shell of "Rydberg vapors" (a special form of Cesium) that are caused by radio waves. See also MIT Tech Review.
  2. Geology is Like AR for the Planet (Wired) -- looking at the planet through a geologic lens is something like strapping on an augmented-reality headset. It invites you, from your vantage point in the present, to summon up Earth’s deep past and far future—to see these parallel worlds with your own eyes, like digital overlays. All nerd-level expertise is awesome for this reason. Try going bar-hopping with a bar owner who can talk about fit-out costs, eyelines, liquor choices, branding, etc. Nothing is boring if you know enough about it. (via Dan Hon)
  3. Radical Open-Access Plan (Nature) -- Eleven research funders in Europe announce "Plan S" to make all scientific works free to read as soon as they are published.
  4. Journey Maps -- A journey map is a collection of customer research most recognizable by its timeline—a visual depiction of every touch point customers have with the product or business, laid out from left to right. [...] Seeing the journey visually helps reveal the emotional landscape of the customer, which helps the product, marketing, customer support, and analytics teams understand what users feel at each point and identify ways the team can improve the experience. Steps and advice on how to build them.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 4 September 2018

By Nat Torkington

New Hardware, Image Discovery, Interactive SQL, and Fooling Object Detection

  1. GATech Rogues Gallery -- acquire new and unique hardware (i.e., the aforementioned "rogues") from vendors, research labs, and startups, and make this hardware available to students, faculty, and industry collaborators within a managed data center environment. By exposing students and researchers to this set of unique hardware, we hope to foster cross-cutting discussions about hardware designs that will drive future performance improvements in computing long after the Moore's Law era of "cheap transistors" ends. (via Next Platform)
  2. The Art and Science of Image Discovery at Netflix -- really interesting breakdown of the process they go through to automatically identify good stills to use as ads for the video.
  3. Select Star SQL -- an interactive book that aims to be the best place on the internet for learning SQL. Nice. SQL and notebooks are a great idea, especially for education.
  4. The Elephant in the Room -- We showcase a family of common failures of state-of-the art object detectors. These are obtained by replacing image sub-regions by another sub-image that contains a trained object. We call this "object transplanting." Modifying an image in this manner is shown to have a non-local impact on object detection. Slight changes in object position can affect its identity according to an object detector as well as that of other objects in the image. We provide some analysis and suggest possible reasons for the reported phenomena.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 3 September 2018

By Nat Torkington

Detecting Skimmers, Forecasting, The Quantum Race, and USB C

  1. Characterization and Fast Detection of Card Skimmers -- After systematizing these devices, we develop the Skim Reaper, a detector which takes advantage of the physical properties and constraints necessary for many skimmers to steal card data. Our analysis shows the Skim Reaper effectively detects 100% of devices supplied by the NYPD. In so doing, we provide the first robust and portable mechanism for detecting card skimmers. Clever. ATMs with a skimmer effectively read the card twice: once for the skimmer, once for the bank. So, the researchers made a fake card that detects double reads, which thus detects skimmers. (via Morning Paper)
  2. Forecasting: Principles and Practice -- The book is written for three audiences: (1) people finding themselves doing forecasting in business when they may not have had any formal training in the area; (2) undergraduate students studying business; (3) MBA students doing a forecasting elective. We use it ourselves for a third-year subject for students undertaking a Bachelor of Commerce or a Bachelor of Business degree at Monash University, Australia.
  3. Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm -- In its most practical form, the “recommendation problem” relates to how services like Amazon and Netflix determine which products you might like to try. Computer scientists had considered it to be one of the best examples of a problem that’s exponentially faster to solve on quantum computers—making it an important validation of the power of these futuristic machines. Now Tang has stripped that validation away.
  4. USB C is a Nightmare (White Quark) -- Twitter thread from a researcher uncovering the horror that is USB C. It has a provision for a multidrop bus. This is Ethernet. Ethernet running at 300 Kbps over the control channel of a USB-C cable. Why.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 31 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

Magic Leap One Teardown, SIGGRAPH, Formats and Protocols, and Nifty Tricks

  1. Magic Leap One Teardown -- interesting rundown of the parts inside each subsystem.
  2. Takeaways from SIGGRAPH -- rundown of the highlights of the show floor.
  3. The SEF Theorem -- you can pick any two of Structured, Extensible, and Forward Compatible. (via Tim Bray)
  4. My Bag of Tricks -- loose notes, design patterns, rules-of-thumb, methods of enquiry, tools, cheatsheets, gimmicks, leverage points, descriptions of systems, key questions, risks, and unknowns. I love these brain dumps.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 30 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

Financial Modeling, Deductive Database, Good Memes, and Product Management

  1. Financial Modeling for Startups: An Introduction -- In this guide, we'll walk through building a model for an example company.
  2. Datalog Educational System -- a deductive database system with Datalog, SQL, Relational Algebra (RA), Tuple Relational Calculus (TRC), and Domain Relational Calculus (DRC) as query languages.
  3. Memes as Force for Good -- online jokes can act as guides for a society or group’s larger moral consciousness.
  4. Product Management Mental Models -- plenty that product managers will recognise as hard-won lessons, e.g., 13. Version two is a lie. When building a product, don’t bank on a second version ever shipping. Make sure the first version is a complete product because it may be out there forever.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 29 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

Online Harassment, Deployment Software, Text to Commandline, and RL Prototyping

  1. Internet of Garbage (Sarah Jeong) -- updated, available for free as PDF, ePub, and MOBI, or for sale on Kindle. An immediate and accessible look at how online harassment works, how it might be categorized and distinguished, and why the structure of the internet and the policies surrounding it are overwhelmed in fighting it.
  2. Shipping Software Should Not Be Scary (Charity Majors) -- Deploy software is the most important software you have. Treat it that way.
  3. nl2bash (Victoria Lin) -- data and source code release of the paper: NL2Bash: A Corpus and Semantic Parser for Natural Language Interface to the Linux Operating System.
  4. dopamine -- a research framework for fast prototyping of reinforcement learning algorithms from Google.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 28 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

3D Learning, Trie DB, Robolawyer Ethics, and Security Controls

  1. Sensing and Learning in 3D -- one of the most exciting areas of machine learning research is in mastering the 3D world. An overview of capturing, representing, and learning about the 3D world.
  2. tkvdb -- Trie (radix trie, in fact) key-value database [...] similar to Berkeley DB, LevelDB or SQLite4 LSM. [...] written in ANSI C, without using platform or OS-specific functions.
  3. Ethics of Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Drafting Legal Documents -- the further steps a lawyer must take to ensure that the use of the service as part of the representation of a client is consistent with the lawyer’s other ethical obligation.
  4. Top 20 Critical Security Controls -- the glamorous stuff like hiring goth hackers to don high-viz and test your pens is not as important as basic hygeine like: A comprehensive view of the devices on your network is the first step in reducing your organization’s attack surface. Use both active and passive asset discovery solutions on an ongoing basis to monitor your inventory and make sure all hardware is accounted for.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 27 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

Notebook Future, Arduino CLI, Robot Mind, and Conscious Computers

  1. Lessons from JupyterCon (Will Crichton) -- reactive notebooks are the future, Jupyter is the new Bash, and data science is a gateway drug. I love that line, "Jupyter is the new Bash"...it's a form of the repl loop that takes the p seriously. For some balance, see I Don't Like Notebooks.
  2. Arduino CLI -- an all-in-one solution that provides builder, boards/library manager, uploader, discovery, and many other tools needed to use any Arduino-compatible board and platforms.
  3. How to Make a Robot Use Theory of Mind (SciAm) -- A simulation-based approach relies on a pre-programmed internal model instead. Winfield describes the simulation theory of mind system as using a “consequence engine.” In other words, a robot equipped with the system can answer simple “what if” questions about potential actions. If it simulates turning left, it might, for instance, detect that it would bump into a nearby wall. To make this prediction possible, the robots are pre-programmed with a basic grasp of physics so that they understand what happens when objects collide. Winfield describes his robots as having a little bit of “common sense.”
  4. Hackable Humans and Digital Dictators -- There is absolutely no indication that AI and computers are anywhere on the road to becoming conscious. More people saying this, please.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 24 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

Scheduling Notebooks, Telepresence Parasite, Bite-Size ML Tutorials, and AI Data Sheets

  1. Scheduling Notebooks -- we’re currently in the process of migrating all 10,000 of the scheduled jobs running on the Netflix Data Platform to use notebook-based execution.
  2. Fusion: A Collaborative Robotic Telepresence Parasite That Lives on Your Back -- I'm in favor of any telepresence system that lets me remotely punch people.
  3. 100 Days of ML Code -- tutorials, open sourced.
  4. Fact Sheet for AI (IBM) -- Fairness, safety, reliability, explainability, robustness, accountability—we all agree they are critical. Yet, to achieve trust in AI, making progress on these issues will not be enough; it must be accompanied by the ability to measure and communicate the performance levels of a system on each of these dimensions. One way to accomplish this would be to provide such information via SDoCs or factsheets for AI services.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 23 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

Visualizing Toxicity, Rubrics, Mozilla Fellows, and Open Source

  1. Visualizing Toxicity in Twitter Conversations -- The project started with an initial design discussion in which we all agreed it would be cool to somehow visualize Twitter conversations as natural-looking trees, where replies form branches and the more toxic the reply, the more withered the branch would look. At this point, I had no idea how I’d even approach rendering a withered tree, but it sounded like a fun experiment, so I said I’d look into it and do my best.
  2. Rubrics for Engineering Role -- I love rubrics and ladders, and this combination would make me very happy.
  3. Mozilla's New Openness, Science, and Tech Policy Fellows -- interesting mix of projects and people.
  4. The Commons Clause Will Destroy Open Source -- the Commons Clause doesn’t present a solution for supporting open source software. It presents a framework for turning open source software into proprietary software. My take: open source is most valuable when it's free. Limiting freedom (including freedom to sell) limits the usefulness of the software. Create more value than you capture!
Four Short Links

Four short links: 22 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

Software Licenses, Crowdsourced Laws, USB Power Over Ethernet, and ML Fairness

  1. Commons Clause -- a condition added to existing open source software licenses to create a new, combined software license.
  2. vTaiwan (MIT TR) -- the simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws.
  3. Power USB Devices Over Ethernet -- cute!
  4. Fairness Without Demographics (Paper a Day) -- After showing that representation disparity and disparity amplification are serious issues with the current status quo, the authors go on to introduce a method based on distributionally robust optimization (DRO) which can can control the worst-case risk.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 21 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

Betting Market, Megaprojects, Object Detection, and Declining Research

  1. Intro to Augur -- an open source, decentralized betting marketplace. Anyone can create markets and allow others to bet for or against it. The outcome is then verified by impartial observers who get a slice of the winnings. This can't possibly go wrong. (Narrator: everything will go wrong)
  2. What You Should Know About Megaprojects -- the "iron law of megaprojects" is laid out and documented: over budget, over time, over and over again. Moreover, the "break-fix model" of megaproject management is introduced as an explanation of the iron law. [...] Sixth, it is shown how megaprojects are systematically subject to "survival of the unfittest," explaining why the worst projects get built instead of the best. (via Dan Hon)
  3. Toward In-baggage Suspicious Object Detection Using Commodity WiFi -- Extensive experiments are conducted with 15 metal and liquid objects and six types of bags in a six-month period. The results show that our system can detect over 95% of suspicious objects in different types of bags and successfully identify 90% of dangerous material types. In addition, our system can achieve the average errors of 16ml and 0.5cm when estimating the volume of liquid and shape (i.e., width and height) of metal objects, respectively.
  4. Winner's Curse -- we observe that the rate of empirical advancement may not have been matched by consistent increase in the level of empirical rigor across the field [of ML] as a whole. This short position paper highlights examples where progress has actually been slowed as a result, offers thoughts on incentive structures currently at play, and gives suggestions as seeds for discussions on productive change.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 20 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

Skepticism, Aphorisms, Acceptance, and Back to Blogging

  1. Keynote Speakers Make Bad Life Decisions and Are Poor Role Models (James Mickens) -- I feel like, as computer scientists, we have forgotten the value of skepticism. Entertaining and on-point keynote at Usenix Security Symposium.
  2. My Favorite Sayings -- John Ousterhout's collection. My favorite of his favorites: Use your intuition to ask questions, not to answer them. Let that one sit for a while.
  3. Staking Your Self-Worth on Social Acceptance -- people who believed they needed to be socially accepted in order to have worth as a person were at higher risk of using Facebook in compulsive and maladaptive way. [...] An initial survey of 337 participants with an active Facebook account found that social acceptance contingencies were positively related to Facebook addiction symptoms.
  4. Social Media (Simon Willison) -- How about if, instead of ditching Twitter for Mastodon, we all start blogging and subscribing to each other's Atom feeds again instead? The original distributed social network could still work pretty well if we actually start using it.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 17 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

LED Patterns, System Change, Evented I/O, and Programmer Workflow

  1. Pixelblaze -- an advanced LED pattern-development engine and controller. It makes it fast and fun to write new patterns with its web-based live editor and highly optimized expression engine.
  2. Places to Intervene in a System -- (in increasing order of effectiveness) 9. Constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards). 8. Regulating negative feedback loops. 7. Driving positive feedback loops. 6. Material flows and nodes of material intersection. 5. Information flows. 4. The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints). 3. The distribution of power over the rules of the system. 2. The goals of the system. 1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system—its goals, power structure, rules, its culture—arises.
  3. libuv Book -- a small set of tutorials about using libuv as a high-performance evented I/O library that offers the same API on Windows and Unix.
  4. LEO Editor -- a PIM, IDE, and outliner that accelerates the workflow of programmers, authors, and web designers. Outline nodes may appear in more than one place, allowing multiple organizations of data within a single outline.
Four Short Links

Four short links: 16 August 2018

By Nat Torkington

Distributed Execution, Roaming SIM, Social Robot, and Bad Design

  1. Ray -- a flexible, high-performance distributed execution framework from OpenAI, targeting AI applications including reinforcement learning. (via "Notes from the first Ray meetup")
  2. KnowRoaming Global SIM Sticker -- Put your SIM card back in your phone. When you’re at home, the sticker. (via Engadget)
  3. Haru (IEEE Spectrum) -- inside Honda's new social robot.
  4. Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Agents' Cover (Foreign Policy) -- In the words of one of the former officials, the CIA had “fucked up the firewall” between the two systems. When bad systems architecture kills people...