Four short links: 19 June 2019
Voice2Face, DIY Minivac, Cloud Metrics, and Envoy for Mobile
- Speech2Face: Learning the Face Behind a Voice — complete with an interesting ethics discussion up-front. I wonder where this was intended to go: after all, it can’t perfectly reconstruct faces, so what you get is a stereotype based on the voice. Meh.
- Minivac 601 Replica (Instructables) — Created by information theory pioneer Claude Shannon as an educational toy for teaching digital circuits, the Minivac 601 Digital Computer Kit was billed as an electromechanical digital computer system.
- Nines Are Not Enough: Meaningful Metrics for Clouds — We show that this problem shares some similarities with the challenges of applying statistics to make decisions based on sampled data. We also suggest that defining guarantees in terms of defense against threats, rather than guarantees for application-visible outcomes, can reduce the complexity of these problems.
- Announcing Envoy Mobile (Lyft Engineering) — as Simon Willison said: Lyft’s Envoy proxy / service mesh has been widely adopted across the industry as a server-side component for adding smart routing and observability to the network calls made between services in microservice architectures. “The reality is that three 9s at the server-side edge is meaningless if the user of a mobile application is only able to complete the desired product flows a fraction of the time”—so Lyft are building a C++ embedded library companion to Envoy which is designed to be shipped as part of iOS and Android client applications. “Envoy Mobile in conjunction with Envoy in the data center will provide the ability to reason about the entire distributed system network, not just the server-side portion.” Their decision to release an early working prototype and then conduct ongoing development entirely in the open is interesting too.
