Four short links: 28 November 2016
Skill Levels, Auto-Provisioning from GitHub, Laptops are Niche, and Vehicular Firehose
- Computer Skill Levels — Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks. (via Greg Linden)
- Fodor — Auto setup and provision GitHub repositories on new DigitalOcean droplets. Genius!
- Tablets, PCs, and Office (Ben Evans) — it was Ben’s podcast that really opened my eyes: we laptop users are in a dying market. Mobile won. Jean-Louis Gassée agrees.
- Car Wars — Cory Doctorow short fiction that builds on the trolleybus problem, commissioned by Deakin University in Australia to illustrate the kinds of research they’re doing. When you worked for Huawei, you got access to the firehose: every scrap of telemetry ever gleaned by a Huawei vehicle, plus all the licensed data sets from the other big automotive and logistics companies, right down to the driver data collected from people who wore court-ordered monitors: paroled felons, abusive parents under restraining orders, government employees. You got the post-mortem data from the world’s worst crashes, and you got all the simulation data from the botcaves: the vast, virtual killing-field where the machine learning algorithms duked it out to see which one could generate the fewest fatalities per kilometre.
