Four short links: 12 January 2017
China and Bitcoin, Software Repeatability, Tesla Radar, and Chinese Data Market
- China’s Deep in Bitcoin — RMB accounted for 98% of global bitcoin trading volume over the past six months. (via Marginal Revolution)
- Software Repeatability — we’re rapidly moving into a space where the long tail of data is going to become useless because the software needed to interpret it is vanishing. […]Second, it’s not clear to me that we’ll actually know if the software is running robustly, which is far worse than simply having it break.
- No, a Tesla Didn’t Predict an Accident and Brake For It (Brad Templeton) — Radar beams bounce off many things, including the road. That means a radar beam can bounce off the road under a car that is in front of you, and then hit a car in front of it, even if you can’t see the car. Because the radar tells you “I see something in your lane 40m ahead going 20mph and something else 30m ahead going 60mph” you know it’s two different things. The Tesla radar saw just that.
- China Data for Sale — Using just the personal ID number of a colleague, reporters bought detailed data about hotels stayed at, flights and trains taken, border entry and exit records, real estate transactions and bank records. All of them with dates, times and scans of documents (for an extra fee, the seller could provide the names of who the colleague stayed with at hotels and rented apartments). Most major Chinese apps report IMEI numbers.
