Four short links: 25 May 2020
Universal Font, Deep Fakes, Streaming Database, Software Development
- NoTo Font — An elegant font with glyphs for all languages. Google commissioned it from Monotype to avoid those rectangular boxes that show up when your font doesn’t have a particular character. (Those boxes are called “tofu” and the font name is short for “No Tofu”. This is explained in Monotype’s post).
- Context-Aware Human Generation — a novel method for inserting objects, specifically humans, into existing images, such that they blend in a photorealistic manner, while respecting the semantic context of the scene. The abstract is a faster load.
(via Twitter) - Materialize — Writes SQL queries against your streaming data. Materialize does all of this by recasting your SQL92 queries as dataflows, which can react efficiently to changes in your data as they happen. Materialize is powered by timely dataflow, which connects the times at which your inputs change with the times of answers reported back to you.
- Today was a Good Day: The Daily Life of Software Developers — Our analysis confirms some findings in previous work, including the fact that developers actually spend little time on development and developers’ aversion for meetings and interruptions. It also discovered new findings, such as that only 1.7% of survey responses mentioned emails as a reason for a bad workday, and that meetings and interruptions are only unproductive during development phases; during phases of planning, specification and release, they are common and constructive. One key finding is the importance of agency, developers’ control over their workday and whether it goes as planned or is disrupted by external factors.
