Four short links: 30 June 2020
Durable Teams, Big Tech, Photos to Cartoons, and Deep Chernoff Faces
- Durable Teams — Rael Dornfest called this “project mindset vs product mindset”. If you’re in a project mindset, you spin up and wind down teams and codebases. If you’re in a product mindset, you have code that lives forever so you need a team to stick with it. Unmaintained code is a security and operational risk, to paraphrase this article.
- Breaking Up Big Tech — I’m collecting these stated issues because there are a lot of suggested courses of action: digital taxes; breaking companies up; preventing companies from selling products in their own marketplaces, and so on and so forth. But what I haven’t seen when these suggestions are made is: A statement of which issue is to be addressed; An analysis of the issue, breaking it down into underlying causes; A hypothesis of how the proposed remedy will be effective; Consequence scanning for undesirable side-effects.
- Learning to Cartoonize Using White-box Cartoon Representations — Paper and code for making “cartoons” (not comic-book style cartoons, but images that look like they were drawn with a sketching app and a drawing tablet) from photos.
- Deep Chernoff Faces — Using a GAN to create Chernoff face visualisations. (This creates visualisations as unsuccessful as all the previous Chernoff face attempts, but it’s still … well … cool!)
