Four short links: 9 May 2017
Chinese Online Shopping, Google's Fuchsia, Leaving Top-Down, and Open Source SyntaxNet
- Chinese Shopping Numbers (BCG) — According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, Chinese consumers spent $750 billion online in 2016—more than the U.S. and the U.K. combined.
- Google’s Fuchsia Operating System — The interface and apps are written using Google’s Flutter SDK, a project that actually produces cross-platform code that runs on Android and iOS. Flutter apps are written in Dart, Google’s reboot of JavaScript, which, on mobile, has a focus on high-performance, 120fps apps. It also has a Vulkan-based graphics renderer called “Escher” that lists “Volumetric soft shadows” as one of its features, which seems custom-built to run Google’s shadow-heavy “Material Design” interface guidelines.
- Composers as Gardeners — So, my feeling has been that the whole concept of how things are created and organized has been shifting for the last 40 or 50 years, and as I said, this sequence of science as cybernetics, catastrophe theory, chaos theory, and complexity theory, are really all ways of us trying to get used to this idea that we have to stop thinking of top-down control as being the only way in which things could be made.
- SyntaxNet Open Sourced — Our release includes all the code needed to train new SyntaxNet models on your own data, as well as a suite of models that we have trained for you, and that you can use to analyze text in over 40 languages.
