Posts in the “technology” category

If you ever wondered how many people use the internet and/or what countries have the most internet users, here you go. (The image is from internetlivestats.com.)

As a quick note, I just configured this website (alvinalexander.com) to have both a desktop version and a new mobile version. I do this by using Nginx to detect mobile devices and redirect the mobile users from the alvinalexander.com URL to the m.alvinalexander.com URL.

The Nginx mobile redirect configuration

The relevant part of my Nginx configuration is shown here:

“But the cloud came along. And one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen in business is when an unrelated type company — a retailer, you can call Amazon of that type, goes into another big industry and sees the future in it, gets into it, and then they gave — and Jeff Bezos would say this, he said it on the Charlie Rose show, some time ago — he got this amazing runway. I mean, the other players — here are all these 200 IQ people, you know, in that business, and they gave him year, after year, after year. It wasn't a secret of what he was doing. And he was, in an important way, revolutionizing the industry, and the other people sat on their hands, basically.”

~ Warren Buffett talking about Amazon and “the cloud” in this Morningstar article

If you feel like digging through this Seeking Alpha article, you’ll find that EV auto sales in China were up to 3.3% in December. That’s well above the 1.2% in the U.S. and 1.9% in Europe. Another quote from that article: “China is likely to announce its internal combustion engine [ICE] ban plan date sometime in 2018. Then, by January 2019, the new China zero emission vehicle [ZEV] system will begin, boosting sales of longer range pure EVs.”

I was just reading this Seeking Alpha article about Facebook and saw the attached image, where for a while “link sharing” on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest overtook search engines in terms of “share of website visits,” but in 2017 search engines once again overtook sharing. The question is, does this mean that fewer people are using those social websites, or fewer people are sharing and clicking on those links?

This medium.com article has some good, simple tips on how to improve your UI design. Also, this eloquentjavascript.net website/book might be good for people interested in JavaScript.

ARK Invest has a good article, “Why has Waymo taken so long to commercialize autonomous taxis?,” in which they write about System Identified Failures and Unexpected Failures.

One interesting note from the article that has nothing to do with Waymo: “Some stretches of road are trickier and some intersections more difficult to navigate than others. In Los Angeles, for example, roughly a quarter of pedestrian collisions take place at only 1% of its intersections.”

Google has some good resources on Progressive Web Apps (PWA), including this Your First Progressive Web App tutorial.

I’m only about fifty pages into the book, How Google Works, but I can already say that if you think of yourself as an entrepreneur, it’s a valuable read. At first I thought the authors were patting themselves on the back a lot (which admittedly they deserve), but as I continued reading they clearly say things like “We’re not that smart,” “We screwed up,” and “Learning from our mistakes, this is why we created Alphabet.”

Some of their ideas, such as building businesses around their smartest people and greatest assets are things that I did in the past, but couldn’t articulate. Maybe it had to do with being in Kentucky at the time, but I always thought of it as “Get out of the way and let the thoroughbreds run.”

The Verge has two stories about Google, Android, and hardware. First, Google sold 3.9 million phones in 2017, increasing their market share from 1.8 to 2.8%. Second, they have a good interview with Rick Osterloh about Google’s hardware plans.

A note from this long article about Google’s Rick Osterloh:

Former CEO Eric Schmidt calls this system “Ship and Iterate,” and in his book How Google Works he makes a consistent case for not even trying to get things right the first time. “Create a product, ship it, see how it does, design and implement improvements, and push it back out,” Schmidt writes. “Ship and iterate. The companies that are the fastest at this process will win.”

Google is making “Cloud TPUs” available in beta. From their announcement: “Starting today, Cloud TPUs are available in beta on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to help machine learning (ML) experts train and run their ML models more quickly. Cloud TPUs are a family of Google-designed hardware accelerators that are optimized to speed up and scale up specific ML workloads programmed with TensorFlow. Built with four custom ASICs, each Cloud TPU packs up to 180 teraflops of floating-point performance and 64 GB of high-bandwidth memory onto a single board.”

The Andreessen Horowitz website has a blog post titled The Crypto Canon which has links to good resources on what a blockchain is, how bitcoin and others work, Ethereum, and much more.

The Google blog has this new article, Making AI accessible to every business., which describes their new cloud offering, Cloud AutoML.

LinkedIn’s engineering blog post has this article about how they use the Play Framework and Akka show online “presence indicators.”

From The Verge, “General Motors plans to mass-produce self-driving cars that lack traditional controls like steering wheels and pedals by 2019.”

Here’s a detailed talk on A brief history branch prediction in CPUs.

“Human beings don’t want to be controlled by machines. And we are increasingly being controlled by machines ... This is likely to be the narrative of the next thirty years.”

This quote from Fred Wilson’s What happened in 2017 article makes me think of Apple’s recent dumb software design decisions as much as it makes me think of algorithms that control my news feeds. As just one example, Apple’s decision to make the “turn off bluetooth” button mean “turn off bluetooth ... well, just until tomorrow” makes me want to switch to Samsung. So, yeah, if I don’t want to be controlled by Apple’s poor design decisions, I sure don’t want to be controlled by robots.

Ben Evans has an interesting article on The Amazon machine. In an unrelated note (except that it came in the same email), here’s an NPR article about What to do if you come across a frozen iguana.

According to ARK Invest, the cost of industrial robots will drop 65% by 2025. As they write, “Combined with advances in machine learning and computer vision, this drop in costs should cause an inflection point in the demand for robots as they infiltrate new industries with more provocative use cases.” (Image from the ARK Invest website.)