“I realize that most inventions fail not because the R&D department can’t get them to work, but because the timing is wrong — not all of the enabling factors are at play where they are needed. Inventing is a lot like surfing: you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.”
I used to use wunderground.com all the time. Then, over time, I noticed that it kept getting slower and slower. Out of frustration I looked around for other good weather websites. Today I use accuweather.com.
On the web and with apps, performance — or lack of performance — is important to acquiring and retaining customers.
This article on When to use Web Workers had this good chart that shows that smartphone CPUs aren’t hitting a performance wall in the same way that PC CPUs did in 2005.
TechCrunch has a nice, full quote from Bill Gates on what he considers his greatest mistake. I include part of the quote in this image because his “winner-take-all” comment is so important.
I was writing with a friend about Facebook, and realized how much I dislike facebook.com because (a) they don’t let me control my own timeline — not surprisingly, humans don’t like to be controlled by algorithms — and (b) you definitely get the feeling that you’re a piece of meat and they’re trying to sell you. If they were perceived as a kind, benevolent company that didn’t constantly force their version of “what’s important” on people, people might use it more.
Per the Technical University of Munich, Bitcoin is causing CO2 emissions comparable to Hamburg.
Ben Evans has an interesting article from 2015 titled, Mobile is not a neutral platform. Here’s a good quote:
“Of course, all this sort of stuff is a big reason why Google bought Android in the first place — Google was afraid that Microsoft (it was that long ago) would dominate mobile operating systems and shut it out. The obvious fear was around things like preloads, and the justice of that fear was proven right with Maps, where Apple Maps now has 2-3x more users on iOS than does Google Maps, despite being a weaker product — the ‘good enough’ default wins and the platform owner chooses what that is.”
ExtremeTech has a good first article on the Nvidia Jetson Nano developer kit. (The image shown is from their article)
I needed to use Gnuplot a little bit over the last few days, mostly to create 2D line charts, and these are my brief notes on how to get started with Gnuplot. If you haven’t used it before, it’s a pretty amazing tool.
Jumping right in ...
Use MacPorts or Homebrew to install Gnuplot on Mac OS X systems:
port install gnuplot brew install gnuplot
My examples use the following 2-column and 4-column data files:
The person who was Employee #2 at Pinterest (and then left) wrote a good article titled, Reflecting On My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company.
I’ll write more about this as time goes on, but I’ve finished the first round of software (and hardware) development on my “Radio Pi” project (which, thanks to a friend, I now refer to as my “RadioPi” system). This project lets me play local FM radio stations, online radio streams, recorded radio streams, and podcasts, all from a little Raspberry Pi (RPI) computing system.
First, here’s a short video of my RPI Radio in action:
I don’t know if it was just coincidence, but I went to Lowe’s yesterday for the first time in seven months, then I had a Lowe’s ad on Twitter first thing this morning. So “Allow some” is now “Off.” (See the Location and Personalization settings in the images.)
airtable.com has put together a cool collection of startup “Pitch Decks.”
Microsoft has a nice interview with FP researcher and Haskell co-creator Simon Peyton Jones.
I'm in the process of publishing my second eBook for the Amazon Kindle, and one thing that's currently hard to find on the Amazon website is what the eBook cover height and width size specifications are. You can currently only find this information when you get ready to publish your book.
So, as a brief public service, as of May, 2012, here are the Amazon Kindle eBook cover height and width specifications, courtesy of the Amazon KDP book publication website:
I haven’t read it yet, but I’m told that Cats, Cubits, and Teleportation is a clear description of quantum computing.
Here are three nice diagrams drawn by Mariko Kosaka that explain HTTP and HTTP2.
When asked, “If you could give one tip for reaching heights in tech today, what would it be?”, this was the initial response from Jonas Bonér, creator of Akka:
While it’s old news (March, 2018), I’ve often wondered why Siri seems to be getting worse, and how/why Amazon and Google beat Apple to the market for Alexa-like assistants. MacRumors has this article where they report several of the problems related to Siri’s development. (Their article is based on an article written by The Information, which requires a subscription.)
Two days ago Google announced their “Principles/Objectives for using AI”:
1. Be socially beneficial
2. Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias
3. Be built and tested for safety
4. Be accountable to people
5. Incorporate privacy design principles
6. Uphold high standards of scientific excellence
7. Be made available for uses that accord with these principles
