Posts in the “technology” category

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.)

Following a few other articles I’ve read recently about the “AI chip market,” techcrunch has an article, The AI chip startup explosion is already here.

From reuters.com, “Toyota Motor Corp is considering making batteries for electric vehicles (EV) with Panasonic Corp, as it ramps up battery development to help meet its goal for green cars to comprise half of global sales by 2030.” Panasonic is currently the main battery supplier for Tesla.

Here’s a link to Google’s announcement about ARCore Developer Preview 2.

I know nothing at all about Bitcoin, but fortunately arstechnica has this article, Seven questions you were too embarrassed to ask about Bitcoin.

Here’s a story about a hospital robot named Tug that helps deliver food and drugs.

Tim Wheeler has a good tutorial on How AlphaGo Zero works.

Thoughtworks just released their annual technology radar.

Per siliconangle.com, Amazon is going to be backing the ONNX AI/ML project.

Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot can now jump on and off platforms, and also does a back flip. The video is here on YouTube.

Here’s a story about a command-line app named speed-test that gives you network speed information from the command line.

Here’s an article from TechnologyReview.com titled, You could become an AI master before you know it. The story is about companies who are trying to make AI usable by non-AI experts.

For the last few years, Intel CPUs have included a copy of the MINIX operating system way down in “Ring -3,” which apparently has support for networking and a web server. ZDnet has one of the more detailed stories about "MINIX Inside.”

cornell.edu has a good page on how the basic part of Google’s PageRank algorithm works. If you ever wonder why math is important in programming, that algorithm made Google billions and billions of dollars.

I was curious what kind of hardware AlphaGo Zero uses, and I found this table on this Wikipedia page. The “TPU” references in that table refer to Tensor processing units.

deepmind.com has a great new article titled, “AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch.”

zdnet.com reports that Samsung is developing an Android app that will let you use your Galaxy phone as a Linux desktop computer. Samsung’s “Linux on Galaxy” announcement is here.