NPR reports that a new version of Google’s AlphaGo Zero software became a Go master by learning to play the game only by playing itself, i.e., only by using reinforcement learning (as opposed to supervised learning). Per the report in Nature.com, “AlphaGo Zero achieved superhuman performance, winning 100–0 against the previously published, champion-defeating AlphaGo.”
I just went through the process of self-publishing my new eBook (How I Sold My Business: A Personal Diary) on the Amazon Kindle store, and after trying a number of different approaches to get my ebook to look the way I wanted it to look, I thought I'd share what I learned here.
defenseone.com reports that the CIA has at least 137 AI “pilot projects” in the works.
As the business world keeps churning, Ikea bought TaskRabbit.
Amazon’s Echo Show is pretty cool, the closest thing I’ve seen yet to what I had in mind with SARAH. (Because I started with a display, it was hard for me to imagine using a device like this without a screen.)
Netflix movie recommendations often leave me scratching my head, but in this list of Christmas movie recommendations, one of these things is not like the others.
Facebook engineers shared this post about how they switched from InnoDB to MyRocks and successfully cut their storage usage in half.
With Twitter being Twitter, I saw this image there, and now I can’t find it again. But it shows that the new iPhone 8 is significantly faster at rendering a cnn.com page.
Actually, since I can’t find the original source, I don’t know if they both rendered mobile web pages, or whether they tried several times to make sure it wasn’t just a hiccup. But seeing that the architecture in a little phone can come anywhere near the performance of a desktop/laptop processor that’s still being sold makes one wonder about the future.
Update: I think this was the original source of the image.
*printer won’t print black text because yellow ink is low*
*Al throws printer off balcony*
I was wondering how dry cleaning works, and this HowStuffWorks article and this MentalFloss article that explain the process (and refer to the same video). The short story is that it works like “wet cleaning,” but the process uses a petroleum solvent called perchloroethylene instead of soap and water.
Here’s a long read about something most techies know: At Facebook, you are the product.
Here’s a Facebook post on how using AI has improved their language translation system by 11%.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a report titled, Measuring the Progress of AI Research.
If you were ever interested in learning about research at Google, here’s their Research at Google website.
My new favorite website (ITHare.com) has this terrific infographic that demonstrates that all CPU operations are not equal.
Here are some details behind why O’Reilly no longer sells books and videos on oreilly.com.
If you’re interested in business, an important part of this is seeing that O’Reilly defines itself as a distributor of knowledge. When you think in terms like that, it’s probably easier to say, “We’re not just a seller of books.” If they defined themselves only as a book-seller, they might be out of business by now.
I thought it was great that you can donate any dollar amount you want to The Guardian to support professional journalism. I wrote the New York Times and Washington Post and said I don’t read their content enough to justify a subscription, and asked if I could either donate to them or use some form of micropayments, but they both wrote back to say they only offer (more expensive) subscriptions.
Update: Someone wrote on Twitter to note that these are for-profit organizations and therefore they can’t take donations. That’s not true, but even if they didn’t want to accept donations, they could offer micropayments or lower-cost subscriptions for a limited number of page views.
I’m sitting here writing a book on how to write better software using functional programming techniques, then I go to the Boulder Community Hospital website to pay my bill (powered by chase.com), and they don’t tell you how much you owe, you’re just supposed to type in how much you think you owe. It’s like calling Kramer on Seinfeld to get a list of movies: “Why don’t you just tell me where you want to see the movie?” *crazy*
architecht.io has this interesting interview with Bradford Cross on AI and startup businesses. I don’t know much about AI, but from my experience with it, I’m sure that you want to “own” the data.
“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Mr. Williams says. “I was wrong about that.”
~ Evan Williams, in a N.Y. Times article, The Internet is broken.
