Spotify CEO renews attack on Apple after Musk’s salvo
STOCKHOLM, Nov 30 (Reuters) – Spotify’s (SPOT.N) CEO Daniel Ek renewed his attack on Apple (AAPL.O) on Wednesday in a series of tweets alleging the iPhone maker “gives itself every advantage while at the same time stifling innovation and hurting consumers”. Ek tagged a number of sympathetic business leaders in his 21-tweet thread, including Musk, […]
OpenAI ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue
We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed […]
The game theory of John von Neumann transformed the 20th century
Illustration by Lily Qian. Unlike his much more famous colleague Albert Einstein, John von Neumann is not a household name these days, but his discoveries shape the possibilities of life for every creature on this planet. As a teenager, von Neumann provided mathematics with new foundations. He later helped teach the world how to build […]
CT scan shows there’s still lots of toner left in an “empty” cartridge
Whereas inkjet printers spray small drops of liquid ink onto paper, laser printers operate using plastics, electricity, and heat. They project an electrostatic charge onto a printing drum in the pattern of the images or text in the document. Each toner cartridge contains finely granulated plastic powder, which holds a static charge and clings to […]
A long expected update (probablistic programming langauge team laid off)
It’s been almost two years since my last update here. A lot has happened. I hope you all are continuing to weather the ongoing multiple global pandemics and other anthropogenic crises. Apologies that this is so long; I didn’t have time to make it shorter. Obviously blogs do not come with a service level agreement, […]
Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
Estonia is a small country with a population of only 1.3 million. In 2005, it became the first country in the world to allow its citizens to vote online in elections, and today 46.9% of those eligible opt to vote online. Almost everything in Estonia can now be done online – from filing taxes to […]
Programmable Ink
Success of spreadsheets Making end-user programming powerful and ubiquitous is a central goal within our lab’s broader vision of making better tools for thought. Spreadsheets are a widely successful end-user programming tool, and in particular we are inspired by their support of gradual enrichment and programming in the moment. End-user programming Programming done by users […]
Roboflow (YC S20) is hiring engineers to democratize computer vision
We’re on a mission to transform every industry by democratizing computer vision. Over 100,000 developers have used Roboflow to add vision to their products. We believe computer vision will transform every industry and affect all of our daily lives. Our goal is to accelerate that inevitable future and ensure that its power is used as a […]
Why I am learning category theory
Category theory is a domain of mathematics that exerts a strange influence over programmers. One thing that can be said for sure about category theory is that it is highly abstract, and its relationship to software engineering is not immediately obvious. I consider myself to be more on the pragmatic side of software engineering, so […]
The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers in Visual C++
August 30th, 2019 Windows adopted Unicode before most other operating systems.[citation needed] As a result, Windows’s solutions to many problems differ from solutions adopted by those who waited for the dust to settle.¹ The most notable example of this is that Windows used UCS-2 as the Unicode encoding. This was the encoding recommended by the […]