Quick links

A tightly curated list of what I enjoyed in the news recently:

• Bezos: "Every single important thing we’ve done has taken a lot of risk, risk-taking, perseverance, guts, and some have worked out. Most of them have not." ([1])
  
  
• Bezos: "You need to select people who tend to be dissatisfied ... As they go about their daily experiences, they notice that little things are broken in the world and they want to fix them. Inventors have a divine discontent." ([1])
  
  
• Page: "Is it going to affect everyone in the world? Very few ... think this way." ([1])
  
  
• "More than anything else, the rise of the bots signals the death of the mobile app ... The whole app thing didn't really work out." ([1] [2])
  
  
• "As it turns out, the mundanity of our regular lives is the most captivating thing we could share with one another" ([1])
  
  
• "This is the most demonically clever computer security attack I've seen in years ... insert a nearly undetectable backdoor into the chips themselves" ([1])
  
  
• "Most Android vulnerabilities don't get patched. It's not Google's fault. It releases the patches, but the phone carriers don't push them down to their smartphone users ... This is a long-existing market failure." ([1])
  
  
• "It’s not like iPhones have somehow gotten worse. Other phones, though? They’ve gotten a whole lot better. And they’re cheap." ([1])
  
  
• "Google, with its tech chops and its control over digital ad delivery, is positioned to do what individual publishers and their associations can’t do on their own, though, by requiring that ads are not obtrusive or annoying — a main reason people choose to block ads." ([1])
  
  
• "How quickly cars can learn to do the really hard parts of driving ... navigate congested cities in the pouring rain where humans, pets and rodents run into the road" ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "With so many advances in machine learning recently, it’s not unreasonable to ask: why aren’t my recommendations perfect by now?" ([1])
  
  
• "Developers’ speed mattered ... only to the extent that we made effective product design choices ... It didn’t matter how fast they were moving if they were moving in the wrong direction." ([1])
  
  
• "Building and growing startups may appear glamorous from the outside ... It is anything but that from the inside." ([1])
  
  
• "% of pitches for bots and/or AI companies approaching 100%" ([1])
  
  
• "Tech firms are plundering departments of robotics and machine learning ... for the highest-flying faculty and students, luring them with big salaries ... The field was largely ignored and underfunded during the 'AI winter' of the 1980s and 1990s, when fashionable approaches to AI failed to match their early promise." ([1])
  
  
• The FizzBuzz Tensorflow interview "will probably only make sense to people who have gone through really terrible CS interview processes" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Remarkable, deep networks trained on artistic style, then used to apply those styles to video ([1])
  
  
• A good summary of the state-of-the-art in deep learning ([1])
  
  
• "There are limits to the predictive abilities of even tremendously superior intelligence (due to partial observability, chaotic behavior, or sheer randomness)" ([1] [2])
  
  
• SMBC comic: "Once you realize there is no hope, you can relax and just enjoy the progress in machine learning." ([1])
  
  
• My favorite old T-shirt from Amazon.com, Earth's Biggest Bookstore ([1])