Quick links

A carefully picked list of some of the tech news I enjoyed recently:

• So, you know that prototype we showed you? Turns out AI in real world conditions is hard. ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Artificial intelligence expert Yann LeCun says, "There have been, on the face of it, impressive demonstrations, [but] those are not as impressive as they look ... They don't have common sense ... One of the things we really want to do is get machines to acquire the very large number of facts that represent the constraints of the real world just by observing it through video or other channels. That’s what would allow them to acquire common sense, in the end." ([1])
  
  
• Genetic algorithms and neural networks are back. It feels like the 1990s all over again. ([1])
  
  
• Bringing more novices to AI now is the way to get more experts and advances later ([1])
  
  
• Nice results from focusing on errors that matter to people, the perceived quality of the system by humans, not theoretical accuracy ([1] [2])
  
  
• Success often comes from trying many things: "Start ... with a hazy intuition or vision ... After a lot of trial and error they get closer and closer to discovering what their idea is ... Seeking novelty instead of objectives is risky — not every interesting thread will pay off — but ... the potential payoffs are higher." ([1])
  
  
• Research includes people able to do things no one else can, including having data or compute at the frontier beyond what anyone else has done before ([1] [2])
  
  
• 6.3M virtual reality headsets sold in 2016, but almost all so far just the cheap toys where you slot your smartphone in to use as the screen ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Total [tablet] sales sinking 15.6%, year on year, with sales of 174.8M units in 2016 compared to 2015's 207.2M" ([1])
  
  
• For the first time, more people in the US using Netflix than a DVR: "54 percent of US adults reporting they have Netflix in their households compared to the 53 percent of US adults that have DVR" ([1])
  
  
• The Economist: "Amazon’s heady valuation resembles a self-fulfilling prophecy. The company will be able to keep spending, and its spending will keep making it more powerful" ([1])
  
  
• "What has surprised AWS as the cloud has evolved ... I don’t think in our wildest dreams we ever thought we’d have a six- to seven-year head start" ([1])
  
  
• ... and that is true in retail for Amazon as well ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "Yahoo is perhaps most famous for destroying all of its best social properties. From its hideous deformations of Flickr and neglect of Upcoming to its starvation of Delicious and torment of GeoCities users, the company excelled at buying great things and turning them into unusable parodies of themselves. Execs seemed to profoundly misunderstand why people used the sites they bought." ([1])
  
  
• "Google will account for 78 percent of search ad revenue in 2017, while Facebook will get 39 percent of display ad revenue. Everyone else ... is fighting over the scraps." ([1])
  
  
• Culture is created by what you publicly reward, not what you say ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "The problem with bad processes is that they institutionalize inefficiency. They ensure that things will be done the wrong way, over and over and over again" ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Burnout begins when a worker feels overwhelmed for a sustained period of time, then apathetic and ultimately numb .... Workers who used to take the lead on projects grow taciturn during meetings. Top performers start coming in late, leaving early and watch their careers stall ... Burnout is claiming victims at work, and companies aren’t ready to cope" ([1])
  
  
• A lot of companies have merely medium data, not big data: "Hundreds of enterprises were hugely disappointed by their useless 2 to 10TB Hadoop clusters ... Their data works better in other technologies" ([1])
  
  
• Lack of incentives leads to poor Internet of Things security ([1])
  
  
• As Javascript ages, it repeats many of the problems of the past: "Using data from over 133K websites, we show that 37% of them include at least one library with a known vulnerability" ([1])
  
  
• "What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Many Xkcd comics are both funny and prescient, and this one on encryption seems particularly relevant right now ([1])
  
  
• Xkcd comic on friends that have an Amazon Echo ([1])
  
  
• SMBC comic on "existential sort". Don't miss the hovertext: "Also, any list can be immediately sorted by just pretty much being fine with it the way it is." ([1])