Blog AF

It has been a while since my last post, so here is some random stuff from the last month and a half around San Francisco. More...

• What Tech Workers Can Learn From Harry Bridges
  Kelsey Gilmore-Innis
  

  San Francisco and the Gold Rush, both old and new. Labor, unions, and narratives of success.

• Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels
  Andrej Karpathy
  

  Another in depth look at modern solutions to artificial intelligence and problem solving. As usual, Karpathy makes complex ideas understandable, this time using OpenAI’s Gym to play Pong.

• Video is the new HTML
  Benedict Evans
  

  HTML, Flash, Video, etc, are only a medium. Corporations today are working hard to exploit these new means of distribution.

• Why the World Is Drawing Battle Lines Against American Tech Giants
  Farhad Manjoo - The New York Times
  
• Can social science yield objective knowledge?
  Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  

  Great analogy between natural science vs. religion and natural science vs. social science. As Noah points out, the idea of the “God of the Gaps” fits in quite well. I have long been a fan of Paul Davies and his take on the classic fight. Noah gives a good explanation for why they are, in a way, the same.

• Carts Without Horses
  Aaron Harris
  

  Understanding that developing markets are fundamentally different beasts, and not just waiting for copies of what has already been done, is both challenging, and exciting. Makes me wonder what I could do if I went back home.

• Why Trump voters are not “complete idiots”
  Chris Arnade - Medium
  

  The expanded version of the tweetstorm. Poor people understand optionality, too. If your downside is flat, and your upside isn’t, logic says break the system.

• What happened, what's happening now and what's next
  Benedict Evans
  

  Yes, two posts by Evans today. It’s that good.

• Satan's Credit Card: What The Mark Of The Beast Taught Me About The Future Of Money
  Charlie Warzel - BuzzFeed News
  

  A glimpse into what money might become.

• Autoencoding Blade Runner
  Terence Broad - Medium
  

  The application of these simple machine learning concepts keep impressing me more and more. Autoencoders are a very simple idea. If anything, click through to see the side-by-side video.

• Perlin noise
  Fuzzy Notepad
  

  Few times does a post involving convoluted math and programming seem so clear. The diagrams help a lot, and the jump to 2D is mindblowing.

• The Unnecessariat
  More Crows than Eagles
  

  An interesting take on the rise of trump. Similar to Chris Arnade’s twitter comments on the implicit understanding optionality of Trump voters, who desire volatility.

• Is Everything Wrestling?
  Jeremy Gordon - The New York Times
  

  It is all a charade. At least the WWE embraces it.

• Hodor, Disability, and 'Game of Thrones': A Conversation With English Professor Lauryn S. Mayer About the Ethics of George R.R. Martin's World
  Spencer Kornhaber - The Atlantic
  

  An analysis of how disabilities were seen in medieval Europe, and how those map onto the GoT world. Particularly interesting was the discussion on how mortality and disability can happen to anyone, which is unusual in literature.Spoliers ahead.

• The Rise of the Beer Can
  The Atlantic - Brendan Byrne
  
• How I used lies about a cartoon to prove history is meaningless on the internet
  Jordan Minor - Geek.com
  

  Orwell would be proud.

After four years living in Evanston, and a year away, returning to Chicago was strange. Very strange. I am sad that I didn’t take more photos of the city, with its architecture and its urban landscapes, but I am glad that the reason why I did not do it was that I had too many people to see. More...

Hi there. It had been a while! I have read a lot less than usual lately, but here are a few things I’ve recently enjoyed.

• I know how to program, but I don't know what to program
  Nano Dano - DevDungeon
  

  Through an analogy between learning CS, and how to play musical instruments, the author explains the value of reinventing the wheel: cloning other people’s projects allows you to learn useful patterns as you go. Start by mimicking, and continue adding your own features. The important part is putting your fingers to work. For example, I got my start with Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial, and modified it bit by bit to fit my needs. One of the best pieces I have read on how to “level up” as a software engineer.

• If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is
  Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Norden - The New York Times
  

  “White people studies.”

• The Netflix Tech Blog: Creating Your Own EC2 Spot Market
  Andrew Park, Darrell Denlinger, and Coburn Watson - The Netflix Tech Blog
  

  I learned this exists from my manager, who used to work at Netflix. Mind blown.

• What happened when a professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant
  Matt McFarland - The Washington Post
  

  TLDR, no one noticed until the guy revealed it.

• 1,700 years ago, the mismanagement of a migrant crisis cost Rome its empire
  Annalisa Merelli - Quartz
  
• Government Must Play a Role Again in Job Creation
  Eduardo Porter - The New York Times
  
• Today's rich families in Florence, Italy, were rich 700 years ago
  Matthew Yglesias - Vox
  
• Google’s Go-to-Market Gap
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  The “best” is not always enough.

• The Curse of Culture
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  Culture is fascinating, but also really subjective, making it hard to quantify, or analyze. To make it worse, it is turtles all the way down: culture matters at the company, division, group, team and individual basis, and the larger the company the more culture solidifies as a “thing” that makes that company what it is.

• The Empty Brain
  Robert Epstein - Aeon
  
• Ruby has been fast enough for 13 years
  David Heinemeier Hansson - Signal v. Noise
  

  Speed is rarely the reason to pick a programming language these days. See below.

• Blue. No! Yellow!
  Robert C. Martin - Clean Coder Blog
  

  Mostly, its a matter of taste. See above.

• Ethereum is the Forefront of Digital Currency
  Fred Ehrsam - The Coinbase Blog
  

  It takes guts to describe your company as the “…most popular way to buy, sell, and use bitcoin” or, more humbly, a “bitcoin wallet and platform” and then come out and say that something else is better, and possibly more sustainable, than BTC. Smells like a soft pivot to cryptocurrencies in general could be coming.

• The Father of Modern Metal
  Jonathan Waldman - Nautilus
  

  Never thought steel could be this fascinating.

• What disturbed me about the Facebook meeting.
  Glenn Beck - Medium
  

  If I am sharing an article by this guy, it must be good. Never thought I’d do that, but he does bring up good points.

• Make America Great Again for the People It Was Great for Already
  Bryce Covert - The New York Times
  
• The G.O.P. Is Not America, Clinton Is Not Rubio
  Paul Krugman - The New York Times
  
• The End of the End of the World
  Jonathan Franzen - The New Yorker
  

  An epic article about Antarctica, family ties, global warming, and the future.

• Hello, This Is London Rising
  Andrew Godwin - Aeracode
  

  A very cool project. Can’t go wrong with mapping + Python + 3D Printing.

• Fizz Buzz in TensorFlow
  Joel Grus
  

  The machine learning inspired cousin to Fizz Buzz in Too Much Detail. You shouldn’t miss this one, even if your knowledge of ML is minimal.