The deep learning technologies that serve targeted ads or recommend songs and shows are the same ones that will ‘be able to diagnose deadly diseases, make million-dollar trading decisions, and do countless other things to transform whole industries.
A lot of what we do online, posting videos, writing blogs or articles has been driven by the desire to garner likes. Now every company is a media company, inbound is your go to market tool driven by original content, in turn driven by likes, click-baits and similar basic appeals – it is time to stop and think.
There is a definite rise of ransomware hits specially on public utilities and government services in the US. What is fueling this? An insightful article by Renee Dudley in Pro Publica sheds a lot of light on what is actually going on.
David Cummings writes mostly short pointed posts which I find thought provoking. A post last month was on how a simple question “How did you come up with the idea for your company?” mostly get meandering uninteresting unmemorable responses.
It is known that the exponential growth we enjoyed thanks to Moore’s law is now leveling off and our ability to drive down the size of transistors using silicon is coming to the end of its road.
We have all heard it before. Why we strive to be the one to be disrupting – build the next Door dash, AirBnB, why Amazon even. Noam Cohen in his piece ‘Seeing Through Silicon Valley’s Shameless Disruption’ in Wired provokes some critical thoughts.
We have been making lists of things that machines could never do – like recognize faces, drive cars, play chess and so on. Well, seems that we were wrong.
Vittorio Loreto at Sapienza University Rome in Italy and his friends have created the first mathematical model that can accurately reproduce the patterns that innovations follow.
I came across this 2015 article in Mashable by Seth Fiegerman on why and how Google jumped into the Social bandwagon, created a non starter and sort of Me-too product, copying Facebook and lost the plot. It is a back story of how Vic Gundotra, then close to Larry page, built up a threat frenzy within where apparently none existed (at this point FB was valued at 14B and Google 200Bn – not any more). Although the security lapses gave the immediate reason for Google to decide on shutting down G+ the broader issues, primarily of non adoption, and blowback for coercion ( remember when you had to have a G+ account to sign into other Google services?) hastened the end.
David Bradley was the 12th member of the 12 member team in Project Acorn – the IBM race to build a PC in record times. It was the spring of 1981 and engineers were going crazy as the prototypes will crash regularly and the boot up will take for ever as every time it had to go through a series of memory tests. Bradley was entrusted with a way to trigger a reset without the memory tests.
