Open Source: The Naive "Good Ol' Days" are Gone

It used to be that open source was generally trusted because it was assumed peer-review would catch stuff like this. Welcome to the World of Today; not any more!  

Keeping your household conversations private!

Mozilla has published instructions on how you can turn off human reviews of household audio captured from voice assistant devices. Check it out!

That's scary

From MIT Technology Review; this is just scary! Humans aren't the most stable geniuses, huh? And consequently, making an AI to think like them is sure to be fraught with contradictions and anomalies 😮 Not to mention that the Corp that gifted us with Windows Update is at the helm 😲

The future audience of the Internet

Interesting. Pay attention to market share, folks! Per this article from Fortune.

Organic Composite looks promising

Cool! This organic composite described in Phys.org looks promising for providing a light-stimulated electric current producing media 😀

The Raspberry Pi Story

Ever wonder how those little boards got created and who was behind them? Check out this article from TechRepublic.

Sometimes the way forward is backwards...

A thought-provoking article from System Engineer Paul Czarkowski on why VMs may be poised to make a come-back in 2019 😲

Metaphysical Migraine :-o

This WIRED article discussing Quantum Error Correcting Codes is guaranteed to give most laypeople a metaphysical migraine 😮

Spring Boot gets Big Props

Spring Boot, the open source Java application framework, got big props this week with Netflix's announcement that it will migrate its Java production environment from its custom-made application infrastructure to Spring Boot! 😮

Book Review: Ethics and Data Science

Ethics and Data Science by Mike Loukides

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Every data scientist or software engineer working with Big Data should read this book! It's short and to the point, distilling what could be a confusing consideration of ethics into a few simple approaches, which will make a big difference for any applied project. Starting with the obvious, pledges and creeds, it quickly shows why they're inadequate. Then, the authors discuss the checklist approach, which is applied, systematic, and reproducible. The book gives practical examples of ethical challenges, showing how easily unexamined projects with noble intentions can go awry! Just raising awareness is a big take-away from the book - and if teams develop and apply the checklist approach, it's far more likely they'll deliver solutions that actually "Walk the Talk" of consumer privacy and responsible data management.