A black and white figure's thought-hive
Why the illusion of privacy is only an illusion
There was a particular gag I came across in a Youtube video. One where, from the point of view of a long-term future, an advance human race made fun of us for having expectations of privacy in our lives.
I brushed it away as a single joke at first, but it stuck with me. I think they might be right.
A debate of several years...
Can unit tests that assert type safety be enough to compete against strong-typed languages?
I just finished reading Tim Ferriss’ 4-hour workweek book. To be honest, it’s not what I expected.
We’ve all heard the news about how AI will revolutionize multiple industries, transform mankind and bring us into a new era of technology. But it all sounds too good to be true. Indeed, it is. Like any other technological tool, there are serious consequences if it is left unchecked.
Discussing the ethics of AI has always been a tricky subject, since the question often asked is “whose fault is it?” This is just scratching the surface in terms of ethical discussions. A deeper analysis of what we mean is more revealing and makes for a better framework to have these conversations.
Let’s dive into detail and discuss AI Ethics.
I got to read Alessandro’s Barico long-essay (book) called The Game. In short, it is a reflexive mapping of how the Digital Revolution came to be.
After my tests with DAIN, I decided to go back and test the new set of frameworks that we have available for AI and DataScience. While Tensorflow 2 and PyTorch are the ones everyone mentions lately, I decided to give FastAI a test drive, and it’s incredibly easy to use.
I just finished reading SQL Performance Explained, by Markus Winand. This book, which is available for free in a web version at Use the Index, Luke!, is absolutely a service to the development community, and from the moment I started reading it, I could not put it down.
About a month ago, a Youtube video crossed my path. It was a video by the Lumière brothers (1896), but in full 4k, 60fps. This caught my attention, and of course, I wondered how can we make the technology behind it more accesible to people.
Chicken soup for the rational progress
I’m halfway through reading Algorithms to live by, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. The book is really good – but this is not a review about the book. Rather, a thought that came to my mind while reading it.
I think that books (and other pieces of knowledge) like these are what are going to fulfill Kurzweil’s predictions on the future of humanity.
Is there such a thing? I believe there is.
I recently read this wonderful article from Vox called The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us. In it, they propose that the progress we’re making in technology, with the debates in ethics and in the erosion of privacy is usually justified by people with mantras like “it’s the natural evolution of technology” and “it’s the way progress works” and “it was going to happen eventually”. They propose that these are invalid excuses.
I disagree.