2000-04-06 Joel Spolsky
Netscape … [made] the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming:
It’s harder to read code than to write it.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
2020-12-09 Bruce Schneier
FireEye [a cybersecurity company] was hacked by — they believe — “a nation with top-tier offensive capabilities”
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/12/fireeye-hacked.html
2020-09-02 Raphael Satter
(Reuters) – Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful – and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.
It combines resistance, capacitance, and what’s called a Mott memristor all in the same device. Memristors are devices that hold a memory, in the form of resistance, of the current that has flowed through them. Mott memristors have an added ability in that they can also reflect a temperature-driven change in resistance. Materials in a Mott transition go between insulating and conducting according to their temperature. It’s a property seen since the 1960s, but only recently explored in nanoscale devices.
The transition happens in a nanoscale sliver of niobium oxide in the memristor. Here when a DC voltage is applied, the NbO2 heats up slightly, causing it to transition from insulating to conducting. Once that switch happens, the charge built up in the capacitance pours through. Then the device cools just enough to trigger the transition back to insulating. The result is a spike of current that resembles a neuron’s action potential.
2020-09-27
The story of how neural nets evolved from the earliest days of AI to now.
States that resemble sleep-like cycles in simulated neural networks quell the instability that comes with uninterrupted self-learning in artificial analogs of brains
…
Watkins and her research team found that the network simulations became unstable after continuous periods of unsupervised learning. When they exposed the networks to states that are analogous to the waves that living brains experience during sleep, stability was restored. “It was as though we were giving the neural networks the equivalent of a good night’s rest,” said Watkins.
https://www.lanl.gov/discover/news-release-archive/2020/June/0608-artificial-brains.php
2020-07-01 William Charles Louis and Richard G. Van de Water
The most likely solution was a new neutrino—a “sterile” neutrino, so called because it would not interact with other matter in any way except through gravity.
“It is physically impossible—as in, against the laws of physics—for triso to melt in a reactor,” says Sell. “And when you start with a reactor that can’t melt, your safety case completely changes.”
2020-05-29 Blender Animation Studio
Fueled by caffeine, a young woman runs through the bittersweet memories of her past relationship. Get the production files, assets, tutorials and exclusive making-of videos by joining Blender Cloud at https://cloud.blender.org/p/coffee-run
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVGeM40dABA
Discovered from https://www.blendernation.com/2020/05/29/coffee-run-blender-open-movie/
2020-04-30 Kim Martineau
They showed that a deep neural network could perform with only one-tenth the number of connections if the right subnetwork was found early in training.
Train the model, prune its weakest connections, retrain the model at its fast, early training rate, and repeat, until the model is as tiny as you want.
https://news.mit.edu/2020/foolproof-way-shrink-deep-learning-models-0430