Four short links: 13 July 2020
Efficiency, Voice Separation, Design Docs, and Counterfeit Hardware
- Too Efficiency — (Tim Bray) Think of efficiency as optimising for one variable. As anyone who has seen a greyhound or a dalmation up close knows, optimising for one aspect of a complex system can weaken other aspects. Tim cites software security, food, work hours, and others. The best optimisation advice I received was “never set one target, always at least two: what you hope to get, and what you don’t want to lose to get there.”
- Voice Separation — (Facebook AI) a new method to separate up to five voices speaking simultaneously on a single microphone. Our method surpasses previous state-of-the-art performance on several speech source separation benchmarks, including ones with challenging noise and reverberations. One step closer to being able to drop a mic into a room and emerge with a transcript of what was said in a meeting.
- Design Docs at Google — A nice structure which may inspire you when compared to your current design documentation. (You have design documentation, right?)
- Counterfeit Hardware — We bought over 1000 “waterproof” probes or bare chips from more than 70 different vendors on ebay, AliExpress, and online stores -big and small- in 2019. All of the probes bought on ebay and AliExpress contained counterfeit DS18B20 sensors, and almost all sensors bought on those two sites were counterfeit. Supply chains are hard, says counterfeit Barbiee[tm].
