Four short links: 2 July 2018
Soft Robots, Debugging Serverless, Map Privacy, and Building Footprints
- Adaptive and Resilient Soft Tensegrity Robots — neat idea for soft robots that invent gaits with a minimum of physical trails, and the video is cute.
- Debugging Serverless — what observability means in this context, and the things you have to pay attention to if you want observability.
- Apple Maps and Privacy — buried in this piece on Apple rebuilding its Maps data using cars driving the streets: “We specifically don’t collect data, even from point A to point B,” notes Cue. “We collect data—when we do it—in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person who went from point A to point B. We’re collecting the segments of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything [to collect more]. We’re not losing any features or capabilities by doing this.”
- U.S. Building Footprints — This data set contains 124,885,597 computer-generated building footprints in all 50 U.S. states. This data is freely available for download and use. Contributed by Microsoft. (via Bing blog)