Four short links: 22 November 2019
FAQs, Privacy, APIs, and Deep Learning Hardware
- FAQ Off — open source software that lets you build gamebook-style FAQ websites to counteract sealioning and mob harassment on social media.
- Privacy Possum — not just content to block ads, Privacy Possum monkey wrenches common commercial tracking methods by reducing and falsifying the data gathered by tracking companies.
- Hyrum’s Law — With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended upon by somebody. (via Simon Willison)
- The Deep Learning Revolution and its Implications for Computer Architecture and Chip Design — paper by Jeff Dean (the Google name behind most of the web-scale distributed systems tech). Very readable guide to the reasoning behind Google’s TPU series of custom hardware for inference and learning, as well as future directions to apply deep learning to improve semiconductor design and manufacture, as well as compilers.
