Four short links: 27 April 2018
Automating Commerce, Faster Training, MacOS Monitoring, and Formal Methods
- Death of A Supply-Driven World — The company employs under a dozen engineers that built a technology stack that integrates the brand’s planning, design, marketing and commerce systems into an all-knowing brain. If a shopper adds a product to the cart and then removes it, the brand knows and feeds this info back into its demand planning system. If a shopper returns one size and keeps another, this informs how the brand will reorder that product, if it does at all. All of this happens automatically, and while there are still humans making some decisions, the brand has no merchandising team. Most of its buying and planning is entirely automated.
- Accelerated Neuro-Evolution — open source code that maximizes the use of CPUs and GPUs in parallel. It runs deep neural networks on the GPU, the domains (e.g. video games or physics simulators) on the CPU, and executes multiple evaluations in parallel in a batch, allowing all available hardware to be utilized efficiently. […] [I]t also contains custom TensorFlow operations, which significantly improve training speed.
- MacOS Monitoring the Open Source Way — interesting read about how Dropbox security team monitor the employee laptops to catch malware, using osquery for snapshots, Santa for real-time process events, and OpenBSM/Audit for real-time syscall monitoring.
- The Great Theorem-Prover Showdown — he chose three imperative programs with variable assignment, and challenged theorem prover Twitter to formally prove the code’s correctness, with interesting results. My favourite sentence in the write-up is If the only result of this challenge is that Leftpad becomes the theorem prover’s “hello world”, I’ll be pretty happy.
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