Four short links: 30 January 2019
No Code, Enterprise Sales, Deep-Learning the Brain, and Computer Architecture
- The Rise of No Code — As creating things on the internet becomes more accessible, more people will become makers. It’s no longer limited to the >1% of engineers who can code, resulting in an explosion of ideas from all kinds of people. We see “no code” projects on Product Hunt often. This is related to my ongoing interest in Ways In Which Programmers Are Automating Themselves Out of A Job. This might be bad for some low-complexity programmers in the short term, and good for society. Or it might be that the AI Apocalypse is triggered by someone’s Glitch bot achieving sentience. Watch this space!
- My Losing Battle with Enterprise Sales (Luke Kanies) — All that discounting you have to do for enterprise clients? It’s because procurement’s bonus is based on how much of a discount they force you to give. Absolutely everyone knows this is how it works, and that everyone knows this, so it’s just a game. I offer my product for a huge price, you try to force a discount, and then at the end we all compare notes to see how we did relative to market. Neither of us really wants to be too far out of spec; I want to keep my average prices the same, and you just want to be sure you aren’t paying too much. Luke tells all.
- Decoding Words from Brain Waves — In each study, electrodes placed directly on the brain recorded neural activity while brain-surgery patients listened to speech or read words out loud. Then, researchers tried to figure out what the patients were hearing or saying. In each case, researchers were able to convert the brain’s electrical activity into at least somewhat-intelligible sound files.
- A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture (ACM) — the opportunities for future improvements in speed and energy efficiency will come from (the authors predict): compiler tech and domain-specific architectures. This is a very good overview of how we got here, by way of Moore’s Law, Dennard’s Law, and Amdahl’s Law.
