Four Short Links

Four short links: 29 August 2019

Debugging a Scale Problem, Verifying Cryptographic Protocols, Remote Team Stress, and PAC-MAN Source

1. 6 Lessons we Learned When Debugging a Scaling Problem on GitLab.com — When you choose specific non-default settings, leave a comment or link to documentation/issues as to why; future people will thank you. This.
2. Verifpal — software for verifying the security of cryptographic protocols. Building upon contemporary research in symbolic formal verification, Verifpal’s main aim is to appeal more to real-world practitioners, students, and engineers without sacrificing comprehensive formal verification features.
3. Stress in Remote Teams — features a good list of the causes of stress in remote teams. The section on work-family conflict struck close to home (so to speak).
4. Atari PAC-MAN Source Code — original Atari 8-bit PAC-MAN source code. You can even compare versions with and without use of the macro assembler.

Four short links: 28 August 2019

Tech and Politics, Crypto-Mining Malware, Cost of Securing DNS, and Anti-Fuzzing Techniques

1. Summer School Presentations — a great selection of talks on technology and political structures.
2. A First Look at the Crypto-Mining Malware Ecosystem: A Decade of Unrestricted Wealth — In this paper, we conduct the largest measurement of crypto-mining malware to date, analyzing approximately 4.4 million malware samples (one million malicious miners), over a period of 12 years from 2007 to 2018. We then analyze publicly available payments sent to the wallets from mining-pools as a reward for mining, and estimate profits for the different campaigns. Our profit analysis reveals campaigns with multi-million earnings, associating over 4.3% of Monero with illicit mining.
3. Analyzing the Costs (and Benefits) of DNS, DoT, and DoH for the Modern Web — two new protocols have been proposed: DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT). Rather than sending queries and responses as cleartext, these protocols establish encrypted tunnels between clients and resolvers. This fundamental architectural change has implications for the performance of DNS, as well as for content delivery. In this paper, we measure the effect of DoH and DoT on name resolution performance and content delivery.
4. Fuzzification — anti-fuzzing techniques.

Four short links: 27 August 2019

Personal Information, Research Data, Massive Lamba Scale, and The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

1. Presidio — recognizers for personally identifiable information, assembled into a pipeline that helps you scrub sensitive text such as credit card numbers, names, locations, social security numbers, bitcoin wallets, US phone numbers, and financial data.
2. Microsoft’s Academic Knowledge Graph — a large RDF data set with over eight billion triples with information about scientific publications and related entities, such as authors, institutions, journals, and fields of study. The data set is based on the Microsoft Academic Graph and licensed under the Open Data Attributions license. Furthermore, we provide entity embeddings for all 210M represented scientific papers.
3. GG — code from the paper From Laptop to Lambda: Outsourcing Everyday Jobs to Thousands of Transient Functional Containers, describing a framework and a set of command-line tools that helps people execute everyday applications—e.g., software compilation, unit tests, video encoding, or object recognition—using thousands of parallel threads on a cloud functions service to achieve near-interactive completion times. In the future, instead of running these tasks on a laptop, or keeping a warm cluster running in the cloud, users might push a button that spawns 10,000 parallel cloud functions to execute a large job in a few seconds from start. gg is designed to make this practical and easy. (via Hacker News)
4. The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work — Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance. I plead for a reinvention of our disciplinary culture to attend not only to puzzles and math, but, also, to the societal implications of our work.

Four short links: 26 August 2019

Avoiding Sexual Predators, YouTube Radicalization, Brian Behlendorf Interview, and Cyberpunk Present

1. How to Avoid Supporting Sexual Predators (Valerie Aurora) — Your research process will look different depending on your situation, but the key elements will be: (1) Assume that sexual predators exist in your field and you don’t know who all of them are. (2) When you are asked to work with or support someone new, do research to find out if they are a sexual predator. (3) When you find out someone is probably a sexual predator, refuse to support them.
2. Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube — the three communities increasingly share the same user base; that users consistently migrate from milder to more extreme content; and that a large percentage of users who consume Alt-right content now consumed Alt-lite and I.D.W. [Intellectual Dark Web] content in the past. And recommendations steer people to more extreme content.
3. Brian Behlendorf Interview — Where a distributed database that was not just “Here is a master MySQL node and slaves that hang off of it,” was not just a multi multi-write kind of system, but one that actually supported consensus, one that actually had the network enforcing rules about valid transactions versus invalid transactions. One that was programmable, with smart contracts on top. This started to make sense to me, and was something that was appealing to me in a way that financial instruments and proof-of-work was not. Hyperledger was announced by a set of large companies, along with the Linux Foundation to try to research this space further, and try to figure out the enterprise applications of these technologies.
4. Employees Connect Nuclear Plant to the Internet so They Can Mine Cryptocurrency (ZDNet) — on the one hand I’m “we’re living in a Cyberpunk novel!” and on the other hand I’m “oh god, we’re living in a Cyberpunk novel!”.

Four short links: 23 August 2019

Open Source Economics, Program Synthesis, YouTube Influence, and ChatBot Papers

1. The Economics of Open Source (CJ Silverio) — I’m going to tell you a story about who owns the Javascript language commons, how we got into the situation that the language commons is *by* someone, and why we need to change it.
2. State of the Art in Program Synthesis — conference, with talks to be posted afterwards, run by a YC startup. Program Synthesis is one of the most exciting fields in software today, in my humble opinion: Programs that write programs are the happiest programs in the world, in the words of Andrew Hume. It’ll give coders superpowers, or make us redundant, but either way it’s interesting.
3. Alternative Influence (Data and Society) — amazing report. Extremely well-written, it lays out how the alt right uses YouTube. These strategies reveal a tension underlying the content produced by these influencers: while they present themselves as news sources, their content strategies often more accurately consist of marketing and advertising approaches. These approaches are meant to provoke feelings, memories, emotions, and social ties. In this way, the “accuracy” of their messaging can be difficult to assess through traditional journalistic tactics like fact-checking. Specifically, they recount ideological testimonials that frame ideology in terms of personal growth and self-betterment. They engage in self-branding techniques that present traditional, white, male-dominated values as desirable and aspirational. They employ search engine optimization (SEO) to highly rank their content against politically charged keywords. And they strategically use controversy to gain attention and frame political ideas as fun entertainment.
4. Chatbot and Related Research Paper Notes with Images — Papers related to chatbot models in chronological order spanning about five years from 2014. Some papers are not about chatbots, but I included them because they are interesting, and they may provide insights into creating new and different conversation models. For each paper I provided a link, the names of the authors, and GitHub implementations of the paper (noting the deep learning framework) if I happened to find any. Since I tried to make these notes as concise as possible they are in no way summarizing the papers but are merely a starting point to get a hang of what the paper is about, and to mention main concepts with the help of pictures.

Four short links: 22 Aug 2019

I Don't Know, Map Quirks, UI Toolkit, and Open Power Chip Architecture

1. I Don’t Know (Wired) — Two per cent of Brits don’t know whether they’ve lived in London before. Five per cent don’t know whether they’ve been attacked by a seagull or not. A staggering one in 20 residents of this fine isle don’t know whether or not they pick their nose. (via Flowing Data)
2. Haberman — interesting research into one way that online maps end up with places that aren’t places.
3. Blueprint — a React-based UI toolkit for the web. It is optimized for building complex, data-dense web interfaces for desktop applications which run in modern browsers and IE11. This is not a mobile-first UI toolkit.
4. IBM Open Sources Power Chip Instruction Set (Next Platform) — To be precise about what IBM is doing, it is opening up the Power ISA [Instruction Set Architecture] and giving it to the OpenPower Foundation royalty free with patent rights, and that means companies can implement a chip using the Power ISA without having to pay IBM or OpenPower a dime, and they have patent rights to what they develop. Companies have to maintain compatibility with the instruction set, King explains, and there are a whole set of compatibility requirements, which we presume are precisely as stringent as Arm and are needed to maintain runtime compatibility should many Power chips be developed, as IBM hopes will happen.

Four short links: 21 August 2019

Competition vs Convenience, Super-Contributors and Power Users, Forecasting Time-Series, and Appreciating Non-Scalability

1. Less than Half of Google Searches Now Result in a Click (Sparktoro) — We can see a consistent pattern: organic shrinks while zero-click searches and paid CTR rise. But the devil’s in the details and, in this case, mostly the mobile details, where Google’s gotten more aggressive with how ads and instant answer-type features appear. Everyone has to beware of the self-serving “hey, we’re doing people a favour by taking (some action that results in greater market domination for us)” because there’s a time when the fact that you have meaningful competition is better for the user than a marginal increase in value add from keeping them in your property longer. (via Slashdot)
2. Super-Contributors and Power Laws (MySociety) — Overall, two-thirds of users made only one report—but the reports made by this large set of users only makes up 20% of the total number of reports. This means that different questions can lead you to very different conclusions about the service. If you’re interested in the people who are using FixMyStreet, that two-thirds is where most of the action is. If you’re interested in the outcomes of the service, this is mostly due to a much smaller group of people. This dynamic applies pretty much everywhere and is worth understanding.
3. Facebook Prophet — a procedure for forecasting time series data based on an additive model where non-linear trends are fit with yearly, weekly, and daily seasonality, plus holiday effects. It works best with time series that have strong seasonal effects and several seasons of historical data. Prophet is robust to missing data and shifts in the trend, and typically handles outliers well. Written in Python and R.
4. On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales — to scale well is to develop the quality called scalability, that is, the ability to expand—and expand, and expand—without rethinking basic elements. […] [B]y its design, scalability allows us to see only uniform blocks, ready for further expansion. This essay recalls attention to the wild diversity of life on earth through the argument that it is time for a theory of nonscalability. (via Robin Sloan)

Four short links: 20 August 2019

Content Moderation, Robust Learning, Archiving Floppies, and xkcd Charting

1. Information Operations Directed at Hong Kong (Twitter) — Today we are adding archives containing complete tweet and user information for the 936 accounts we’ve disclosed to our archive of information operations—the largest of its kind in the industry. This is a goldmine for researchers, as you can see from Renee DiResta’s notes. Facebook also removed accounts for the same reason but hasn’t shared the data. Google has not taken a position yet, which prompted Alex Stamos to say, “Two of the three relevant companies have made public statements. Neither have realistic prospects in the PRC, the other does. Lots of lessons from this episode, but one might be a reinforcement of how Russia represents ‘easy mode’ for platforms doing state attribution. It’s a lot harder when the actor is financially critical, like the PRC or India.” We’re in interesting times, and research around content moderation are the most interesting things I’ve seen on the Internet since SaaS. This work cuts to human truths, technical capability, and the limits of openness.
2. Robust Learning from Untrusted Sources (Morning Paper) — designed to let you incorporate data from multiple “weakly supervised” (i.e., noisy) data sources. Snorkel replaces labels with probability-weighted labels, and then trains the final classifier using those.
3. Imaging Floppies (Jason Scott) — recording the magnetic strength everywhere on the disk so you archive all the data not just the data you can read once. The result of this hardware is that it takes a 140 kilobyte floppy disk (140k) and reads it into a 20 megabyte (20,000 kilobyte) disk image. This means a LOT of the magnetic aspects of the floppy are read in for analysis. […] This doesn’t just dupe the data, but the copy protection, unique track setup, and a bunch of variance around each byte on the floppy to make it easier to work with. The software can then do all sorts of analysis to give us excellent, bootable disk images. Don’t ever think that archiving is easy, or problems are solved.
4. Chart.xkcd — a chart library plots “sketchy,” “cartoony,” or “hand-drawn” styled charts. The world needs more whimsy.

Four short links: 19 August 2019

Developer Tool, Deep Fakes, DNA Tests, and Retro Coding Hacks

1. CROKAGE: A New Way to Search Stack Overflow — a paper about a service [that] takes the description of a programming task as a query and then provides relevant, comprehensive programming solutions containing both code snippets and their succinct explanations. There’s a replication package on GitHub. Follows in the footsteps of Douglas Adams’ Electric Monk (which people bought to pay for them) and DVRs (which people use to watch TV for them), now we have software that’ll copy dodgy code from the web for you. Programmers, software is coming for your jobs.
2. Cheap Fakes Beat Deep Fakes — One of the fundamental rules of information warfare is that you never lie (except when necessary.) Deepfakes are detectable as artificial content, which reveals the lie. This discredits the source of the information and the rest of their argument. For an information warfare campaign, using deepfakes is a high-risk proposition.
3. I Took 9 Different Commercial DNA Tests and Got 6 Different Results — refers to the dubious ancestry measures. “Ancestry itself is a funny thing, in that humans have never been these distinct groups of people,” said Alexander Platt, an expert in population genetics at Temple University in Philadelphia. “So, you can’t really say that somebody is 92.6 percent descended from this group of people when that’s not really a thing.”
4. Dirty Tricks 6502 Programmers Use — wonderfully geeky disection of a simple task rendered in as few bytes as possible.

Four short links: 15 August 2019

Data Businesses, Data Science Class, Tiny Mouse, and Training Bias

1. Making Uncommon Knowledge Common — The Rich Barton Playbook is building Data Content Loops to disintermediate incumbents and dominate Search. And then using this traction to own demand in their industries.
2. Data: Past, Present, and Future — Data and data-empowered algorithms now shape our professional, personal, and political realities. This course introduces students both to critical thinking and practice in understanding how we got here, and the future we now are building together as scholars, scientists, and citizens. The way Intro to Data Science classes ought to be.
3. Clever Travel Mouse — very small presenter tool, mouse, and pointer.
4. Training Bias in “Hate Speech Detector” Means Black Speech More Likely to be Censored (BoingBoing) — The authors do a pretty good job of pinpointing the cause: the people who hand-labeled the training data for the algorithm were themselves biased, and incorrectly, systematically misidentified AAE writing as offensive. And since machine learning models are no better than their training data (though they are often worse!), the bias in the data propagated through the model.

Four short links: 14 August 2019

Hardware Deplatforming, Hiring Groupthink, Loot Boxes and Problem Gambling, and Interoperability and Privacy

1. Getting Deplatformed from Apple (BoingBoing) — It turned out that getting locked out of his Apple account made all of Luke’s Apple hardware almost useless. I think it should be illegal to do this. I believe in deplatforming (with appropriate boundaries and appeal) but breaking my hardware is bollocks.
2. How to Avoid Groupthink When Hiring (HBR) — abridged process: First, make it clear to interviewers that they should not share their interview experiences with each other before the final group huddle. Next, ask each interviewer to perform a few steps before the group huddle: distill their interview rating to a single numerical score; write down their main arguments for and against hiring this person and their final conclusion; If interviewers are emailing in their numerical scores and thoughts on a candidate, don’t include the entire group in the email. Finally, the hiring managers should take note of the average score for a candidate.
3. Loot Boxes a Matter of “Life or Death,” says Researcher — “‘There’s one clear message that I want to get across today, and it stands in stark contrast to mostly everything you’ve heard so far,’ Zendle said. ‘The message is this: Spending money on loot boxes is linked to problem gambling. The more money people spend on loot boxes, the more severe their problem gambling is. This isn’t just my research. This is an effect that has been replicated numerous times across the world by multiple independent labs. This is something the games industry does not engage with’.”
4. Interoperability and Privacy (BoingBoing) — latest in the tear that Cory Doctorow’s been on about how to deal with the centralised power of BigSocial.

Four short links: 13 August 2019

Recognizing Fact, YouTube & Brazil, Programming Zine, and Credit Blacklists

1. Younger Americans are Better than Older Americans at Telling Factual News Statements from Opinions (Pew Research) — About a third of 18- to 49-year-olds (32%) correctly identified all five of the factual statements as factual, compared with two-in-ten among those ages 50 and older. A similar pattern emerges for the opinion statements. Among 18- to 49-year-olds, 44% correctly identified all five opinion statements as opinions, compared with 26% among those ages 50 and older. Or, 68% of 18-49 year olds couldn’t tell whether five factual statements were factual? (via @pewjournalism)
2. How YouTube Radicalized Brazil (NYT) — He was killing time on the site one day, he recalled, when the platform showed him a video by a right-wing blogger. He watched out of curiosity. It showed him another, and then another. “Before that, I didn’t have an ideological political background,” Mr. Martins said. YouTube’s auto-playing recommendations, he declared, were “my political education.” “It was like that with everyone,” he said.
3. Paged Out — a new experimental (one article == one page) free magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.
4. Credit Blacklists, Not the Solution to Every Problem — translated Chinese article on blacklists. As the aforementioned source explained, Wulian County is one of the first in Shandong Province to trial the construction of a social credit system, that began last year. The blacklist is a disciplinary measure restricted to persons within the county. It is different from the People’s Bank of China’s credit information evaluation system blacklist, or the blacklist for those deemed to be untrustworthy by the People’s Court. It does not affect the educational opportunities of anyone’s children, whether or not they themselves can ride a train or plane, and so on. Activities such as volunteering, donating blood, charitable contributions, and so on, can add to one’s personal credit (score), and can also be used to restore and upgrade credit ratings, removing themselves from the blacklist. (via ChinAI)

Four short links: 12 August 2019

Retro Hacking, Explaining AI, Teacher Ratings, and Algorithmic Bias

1. First Person Adventure via Mario Maker (Vice) — the remarkable “3D Maze House (P59-698-55G)” by creator ねぎちん … a level somehow manages to credibly re-create the experience of playing a first-person (!!) adventure game like Wizardy, something Nintendo clearly never intended.
2. Measurable Counterfactual Local Explanations for Any Classifier — generates w-counterfactual explanations that state minimum changes necessary to flip a prediction’s classification [and …] builds local regression models, using the w-counterfactuals to measure and improve the fidelity of its regressions. Making AI “explain itself” is useful and hard, this seems like an interesting step forward.
3. Student Evaluation of Teaching Ratings and Student Learning are Not Related (Science Direct) — Students do not learn more from professors with higher student evaluation of teaching (SET) ratings. […] New meta-analyses of multisection studies show that SET ratings are unrelated to student learning. (via Sciblogs)
4. Apparent Gender-Based Discrimination in the Display of STEM Career Ads — women disproportionately click on job ads, so bidding algorithms charge more to advertisers to show to women, so men see more job ads. (via Ethan Molick)

Four short links: 9 August 2019

Shadowban Patent, Abusing Unix Tools, Deblurring Photos, and Postal Vectors

1. Facebook Patents Shadowbanning — which has a long history elsewhere.
2. Living Off The Land in Linux — legitimate functions of Unix binaries that can be abused to break out restricted shells, escalate or maintain elevated privileges, transfer files, spawn bind and reverse shells, and facilitate the other post-exploitation tasks. Interesting to see the surprising functionality built into some utilities.
3. Neural Blind Deconvolution Using Deep Priors — deblurring photos with neural nets. Very cool, and they’ve posted code. (via @roadrunning01)
4. Warshipping (TechCrunch) — I mail you a package that contains a Wi-Fi sniffer with cellular connection back to me. It ships me your Wi-Fi handshake, I crack it, ship it back, now it joins your network and the game is afoot. (via BoingBoing)

Four short links: 8 August 2019

Counterfeit Security, Poses in Art, Content Moderation, and iPhone Remote Attack Surface

1. From The Depths Of Counterfeit Smartphones — security look at the counterfeit phones. Spoiler: they’re nasty, stay away. Both the Galaxy S10 and iPhone 6 counterfeits we assessed contained malware and rootkits. And that’s the most straightforward nastiness: even if you removed the rootkit they’d still be shocking. In the case of the “iPhone,” further digging revealed that it runs a far older version of Android: Kitkat 4.4.0. Kitkat’s last update came in 2014.
2. Linking Art through Human Poses — arXiv paper that finds artwork with matching poses using OpenPose. (via MIT TR)
3. A Framework for Content Moderation (Ben Thompson) — pretty good post, tackling why and where the different levels of moderation make sense.
4. Fully Remote Attack Surface of the iPhone (Google Project Zero) — very interesting read, showing the detail and dead ends of a security tester. The method […] processes incoming MIME messages, and sends them to specific decoders based on the MIME type. Unfortunately, the implementation did this by appending the MIME type string from an incoming message to the string ‘decode’ and calling the resulting method. This meant that an unintended selector could be called, leading to memory corruption.

Four short links: 7 August 2019

Checklists, Farewells, De-Risking, and Statistical Complexity of Brain Activity

1. Why Checklists Fail (Nature) — After the NHS mandated the WHO checklist, researchers at Imperial College London launched a project to monitor the tool’s use, and found that staff were often not using it as they should. In a review of nearly 7,000 surgical procedures performed at 5 NHS hospitals, they found that the checklist was used in 97% of cases, but was completed only 62% of the time. When the researchers watched a smaller number of procedures in person, they found that practitioners often failed to give the checks their full attention, and read only two-thirds of the items out loud. In slightly more than 40% of cases, at least one team member was absent during the checks; 10% of the time, the lead surgeon was missing. If you give a checklist that ensures X to workers who don’t value X, you get workers who half-arse their way through a checklist. And, in this case, unnecessarily hurt and/or killed patients.
2. Rowboats and Magic Feathers: Reflections on 13 Years of Museum 2.0 (Nina Simon) — popular social media productions twist the creators’ perceptions and become burdens. I kept to a rigorous schedule and never took a week off. Even weeks when I was giving birth, on vacation, or exhausted from challenges at work, I blogged. My attitude was, “readers don’t care what’s going on with me. They want the content.” This blog became like Dumbo’s feather. I loved it, but I also let it overpower my sense of self. As long as I was holding it — as long as I was pumping out content — I could soar. But I was terrified to let it drop. Without the blog, I presumed I could not fly. Compare Overly-Attached Girlfriend’s video on leaving YouTube. It’s hard stuff.
3. De-Risking Custom Technology Projects (18F) — sweet advice.
4. Distinguishing States of Conscious Arousal using Statistical Complexity — how can you tell whether someone is awake or sedated, just from their brain activity? By analysing signals from individual electrodes and disregarding spatial correlations, we find that statistical complexity distinguishes between the two states of conscious arousal through temporal correlations alone. In particular, as the degree of temporal correlations increases, the difference in complexity between the wakeful and anaesthetised states becomes larger. Uses an “epsilon machine,” which I’d not heard of before but which is a “minimal, unifilar presentation of a stationary stochastic process” (particular type of hidden Markov model). The entropy of the epsilon machine’s states yields a measure of statistical complexity, which this paper shows maps to sedated/wake states.

Four short links: 6 August 2019

Path Tracing, Games Experiences, Cinematic Visualisation, and IoT Security

1. The Path to Traced Movies (Pixar) — Until recently, brute-force path tracing techniques were simply too noisy and slow to be practical for movie production rendering.[…] In this survey, we provide an overview of path tracing and highlight important milestones in its development that have led to it becoming the preferred movie rendering technique today.
2. Free to Play? Hate, Harassment, and Positive Social Experiences in Online Games (ADL) — The survey found that 88 percent of adults who play online multiplayer games in the US reported positive social experiences while playing games online. The most common experiences were making friends (51%) and helping other players (50%). […] Seventy-four percent of adults who play online multiplayer games in the US experience some form of harassment while playing games online. Sixty-five percent of players experience some form of severe harassment, including physical threats, stalking, and sustained harassment. Alarmingly, nearly a third of online multiplayer gamers (29%) have been doxed.
3. Cinematic Scientific Visualization: The Art of Communicating Science — slides and words from SIGGRAPH talk on advanced film-style techniques for telling science stories.
4. Core Cybersecurity Feature Baseline for Securable IoT Devices: A Starting Point for IoT Device Manufacturers (NIST) — draft of some excellent guidelines to device manufacturers. Device identifiers, firmware updates and resets, data protection, disabling and restricting access to local and network interfaces, event logging, etc. Doesn’t specify how to do these things, just that manufacturers should do them. Important so we don’t build more future botfarms.

Four short links: 5 August 2019

Innovation Policy Toolkit, Differential Privacy, Ethically-Aligned Design, Low-n Learning

1. Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation (Journal of Economic Perspectives) — We discuss a number of the main innovation policy levers and describe the available evidence on their effectiveness: tax policies to favor research and development, government research grants, policies aimed at increasing the supply of human capital focused on innovation, intellectual property policies, and pro-competitive policies. In the conclusion, we synthesize this evidence into a single-page “toolkit,” in which we rank policies in terms of the quality and implications of the available evidence and the policies’ overall impact from a social cost-benefit perspective. We also score policies in terms of their speed and likely distributional effects. (via Marginal Revolution)
2. A Brief Tour of Differential Privacy — lecture slides from a CMU course. Content warning: Comic Sans.
3. Ethically-Aligned Design, 1ed — read online. The most comprehensive, crowd-sourced global treatise regarding the Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems available today.
4. n-Shot Learning — brief overview of machine learning from zero, one, or a handful of examples.