Some of the things I've learned in more than 20 years in the tech industry.

You need to hear these.

🧵👇

Listen to more people who don't look like you, don't speak your language, and don't come from the same place you do.

We aren't doing this near enough.

Small habits compound.

No small improvement is too small.

Just aim for something new every day, and you'll be surprised at the end.

Take responsibility.

It doesn't really matter how you feel, I'm sure you could have done better.

Always keep the big picture in mind and never lose the forest for the trees.

Be the person that pulls everyone out of the rabbit holes.

When you complain about an open source project's management you'll get the reply, "Use something else if you don't like it!" That'd be true except for the tiny problem that *many* projects also strive for complete monopolistic dominance.

Let me tell you about Java in early 2k:

I was programming in Java since it's release, and all through the late 90s into the early 2000s. At first Java was very determined to unseat C++ and it used various propaganda tactics to turn C++ and malloc into a weird enemy for all of us to hate. This worked great!

Everything was fine though because there were plenty of jobs in tech because of the dot-com boom, and then suddenly there were not jobs because of the dot-com bomb.

Overnight it seemed as if the *only* way to get a job was at giant companies, and they *loved* Enterprise Java.

Now, this is the golden ticket for many open source projects and corporations. They all want to be the top dog #1 in the industry for their particular use, and once they gain that position they become abusive by ignoring user needs and extracting wealth from them.

With Java the dominance was so insane that *every* language had to copy Java's weirdness to survive. If you wonder why a language has some odd CamelCase things it's because early Python, Ruby, and others had to copy Java's semantics and style to even be considered "serious".

ET Weekend Deals: $100 off New Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G Smartphone, Dell Vostro 15 5501 Intel Core i5 Aluminum Laptop for $629.https://t.co/wgXnApT72j technology up to date

Samsung’s Galaxy S20 FE 5G smartphone is now officially available, and today you can get it with a $100 discount.

I’m quoted in this, which does about as good a job overviewing the topic as a New York Times profile can be expected to.

Major oversights in it as I see.

First, It does not acknowledge the fact that Yudkowsky is, at heart, a complete crank. This remains, to my mind, crucial to understanding the rationalist community’s influence on the world: they’re sci-fi writers being mistaken for scientists.

You can’t really understand the harmful effects of SSC until you realize that it’s part of a larger movement of bullshit artists serving as cult leaders to the techbros.

Second, and more importantly, it never really explains the harm that’s being done by Scott Siskind and his followers. It comes close, noting that “SJWs” were the only group not welcome in SSC, but it doesn’t capture the harm of that because it doesn’t unpack the term.

What is meant in practice when “SJWs” aren’t welcome in a space is that marginalized people speaking of the harm they experience are silenced.

That’s it. That’s the meaning.

South Korean carmaker Hyundai on Wednesday presented the first 7 hydrogen-powered trucks to customers in Switzerland, out of 50 such vehicles scheduled this year to bring zero-emission commercial vehicles to European roads


For long haul, proponents say hydrogen-powered trucks have an advantage over electric rivals as they have a greater range and require less charging times but their uptake and mass production has been slow because they are expensive

However, a McKinsey study in January said that once relative efficiencies of the power sources and lifetime costs of a truck are factored in, green hydrogen could reach cost parity with diesel by 2030

PARITY WITH DIESEL ???

Hyundai has been partnering with Swiss companies to build a value chain covering the production of green hydrogen from hydropower, hydrogen charging stations and the service and maintenance of the trucks

The customers, which include supermarket chain Migros, will be leasing the trucks from Hyundai Hydrogen Mobility HHM to transport goods around the country, backed by the new hydrogen infrastructure

Neural Volume Rendering for Dynamic Scenes

NeRF has shown incredible view synthesis results, but it requires multi-view captures for STATIC scenes.

How can we achieve view synthesis for DYNAMIC scenes from a single video? Here is what I learned from several recent efforts.

Instead of presenting Video-NeRF, Nerfie, NR-NeRF, D-NeRF, NeRFlow, NSFF (and many others!) as individual algorithms, here I try to view them from a unifying perspective and understand the pros/cons of various design choices.

Okay, here we go.

*Background*

NeRF represents the scene as a 5D continuous volumetric scene function that maps the spatial position and viewing direction to color and density. It then projects the colors/densities to form an image with volume rendering.

Volumetric + Implicit -> Awesome!

*Model*

Building on NeRF, one can extend it for handling dynamic scenes with two types of approaches.

A) 4D (or 6D with views) function.

One direct approach is to include TIME as an additional input to learn a DYNAMIC radiance field.

e.g., Video-NeRF, NSFF, NeRFlow

B) 3D Template with Deformation.

Inspired by non-rigid reconstruction methods, this type of approach learns a radiance field in a canonical frame (template) and predicts deformation for each frame to account for dynamics over time.

e.g., Nerfie, NR-NeRF, D-NeRF

NEW INTERVIEW: Former Chairman of Sony Entertainment on Nintendo's Everlasting Intellectual Property

'Mario is probably impervious to extinction'

$NTDOY

https://t.co/MI0mMmSDsf

Nintendo has 100 years of experience in gaming.

'They are the masters in this field'

'As a platform holder, our job is to create a wider audience, continually.'

'I think Nintendo really understands the game design maxims for a handheld platform and then how to leverage their very powerful IP vault in that medium.'

It seems Fortnite and Roblox is additive to the industry and not exactly zero-sum vs AAA games?

Microtest Test-Driven Development is a strategy for *change*. To understand the case, we need to answer two questions: 1) Why have a strategy for change? 2) How does TDD provide one? Let's take up the first question today.

(Before we begin, I remind you of the relative unimportance of geekery to me just now. This is just respite.

Please work for change and support the others who are doing so.

Black lives matter.

Stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind.)

Why is having a change strategy so urgent?

The TL;DR is dead simple:

Because continuous ongoing change is at the base of all software development, both before and after our software is in the field.

When I read old-school software ideas, or for that matter what is being taught in our colleges for the most part today, I'm struck over and over again by the "timeless" aspect of the material. It is concerned almost entirely with the static and atemporal aspects of software.

In these approaches, applications spring Athena-like from the heads of our pantheon-worthy programmers. The designs emerge in an instant and once emerged they are final. The process looks like 1) Nothing. 2) Everything. 3) Move on.

AT&T looks to sell DirecTV as investors question its huge bet on content.https://t.co/JZgjgHwUco business information up to date

AT&T is reportedly putting its DirecTV business up for auction just five years after buying it. The move raises momentous questions: Does this signal the unwinding of AT&T’s hugely ambitious program to become a media titan,

"Working software is the primary measure of progress" is an enabling constraint. Sometimes, managers use the phrase as a club to get people coding. Coding, however, is a necessary driver of creating software, but it's not the only thing you have to do. 1/5

Standing in front of a whiteboard and discussing design, creating and running tests, just staring out the window and thinking, are all necessary parts of the development process; but if you don't get that software into your customers hands, you've accomplished nothing. 2/5

Using working software (the result of the process) as your measure of progress, puts natural limits on the entire process, including the staring-out-the-window parts. It forces you to work small (thus the "constraint") enough to deliver frequently. 3/5

I'll add that sometimes, progress does have to slow down so that you can think things through. That's fine. That's natural overhead in the process. Incorporate it into your planning. 4/5

But, if the overhead overtakes valuable work (creating "working software"), then you need to take a long hard look at how you're doing things. 5/5

In 2003's Pattern Recognition, @greatdismal discusses the role of "apophenia" - finding patterns where none exist - in paranoid thinking. We are a pattern-matching animal, prone to seeing faces in clouds and hearing speech in static.

https://t.co/lKHfKbvzLN

1/

Apophenia is omnipresent and weird. It's why 5G conspiracy theorists started circulating a guitar-pedal circuit diagram as a leaked 5G cancer-microchip design (the diagram has a segment labeled "5G

But this kind of hilarious idiocy doesn't occur in a vacuum. It's got a business model. Companies like Devon's @Energydots1 prey on people who've been sucked in by their own apophenic misfirings to sell them "Smartdots" - stickers to protect them from "radiation."

3/

It will not surprise you to learn that Smartdots don't work. Indeed, they don't do anything, except, perhaps, produce a hard-to-remove gummy

Energydots claims that their stickers are programmed with "scalar energy" - a study by the University of Surrey's 6th Generation Innovation Centre, commissioned by the @BBC, was unable to detect "scalar energy".

5/

The ACCC rejected the insufficient conditions w/ which DG Comp cleared Google-Fitbit. The EC decision shows a lack of courage and a refusal to learn from past mistakes. Having worked for months w/ @Caffar3Cristina trying to explain why, it’s time to put down a final marker. 1/

This is a (long) thread in four parts:

I.The Problem with Google
II.Google-Fitbit in a time of Digital Platform introspection
III.Google-Fitbit Theories of Harm
IV.The remedies are insufficient

2/

PART I: The Problem with Google.

We’ll start by agreeing that Google makes some great products. (That’s not the problem.) It claims: 3/

We have a very different view of Google’s true motives: 4/

To see this, divide Google’s product history into three parts. Part 1 is “Google as Traditional Media Company”. They launch Desktop Search (1998) and acquire YouTube (2006). Both are free services, monetized by advertising.

5/

The Elon Musk BS about indentured servitude on Mars, this was bothering me the other day before I read that quote and I didn’t tweet about it, but yeah I have thoughts about capitalists planning to “save humanity” by leaving earth...

The idea that it is somehow an easier feat of engineering to leave our planet and terraform another planet, than it is to fight climate change on Earth is a load of horseshit. So why is it billed that way? Why convince people that space travel is “our only hope as a species”?

When I played Horizon Zero Dawn, one thing that really, really upset me was the quest where you discover the classrooms intended to educate future humans, and there is a Faro logo on *everything*.

It’s not about saving humanity, it’s about being acknowledged as a “saviour”

You can’t save “humanity” by fleeing the Earth, leaving billions to die and the biosphere to collapse. And you can’t create a utopian society elsewhere by exporting the same sociocultural mindset and capitalist ideology that destroyed our planet, you can only delay the inevitable

It’s one big fucking vanity project entirely devoid of merit, and a society with a literal saviour is not going to be one where shit like equality is possible. Without dissenters, it’s going to be a perfect distillation of everything already wrong with our present society

1/ Now that the election has been called and voter fraud dismissed, it’s time to search for other frauds. Let’s look at $TSLA Full Self Drive. About 3 weeks ago, Tesla released its Beta version to a limited audience of Tesla influencers.

2/ The influencers were supposed to flood social media with praise and testimonial videos. Instead, FSD performance was so bad that every video contained errors, many requiring driver intervention.

3/ Excuses were made. “Remember, this is only Beta”. “I’m teaching it to drive down this street”. But the reality clear to everyone was that Tesla’s Beta FSD is anything but Full Self Drive.

4/ Beta release – what does that mean? It means that the software is a candidate for production release. It means 100% of the specification has been implemented. It means only clean-ups remain.

5/ So how is it possible that FSD performs so poorly after all the hype? Certainly, there’s an element of time pressure to fulfill the Robotaxi proclamation. And similar pressure from Waymo’s competition.