Friday 7th June 2024

Three reasons why it’s good news that robots are getting smarter - The Economist (No paywall)

THE ROBOTS are coming! In science fiction that is usually an ominous warning. In the real world, it is a prediction—and a welcome one. The field of robotics has made impressive progress in the past year, as researchers in universities and industry have applied advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to machines. The same technology that enables chatbots like ChatGPT to hold conversations, or systems like DALL-E to create realistic-looking images from text descriptions, can give robots of all kinds a dramatic brain upgrade.

As a result, robots are becoming more capable, easier to program and able to explain what they are doing. Investors are piling into robotics startups. OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, which gave up on robots a few years ago, has changed its mind and started hiring a new robotics team. When brought to bear upon the physical world, previously disembodied AI now appears to have enormous potential.

Continued here

Heuristics on the high seas: Mathematical optimization for cargo ships

Continued here

Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem

With the rise of 'okupación' in Spain, property owners and individuals alike are seeking to navigate the legal landscape and social implications of squatting.

Continued here

The Problem with Lying is Keeping Track of All the Lies

“The real difficulty with lying is that you have to keep track of all the lies that you’ve told, and to whom” is a quote I once read that I can’t definitively source (it’s… inconsistently attributed to Mark Twain). It’s stuck with me because it captures the logic as to why it’s so hard to be productive as a programmer in a world of weak isolation models.

[Author’s note: database communities use the term “isolation,” and distributed systems communities use the term “strong consistency,” to refer to overlapping concepts. In the rest of this post, I will stick to the database terminology because this is all their fault in the first place.]

Continued here

Compromised visions are superior

My office hours from last week went well. I answered a question about seeking Clojure jobs. And I got into a nice discussion about the REPL getting out of sync with your code. I also learned that I should have more questions ready to fill time. There are no Office Hours this week. But I’ll pick it up next week. Please ask a question here.

The show has clever writing and fun characters. But what blew me away was how alive the characters felt. They ooze life. I know that one of their practices was to make the puppets have motion multipliers. For example, a character’s hair might bounce around as the puppet moves. A small motion of the hand makes lots of motion on the screen.

Continued here

Martha Gellhorn Was The Only Woman to Report on the D-Day Landings From the Ground

That moment stood in stark contrast to what Gellhorn had witnessed earlier: destroyed and smoldering vehicles, broken and bloodied bodies, gaping holes in the soft sand. The vestiges of battle from the day before—D-Day, June 6, 1944—lined the beach, where soldiers from the United States Army had fought their way ashore as part of the Allied invasion of France during World War II.

Gellhorn was one of the first journalists—and the only female correspondent—to view that hellish scene 80 years ago. Lacking proper credentials, she lied her way onto a hospital ship traveling from England to France, then rode in a water ambulance to the still-dangerous Normandy shore as artillery shells from battleships roared overhead. Among other hazards, she endured snipers, landmines and strafing by German warplanes, all to get the story.

Continued here

Hybrid Bonding Plays Starring Role in 3D Chips

Tech makes millions of connections in a square millimeter of silicon

Continued here

AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead

Continued here

Inside Myanmar: The devastating cost of fighting the military junta

The BBC hears allegations of rape and torture by Myanmar's military in Chin State.

Continued here

Kate Middleton’s cancer diagnosis, explained

Her disappearance from public view is getting weirder.

Continued here