Monthly Archives: November 2019

Troubling trends in machine learning scholarship (2018)

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Academia. ML bullshit might be the bullshitiest, but from where I'm sitting, the goodheart-artifact behavior is the rule, not the exception.
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It’s not a zero-sum game for Apple TV+, Netflix, and Disney+

Source: Hacker News

Article note: No, it's worse. The more fragmented and incomplete each service becomes, the more piracy becomes an attractive option. If they spend their energy squabbling for exclusives, they all lose.
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do me a favor and spread this paper far and wide

Source: the ANOVA

Article note: Bahahaha. The value-add model being used to evaluate teacher performance from student scores correlates just as well with student _height_ as student test outcomes. That's a lovely way of demonstrating the model is bullshit because the premise is bullshit.

Teachers have about as much impact on student height as they do on their test scores.

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A brutally honest landing page

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Hah. They have a set of very similar "real" landing pages for their various pitches at different one-word paths, plus a spectacular parody-of-their-industry-and-selves fake landing page at the path "/anxiety." I respect that self-awareness. I have no need for SAAS collaborative project management tools, but it actually looks pretty nice.
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No more Google for console junkies

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I was setting up a slightly-obstinate machine (a Braswell Chromebook flashed with a UEFI Coreboot payload) over the weekend and was trying to search from it before I bothered to install X (...still haven't), and ran into this. It was quite annoying.
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The Big Push: IBM 360 Model 20 Rescue and Restoration

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I've been following this one, awesome to hear that they found so much of the right help to move and house the thing.
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SC’19

Even though I haven’t done any work in that area in years, I got pulled into the Supercomputing conference again this year.  Can’t complain, it’s always fun.  UK’s combined booth looked good this year

Far corner is a little updated TinyTitan style Raspberry Pi cluster with a interactive CFD demo running on it that the CCS folks have been playing with, that thing in the leading corner is a cute flip-dot “quantum computer” model we built as a front-end for a 16-bit instance of Hank’s parallel bit-pattern computing system that can do quantum algorithms efficiently on a conventional platform – set in the corner of the booth like

You don't need quantum physics to perform quantum compution. Change my mind.

He did surprisingly well with this approach.

The exhibit floor was even more dominated by cooling tech this year. Exciting finds are the coming of very open (Open Compute Project, Coreboot + Open Network Linux) white-box 100GBE switches at reasonable prices, Fujitsu’s A64fx ARM with SVE and obscene memory bandwidth parts actually landing in systems, and (just because it tickled me) pre-wired fully populated Clos topology 100G cable harnesses.  The other dominant species was AI woo; my body is ready for AI Winter 3.0.

Google photos album of my annotated show floor photos is here.

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Former Apple chip executives found company to take on Intel, AMD

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Interesting. My strong guess is high-end ARM (The Marvell - strictly acquired from Broadcom - ThunderX2 based demonstrator systems proved out this year, and Fujitsu's A64FX is yet more impressive), but I notice they're very carefully not precisely specifying that in any of their press materials. Could just be that they're still working out licensing details.
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‘7 pounds of flour in a 5 pound sack.’ Zone change denied for Maxwell apartment complex

Source: Kentucky.com -- Fayette County

Article note: Good. The area already has way too many gigantic, shoddy apartment complexes aimed at ripping off students.

A proposal to rezone an area on East Maxwell Street to make way for a 10-story apartment building geared toward University of Kentucky students was voted down Thursday by the … Click to Continue »

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Google Will Cancel Google Cloud Print in 2020

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The regularly scheduled "any google product that is more useful than intrusive will be canceled" news has struck. This time: cloud print service.
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