Interesting Links: May 8, 2019
Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.
Straight from my RSS feed:
Ten links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- Windows 10 will soon ship with a full, open source, GPLed Linux kernel - File system intensive activities will be up to 20 times faster, it will support native linux drivers as well as docker, and it will be maintained through Windows Update.
- A Facebook-led organization is about to change the $469 billion semiconductor industry forever - The Facebook founded Open Compute Project now has an arm that wants to revamp the chip industry by designing so-called "chiplets", subcomponents of the chip that can be purchased from multiple vendors for mix and match assembly into chips. The project is known as the Open Domain Specific Architecture (ODSA).
- We got an inside look at pharma giant Merck's strategy to upend the $20 billion HIV drug market using tech borrowed from birth control - HIV treatment today is better than it has ever been, with treatment and prevention offerings available as daily pills. However, 37 million people are infected with the disease, and 5,000 new infections occur daily. When patients forget to take their pills, it reduces the treatment's effectiveness and can engender resistance to the medications. In order to overcome those shortcomings, Merck is developing MK-8591, from a decade old technology that was invented by Japanese researcher, Hiroshi Ohrui. The new medicine is intended to be implanted in the human body and eliminate the need for daily pills.
- SYMHC Classics: The Bawdy House Riots of 1668 - The SYMHC podcast describes the 1668 riots by many of London's apprentices. Brothel (Bawdy House) riots were apparently somewhat common throughout early 1600s England, often happened on "Strothe Tuesday" (Fat Tuesday), and typically included the actual physical dismantling of the buildings. Because of the contrast between the popularity of brothels among young men on one hand, and the religious disfavor of brothels on the other, the brothel's customers and rioters were often one and the same people, and the riots were usually not considered to be serious crimes. The 1668 riots, however, were larger than usual, and occurred after Easter instead of happening on Fat Tuesday. Also known as the messenger riots, initially there were more than 500 participants, and they expanded over a period of days to more than 1,000. King Charles II engaged the militia to suppress the rioting, and after some arrests, the rioters also turned their attention to jail houses. Some satirical articles remain from the time period after the riots, revealing some community opinions on a variety of topics. The political and religious undertones revealed in the satire may help explain the harsh punishment received by four riot participants who were hanged, drawn, and quartered as punishment. h/t Stuff You Missed in History Class
- New Jersey may ban all supermarket bags - The bill would make New Jersey the first state in the country to ban all single-use grocery bags. The ban is supported by trade group, The New Jersey Food Council.
- Microsoft announces Windows Terminal and WSL 2, coming in June - Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) is the above-mentioned GPL Linux kernel for windows. Windows Terminal, which is already available in preview, is a command line window that features GPU accelerated text rendering, tabs, tear-away windows, and full Unicode support. h/t OS news
- Blue Origin is a step closer to taking space tourists after it landed its rocket again - The rocket will take tourists to about 62 miles in height, where they can experience a few minutes of weightlessness before returning to earth. The firm hopes to start carrying tourists by the end of 2019, and seats are rumored to cost about $200,000. See here for more, from my May 3rd "Interesting Links" post.
- STEEM What is MIRA? - @andrarchy interviews @vandeberg about MIRA, a database scaling solution that makes use of ROCKSDB to reduce Steem node operational costs by enabling node owners to move much of the data from memory to disk, including "old school spinning drives." (5% of this post's payout will go to @vandeberg.)
- STEEM Are We Humans Even Smart Enough To Understand The Nature of Reality? - Prompted by a youtube interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson , @sauravrungta wonders if the human mind is even capable of understanding the universe at its most fundamental. He points out that even a tiny difference in DNA between a human and a chimp makes a huge cognitive difference, so the difference between a human and an alien species could be extraordinary. Expanding on that, I'd suggest that the people who get closest to understanding the infinite are often the ones who wind up having cognitive difficulties in other areas of life (i.e. Godel, Nash, Cantor, possibly even Newton, etc...), and the universe may be impossible to completely understand, even in principle (i.e. infinite in all directions, Godel's theorems). (@sauravrungta will receive 5% of this post's rewards.)
- Google Translate Does Not Understand the Content of the Texts - Herbert Bruderer shows a series of translation results from Google Translate and Amazon's DeepL, and concludes that the translation programs vary between effective and useless. He points out that somewhat similar results were achievable as early as 1975, and the machine learning process is far more difficult for machines than for humans. As he notes, "A child does not need millions of images to recognize a cat. A human does not need millions of examples to translate a text correctly. This is one of the weaknesses of this approach, which is reminiscent of brute force.".
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