Progress and the Randomized Time Machine

Progress and the Randomized Time Machine

Your only choice is whether you choose to be thrust forward in time, spending your new life in some random future in some random place, or thrust into the past, in some random time and random place. But since this is random placement, there is still a higher chance you’d get a bearable life in the future, even if you were at the bottom of that society, than you’d randomly for sure get in the past. There are romantic notions of the past that are not based on evidence; some of these lovely visions of the past are not untrue; it’s just that they are select, rare, privileged slivers that disregard the actual state of most humans for most times in most places, which any serious inquiry into global history will reveal.

Source: kk.org

Smarking (YC W15) is hiring a back-end engineer

Smarking (YC W15) is hiring a back-end engineer

Smarking is a tech startup leveraging data analytics and machine learning to help parking managers solve parking problems in major urban areas. Founded by MIT PhDs and backed by Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures, we’ve brought real-time data dashboards, predictive analytics, and dynamic pricing to thousands of parking locations for more than 50 clients including cities (Miami, Houston, etc.), airports (Boston, Edmonton, etc.), universities (MIT, Washington University, etc.), real-estate owners, and parking operators. We expect our backend engineers to:Work extensively on our data infrastructure, including data streaming, third-party data integration, and internal tooling for data warehouses.Join our efforts to scale databases and services for fast-growing data volumes and requests.Help

Our backend stack includes Python, Postgres, Flask, Docker, Redis, ElasticSearch, Airflow, Terraform, and AWS services such as EC2, S3, RDS, and ECS.

Source: jobs.lever.co

Black, Hot ‘Superionic’ Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water

Black, Hot ‘Superionic’ Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water

Physicists have been after superionic ice for years — ever since a primitive computer simulation led by Pierfranco Demontis in 1988 predicted water would take on this strange, almost metal-like form if you pushed it beyond the map of known ice phases. Inside Uranus and Neptune, then, fluid layers might stop about 8,000 kilometers down into the planet, where an enormous mantle of sluggish, superionic ice like Millot’s team produced begins. Other planets and moons in the solar system likely don’t host the right interior sweet spots of temperature and pressure to allow for superionic ice.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org

Two amateur sleuths discover ancient rock art in the plains of India

Two amateur sleuths discover ancient rock art in the plains of India

Most of the animals, including elephants, are life-size and one site with multiple carvings is the largest in South Asia, Dr. Garge said. Meenakshi Dubey-Pathak, a freelance researcher and artist who has published extensively on Indian rock art said the carvings share imagery with other Indian rock art and rock art worldwide. To find the carvings, a tourist needs to ask local town and village residents; Dr. Garge, Mr. Risbud and Mr. Marathe would like to keep it that way.

Source: www.nytimes.com

PyTorch Internals

PyTorch Internals

We can think of a tensor as consisting of some data, and then some metadata describing the size of the tensor, the type of the elements in contains (dtype), what device the tensor lives on (CPU memory? First, there is the trinity three parameters which uniquely determine what a tensor is:

If you want to add an extension to PyTorch tensors (by the way, if that’s what you want to do, please talk to us! There’s one last way you can make an “extension” to Tensor functionality, and that’s write a wrapper class around PyTorch tensors that implements your object type.

Source: blog.ezyang.com

Tracking logo found in Navy email to Navy Times amid leak investigation

Tracking logo found in Navy email to Navy Times amid leak investigation

The Navy’s top spokesman, Capt. Greg Hicks, declined to comment on the email device targeting Navy Times but acknowledged that the Navy is conducting “an ongoing investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of information covered by a judge’s protective order.” Tim Parlatore, attorney for Gallagher, whose case is covered by the gag order imposed by Navy Judge Capt. Aaron Rugh, told Military Times he has filed a motion calling for, among other things, the case to be dismissed and a full investigation into the emails by neutral parties. On May 10, Air Force Lt. Col. Nicholas McCue, an attorney for Portier, received an email on his military computer system from Czaplak, also containing the unusual logo beneath the prosecutor’s signature.

Source: www.militarytimes.com

Salesforce enables ‘modify all’ in user profiles

Salesforce enables ‘modify all’ in user profiles

This was admitted by a Salesforce representative

Edit 1: THIS IS NOT A JOKE – CHECK COMMENTS

This is a call to all to check PERMISSION SETS and PROFILES on ALL of their orgs. org:

It has been confirmed on mutliple orgs, spanning multiple shards (eu6, eu8, NA41, NA49 at least) that Salesforce has bugged out this morning and has given MODIFY ALL (so all permisisons) to literally EVERY SINGLE PROFILE in some orgs. CHECK ALL ORGS.

Source: www.reddit.com

Microbots Are on Their Way

Microbots Are on Their Way

L ike Frankenstein, Marc Miskin’s robots initially lie motionless. Thousands fit side-by-side on a single silicon wafer similar to those used for computer chips, and, like Frankenstein coming to life, they pull themselves free and start crawling. “We can take your favorite piece of silicon electronics, put legs on it and then build a million of them,” said Dr. Miskin, a professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard to delete

Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard to delete

Google tracks a lot of what you buy, even if you purchased it elsewhere, like in a store or from Amazon. I made these purchases using online services or apps such as Amazon, DoorDash or Seamless, or in stores such as Macy’s, but never directly through Google. Google even knows about things I long forgot I’d purchased, like dress shoes I bought inside a Macy’s store on Sept. 14, 2015.

Source: www.cnbc.com