Interesting Links: April 12, 2019
Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.
Straight from my RSS feed:
Ten posts and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- Is Superintelligence Impossible? - In this edge.org video, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, and John Brockman discuss the question of whether a truly autonomous artificial intelligence agent can eventually be created. Brockman moderates the conversation, and the two panelists agree that "superintelligence" can exist, in principle. In the practical realm, Chalmers is optimistic about the long-term (next century or two) possibilities. Dennet is less so, emphasizing the evolutionary importance of "use it or lose it" and a fundamental desire for honesty as limiting forces between what can be and what will be.
- T-Mobile relaunches Layer3 TV service as TVision Home - According to the article, the service launches on April 14 with $90 per month pricing for a limited time in 8 cities, including Philadelphia, Washington DC, and New York City. Longer term pricing is expected at $100, which is still lower than the average cable price of $107, but the price does not include taxes and fees, and additional TVs will cost another $10 per month.
- Patch blues-day: Microsoft yanks code after some PCs are rendered super secure (and unbootable) following update - Some users of Avast and Sophos Endpoint are locked out of their Windows systems after upgrading. Sophos recommends booting to safe mode and disabling sophos while awaiting a fix. Microsoft has disabled updates to (known) potentially vulnerable machines.
- STEEM Interested how developers learn and level up and which tools they are using? Check out the Developers Survey Results 2019. - @keysa comments on some of the results from the 9th yearly Stack Overflow Developers Survey, which received responses from 90,000 subjects. The most popular technology was javascript, but python is gaining ground. The participants were split about 50/50 as to the usefulness of blockchain. Click through for more interesting discussion.
- How risk-taking changes a teenager's brain - In this TED talk, Harvard Freshman Kashfia Rahman, winner of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, discusses her high school research into brain changes that result from teen habituation to risky behavior.
- Mysterious hackers hid their swiss army spyware for 5 years - The software has over 80 components, stayed hidden for over 5 years, and is thought to be sourced from a previously unknown state sponsored hacking group. More support for my own contention that all enterprises of substantial size should start from the assumption that they have already been compromised.
- Pennsylvania’s State-Backed VC Firm Is Tokenizing an Investment Fund - Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania is looking to raise $35 million through tokenization of it's GO Philly global opportunity fund. The token will be available to accredited investors with a minimum buy-in of $250,000. The token will be provided by California's Seucritize.
- Blockchain Was the First, but Will Not Be the Last - Blockchain was the first Zero-Trust Decentralization (ZTD), but others are coming. Early examples include Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) for technologies like IOTA and ByteBall as well as client-side protocols like Zold
- Sharing Economy Is Opposite of Servant Economy - Responding to an article in The Atlantic, this author argues that, by connecting buyers and sellers directly, the sharing economy reduces transaction costs and risk, and that it's no closer to servitude than traditional forms of employment.
- When Gut Bacteria Betray Their Hosts - By analyzing 62 samples of a 1980s era disease outbreak which took root from a normally harmless bacteria, scientists observed that the E. faecalis bacteria contained diverse mutations in some of the same portions of their genes, converging repeatedly on the same strategy. This may give insight into other bacteria that can also mutate from harmless to noxious.
Note: Sharing a link does not imply endorsement or agreement.
Thanks to SteemRSS from @philipkoon, @doriitamar, and @torrey.blog for the Steem RSS feeds!
Please feel welcome to discuss any of those links in the comments.