hi all. its the day before xmas and its all quiet thru the blog and my house where the family is travelling on vacation to south america. even with many page views even the trolls have been very quiet on this blog last few months. be careful what you wish for, you might get it. you know youre lonely when you kinda wish even the troll(s) might write something on your blog, just for evidence that it “makes some noise”. 😐 😥 😛
lately have been musing on the information age. its aptly named. we are drowning in information. but alas, its only very indirectly related to happiness… have some happiness in eg reading the latest fantastic books on stuff that have researched myself over the years. but the information age is also a deluge and theres millions of blogs in the world and its hard to carve out a niche. sometimes attention and even more valuable, engagement is “spread very thin” across cyberspace. or, into the “very long tail” inevitably also evoking “winners vs losers” or “winner take all” scenarios. oh well, when in doubt just keep writing come up with even more engaging content! … 😮 😳 
have been blogging on misc topics less these days due to some of these factors, still collect great piles of links.
heres an example of a neat/ inspiring story just read of a blog that worked as far as audience engagement, the 64 yr old author travelled the US and got many friendly comments on her blog and even invitations, maybe making some friends. remarkable! lol so maybe should write a travel blog instead? sometimes its not easy being a geek… or a blogger, lol. (an oldtimer muppets ref! anyone recognize it?)
sometimes it seems like building up an engaged/ vocal audience in cyberspace aka “commentariat” is one of the hardest things to do… had no idea it would be like pushing boulders up a hill. ugh, argh.
anyway have a big backlog of links on the favorite topics of this blog and need to unload them at the end of the year, have a little extra time to blog, am going to try to crank a few out.
the big topic of “code” for this blog interpreted broadly is extremely lively as always, but a bit paradoxically my categorized link pile on the narrower subject is rather lean this year. all the action is in related areas such as AI, ML, robotics, and have massive piles of links on that.
it seems the world is speaking less of coding per se and all the big streaming news is in related, generally more applied areas.
trends this year: hacking competitions/ hackerthons/ hacker clubs were a big theme last few years, dont see a sign of them levelling off. [a1-5] the #metoo movement entered CS in some intersections.[a6]
diversity was a big theme: racial and gender, a lot getting triggered at Google, which had a bad year for lawsuits and headlines, but it seems like maybe finally thats trending downward.[a2] google made the news in a lot of other ways, the loss of the Oracle Java lawsuit was quite notable but havent seen much further news on that.[a4]
some leaders such as Jobs were seen to have “feet of clay” as the expression goes.[a3] others were real quality/ untainted heroes.
a theme this year was “ethics and/ or the darkside”.[a6] a lot of this has to do with the facebook/ zuckerberg congressional hearings earlier in the year setting a dark tone for the entire year. a few short years after the facebook IPO the bloom is off the rose and the honeymoon is over so to speak. for anybody who lived thru the dotcom age it wasnt too surprising. actually it was a familiar/ predictable story.
increasingly software engineering has to come to grips with the real hard problems of culture. technology has a kind of power, but it also has a kind of blind side to it. the really hard problems of the ages are timeless (eg those faced in journalism about “fake news” over the centuries!) and technology can shift the problem sometimes but other times its a pandoras box. have seen technology do incredible things but we live in the age of interesting times aka “be careful what you wish for you might get it”. zuckerberg liked to “move fast and break stuff” (actually honestly the ethos of most innovators/ entrepreneurs) but he never imagined the end result might be his own reputation. live and learn.
- 1. Cal Hacks Recruiting
- 2. Cal Hacks 4.0 | The Daily Californian
- 3. 5 amazing projects from Cal Hacks | The Daily Californian
- 4. Cal Hacks 4.0: The worlds largest collegiate hackathon held at UC Berkeley – Devpost
- 5. Deep Shift 21 Ways Software Will Transform Global Society/ World Economic Forum
- 6. #metootcs | Windows On Theory
- 7. Cambridge Computing The First 75 Years
- 8. Simple Rules, Emergent Beauty, and Life; Artificial and Otherwise
- 9. Take a look inside the Furby’s leaked source code
- 10. Can you win at TETRIS? – UBC Library Open Collections
- 11. Has a Piece of the World’s Oldest Computer Been Found?
- 12. Could AMOEBAS be the future of computing? | Daily Mail Online
- 1. Women Once Ruled Computers. When Did the Valley Become Brotopia? – Bloomberg
- 2. We Know Who He Is – Cate Huston – Medium
- 3. All STEM fields are not created equal: People and things interests explain gender disparities across STEM fields
- 4. Fired Google Engineer Loses Diversity Memo Challenge – Bloomberg
- 5. Google Fired and Disciplined Employees for Speaking Out About Diversity
- 6. Female software engineer at Google sues the tech giant | Daily Mail Online
- 7. Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts – Ars Technica
- 8. Google is being sued for discrimination against white and Asian men – Business Insider
- 9. Google accused in lawsuit of excluding white and Asian men to boost diversity
- 10. ‘Robotics Engineer Barbie’ Aims To Inspire Girls To Pursue STEM Careers | HuffPost
- 11. Ada Lovelace, a Mathematician Who Wrote the First Computer Program – The New York Times
- 12. World’s first ever computer manual which was written 175 years ago is sold for nearly £100,000 | Daily Mail Online
- 1. How the Father of Computer Science Decoded Nature’s Mysterious Patterns – The New York Times
- 2. The Yoda of Silicon Valley – The New York Times
- 3. Pioneers of Modern Computer Architecture Receive ACM A.M. Turing Award
- 4. Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes ‘Small Fry’ memoir – Business Insider
- 5. Steve Jobs looks like terrible human in daughter’s ‘Small Fry’ book – Business Insider
- 6. A Poor Imitation of Alan Turing | by Christian Caryl | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
- 7. Computer Scientist Constantinos Daskalakis Wins Nevanlinna Prize | Quanta Magazine
- 8. “Breakthrough” algorithm exponentially faster than any previous one | Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
- 1. After Patent Office Rejection, It is Time For Google To Abandon Its Attempt to Patent Use of Public Domain Algorithm | Electronic Frontier Foundation
- 2. Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain | Ars Technica
- 3. Google Accused of Trying to Patent Public Domain Technology
- 4. Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain : programming
- 5. Inside Google’s $131 Million Boulder Campus – Bloomberg
- 6. Google’s Fuchsia OS on the Pixelbook: It works! It actually works! | Ars Technica
- 7. Google loses Android battle and could owe Oracle billions of dollars
- 1. Why Rust is the future of robotics – pollenrobotics – Medium
- 2. 2018 Developer Skills Report by HackerRank
- 3. Top Java Developers Offer Advice to Students
- 4. Robotics Classes & STEM Programs For Kids To Learn About Robots Coding & Technology
- 5. How I went from newbie to Software Engineer in 9 months while working full time
- 6. What I’ve Learned from a year of coding – freeCodeCamp
- 7. What is front-line research in computer science and mathematics like? : compsci
- 1. Blame the Computer | Corey Pein
- 2. Tech’s Ethical ‘Dark Side’: Harvard, Stanford and Others Want to Address It – The New York Times
- 3. Remembering the ’70s activist group that tried to save us from the tech industry | The Outline
- 4. How Stanford Is Training Socially Minded Programmers – The Atlantic
- 5. Did a Computer Send Lion Air Flight 610 Into a Death Dive?
- 6. The Triple Jeopardy of Ke Xu, a Chinese Hedge Fund Quant – Bloomberg
