Thank you, Stack Overflow (& the other sister websites) for helping me many times in the past. But my experience in the past years has become worse and worse. Now-a-days, I have my stomach almost in knots when I post a question there. The attitude of some people there is quite… negative (to put it very politely).
Mentatul Monthly Focus
January 2020 Edition
– Big Data & Quantum Computing –
Machine Learning is powerful. But it’s still using good old transistors. And transistors might soon look like a horse & carriage compared to what quantum computers will be capable of (even though the two will no doubt have synergies fueling their co-existence for a while). So what will happen when we reach, and then dive deep into quantum supremacy and bring all our Big Data tech to that depth?
This article goes through:
1. Big Data & Machine Learning
2. How corporations profit from ML
3. How ML accelerates science
4. Basics of Quantum Computing
5. Quantum Computing today
6. Quantum supremacy
Mentatul Monthly Focus
August 2019 Edition
– Spamming privacy into numbness –
While surfing the web, did you perhaps, just by chance, come across popup messages and notifications? Doesn’t it seem like there’s more of those with every passing year? Have you been assaulted by updated “terms and conditions” statements from the plethora of services you use?
Notifications about cookies abound. The GDPR “spam” is wreaking havoc. At least in the EU, surfing is becoming increasingly annoying. The first access on almost any given site leads to at least two popups, and perhaps a third one about allowing the site to give notifications, or a fourth about social media interactions, or a fifth about sharing location… the list goes on and on.
This article focuses on the following 6 “main sources” of privacy-related notification spam:
1. The EULA (End User License Agreement)
2. Cookies
3. GDPR
4. Ad blockers
5. Social media-related notifications
6. Websites forcing users to install native apps
Introducing the latest and greatest in exo-planet hunting: TESS. This is a compilation of news about NASA’s new telescope.
In general, it’s good for a country to have large, powerful companies that employ a lot of people and pay them very well (more taxes). However, the resulting income inequality causes some serious trouble in communities hosting or close to high-pay hotspots.
One of the saddest examples is San Francisco, where property prices have skyrocketed during the past decade, mostly due to an influx of well-payed employees from corporations such as Google, Apple and Facebook as well as a host of tech startups and highly profitable medium-sized companies.
Time for a look into some amazing engineering. Sweden’s capital is experiencing increasing traffic difficulties due to both its growth and the growth of other cities in the country. This often generates traffic that exceeds the capacity of the current infrastructure.
Major European road E4 currently passes through Stockholm, where it mixes with the local traffic, leading to unpleasant experiences for everybody involved. But come 2026, vehicles traveling the North-South direction close to the capital will benefit from one of the superstructures of the 21st century.
Solar-power uptake has been doing very well recently due to falling costs in producing it. In any contest, there are events that can seal the victory. In the energy contest between fossil and renewable, I believe that Tesla has won a major battle. And it all happens in the country that is the world’s top exporter of the dirtiest fossil fuel (Australia, coal).
Minecraft is innocent enough, right? Many tales of wicked deeds sometimes have an unlikely, harmless beginning. Here is one such tale.
Even though it’s about something that happened way back in 2016 (a cyberattack on the DNS network that crippled the Internet for a majority of users in North America), this well-written cyberwar article is totally worth sharing in light of recent privacy and security scandals.
Unsurprisingly, we still have a lot to learn from ancient cultures, even when it comes to technology. Sure, it can be argued that the Romans half-invented this super-strong type of cement, half-stumbled upon it by chance. From what we know, they were far behind us when it comes to understanding complex chemical reactions, but as the saying goes, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”.
Diversity is beautiful. It’s the reason why our planet is so different than everything else we’ve encountered so far. Humans have added to the diversity through art and technology. But what if there is a boundary after which adding more diversity becomes ugly?
Do I blame the engineers that build hyper-cars? Of course not. Besides being a former Formula 1 fan, I know that these people are only doing their job. I do blame, however, a society that doesn’t encourage these bright minds to work on fixing bigger, more meaningful problems.
