Thanks to the Nokia 6, I am now in possession of a Google Assistant phone. This gave me the perfect foil against the upcoming Cortana and Siri speakers: if you have an assistant with a screen, how different are the answers to one without, even though it’s the “same” assistant? I expected that the audio…
When running TensorFlow using the official binaries, something that will happen more often now that macOS builds no longer support GPU off the bat, is the recurring and annoying warning that it could be running faster if it were only compiled with some more CPU flags. This seems ominous — keeping track of all the…
Microsoft invests in, gives free IP access for rural white-space networks [Ars Technica]
The Nokia 6: Amazon Edition is here, right in time for Prime Day. Unfortunately, for me, the Prime Day deals were less-than-impressive, so I entertained myself instead greatly with unboxing, looking at, and gathering first impressions of the Nokia 6 handset. Not just any Nokia 6, but the Nokia 6 with Amazon Ads Edition. I’ll…
Previously, I’ve covered both DNNs and voice assistants. Today, I look at a different use case for DNNs: generating source code from images. A tantalising proposition for sure, but it is ever so slightly hamstrung by the fact that DNNs do not understand what they are doing.
IBM’s Watson Speech-to-Text comes with a built-in profanity filter. Unfortunately, Dick Van Dyke, a name that is the bane of profanity filters everywhere, apparently, has ended up on the wrong side of the censoring wall once more.
Davey Alba at Wired muses that we are headed towards a “splinternet”: an internet that is different depending on the country of origin. There are two unfortunate realities to this. First, this is already true, in his own acknowledgement. Second, it is inevitable. What’s worrying isn’t that there are different internets; it’s that there’s a max-censored one.
A recent paper from Microsoft Research, Azure and John Hopkins University discusses the issues of troubles of grey failures. This is a type of cloud failure under some discussion, that I treat as follows: A grey failure is a problem that is affecting one or more applications deployed on a platform, that is detectable by those…
Fox and AMC changing up traditional TV formats [TechHive]
CoreOS recently commissioned a study to show the usage of containers in the clouds where they discuss how many enterprises are using Kubernetes, and how this is spearheading a move to hybrid clouds. Interesting, I thought, and take a look.