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Blockchain newsletter

My curated recommended articles on blockchain.

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below, updated regularly.

Ethics newsletter

My curated recommended articles on ethics and technology.

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below, updated regularly .

OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless

from MIT Technology Review

The AI is the largest language model ever created and can generate amazing human-like text on demand but won't bring us closer to true intelligence. “Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week.

Andrew Yang is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data

from The Verge

Andrew Yang wants people to get paid for the data they create on big tech platforms like Facebook and Google, and with a new project launching on Monday, he believes he can make it happen.

What Technology Has Accidentally Killed the Most People?

from Gizmodo

Show me a museum of important historical inventors and I will show you a gallery of deluded mass murderers. I’m not talking about machine gun manufacturers or nuclear scientists—those people, at least, have some sense of what they’re up to.

Is your start-up sexist?

from

What springs to mind when you think “Berlin start-up”? Probably not the clichéd ‘old boy’s club’ culture of 1960s ad agencies.

If a novel was good, would you care if it was created by artificial intelligence?

from The Guardian

Roland Barthes was speaking metaphorically when he suggested in 1967 that “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author”.

How hard will the robots make us work?

from The Verge

On conference stages and at campaign rallies, tech executives and politicians warn of a looming automation crisis — one where workers are gradually, then all at once, replaced by intelligent machines. But their warnings mask the fact that an automation crisis has already arrived.

Emotion AI researchers say overblown claims give their work a bad name

from MIT Technology Review

Perhaps you’ve heard of AI conducting interviews. Or maybe you’ve been interviewed by one yourself. Companies like HireVue claim their software can analyze video interviews to figure out a candidate’s “employability score.

Ethical Maturity in User Research

from

Summary: How ethically mature are your user-research practices? Assess your current state of ethical maturity by answering these simple questions. Many organizations have flourishing design teams who conduct user research on a regular basis.

What Happens After Prisoners Learn to Code?

from The Atlantic

Slack, one of Silicon Valley’s more diverse companies, has hired three formerly incarcerated coders. Jesse Aguirre’s workday at Slack starts with a standard engineering meeting—programmers call them “standups”—where he and his co-workers plan the day’s agenda.

Understanding the Hidden Bias in Emotion-Reading AIs

from

Facial recognition technology has progressed to point where it now interprets emotions in facial expressions. This type of analysis is increasingly used in daily life. For example, companies can use facial recognition software to help with hiring decisions.

The AI community needs to take responsibility for its technology and its actions

from MIT Technology Review

On Monday, at the opening of one of the world’s largest gatherings of AI researchers, Celeste Kidd addressed thousands of attendees in a room nearly twice the size of a football field. She was not pulling her punches.

Yay! Tech has got its sexism back

from ZDNet

It seems like only yesterday. There we were, waddling about the halls of CES and other fine tech conferences. And there they were, women in bikinis enticing us to buy, sometimes by dancing.

A Nude ‘Playboy’ Photo Has Been a Mainstay in Testing Tech for Decades

from

1972, a Swedish woman named Lena Söderberg accepted a modeling job from the photographer Dwight Hooker. Söderberg was 21, new to the United States, and broke. The name of Hooker’s employer, Playboy, didn’t mean much to her; the contract definitely did.

Opinion: AI For Good Is Often Bad

from WIRED

After speaking at an MIT conference on emerging AI technology earlier this year, I entered a lobby full of industry vendors and noticed an open doorway leading to tall grass and shrubbery recreating a slice of the African plains.

On Weaponised Design

from

“When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifications. With everyday objects, the result is frustration.

Dark Patterns: When Companies Use Design to Manipulate You

from How-To Geek

Ever feel like you’re being prompted into going along with something you don’t want because better options aren’t clearly being presented? You probably just found a dark pattern. “Dark patterns” are designs that deliberately trick you into doing what a company wants.

Dark Patterns and the Ethics of Design

from Medium

Dark design patterns use all of the powers of visual design with the flair of a magician’s misdirection, and the language of a shady sideshow barker (dare you to say ‘shady sideshow barker’ eight times in a row).

WeWork’s Implosion Shows How SoftBank Is Breaking the World

from VICE

Why should we believe any of the people responsible for the ongoing tech bubble when they claim what they’re doing has great benefit for humanity? Listening to them, you might think that rising inequality, rampant tax evasion, and ecological devastation are simply capitalism run amok.

The scientists who make apps addictive

from The Economist 1843

In 1930, a psychologist at Harvard University called B.F. Skinner made a box and placed a hungry rat inside it. The box had a lever on one side. As the rat moved about it would accidentally knock the lever and, when it did so, a food pellet would drop into the box.

Give robots 'personhood' status, EU committee argues

from The Guardian

The European parliament has urged the drafting of a set of regulations to govern the use and creation of robots and artificial intelligence, including a form of “electronic personhood” to ensure rights and responsibilities for the most capable AI.

Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game

from MIT Technology Review

As a child, you develop a sense of what “fairness” means. It’s a concept that you learn early on as you come to terms with the world around you. Something either feels fair or it doesn’t. But increasingly, algorithms have begun to arbitrate fairness for us.

The Creators Of Pokémon Go Mapped The World. Now They're Mapping You

from Kotaku

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the latest game from the company behind Pokémon Go, lets players harness the magic of their childhood to combat monsters and collect shimmering digital artifacts across their local neighborhoods.

Google contractors reportedly targeted homeless people for Pixel 4 facial recognition

from The Verge

In July, Google admitted it has employees pounding the pavement in a variety of US cities, looking for people willing to sell their facial data for a $5 gift certificate to help improve the Pixel 4’s face unlock system.

Programmer who took down open source pieces over Chef ICE contract responds

from TechCrunch

On Friday afternoon Chef CEO Barry Crist and CTO Corey Scobie sat down with TechCrunch to defend their contract with ICE after a firestorm on social media called for them to cut ties with the controversial agency.

Richard Stallman’s Exit Heralds a New Era in Tech

from WIRED

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?

ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

from

Computing professionals' actions change the world. To act responsibly, they should reflect upon the wider impacts of their work, consistently supporting the public good. The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct ("the Code") expresses the conscience of the profession.

Code of Ethics

from

The short version of the code summarizes aspirations at a high level of the abstraction; the clauses that are included in the full version give examples and details of how these aspirations change the way we act as software engineering professionals.

A Hippocratic Oath for AI developers? It may only be a matter of time

from

Developments in artificial intelligence and robotics are picking up pace.

The Technologist’s Hippocratic Oath

from

Technologists today wield a powerful tool. We are designing, prioritizing, and putting things out into the world, affecting people we have never met. We are on their wrists, in their laptops, in their pockets, and thus, in their heads.

Maths and tech specialists need Hippocratic oath, says academic

from The Guardian

Mathematicians, computer engineers and scientists in related fields should take a Hippocratic oath to protect the public from powerful new technologies under development in laboratories and tech firms, a leading researcher has said.

Richard Stallman and the Fall of the Clueless Nerd

from WIRED

If I find another copy of the Blue Cover version of Hackers could I get you to autograph it again? The one I currently have was signed by you and Richard Stallman at LinuxWorld in 1999, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to burn or shred it.

The race to create a perfect lie detector – and the dangers of succeeding

from The Guardian

AI and brain-scanning technology could soon make it possible to reliably detect when people are lying. But do we really want to know? By We learn to lie as children, between the ages of two and five. By adulthood, we are prolific.

IBM accused of targeting older workers as 'up to 100,000' laid off

from ZDNet

The accusations figure in court documents in an age-discrimination case that IBM is facing, brought by Jonathan Langley, a former world program director and sales lead for IBM Bluemix, who filed a lawsuit last year after being laid off in 2017 when he was aged 59 years.

Why mindfulness and therapy puppies ignore what's really wrong with working life

from WIRED UK

Tech companies are known for their generous employee perks: free snacks, nap pods, the now-obligatory office ping-pong table.

Silicon Valley’s Right Wing Is Angry And Punching Back

from BuzzFeed News

How a small group of right-wing tech employees built a back channel straight to the nation’s capital. On Jan. 16, Republican lawmakers turned on one of the world’s biggest tech companies.

Atlassian ditches ‘brilliant jerks’ in performance review overhaul

from news.com.au

The $47 billion Australian software company, which was founded in Sydney in 2002 and floated on the US stock market in 2015, says two-thirds of every performance review will now have nothing to do with job skills.

'We all suffer': why San Francisco techies hate the city they transformed

from The Guardian

It was a beautiful winter day in San Francisco, and Zoe was grooving to the soundtrack of the roller-skating musical Xanadu as she rode an e-scooter to work.

Silicon Valley doesn't care about poor people: Top AI models kinda suck at ID'ing household stuff in hard-up nations

from The Register

Off-the-shelf object-recognition systems struggle, relatively speaking, to identify common items in hard-up homes in countries across Africa, Asia, and South America. The same software performs better at identifying stuff in richer households in Europe and North America.

We All Work for Facebook

from Longreads

When I was a kid, in the pre-internet days of the 1980s, my screen time was all about Nickelodeon. My favorite show was “You Can’t Do That on Television.” It was a kind of sketch show; the most common punchline was a bucket of green slime being dropped on characters’ heads.

Who’s Really Buying Property in San Francisco?

from The Atlantic

Updated on April 19 at 1:28 p.m. ET. There has never been a town like the one San Francisco is becoming, a place where a single industry composed almost entirely of rich people thoroughly dominates the local economy.

Is Software Eating the World?

from

As creators of technology, we need to ask whether our progress is antagonistic to the place that we call home.

The grim reality of life under Gangs Matrix, London's controversial predictive policing tool

from WIRED UK

The first time Bill was stopped and searched by police, he was standing outside a friend’s house in south London. “The police pulled up on us, three cars,” he says. “I asked them why they were searching us, and one said, ‘Because I want to’.” Bill was 11. That was nearly a decade ago.

Coders’ Primal Urge to Kill Inefficiency—Everywhere

from WIRED

Shelley Chang was working as a business analyst for a computer company in 2010 when she met Jason Ho through some mutual friends. Ho was tall and slender with a sly smile, and they hit it off right away. A computer programmer, Ho ran his own company from San Francisco. He also loved to travel.

Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor

from The Verge

“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup.

What Google knows about you — and what you can do about it

from Axios

For all the many controversies around Facebook's mishandling of personal data, Google actually knows way more about most of us. The bottom line: Just how much Google knows depends to some degree on your privacy settings — and to a larger degree on which devices, products and services you use.

What If Mark Zuckerberg Had Stayed in School?

from Medium

This month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced yet another new direction for his famously bad-acting company. Now, he says, the platform once responsible for the Cambridge Analytica…

The Internet Is Not Your Friend: MySpace and the Loss of Memories

from Rolling Stone

On Monday, reports surfaced indicating what many MySpace users had long suspected: that MySpace had deleted a great deal of the content uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015.

Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders

from

ach year, 600 coders gather to talk shop at a conference in New York called PyGotham. The organizers know how male and white the tech industry is, so they make a special effort to recruit a diverse speaker lineup.

We Need to Save Ignorance From AI

from Pocket

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared Communist-era secret police service. To date, it is estimated that only 10 percent have taken the opportunity.

Google employees can’t just walk away from ethical tradeoffs like Dragonfly

from TechCrunch

Let me blunt up front: I think Google should launch a censored search engine in China (albeit with careful organizational boundaries).

The deadly truth about a world built for men – from stab vests to car crashes

from The Guardian

When broadcaster Sandi Toksvig was studying anthropology at university, one of her female professors held up a photograph of an antler bone with 28 markings on it. “This,” said the professor, “is alleged to be man’s first attempt at a calendar.

AI Safety Needs Social Scientists

from

We've written a paper arguing that long-term AI safety research needs social scientists to ensure AI alignment algorithms succeed when actual humans are involved.

Robot Love: Why romance with machines is a foregone conclusion

from ZDNet

One of the big robotics storylines of 2018, at least in the mainstream press, was the arrival of multiple sex robots on the market.

Margaret Atwood on How She Came to Write The Handmaid’s Tale

from Literary Hub

Some books haunt the reader. Others haunt the writer. The Handmaid’s Tale has done both. The Handmaid’s Tale has not been out of print since it was first published, back in 1985. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and has appeared in a bewildering number of translations and editions.

“What Have We Done?”: Silicon Valley Engineers Fear They've Created a Monster

from Vanity Fair

In the heart of San Francisco, the gig economy reigns supreme. Walk into a grocery store, and a large number of shoppers you see are independent contractors for grocery-delivery start-up Instacart.

The Ethics Of Persuasion

from Smashing Magazine

Nowadays, users are increasingly cautious of online and email scams, phishing attacks, and data breaches. This article provides food for thought for designers and developers to avoid crossing the ethical line to the dark side of persuasion. (This article is kindly sponsored by Adobe.

Language newsletter

My curated recommended articles on linguistics, natural language processing and interactive fiction.

Newsletter coming soon, for now enjoy the posts below, updated regularly .

OpenAI’s new language generator GPT-3 is shockingly good—and completely mindless

from MIT Technology Review

I used an algorithm to help me write a story. Here’s what I learned.

from MIT Technology Review

An insight into the way machines make meaning. A few years ago I used an algorithm to help me write a science fiction story.

Introduction to UX writing

from

In a nutshell, UX writing is any text that users encounter while interacting with software. Be it button names, menu items, or product categories, you’re dealing with UX copy, often referred to as microcopy.

OpenAI’s Text Generator Is Going Commercial

from WIRED

Last spring, artificial intelligence research institute OpenAI said it had made software so good at generating text—including fake news articles—that it was too dangerous to release.

The many languages missing from the internet

from BBC

Imagine your favourite social media platform does not let you post in English. Now think of a keyboard that won’t allow you to type in your own words. You would have two options: either switch to another language or remain digitally silent.

How to Edit Your Own Writing

from The New York Times

Writing is hard, but don’t overlook the difficulty — and the importance — of editing your own work before letting others see it. Here’s how. The secret to good writing is good editing.

How to Edit Your Own Writing

from The New York Times

Writing is hard, but don’t overlook the difficulty — and the importance — of editing your own work before letting others see it. Here’s how. The secret to good writing is good editing.

If a novel was good, would you care if it was created by artificial intelligence?

from The Guardian

Roland Barthes was speaking metaphorically when he suggested in 1967 that “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author”.

Roberta Williams Is the World’s First Graphic Computer Game Designer—But She’s Famous for All the Wrong Reasons

from

YOU ARE IN THE FRONT YARD OF A LARGE ABANDONED VICTORIAN HOUSE. STONE STEPS LEAD UP TO A WIDE PORCH. If you’re a computer programmer or digital designer over the age of 40, this is probably how the future began for you.

Garbage Language

from Vulture

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. I worked at various start-ups for eight years beginning in 2010, when I was in my early 20s. Then I quit and went freelance for a while.

A Code-Obsessed Novelist Builds a Writing Bot. The Plot Thickens

from WIRED

In the first episode of the Netflix adaptation of Vikram Chandra’s best-selling novel, Sacred Games, the criminal kingpin Ganesh Gaitonde makes a phone call to a detective, Sartaj Singh.

The advantages of Document Markup Languages vs WYSIWYG editors

from Medium

Did you ever wonder what’s the best tool to write an article, user manual, book, or any other kind of text document? There are many options to choose from. Most people use a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor (also called a text processor), such as Google Docs, LibreOffice or Word.

5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World

from Pocket

Think about this sentence. It’s pretty simple—English speakers would know precisely what it means.

What I learned from studying billions of words of online fan fiction

from MIT Technology Review

When I was 10, I was a lonely, geeky girl, a first--generation Latina growing up in a small town in Indiana. I happened across J.R.R.

Write Better Stories with this Python Tool

from Towards Data Science

If you write articles, blog posts or reports to your boss a lot, then you want to make sure people are understanding what you say. In this article, I’ll show how to use a Python library called textstat to determine readability, complexity, grade level and more about your text.

The Commas That Cost Companies Millions

from Pocket

How much can a misplaced comma cost you? If you’re texting a loved one or dashing off an email to a colleague, the cost of misplacing a piece of punctuation will be – at worst – a red face and a minor mix-up.

It's All Greek to You and Me, So What Is It to the Greeks?

from Atlas Obscura

It’s a curious thing when there is an idiom—structured roughly the same way and meaning essentially the same thing—that exists in a large number of languages. It’s even more curious when that idiom, having emerged in dozens of different languages, is actually … about language.

How Non-English Speakers Learn This Crazy Grammar Rule You Know But Never Heard Of

from Pocket

English grammar, beloved by sticklers, is also feared by non-native speakers. Many of its idiosyncrasies can turn into traps even for the most confident users.

The race to create a perfect lie detector – and the dangers of succeeding

from The Guardian

Having a Laugh: Humor and Chatbot User Experience

from UX Planet

Chatbots and conversational computing present many contextual user experience challenges: humor, for example. And that’s before even considering if the content was funny to begin with. Luckily, we still have humans with interests in dramatic arts still around. For now.

Computer Algorithm Generates Poetry As Good As Shakespeare's - PSFK

from

MIT student uses machine-learning to teach a machine how to compose sonnets. Machine learning was recently named as the force behind a potential cure for HIV, but now it’s a process that is also capable of more artistic endeavours. MIT PhD student J.

CS224n: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning

from

Suggested Readings: Joakim Nivre. 2004. Incrementality in Deterministic Dependency Parsing. Workshop on Incremental Parsing. Danqi Chen and Christopher D. Manning. 2014. A Fast and Accurate Dependency Parser using Neural Networks. EMNLP 2014. Sandra Kübler, Ryan McDonald, Joakim Nivre. 2009.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks

from

There’s something magical about Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). I still remember when I trained my first recurrent network for Image Captioning.

Understanding LSTM Networks

from

Humans don’t start their thinking from scratch every second. As you read this essay, you understand each word based on your understanding of previous words. You don’t throw everything away and start thinking from scratch again. Your thoughts have persistence.

Translation with a Sequence to Sequence Network and Attention — PyTorch Tutorials 0.4.0 documentation

from

In this project we will be teaching a neural network to translate from French to English. This is made possible by the simple but powerful idea of the sequence to sequence network, in which two recurrent neural networks work together to transform one sequence to another.

A ten-minute introduction to sequence-to-sequence learning in Keras

from

I see this question a lot -- how to implement RNN sequence-to-sequence learning in Keras? Here is a short introduction. Note that this post assumes that you already have some experience with recurrent networks and Keras.

[1711.09534] Neural Text Generation

from arXiv

Full-text links: Download: (license) Bookmark (what is this?) Title: Neural Text Generation: A Practical Guide Authors: Ziang Xie Abstract: Deep learning methods have recently achieved great empirical success on machine translation, dialogue response generation, summarization,

The joy of text – the fall and rise of interactive fiction

from The Guardian

The annual Interactive Fiction Competition is an institution that has endured for almost 20 years, with the goal of discovering each year’s best and brightest works in the world of text-based gaming.

Ampersand Usage — “&” or “And”?

from

Writers in business contexts often appear clueless when using ampersands, and they frequently get ampersand usage wrong. I see it every day in my commercial copy editing work. But & and and have distinct functions, meanings, and uses.

Twine, the Video-Game Technology for All

from The New York Times

Perhaps the most surprising thing about “GamerGate,” the culture war that continues to rage within the world of video games, is the game that touched it off.

The most important tech boom designers are ignoring

from Fast Company

Voice assistants are a part of everyday life, and they’re here to stay. Juniper Research recently released a report predicting that by 2023 there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use, tripling the estimated 2.5 billion voice assistants in use at the end of 2018.

Smart speakers: Why your voice is a major battle in music

from BBC

Smart speakers, those voice-activated devices that allow you to check the weather, play podcasts or order food delivery, are becoming more and more common in our homes.

Notes on Writing Weird Fiction By H. P. Lovecraft

from

My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.

from Inc. Magazine

All you need to know about hyphenation in CSS

from

Earlier this month I was invited to give an evening lecture at the Typography Society of Austria (tga) in Vienna.

from

How to Build a Smart Chatbot Assistant with ChatEngine and IBM Watson Assistant

from Hacker Noon

Chatbots, whether they be customer service agents or shopping assistants in an online store, have become commonplace amongst the way we interact with businesses.

Sharing our Common Voices – Mozilla releases the largest to-date public domain transcribed voice dataset

from Mozilla

Mozilla crowdsources the largest dataset of human voices available for use, including 18 different languages, adding up to almost 1,400 hours of recorded voice data from more than 42,000 contributors.

from Pocket

Logistic Regression with TensorFlow and Keras

from Hacker Noon

Learn logistic regression with TensorFlow and Keras in this article by Armando Fandango, an inventor of AI empowered products by leveraging expertise in deep learning, machine learning, distributed computing, and computational methods.

Conversations with Robots: Voice, Smart Agents & the Case for Structured Content

from A List Apart

In late 2016, Gartner predicted that 30 percent of web browsing sessions would be done without a screen by 2020. Earlier the same year, Comscore had predicted that half of all searches would be voice searches by 2020.

How a new technology is changing the lives of people who cannot speak

from The Guardian

Millions are robbed of the power of speech by illness, injury or lifelong conditions. Can the creation of bespoke digital voices transform their ability to communicate? By Last November, Joe Morris, a 31-year-old film-maker from London, noticed a sore spot on his tongue.

7 command-line tools for writers

from Opensource.com

For most people (especially non-techies), the act of writing means tapping out words using LibreOffice Writer or another GUI word processing application.

SMOG

from Wikipedia

The SMOG grade is a measure of readability that estimates the years of education needed to understand a piece of writing. SMOG is an acronym for Simple Measure of Gobbledygook. The formula for calculating the SMOG grade was developed by G.

Flesch–Kincaid readability tests

from Wikipedia

The Flesch–Kincaid readability tests are readability tests designed to indicate how difficult a passage in English is to understand. There are two tests, the Flesch Reading Ease, and the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level.

Coleman–Liau index

from Wikipedia

The Coleman–Liau index is a readability test designed by Meri Coleman and T. L. Liau to gauge the understandability of a text. Like the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning fog index, SMOG index, and Automated Readability Index, its output approximates the U.S.

Gunning fog index

from Wikipedia

In linguistics, the Gunning fog index is a readability test for English writing. The index estimates the years of formal education a person needs to understand the text on the first reading.

Get Started with the ASK Toolkit for Visual Studio Code

from