Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2022
From The Eponymous Pickle
Leap-Second Gets a Considerable Pause
Surprising and oddly considerable pause in a natural measurement is agreed to. Rarely see this kind an event. Implications?
Network-Crashing Leap Seconds to Be Abandoned by 2035, for at Least a Century in Ars Technica, Kevin…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for White Papers: Mid-cycle Robotics Roadmap Update
Through support from the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), the US National Robotics Roadmap was first created thirteen years ago by a group of 120 people from industry and academia. It has since been used by government agencies…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Generic number compression (zstd)
I have done a lot of work that involves compressing and uncompressing data. Most often, I work on data that has specific characteristics, e.g., sorted integers. In such cases, one can do much better than generic compression routines…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Generative AI Could Create Assets for the Metaverse
Have my doubts of how effectively , but interesting thought ...
How Generative AI could Create Assets for the Metaverse | Jensen Huang
Check out the on-demand sessions from the Low-Code/No-Code Summit to learn how to successfully…From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Driverless Trucks
A likely future of Supply Chains
The Long Road to Driverless Trucks
By The New York Times, November 28, 2022
Companies know the technology is a long way from the moment trucks can drive anywhere on their own, so they are looking…From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantum Microscopy
More on the topic in
Quantum-enhanced nonlinear microscopy in Nature
Catxere A. Casacio, Lars S. Madsen, Alex Terrasson, Muhammad Waleed, Kai Barnscheidt, Boris Hage, Michael A. Taylor & Warwick P. Bowen
Nature volume 594, pages201…From The Eponymous Pickle
Does Consciousness Change the Rules of Quantum Mechanics?
Hmm...
Does consciousness change the rules of quantum mechanics?
Maybe our understanding of quantum entanglement is incomplete, or maybe there is something fundamentally unique about consciousness.
In the past few years, scientists…From BLOG@CACM
What Does Meta AI's Diplomacy-Winning Cicero Mean for AI?
Hint: It's not all about scaling.
From Schneier on Security
Computer Repair Technicians Are Stealing Your Data
Laptop technicians routinely violate the privacy of the people whose computers they repair:
Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial…From insideHPC
AWS Announces Water Positive Commitment by 2030
Nov. 28, 2022 — LAS VEGAS– Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced it will be water positive (water+) by 2030, returning more water to communities than it…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Pepper’s Ghost: an 1860s illusion used in ‘head-up displays’ ^JB
by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London (first published in 2007) When Pepper’s Ghost first appeared on the stage as part of one of Professor Pepper’s shows on Christmas Eve, 1862 it stunned the audiences. This was more…
From The Noisy Channel
Attention, Expertise, Trust
I’m old enough to remember when the web was new, and honest enough to admit that I was a skeptic at the time. Fortunately, I was wrong, and I owe my career to the digital revolution that the web enabled.
When social networking…From The Eponymous Pickle
Tiny, Private Houses
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI is Solving Classical Computing's Quantum Problem
Intriguing mix of domains.
AI is Solving Classical Computing's Quantum Problem
By R. Colin Johnson, Commissioned by CACM Staff
November 22, 2022
The number of equations that need to be solved to fully describe the many-body problem…From The Eponymous Pickle
Protests at IPhone Factory
Leading to some phone outages.
China Covid: Angry protests at giant iPhone factory in Zhengzhou in the BBC
Published, 4 days ago
Protests have erupted at the world's biggest iPhone factory in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, according…From The Eponymous Pickle
Lost Something? Search 91.7 Million Files from the '80s, '90s, 2000s
Seeing it all?
Lost Something? Search 91.7 Million Files from the '80s, '90s, 2000s By Ars Technica, October 21, 2022
The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years.
A newHosted…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (November 26 2022)
Molière’s famous play, Tartuffe, the main characters is outwardly pious but fundamentally deceitful. Are people who insist on broadcasting their high virtue better people, who are they more like Tartuffe. Dong et al. (2022) conclude…
From The Eponymous Pickle
TikTok Eating the Internet
Evolution. Does it deliver customers online?
By The Washington Post, October 18, 2022
In five years, TikTok, once written off as a silly dance-video fad, has become one of the most prominent, discussed…From The Eponymous Pickle
How the First Transistor Worked
How far we have come.
HOW THE FIRST TRANSISTOR WORKED
Even its inventors didn’t fully understand the point-contact transistor
By GLENN ZORPETTE in Spectrum.ieee 20 NOV 2022 12 MIN READ
A photo of an outstretched hand with several…From The Eponymous Pickle
Regarding an NFT Bubble
This surprised me, below is an outline, and then beyond. Legit? Following up. I will remove if I find this invalid.
From DSHR Blog: https://blog.dshr.org/
I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm…From The Eponymous Pickle
Chinese Drones in Restricted Spaces
Of course there are now many drones in that area, many Chinese built. But still a valid concern.
In American Military News:
Hundreds of Chinese-made drones have flown into restricted airspaces over Washington, D.C., in recent…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Making all your integers positive with zigzag encoding
You sometimes feel the need to make all of your integers positive, without losing any information. That is, you want to map all of your integers from ‘signed’ integers (e.g., -1, 1, 3, -3) to ‘unsigned integers’ (e.g., 3,2,6,7)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Optimal Decision Making
Technical, but quite interesting point being made. Optimality may be a good thing, but how do I embed it in useful real time decisions? Notably too the consideration of noise, often a key consideration. This worth a look…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What authors want from AI ‘ghostwriters’
I was recently introduced to some examples of this, quite impressive.
What authors want from AI ‘ghostwriters’
Compute me a story
October 7, 2022 - 12:09 pmIn Sept. 2020, The Guardian published an opinion piece written by a program…From insideHPC
@HPCpodcast: An SC22 Retrospective
https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/044@HPCpodcast_SC22-Postview_20221123.mp3 In this SC22 post-view, Shahin and Doug go over what happened at the supercomputing conference in Dallas last week. Topics include: the energy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantum Microscope
Intro, see also in Sabine Hossenfelder's Youtube here: https://youtu.be/fkXSCNDfj14
The quantum microscope revolution is here in CosmosMagazine By Lauren Fuge
New entanglement-based sensor surpasses light-based microscopes…From The Eponymous Pickle
MITRE Attack Framework
When I worked with the Govt in the past, worked with MITRE, impressive overall. I noted this recent introduction to their 'Threat actors' capability. (which I did not use at the time). Of interest.
Introduction to MITREJosh…From The Eponymous Pickle
Seoul Patrols Streets with Robots
Interesting approach but unlikely to be tolerated today in the West.
Self-Driving Robot Patrols Seoul Streets
EuroNews, Roselyne Min, November 19, 2022
South Korea has launched its first autonomous urban patrol robot, which patrols…From Geeking with Greg
Alternatives to Twitter
About five years ago, I moved most of my blogging from here to microblogging on Twitter. In part that was from the shut down of Google Reader. In part I was finally giving in on the trend against long form blogging. So this blog…
From Putting People First
[Book] Voices in the Code
![[Book] Voices in the Code](/system/assets/0000/1953/030209_Vanderbeeken_Mark_250.small_square.jpg?1476779420&1260281963)
In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in a relatively inclusive, accountable way, and draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology…