Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 9th 2019)
In 2007-2008, the recipient of a bone-marrow therapy (Timothy Brown) was cured of HIV. Another person was cured following a bone marrow transplant. And then yet...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Should our kids use pencils or keyboards?
In Montreal, most kids have to write on paper using a pencil. They have paper dictionaries. My kids have spent an enormous amount of time learning to write in cursive...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 2nd, 2019)
Shapiro in his book The New Childhood argues that we should stop worrying so much about how much time our kids spend on video games and on their phone. He calls...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Parsing JSON quickly: early comparisons in the wild
JSON is arguably the standard data interchange format on the Internet. It is text-based and needs to be “parsed”: the input string needs to be transformed intoContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 24th, 2019)
Dooley interviews Barabási (a famous researcher) on his book The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success. Here is an interesting quote: It is true that major breakthroughs...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
More fun with fast remainders when the divisor is a constant
In software, compilers can often optimize away integer divisions, and replace them with cheaper instructions, especially when the divisor is a constant. I recently...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 16th, 2019)
In their new book Empty Planet, Bricker and Ibbitson argue that within the next 30 years, Earth’s population will start to rapidly decline. They believe that official...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My iPad Pro experiment: almost two years later
Soon after the first iPad Pro came out, I bought one and started using it daily. The experiment is ongoing and I thought it was time to reflect upon it further....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 9th, 2019)
Though deep learning has proven remarkably capable in many tasks like image classification, it is possible that the problems they are solving remarquably well are...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Faster remainders when the divisor is a constant: beating compilers and libdivide
Not all instructions on modern processors cost the same. Additions and subtractions are cheaper than multiplications which are themselves slower than divisions....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 3rd, 2019)
A Canadian startup built around electric taxis failed. One of their core findings is that electric cars must be recharged several times a day, especially during...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
New Web host
Following my recent blogging problems, the majority advice I received was to move to a different host. My blog is now hosted by SiteGround. Moving my content over...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Web caching: what is the right time-to-live for cached pages?
I have been having performance problems with my blog and this forced me to spend time digging into the issue. Some friends of mine advocate that I should just “pay...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My blog can’t keep up: 500 errors all over
My blog is relatively minor enterprise. It is strictly non-profit (no ad). I have been posting one or two blog posts a week for about fifteen years. I have been...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What is the space overhead of Base64 encoding?
Many Internet formats from email (MIME) to the Web (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) are text-only. If you send an image or executable file by email, it often first gets encoded...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Data scientists need to learn about significant digits
Suppose that you classify people on income or gender. Your boss asks you about the precision of your model. Which answer do you give? Whatever your software tells...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Rethinking Hamming’s questions
Richard Hamming is a famous computer scientist. In his talk You and Your Research, Hamming recounts how asked researchers three questions which I paraphrase: What...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (January 26th, 2019)
We are training many more doctors (PhDs) than we need, when looking at the number of new faculty positions. In science, this has been true since at least the 1980s...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (January 19th, 2019)
Losing even just a bit of weight can be enough to restore fertility in women. Digital technology does not appear to have a significant negative effect on teenagers...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog