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 (December 8th, 2017)
Facebook’s leading artificial-intelligence researcher Yan Lecun wrote: In the history of science and technology, the engineering artifacts have almost always preceded...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Simplistic programming is underrated
I was a nerdy kid who liked to spend a lot of time reading. Back then, we did not have the Internet, we could not even imagine it… so I ended up reading the dictionary...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 1st, 2017)
Chollet has a piece on the impossibility of intelligence explosion. He is responding to the theory that smart machines will build even smarter machines, and that...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Bit hacking versus memoization: a Stream VByte example
In compression techniques like Stream VByte or Google’s varint-GB, we use control bytes to indicate how blocks of data are compressed. Without getting into theContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (November 24th, 2017)
Women earned majority of doctoral degrees in 2016 for 8th straight year and outnumber men in grad school 135 to 100. Materialists use Facebook more frequently,Continue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
Many of us rely on a Qwerty keyboard, at least when we are typing at a laptop. It is often said that the Qwerty keyboard is inferior to clearly better alternatives...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
You are your tools
I believe that there are no miracle people. When others get the same work done as you do, only much faster, they are almost surely using better tools. Tools are...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Do relational databases evolve toward rigidity?
The Hanson law of computing states that: Any software system, including advanced intelligence, is bound to decline over time. It becomes less flexible and moreContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (November 17th, 2017)
Josiah Zayner, a biochemist who once worked for NASA, became the first person known to have edited his own genes (…) During a lecture about human genetic engineering...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast exact integer divisions using floating-point operations (ARM edition)
In my latest post, I explained how you could accelerate 32-bit integer divisions by transforming them into 64-bit floating-point divisions. Indeed, 64-bit floating...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast exact integer divisions using floating-point operations
On current processors, integer division is slow. If you need to compute many quotients or remainders, you can be in trouble. You potentially need divisions when...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 18th, 2017)
We’d like, one day, to transplant pig organs into human beings. Sadly, this is currently very dangerous because, even though pigs are very similar to us, the small...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Damore, Google: my thoughts
So an engineer called Damore wrote a memo that opposed Google’s diversity policies and he was fired. Here is a questions-and-answers with me. I am the interviewer...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator
Computers often need random numbers. Most times, random numbers are not actually random… in the sense that they are the output of a mathematical function that is...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Bubbling up is lowering empathy at a civilization scale
Computer networks are a fantastic invention. When they came in my life, I remember spending hours, sometimes days, arguing with people I violently disagreed with...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Optimizing polynomial hash functions (Java vs. Swift)
In software, hash functions are ubiquitous. They map arbitrary pieces of data (strings, arrays, …) to fixed-length integers. They are the key ingredient of hash...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 11th, 2017)
It looks like the Java programming language might finally get in-language support for vector instructions, these instructions are supported by modern processors...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 4th, 2017)
Lifting a lot of small weights and eating protein regularly builds muscle mass. There is no need for heavy weights and hormones matter less than you think. There...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 27th, 2017)
Currently, damage to the retina is largely viewed as irreversible. However, some researchers were able to generate retinal cells in mice. Toyota is reportedly ready...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog