f-spin

Things picked here and there:

• Artificial intelligence could identify gang crimes—and ignite an ethical firestorm

Hau Chan, a computer scientist now at Harvard University who was presenting the work, responded that he couldn’t be sure how the new tool would be used. “I’m just an engineer,” he said. Lemoine quoted a lyric from a song about the wartime rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, in a heavy German accent: “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?” Then he angrily walked out

This is the same kind of irresponsible answer engineers, developers, and professionals in general without a political stand will make. It makes me think of this Radiolab episode, where a engineer said exactly the same: “I’m just an engineer”.  https://www.radiolab.org/story/breaking-news/

Somebody mentioned this book The Technological Society.

Further you could also read this article on MIT Tech Review: Bias already exists in search engine results, and it’s only going to get worse

• The Building Blocks of Interpretability. This is complicated, but very interesting. I remember this series a saw a time ago in youtube (yikes!) > Learning to See. What I enjoyed the most is also the way I have to think about what “seeing” means. Teaching is the best way of learn.

About Programming:

• Async iterators and generators
• @mpjm is talking about Observable an interesting playbook (?) for js? oriented to data analyse?
• javascript re template for regex

About other things in the thing:

• Salon mines in readers’ browsers — usual false claims in FAQ about “unused computing power”
• Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself
• LittleThings shuts down, a casualty of Facebook news feed change funny (or sadly) enough the next quote has to do with this:

The final army is led by The Four Horsemen: Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple, the four most influential and dominant technology companies on the planet. (In past lives I’ve been a soldier for two of The Four, Amazon and Facebook). Whether it’s selling ads or storing data, The Four have become the nerve center of businesses all across the world and therefore take a cut from almost every business, regardless of whether it’s winning or losing its own particular battle for market share.

Taken from the Run Less Software, on Intercom. An article meant to hire new people I think. It says some interesting things, but also a lot of startups blah blah.

Nice stand on diversity from Access Now’s Open letter to the organizers of the RSA Conference

How did this happen? It’s hard to believe it is for lack of knowledge of the issues raised by lack of representation at panels and events. Women and TGNC individuals across the internet have raised alarm bells on this very issue for years. There are many resources for conference organizers, including the Geek Feminism Wiki, for example, with lists of diverse speakers in the tech field. Remarkably, despite these resources, many events beyond RSA Conference still fail to achieve even a modicum of diversity. However, as organizers of a series of conferences that attract a larger audience “than any other conference out there,” it is your responsibility to be aware of these issues and ensure proper representation.