OpenAI Five is the first AI to beat the world champions in an esports game, having won two back-to-back games versus the world champion Dota 2 team, OG, at Finals this weekend. Both OpenAI Five and DeepMind’s AlphaStar had previously beaten good pros privately but lost their live pro matches, making this also the…
Discussions: Hacker News (195 points, 51 comments), Reddit r/Python (140 points, 18 comments) If you’re planning to learn data analysis, machine learning, or data science tools in python, you’re most likely going to be using the wonderful pandas library. Pandas is an open source library for data manipulation and…
I recently did a corporate TLA+ workshop and some people asked what TLA+ specs look like in practice. If you looked at the most common public examples, you’d probably come away thinking that people only used it for critical consensus algorithms. This is a problem for two reasons: first, it makes it harder to learn…
As the year draws to a close, so has EFF’s long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Agency about the mass phone surveillance program infamously known as “Hemisphere.” We won our case and freed up tons of records. (So did the Electronic Privacy Information Center...
The EU is back to regulating tech companies, and getting the Internet wrong in the process. That, though, helps illuminate an approach that could work.
Update: On December 6th we released WordPress 5.0. It was definitely the most controversial release in a while, but the usage and adoption metrics are looking similar to previous releases. I’m look…
Today, Nextcloud 15 has been made available. As there is so much new and improved in this release, we have dedicated separate blogs to each main area of improvement. This blog covers a preview of the the brand new Nextcloud Social app, introducing social networking to Nextcloud. Download now! The Mastodon project is…
Introduction to the Rust language, standard library and ecosystem
I have recently been talking at small and mid-size companies, sharing engineering best practices I see us use at Uber, which I would recommend any tech company adopt as they are growing. The one topic that gets both the most raised eyebrows, as well the most "aha!" moments is
A guide to all the Magic Methods in Python
Neuroscientists at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT have discovered that when a synapse strengthens, neighboring synapses weaken based on the action of a crucial protein called Arc. The finding provides an explanation of how synaptic strengthening and weakening combine in neurons to produce…
It’s not often I am able to write a patch that not only reduces memory usage, but increases speed as well. Usually I find myself trading memory for speed, so it’s a real treat when I can improve both in one patch. Today I want to talk about the patch I submitted to Ruby in this ticket. It decreases “after boot” memory…
Internally our DDoS mitigation team is sometimes called "the packet droppers". When other teams build exciting products to do smart things with the traffic that passed through our network, we take joy in discovering novel ways of discarding it.
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
Today we are excited to announce the official release of editor.p5js.org! The p5.js Web Editor is an online platform for learning to code…
For the system at work, I am on call one week every seven weeks. For most of the past ten years, I have been on organized on call rotations for the systems I have been developing. I think being on …
We can never know for sure because we don't have a comprehensive list of all the data. But what can we say probabilistically? Restating it like so:
Today we're proud to announce the release of TypeScript 2.7! If you're not familiar with TypeScript, it's a language that brings optional static types to
Two decades ago when I first started working at Avid, one of the tasks I was assigned was porting our product (a consumer video editor - th...
The Personal blog and musings of Chris Penner, a designer, developer and future opsimath.
Explore Google Design’s human-centered approach to UX design for AI. Learn how Google Clips uses ML for user-friendly, private experiences. Discover more.
