rrwright

So far, “Turing’s Cathedral” by George Dyson is the best von Neumann biography I’ve found—though it’s not explicitly a biography of him, but of the development of the computer (and the Princeton IAS). It includes lots of other characters who played their parts, but von Neumann is clearly at the center.

I’m the creator of thatDot Connect [1], a distributed asynchronous streaming graph interpreter, where we’ve been working on exactly this problem for about 7 years now. Scalable distributed graph processing has so many applications! We were fortunate enough to be funded by DARPA for a while working on automated APT detection for cyber-security. Some of our recent work has shown linear scalability of this approach on large clusters at high throughput. For example, we got to half a million complex graph events ingested per second on a combined read/write workload and could have just kept scaling. We’re in the process of writing up this work and sharing all the details.

[1] https://www.thatdot.com/technology/

Before the pandemic, I would walk 45 minutes to and from the office each day. It was magnificent time to think. I’d often leave the office thinking about a thorny technical problem, and on the way home, inspiration would strike. That happened so often that I started noticing it was always at the same point on my walk home. I’d see that place up ahead and privately joke to myself, “I’m about to have a great idea!” Then I’d forget about my private joke and go back to thinking and walking. Then I’d have a great idea! Sure enough, it was at that same spot.

The spot wasn’t magic. I’m convinced that it was the amount of time I spent walking. It was enough to start loosening my tight mental grip on the problem and let my mind roam. That relaxed mental processing was immeasurably valuable.

In a few weeks, I’m choosing to go back to office. What I’m looking forward to most is reaching that spot on my walk home.

I've found this python library helpful for thinking about how to use/convert categorical data to numeric data: https://contrib.scikit-learn.org/category_encoders/

thatDot | Remote | Full Time | https://www.thatdot.com

TL;DR: https://that.re/tldr

We're hiring backend and frontend software engineers.

We have built new capabilities for categorical anomaly detection and streaming graph computation after 6 years of DARPA-funded research on [Transparent Computing](https://www.darpa.mil/program/transparent-computing). Our products are used by major security companies to do real-time behavioral analysis, monitor and triage their alarms, and automate remediation of security threats. We're an early-stage venture backed company, and now is a great time to join!

We believe strongly that each person should get more out of job than just a paycheck. It should be interesting, provide a chance to learn new things, help advance your career, work with amazing and kind people, and be fun! A person ≠ their opinions. We value individual people who know how to disagree with each other productively, and deliberately cultivate a space where learning new things is the goal. Non-traditional backgrounds (i.e. non-CS degrees) are strongly encouraged; philosophy majors wanted!

Tools in our stack:

  - Scala: We happily lean toward functional programming and pragmatic use of the powerful type system.
  - Akka: The Actor model is at the heart of what we do.
  - Akka Streams: Backpressure is the ideal way to approach streaming data.
  - React: Beautiful, functional, maintainable.
  - And the right tool for the job.

If you're interested in learning more, please reach out to: contact@thatDot.com

A recommendation for the book. It was excellent.

Act 3 Scene 1 of Hamlet, by William Shakespeare: https://www.sparknotes.c

Website link: https://depict.ai/

The `say` command line tool. It will cause a synthesized voice to speak out loud whatever follows that command via text-to-speech.

This is especially useful for pranking your loved ones for whom you have remote shell access. ssh in and cause the other person’s computer to start talking to them... by name... asking for help... to be let out of the small metal box they’ve been trapped in for SO long...

This has been available in Mac OS for at least 15 years, and probably longer.

I strongly agree with this recommendation. And though it isn’t meant to be related, I think of “Decoding Reality” by Vlatko Vedral as being a spiritual successor and deeper dive into information theory (from a theoretical physicist’s point of view).

Akka is what you’re looking for: https://akka.io/

It is very deliberately inspired by Erlang and used widely in JVM applications.

Pentagon DoD contracts — Jedi.

Maybe. Almost nothing is straightforward about fair use.

"This means that the production of nucleotides is essential to keep cells young," Delfarah said. "It also means that if we could prevent cells from losing nucleotide synthesis, the cells might age more slowly."

Am I the only one wondering if this person is confusing cause and effect?

Reminds me of this poetic data visualization: https://www.theatlas.com/charts/HJFYm4uQ-

From the abstract:

“Statistically significant results were more likely than nonsignificant findings to be published in the study abstract than in only the full text (P < 0.0001).“