News

Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic to Latin-based

That the Kazakh language is currently written in Cyrillic – and the persistent use of Russian in elite circles – is a legacy of the Soviet Union’s rule, one that some of its neighbouring countries sought to shed right after the union’s collapse in 1991. Azerbaijan, for example, started introducing textbooks in Latin script the next year, while Turkmenistan followed suit in 1993. Kazakhstan is making the transition almost three decades on, in a different economic environment that makes the costs hard to predict.

Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful

In this post, I want to convince you that nurseries aren’t quirky or idiosyncratic at all, but rather a new control flow primitive that’s just as fundamental as for loops or function calls. And furthermore, the other approaches we saw above – thread spawning and callback registration – should be removed entirely and replaced with nurseries.

A “major breakthrough” in diesel technology significantly reduces emissions

Bosch has claimed that it has made a major breakthrough in diesel technology, which could put an end to the ‘death of diesel’ debate. The new technology promises to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions to ‘unprecedented’ levels in diesel cars. According to the technology firm, the technology will enable vehicle manufacturers to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) so drastically that they will comply with future limits, without the need for any additional technology.

Aiming to fill skill gaps in AI, Microsoft makes training courses available to the public

Caddy – The HTTP/2 Web Server with Automatic HTTPS

All you have to do is run caddy and voilà! Caddy automatically loads your Caddyfile if it’s in the same folder. For production sites, HTTPS is on by default!

Lessons from My First Two Years of AI Research

A friend of mine who is about to start a career in artificial intelligence research recently asked what I wish I had known when I started two years ago. Below are some lessons I have learned so far. They range from general life lessons to relatively specific tricks of the AI trade.

CIA plans to replace spies with AI

Human spies will soon be relics of the past, and the CIA knows it. Dawn Meyerriecks, the Agency’s deputy director for technology development, recently told an audience at an intelligence conference in Florida the CIA was adapting to a new landscape where its primary adversary is a machine, not a foreign agent.

Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires

More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon. I’ve termed it ‘metric fixation’. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is possible – and desirable – to replace professional judgment (acquired through personal experience and talent) with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardised data (metrics); and that the best way to motivate people within these organisations is by attaching rewards and penalties to their measured performance.

Why Water Is Weird

It’s striking that water can illustrate and elucidate a martial arts philosophy while also being, to this day, the “least understood material on Earth,” as researchers reported recently.

Exabytes in a Test Tube: The Case for DNA Data Storage