TLDR 2018-10-22

Last month, Bloomberg reported that Apple and dozens of other US tech companies had been victims of a Chinese hardware hack. Apple CEO Tim Cook is now calling out Bloomberg directly, saying "There is no truth in their story about Apple. They need to do the right thing and retract it." Apple has never done this before, even for stories that were demonstrably false. Tim Cook says that they went through email searches, data center records, financial records, shipment records, and each time came to the same conclusion: no hack occurred.

I like to think of TLDR as relatively undepressing news, so I think you guys might also like this newly launched site which is a feed of interesting positive news stories (currently the top story is "Syrian refugee opens restaurant in Tennessee, wins title of 'Nicest Place in America'").

The conventional wisdom surrounding AI is that the company with the most data wins. Now, startups are using blockchains to democratize data so that data remains under the user's control instead of Google's or Facebook's. Ocean Protocol is a Berlin-based startup that allows anyone to set up a data marketplace, with users of data paying for the data with digital tokens. Revel is a company that pays out tokens in exchange for training data sets, like collecting pictures of taxis. Oasis is a medical information blockchain using advanced encryption techniques such that no company, not even the one using the data, will have access to it. Researchers will be able to run the data through their machine learning algorithms and prove that calculations are done correctly all without ever having access to the underlying data. SingularityNET is a blockchain of AIs, so that if one AI cannot come up with an answer, it can pay another AI to help.

Expert estimates about the impact of automation on jobs are all over the place (there's a chart in the article with estimates from reputable sources between 5 million and 80 million jobs destroyed in the next 20 years). This is because we don't know if a technology will actually be used due to legal or social hurdles, jobs actually include a multitude of tasks (this is why conveyor belts haven't replaced human waiters), and it's really hard to know what you don't know (always a problem when trying to predict the future!). For example, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, we would have 15 hour workweeks due to productivity gains. While the productivity gains materialized, the 15 hour workweeks unfortunately have not, even though it probably seemed intuitively obvious at the time that higher productivity would lead to less work.

Relativity Space is a startup that is using 3D printing to make rocket parts. This will be especially crucial for missions in space colonies, where it isn't feasible to build a new factory. The goal of the company is to eventually be able to 3D print a full rocket using Stargate, the largest metal 3D printer on Earth. Stargate has cameras, sensors, and software which can help it detect errors when printing highly complex parts. Relativity Space believes that it will be able to print 95% of the parts needed to build a rocket by 2020, where current rocket companies are only 3D printing about 1% of their parts.

This is a repo of simple tutorials with ready-to-use code examples for learning Tensorflow. It has everything from basic arithmetic operations all the way to neural networks, so if you're looking to play around with Tensorflow, this is a great place to start!

Okay, this video is actually from 2017 and has 15 million views so some of you might have seen it already, but I just came across it and it's incredible. This guy walks around Huaqiangbei, China and builds his own iPhone out of spare parts being sold by random replacement part shops.