#i can already see it. my publishing house uses ai for books covers and it is NOTICEABLE AT FIRST GLANCE. looks awful too

[3liza]

thank you for speaking rational thought AS AN ARTIST into the ai debate. i get so tired of people over simplifying, generalizing, and parroting how they’ve been told ai works lmao. you’re an icon

some of the worst AI art alarmists are professional artists as well but theyre in very specific fields with very specific work cultures and it would take a long and boring post to explain all the nuance there but i went to the same extremely tiny, hypefocused classic atelier school in San Francisco as Karla Ortiz and am actually acquainted with her irl so i have a different perspective on this particular issue and the people involved than the average fan artist on tumblr. the latter person is also perfectly valid and so is their work, all im saying is that we have different life experiences and my particular one has accidentally placed me in a weird and relevant position to observe what the AI art panic is actually about.

first thing i did when the pearl-clutching about AI art started is go on the Midjourney discord, which is completely public and free, and spent a few burner accounts using free credits to play with the toolset. everyone who has any kind of opinion about AI art should do the same because otherwise you just wont know what youre talking about. my BIGGEST takeaway is that it is currently and likely always will be (because of factors that are sort of hard to explain) extremely difficult to make an AI like Midjourney spit out precisely wht you want UNLESS what you want is the exact kind of hyperreal, hyperpretty Artstation Front Page 4k HDR etc etc style pictures that, coincidentally, artists like Karla Ortiz have devoted their careers to. Midjourney could not, when asked, make a decent Problem Glyph. or even anything approaching one. and probably never will, because there isn't any profit incentive for it to do so and probably not enough images to train a dataset anyway.

the labor issues with AI are real, but they are the result of the managerial class using AI's existence as an excuse to reduce compensation for labor. this happens at every single technological sea change and is unstoppable, and the technology itself is always blamed because that is beneficial to the capitalists who are actually causing the labor crisis each time. if you talk to the artists who are ACTUALLY already being affected, they will tell you what's happening is managers are telling them to insert AI into workflows in ways that make no sense, and that management have fully started an industry-wide to "pivot" to AI production in ways that aren't going to work but WILL result in mass loss of jobs and productivty and introduce a lot of problems which people will then be hired to try to fix, but at greatly-reduced salaries. every script written and every picture generated by an AI, without human intervention/editing/cleanup, is mostly unusable for anything except a few very specific use cases that are very tolerant of generality. i'm seeing it being used for shovelware banner ads, for example, as well as for game assets like "i need some spooky paintings for the wall of a house environment" or "i need some nonspecific movie posters for a character's room" that indie game devs are making really good use of, people who can neither afford to hire an artist to make those assets and cant do them themselves, and if the ai art assets weren't available then that person would just not have those assets in the game at all. i've seen AI art in that context that works great for that purpose and isn't committing any labor crimes.

it is also being used for book covers by large publishing houses already, and it looks bad and resulted directly in the loss of a human job. it is both things. you can also pay your contractor for half as many man hours because he has a nailgun instead of just hammers. you can pay a huge pile of money to someone for an oil portrait or you can take a selfie with your phone. there arent that many oil painters around anymore.

but this is being ignored by people like the guy who just replied and yelled at me for the post they imagined that i wrote defending the impending robot war, who is just feeling very hysterical about existential threat and isn't going to read any posts or actually do any research about it. which is understandable but supremely unhelpful, primarily to themselves but also to me and every other fellow artist who has to pay rent.

one aspect of this that is both unequivocally True AND very mean to point out is that the madder an artist is about AI art, the more their work will resemble the pretty, heavily commercialized stuff the AIs are focused on imitating. the aforementioned Artstation frontpage. this is self-feeding loop of popular work is replicated by human artists because it sells and gets clicks, audience is sensitized to those precise aesthetics by constant exposure and demands more, AI trains on those pictures more than any others because there are more of those pictures and more URLs pointing back to those pictures and the AI learns to expect those shapes and colors and forms more often, mathematically, in its prediction models. i feel bad for these people having their style ganked by robots and they will not be the only victims but it is also true, and has always been true, that the ONLY way to avoid increasing competition in a creative field is to make yourself so difficult to imitate that no one can actually do it. you make a deal with the devil when you focus exclusively on market pleasing skills instead of taking the massive pay cut that comes with being more of a weirdo. theres no right answer to this, nor is either kind of artist better, more ideologically pure, or more talented. my parents wanted me to make safe, marketable, hotel lobby art and never go hungry, but im an idiot. no one could have predicted that my distaste for "hyperreal 4k f cup orc warrior waifu concept art depth of field bokeh national geographic award winning hd beautiful colorful" pictures would suddenly put me in a less precarious position than people who actually work for AAA studios filling beautiful concept art books with the same. i just went to a concept art school full of those people and interned at a AAA studio and spent years in AAA game journalism and decided i would rather rip ass so hard i exploded than try to compete in such an industry.

which brings me to what art AIs are actually "doing"--i'm going to be simple in a way that makes computer experts annoyed here, but to be descriptive about it, they are not "remixing" existing art or "copying" it or carrying around databases of your work and collaging it--they are using mathematical formulae to determine what is most likely to show up in pictures described by certain prompts and then manifesting that visually, based on what they have already seen. they work with the exact same very basic actions as a human observing a bunch of drawings and then trying out their own. this is why they have so much trouble with fingers, it's for the same reason children's drawings also often have more than 5 fingers: because once you start drawing fingers its hard to stop. this is because all fingers are mathematically likely to have another finger next to them. in fact most fingers have another finger on each side. Pinkies Georg, who lives on the end of your limb and only has one neighbor, is an outlier and Midjourney thinks he should not have been counted.

in fact a lot of the current failings by AI models in both visual art and writing are comparable to the behavior of human children in ways i find amusing. human children will also make up stories when asked questions, just to please the adult who asked. a robot is not a child and it does not have actual intentions, feelings or "thoughts" and im not saying they do. its just funny that an AI will make up a story to "Get out of trouble" the same way a 4 year old tends to. its funny that their anatomical errors are the same as the ones in a kindergarten classroom gallery wall. they are not people and should not be personified or thought of as sapient or having agency or intent, they do not.

anyway. TLDR when photography was invented it became MUCH cheaper and MUCH faster to get someone to take your portrait, and this resulted in various things happening that would appear foolish to be mad about in this year of our lord 2023 AD. and yet here we are. if it were me and it was about 1830 and i had spent 30 years learning to paint, i would probably start figuring out how to make wet plate process daguerreotypes too. because i live on earth in a technological capitalist society and there's nothing i can do about it and i like eating food indoors and if i im smart enough to learn how to oil paint i can certainly point a camera at someone for 5 minutes and then bathe the resulting exposure in mercury vapor. i know how to do multiple things at once. but thats me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[boopidyboopidyboop]

Howdy!

I recently saw a reply you made in a post about feeding unfinished fic to large language models like ChatGPT. In there, you said that free-to-use AIs are "free to use because the company who makes them is actively profiting and taking aspects like phrasing, style, etc." I've heard of variants of this idea but could never figure out where it came from. Can you tell me more about the origin of that?

Well I'll start off by saying I'm not an expert in the field, and that AI technology is actually relatively "new" in terms of very recent rapid developments and it's in this stage where the future is generally uncertain. However, as early as now, people are already using AI for commercial works. There was a movie announced where all backgrounds were made with an AI, and a manga that was made near entirely with AI. The rhythm game Cytus has recently drawn ire from fans and even its own creators and designers for using AI generated art instead of the very stylistic art it used to use. The moral and economical issue here would lie in that they still charge the same amount for the game and it's already a game that is criticized by some for its high price point compared to other rhythm games. So not only are they earning more, in a way are putting less effort into the game. Those who purchase it would essentially be paying more for less and the money would not be going to the artists because their styles will have been copied but they themselves wouldn't be credited or paid.

Now for a more direct example, I've also heard reports that publishing houses are being spammed with hundreds of purely AI generated work. This of course directly negatively affects writers trying to get published if only by uhhh what's the word,,,, adding a bunch to the pool (sorry English is my third language).

I myself do writing for companies overseas by editing and writing the info on their websites. As someone from a third world country, this contributes to a good chunk of my income as the local economy is not great. Due to the recent popularity of bots like chat GPT, the market had dropped by a LOT and while at first it was my primary source of income, its not really sustainable anymore.

Now these examples don't all use language based examples but they do show that the creation of AI art forms so far is mostly just harming artists and from the examples such as Cytus and just,, life in general I suppose, as "young" as commercial AI is, we can likely assume that corporations don't intend on making their AI for purely wholistic reasons. The art AI midjourney was even found using stolen art after saying that they don't. AI writing, I believe, is going to be more finicky than AI art and as such, I expect theyd want to do a lot more fine tuning before using it to write whole textbooks while art bots are already being used on book covers and movies, only because you don't need to fact check art.

Sure people can see something is wrong, but with the sheer amount if it used, it's rapidly adapting to fix the anatomical issues in its art. Written work I think would need to be double checked a lot and by a human before they release one making bold claims such as "You can't buy food but you can buy paint thinner from home depot instead" (an actual AI result generated by Quora when I was trying to find a place to eat that Google tool as the top rated answer on the website and proudly presented to me). But that doesn't mean it won't eventually go as far as to take someone's job entirely. It's already starting to take mine.

For a clear cut example, sorry to say I can't name one myself, but you can look at the way AI is already being used this early on and how it's already being used to substitute and replace some artists and writers and how apparently even fanfiction writers who do their work out of love, and look just a few years in the future based on the patterns that have been happening and the way corporations will always value profits over the heart of what they make, and for most the picture of what will happen is a very grim one for art.

The "Origin" of it differs from person to person. Some artists have seen their art put into AIs and their styles mimicked (art which will be very difficult to claim the person who generated it shouldn't be allowed to use for commercial purposes). Some writers who write more boring industry stuff that is very easy to mimic are getting their jobs taken away from them. Others without firsthand experience can only look at examples or patterns and infer a probable and large scale outcome similar to that of Cytus. All in all, to me the backlash and opinion that AI is copying peoples works is more of a social movement with no clear cut origin but a lot of evidence that points towards AI generated writing and imagery being a bastardization of the work of hundreds even if it's just a lot harder to see when it comes to a non visual form of art like writing.

Hmm I think if you want a clearer answer or example, the best personal one I can give you is an article I edited which was so poorly written I sent it back and they had a different writer do it. When it got back to me it was better, but extremely familiar. It repeated phrases from the OG article and had the same problems I had noted (strange wording, odd vocabulary, etc) so I asked them if they had wrote it. Apparently they just put it into chat GPT and told the bot to rewrite it without changing too much, so the bot mimicked phrases and words but changed the flow by adding conjunctions or paraphrasing, but to me, who has read the first persons work several hundred times, I still recognized the style, if I can call it that. The person profiting wasn't Chat GPT, but if the state of AI art is anything to go by, in a few years it could very well be.

(sorry about the long reply and if anything is messy or hard to understand. I am not an organized thinker.)

[galvanizedfriend]

I'm scared about all the AI stuff that's been going on. I don't want to lose my work or my characters. Is there anything that we can do to make sure we still keep our works?

So am I. :( In my line of work we're already starting to see the use of AI being seriously discussed to replace certain tasks - and not because it'll make workers' lives easier, or even be necessarily more efficient, since it'll be utter chaos not to have real humans in certain position. It's purely to save money, both by replacing people and by creating more unemployment, which will then lower overall wages.

If you're a writer (I assume you are, since you mentioned you don't want to lose your characters), I don't think it's so much about losing rights over what you create, but having machines being trained on existing content (maybe even yours) in order to do your job. Publishing a single book is work that involves an entire chain of people. The writer is just one part. You have at least one editor, you have someone who prepares the text, you have someone who does formatting, you have sometimes a proof-reader, or sensitivity readers depending on what kind of story you write, then you have artists who create the covers and other related illustrations, and that's not even to mention people such as agents, who perform a very important role identifying good manuscripts, finding new writers, and then representing them.

What AI is already doing is using existing works in order to train a machine in specific styles so that a computer might churn out an entire novel in the space of an hour. They're using someone's work for machine-learning, but they're no longer having to pay any of these people in the chain of creation any money for it. In my country, there are big publishing houses already using AI created illustrations for books. But computers don't have artistry, it doesn't have coloring or drawing styles. They are stealing the work of illustrators to allegedly create something "new", making money off of this thing, and not paying the original creators a dime.

This is a particularly dire situation for independent writers/creators, or writers/creators who publish their work through small, lesser-known publishing houses. There's always going to be a hefty countract for the J.K. Rowlings and the Stephen Kings and other big name authors. It's for the little ones and the ones just starting that things are going to be very complicated if widespread AI use is allowed to continue like this. And then imagine the consequences of this in the long run in terms of authenticity, originality, creativity, diversity. Imagine the consequences of this for entire careers. How many people are actually going to be able to make a living in the publishing industry?

I'm obviously painting a very bad picture here that might seem like an exaggeration right now, but it's certainly the path things are starting to take (like with the book covers I mentioned). And I honestly don't know what we can do. I don't know if there is anything any one person can do to stop it. For so many years, particularly for artists and creators in general (but noy only) we've been told that the internet was where we should be. Showcasing our writing, photography, illustrations, paintings, and so on. It's how people publicize their work and get noticed. If you're not on the internet, you don't exist. You need to have portfolio online, preferably with a built audience. And suddenly, having that kind of thing out there now just means that everything we create can (and probably will) be used to train an AI that will make these very same creations not necessary to the industry anymore. It doesn't stop us from writing, painting, or what have you, but it means we might not be able to make a living out of it anymore.

It's not really about banning the use of AI, it's about establishing rules both about how it is trained, and about whether or not whatever an AI creates should be copyrightable. Honestly, if it's decided that AI-created content, whatever kind of content it might be, cannot be used for profit or protected by intellectual rights, then it's already a very big step, because then it will just not be financially interesting anymore to these industries to replace artists and writers and actors for AI, since anyone will then be able to just steal whatever they create out of that. If Disney have a show where scripts are made by AI, then it can't be copyrighted. Anyone can take it and do their own thing, make a new show, whatever. What are the chances that Disney will then start using solely AI for their scripts (like they want to)?

That's the discussion that needs to happen in the next few years in many, many areas. It's already happening in many countries, within many industries, unions and sectors of society in general. AI can be a very useful, helpful tool, but it cannot be used for exploitation and to create massive unemployment.

I'm not the most politically engaged person in that aspect, but what I can say is if you're ever in a position to have your voice heard, do it. If you know that discussions are happening close to you, or online, see if there's a way for you to take part in it. or just spread the word, make sure more people are aware of it. Discuss it with your friends or your social groups. And if there's a way for you to protect your creations from AI-mining, do it as well. As individual people with very little power, we can often only rely on our representatives to make the right decisions (which doesn't always happen, sadly, especially in certain countries), but there are serious people and unions fighting the good fight out there. We can show our support.

[duaneodavila]

Law Students Are Already Using Legal Technology To Live In The Future [Sponsored]

Earlier this month, I went to the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting. It’s a good conference full of law professors and deans thinking deeply about the state of the law and the critical issues of educating young lawyers.

But there were also a lot of legal technology providers and thinkers floating around the conference. Normally, people focus on legal technology from the perspective of actual practitioners. It’s weird to not focus on getting law students to adopt technology given that students are early adopters of tech. If you can train them on your system, then they’ll demand those systems when they enter the workplace. Don’t believe me? Try asking a lawyer under 50 to research cases in a “library.” They’ll act like you’ve told them to build a house without a hammer.

During the conference, I had the opportunity to talk with Vikram Savkar, the Vice President & General Manager, International and Higher Education Markets, of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. Here’s a condensed and edited readout of our conversation:

Elie: Okay, first things first, we’re here at AALS, the big law professor, law dean conference. They always throw it up right after the new year for… reasons. Why is Wolters Kluwer here? What’s the play for this particular group of generally musty old men?

Vikram: We are the leading publisher of educational materials for law schools in America. We publish a lot of casebooks that are in use in more than 200 law schools. We also are the leading provider of digital solutions now for the new digital native generation, and that means that the people we have to care about most on a daily basis are law professors and law students. The more we understand what they value and what they are looking for, the better job we can do as a creator of solutions. There is no other place where you can talk to 2,500 law professors over two days.

Elie: We still deal with lawyers who are just like, “Why can’t it work like my typewriter?” What do you see when we’re talking about law professors? Because, on the one hand, they still have that same self-selection against innovation, but on the other hand, they work at a school. There’s a sense that they are a little bit more forward-looking and embracing of the future. What do you find in terms of their uptake and ability to adjust to new technological solutions?

Vikram: Most law students today are digital natives. They grew up with Google and Facebook, and more importantly they grew up in their classrooms with things like MyLabs and technology solutions. To them, being in a classroom is very closely tied to having really cool and powerful technologies to help them succeed, and they are very vocal about that with their professors.

So, whoever the professor is, whatever his or her personal taste for technology is, he or she is very clear that their students are really eager for these technologies. Law professors are scholars, but they’re also passionate teachers, which means they care to give their students what their students want. So, what we find is, if we’re able to give them solutions that students can be excited by, they will use them.

Elie: Let’s get into some of the specific solutions that you offer. I took a demo of Casebook Connect downstairs and the first thing that jumped out to me was that… so, I’m old. When I was in law school we were still fundamentally using books, like physical books. I had to carry my books in my backpack, uphill both ways, to get to property class, right? When I saw CasebookConnect.com, it kind of jumped off the screen, of like, “Well, of course casebooks are digitized or should be.” You were talking about the adoption rate, I kind of feel sorry for the kids who are still lugging the books. It’s just so obvious now that you should be digitizing your casebooks and reading them online.

Vikram: I think you’ve got it. It is on some level obvious and that’s why once we launched, it became very popular very quickly and has continued to grow. Let’s go back to the genesis. Five or six years ago, it wasn’t as obvious, right? Everybody was using print books in the classroom, and they were happy with them. Nobody was saying, “Hey, this situation isn’t working,” and professors felt like, “This is fine, I run my classroom well.” We did a lot of research over the course of a year with hundreds of students, scores of faculty, focus groups, and contextual design.

We actually did some exercises where we watched students studying over their shoulder in a non-intrusive way to the best of our ability and tried to learn how they study. What we learned is there are a few things that students care about that print books weren’t making happen. One, they wanted a huge amount of feedback. It’s a generational issue. This generation of students has grown up getting a lot of feedback in everything they do, and they want that in the law school classroom.

The second thing they wanted was a lot of exercises. They hear these theoretical ideas and they wanted a chance to put it into action.

The third thing was portability. So exactly to your point, lugging books, “uphill, both ways,” is a very real issue. Law school books are huge and carrying five of them was difficult. It meant they couldn’t take them when they went on vacation, or when they’re on the subway. So there were places where they could study and places where they couldn’t study. We designed Casebook Connect to solve all of those problems, and I think to a large extent, it has.

Elie: It looks particularly powerful when the professor is involved.

Vikram: You’re absolutely right, 100 percent right. CasebookConnect.com is useful for students on their own and it helps them learn, but it was designed as a tool for classrooms, not as replacement for classrooms. It was designed as something to facilitate professors. Professors can go in, annotate in the margins, add links to scholarship, put their own notes and highlights to share with students . . . students can actually do that as well to share with each other. It’s very much an interactive tool. You said earlier that CasebookConnect.com digitizes books, and our mission was to make sure that we did more than that. We did more than take the books and put them online. We wanted the reading experience — the consumption experience online — to be much more powerful than a print book, and I am very confident that it is. Not only do we have all these interactive elements to the online book, we’ve got a study center with thousands of questions and exercises that are tightly integrated with the material in the book, so the student reads the book and can understand further what is going on. We’ve got news feeds and features that allow them to share briefs and notes with each other.

Elie: Let’s get to Leading Edge, because this is a conference that you guys run that’s really helping professors share the best innovative practices among themselves.

Vikram: Yes. Leading Edge is one of our favorite things to do. It’s a conference we host every July, the week after the 4th of July, in a cabin in the woods of Illinois. We invite about 30 of the leading movers and shakers, thinkers, and innovators across the entire law school world in America and to some extent around the world. It’s an unconference. What that means is — and it’s a little scary, but it works — what it means is we don’t give them an agenda in advance. We don’t say at 9 o’clock we’ll be talking about this, and at 10 o’clock we’ll be talking about this. We just get together the brightest people we can find in a room, we give them an empty agenda, and for the first hour of the conference we say, “Create your agenda.” They get together and they talk, steam comes out of their heads, and they figure out what they have mutual passions in, and then they build a three-day agenda within an hour. They’ve sketched out 18–20 sessions that they want to cover, and then they run that conference. So it’s a conference that we host and watch, but that they run.

Then what happens is ideas, brainstorming, and collaborations. It’s not only that super interesting things are talked about and that people come up with answers to problems that they’ve been wrestling with for years, but also, they meet people that they are going to collaborate with in the future after they leave the conference.

Elie: What kind of issues have they been facing?

Vikram: There are many things that are talked about in the conference, but I really think that it all boils down to student success, which is the same thing that drives us at Wolters Kluwer. What gets us out of bed in the morning is figuring out: “How can we help more law students succeed?” I think they worry about the same thing. You’ve seen the bar passage rates. You know the number of students who take out loans, go to law school, and then are unable to get jobs. I think the law professors and the deans of these law schools care about this. It’s not a happy situation for them. They’re happy for the students who succeed, but they really want to figure out ways to get all of their students to graduate, pass the bar, and get a job, and we’re a long way from that.

So I think they think a lot about how can we change the curriculum, maybe in profound ways. What kinds of new tools can we use? How do we change our admittance practices? How do we create success tracks to help the struggling students succeed better? What are the predictors of bar passage success? How can we bring design thinking from architectural schools into law schools? How can we work with computer science departments at our school to teach students AI and big data so that they can be prepared to practice in those areas? I think there is a broad set of questions that all boil down to: “How can we make sure that 100 percent of our students succeed?”

Elie: That’s as good a place as any to end it. Thanks for your time.

Law Students Are Already Using Legal Technology To Live In The Future [Sponsored] republished via Above the Law

[cryptswahili]

BEST TECH STORIES of 2019 (so far)

Hello Curious Hacker,

The internet has so many best of 2018 articles right now… At Hacker Noon, we’re forward thinking. Below are the best 27 stories of the year 2019 (so far).

But first, three short updates from around the Hacker Noon HQ:

Our equity crowdfund campaign is up to $986k from 893 people. The Reg CF maximum raise is $1.07M. Invest before it’s too over.

We’ll be media partner at Blockchain Connect Conference: Academic 2019 @ San Francisco Marriott tomorrow (Jan 11th), with Trent Lapinski recording podcasts and Derek Bernard recording video. A few tickets are still available, come meet the team.

Longtime Hacker Noon contributor Febin John James published a new book: “Ripple Quick Start Guide: Get started with XRP and development applications on Ripple’s blockchain” via another long timer Hacker Noon contributor Packt_Pub, and it included this really kind acknowledgement. Thanks Febin! We bought your book too :-)

And now onto the good stuff: THE 27 BEST TECH STORIES OF 2019 (so far):

CRYPTO WINTER

Surviving Crypto Winter — Part One: Mattereum and the Internet of Agreements by Daniel Jeffries and Carly E. Howard, JD, LLM. Time to build. From the ashes of competition, rises the phoenix. As winter hits, good projects buckle down and get to work building real technology that works in the real world. And that’s what this new series of articles is all about: Who will survive the crypto winter? I’m going to dig deep and profile companies with the best shot at surviving the bust and building something we can’t imagine living without in the coming years.

Surviving Crypto Winter — Part Two: Blockstack and the Great Pendulum of History by Daniel Jeffries. AI went through two wintersand it took 50 years for anyone to reap rewards like self-driving cars. The Internet looked like a joke for the first twenty years. 3D printing is still in a winter, after early hopes of a printer in every house failed to materialize without the reason to have one yet. And of course, the crypto market suffered a spectacular crash in 2018, as the markets lost 80% or more of their value over a long slow slide to despair. The winds of crypto winter are blowing furiously and the storm is taking many victims already. In this series, I cover who stands the best chance of rising from the freezing cold and thriving when spring comes again.

2019 Developments

Best Coding Languages to Learn in 2019 by Rafi Zikavashvili. In an ideal world, your choice of programming language shouldn’t matter. Most of the popular languages share the same basic concepts, to the untrained eye most of them look the same, and let you achieve more or less the same outcome. From a developer’s perspective, a programming language is a tool and choosing the right one will influence one’s career, economic prospects, and future happiness. This article looks at five of the most popular programming languages, examines their individual and relative merits, and recommends which ones you should learn in 2019.

Major Programming Trends to Prepare for in 2019 by Constantin. Trend #1: Could Python Catch up to Java? If you look at the chart above, you’ll see that Python is already the third most popular programming language in the world. According to Stack Overflow, it surpassed C# in popularity in 2018 and PHP in 2017. But Python only recently achieved this status.

Useful Vim tricks for 2019 by Cláudio Ribeiro. Vim has a steep learning curve, let’s not try to cover it. But once you start getting the nuances of it you start discovering that Vim is full of time-saving tricks. That’s what we’re going to cover in this article. I’ve scoured the internet for Vim tricks. Some of them come from different websites, twitter posts and some of them are my own. Either way, some of these might be useful to improve your workflow in 2019.

What if

… we could verify npm packages? by Steve Konves. An npm package is just tarball of files. The fact is that all package managers (Npm, Nuget, Maven, etc) just distribute tarballs or zip files or some other bundle of content. Any responsible developer is going to keep their code in source control; however, this code may or may not be the only thing in the package. For compiled languages like Java or .Net, packages contain build artifacts, not source code. Especially if the build output is obfuscated, it is difficult if not impossible to casually discover security flaws in the package contents. Javascript is a bit different in that many simple packages are simply tarballs of unmodified source code. However, Typescript requires a transpilation step any many other non-Typescrpt codebases include some form of bundling or minification process before an npm package is created. Security concerns are exacerbated but the fact that minified code is hard to read.

Making Career Moves

How I Got Multiple Software Engineer Job Offers When Switching from Another Industry by Weihe Wang. Failure is the mother of success. I failed onsite interviews 4 times before getting my first offer. Sometimes you solved all problems brilliantly but failed the interview; while sometimes you struggled in one or two rounds but succeed in the end. There is an uncontrollable factor called luck that might be pivotal. It is frustrated to be rejected after an onsite interview, but don’t lose confidence and keep applying to other companies.

PODCASTS

Cowen, Andreessen, and Horowitz: Annotated by Arnold Kling. The view from 1995: Marc Andreessen and bhorowitz first collaborated in 1995, when Horowitz left an established, successful company, Lotus Notes, to work with Andreessen at a high-flying startup, Netscape. Andreessen points out that the big issue dividing the tech world was whether or not the Internet was going to actually solve the problem of connecting the world’s computers. As late as 1995, there were still many major companies that were working on technology that would be valuable if and only if the Internet did not work. That was a bad bet.

Hacking The Self with Nick Seneca Jankel & Trent Lapinski. “What is purpose? Well, purpose is like love in action. It is that love and kindness that comes out into I’m going to take on this community issue, I’m going to take on a bigger social problem then I was before. Until we can access purpose within, and keep it stable within us, that control and protect mode of a monkey will keep going ‘forget the purpose, lets make another million, that would be really cool, then we’ll be loved’.” Listen on iTunes or Google Play

Traction

24 Experts Weigh In: How Do You Get Traffic Without Budget? by Kirill Shilov. In my own personal experience, the best way to come up with new solutions is to find experts who have already achieved success in the same field as you and simply improve or repeat what they did. So I went ahead and asked experts from different fields about what they would do if they could start from scratch in 2019. And they answered!

Venture Capital

The Warning Label That Should Come With Venture Capital by Founder Collective.

The 200 Black Women in Tech to Follow On Twitter List by Jay Jay Ghatt. Why Black Women? Since the first list was published three years ago, I’ve been asked why I only featured women on this list when the tech ecosystem is not inclusive of black men as well. My answer: the list of 200 Black Women in Tech to Follow on Twitter was created out of a need to fill a specific and articulated void after I learned that Black Women were less than 1% of StartUp Founders receiving VC Capital (less than .02%), and in essence were located at the bottom of the totem pole and represented the least, much less than black men, white women, Asian American women and other marginalized groups. Not only did this group not receive funding, it was the least represented on the staffs of tech companies and virtually absent on other “who to follow” lists in tech. Out of exclusion comes a solution. I wanted all to know that we’re here too and to make it easier to “find us”, offer a list of the group least represented to draw from so that could not longer be an excuse as to why we were not included.

Hmm… the internet actually works for…

Who’s Really Behind the World’s Most Popular Free VPNs? by William Chalk. Over half (59%) of the apps studied ultimately have Chinese ownership or are based in China, despite its strict ban on VPNs and its notorious internet surveillance regime. This raises questions about why these companies — which have such large international user bases — have been allowed to continue operating. The Chinese-owned VPNs have been downloaded by users in the US, UK, Latin America, Middle East, and Canada. Three of the apps — TurboVPN, ProxyMaster and SnapVPN — were found to have linked ownership. In their privacy policy, they note: “Our business may require us to transfer your personal data to countries outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”), including to countries such as the People’s Republic of China or Singapore.”

More Government Imagery

See people’s faces from miles away in the 195 gigapixel photo of Shanghai. by Ben Longstaff. As an engineer this is amazing, as a citizen the privacy implications are terrifying. Your average smartphone camera is around 12 megapixels. This image of Shanghai is 195 gigapixels. One megapixel equals one million pixels, a gigapixel equals one billion pixels. Put another way, this image is 16,250 times larger than the image you can take with your smart phone. Let’s see what that feels like through the BigPixel viewer looking at the roof top of a building a few miles away.

How to Download Live Images From Government Weather Satellites by Alex Wulff. Using nothing but your computer, some software, and a $20 radio dongle you can receive transmissions from NOAA weather satellites in the sky overhead. This is an incredibly exciting project that’s easy to do but produces great images. Think about it — you can receive images from a satellite almost 1000KM straight above you!

Listing Infinity

Infinite Data Structures In JavaScript by Francis Stokes. In the real world we deal with “infinite” ideas all the time. All the positive numbers is an example of an infinite concept we wouldn’t bat an eye at. But typically when we are programming we have to think of these infiniteconcepts in a finite way. You can’t have an Array of all the positive numbers (at least not in JavaScript!). What I want to introduce in this article is the idea of an Infinite List data structure, which can represent some never ending sequence, and let’s us use common operations like map and filter to modify and create new sequences.

You Know the Value of Patterns

Complicated patterns aren’t always that complicated. Usually it’s the “simple” ones that bite you. by Patrick Lee Scott. Staring at the maze of interconnected passageways of the microservice system, I immediately recognized the problems. I was sitting with a new client doing a review of their system. This was the first time they were showing me the code which was described as “very interesting” and “definitely one of the most complex I’ve worked on!” with excitement. I shuttered a bit. I thought about my ironically misquoted t-shirt with a picture of Albert Einstein.“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex… It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.” — E. F. Schumacher.

Necessary Comparison of Bitcoin to the Weather

Bitcoin: The Gathering Storm. How Thunderstorm Dynamics Are Similar To Bitcoin Market Cycles by Charlie Shrem. On a typical summer day in Florida, the sun rises and begins to heat the ground. This solar heating is transferred into the lowest part of the atmosphere near the surface, essentially the air near the ground begins to gain energy and buoyancy. This can be compared to how Bitcoin adoption increases, such as when thousands of Bitcoin ATMs are deployed and stores begin to accept Bitcoin, which pumps energy into the Bitcoin system.

Necessary Comparison of Bitcoin to Light Itself

The Bitcoin Light Bulb Moment by Beautyon. This is the central problem with the state interfering with technology; no one can predict the future. Now that the law is in force, we are in a situation where capital has been wasted and misdirected, resources wasted and misdirected and depending on the state of the decommissioning of the incandescent bulb lines, no cost less way back to the manufacturing of incandescent light bulbs. The state, by its nature, is incompetent. They cannot predict the future and they are not omniscient. In order to be able to legislate effectively, especially where technology is concerned, they would need to be omniscient, with perfect knowledge of every piece and field of ongoing research and technology, and the potential of each piece and field of research and technology.

About Your Health

Eat Fat, Get Thin? A Physician’s Approach to Reinventing Your Health in 21 Days by Jordan “J” Gross. I tested the strategies presented in Dr. Mark Hyman’s New York Times best-selling book, and here is how it went… My friends have called me the human guinea pig. I am a test mouse in a lab full of endless possibilities. I have gone seven days with only eating Chipotle, I have done a full year with no McDonald’s, I have talked to a new person every day for the last few years, and I have even gone a full month without going to the gym (that one was the hardest for me)… the self-experimental journey I embarked upon recently was actually not so much out of curiosity and adventure, but rather, it was out of necessity.

About Those Other Coins

“When Altseason?” — How to Time the Most Profitable Period in the Cryptocurrency Market. by Rekt Capital. Altseason, a shorthand for Altcoin Season, is the time of the year when the majority of the people in the cryptocurrency market develop a very positive sentiment about Altcoins. This translates into exponential gains across Altcoins (i.e. Alternative coins to Bitcoin). In the past, Altcoins have enjoyed immense gains during Altseasons. Most notably in December 2017 which saw most (if not all) Altcoins gained their initial market valuation many times over during a period of a few weeks of constant, almost uninterrupted uptrends.

About Those Other Tokens…

STO Market Outlook 2019 by Tatiana Koffman. 2018 will be remembered as having paved the way for a new generation of security tokens. Issuers and investors continue to remain curious about the benefits of tokenization such as increased liquidity, fractional ownership, decreased issuance costs, innovative structures and greater pricing efficiency. After conducting an independent study of 130+ STOs currently on the market, the following are some trends forming for 2019.

ETHEREUM

2.0 — The Road To Constantinople And Beyond by Vince Tabora. The next system wide upgrade for the Ethereum network called Constantinople will be implemented in 2019 (originally set for 2018). It is also called as “Ethereum 2.0” or the “New Ethereum”, software version 3.5, part of the release called Metropolis. There is a lot on the line with the success of the Ethereum project, and these are the upgrades to scale the network. The Constantinople upgrade is scheduled for block #7080000. There will actually be three forks in the beginning of 2019 and this includes Constantinople. The two other forks are “hard forks”, meaning they will create a new cryptocurrency. These are Classic Vision and Ethereum Nowa. ETH holders should get an equivalent of those coins in their digital wallet after the fork, if supported by the wallet or digital exchange.

DATA, DATA, DATA

Interview with Data Scientist at kaggle: Dr. Rachael Tatman by Sanyam Bhutani (check out his whole series on machine learning heroes). Dr. Rachael Tatman: As for technical speaking, the best two pieces of advice I can give you are, first, to practice as much as possible. Ask if you can give talks at local events or to relevant clubs. The more talks you give the less nerve-wracking they are and the more you learn what is effective for you. Practice is doubly important when you’re prepping a talk. I usually try to run through the talk at least twice a day in the week leading up to it, making little adjustments when I come across awkward places. Of course, I don’t do that with live streams. I pretty much treat livestreams like technical interviews; it doesn’t matter if I make mistakes so long as I’m telling you what I’m thinking so you can follow my thought processes. My second piece of advice is to be as specific as possible. One of my personal pet peeves are talks that are about how “data science is revolutionizing something” but that is super vague. I want information I can actually apply! If you built a model that does X, talk about why X is important, how you built the model, what makes your model different from other models and how it performed in various situations. Tell me about what specifically you did that didn’t work so I know not to try it. Think about what you wanted to know about whatever you’re talking about a year ago and then tell me those things.

A Last Thought About Diversification

Why Should Everyone Invest In 2019 (Attention, Engineers) by Rafael Belchior, who also wrote the definitive productivity post of the modern era: Top 1,337 Productivity Tips For 2019, Or Any Other Year. As we have just started 2019, 🎉 we have another perfect opportunity to review our lives, opportunities, values, and expectations.

Source: https://dilbert.com/strip/2018-12-31

Despite being a tech addict (DevOps, Blockchain), my path presented me several ways of approaching life and the knowledge I have gained. At some point, I noticed that there is something that professors at my university are not teaching that would turn us into more independent persons. Money. In particular, I became very interested in the investments world, as it allows you to generate money using the money. If you don’t invest your money, it will never increase. You will likely spend, give it away or save it (and possibly spend it in a short-term wish). Now, you could be asking yourself: Why should we care about investments and money? What are the opportunities? Shouldn’t we just save money? How to start well? How to avoid being scammed by false gurus? What is the big picture that we should be aware? Shouldn’t we limit ourselves to the observation of the secret mysteries of this beautiful universe? 🌌

Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted.

Kind Regards,

David Smooke

P.S. We built 13 new collections this week to make easier to find great stories about: BioHacking, Bitcoin ETF, Blockchain Development, Coding, Cryptoeconomics, EOS, Learning to Code, Hacks, Ripple (XRP), Security Tokens, Tech Economics, & Women in Tech.

P.P.S. Our equity crowdfund campaign is up to $986k from 893 people. The Reg CF maximum raise is $1.07M. Invest before it’s too late.

BEST TECH STORIES of 2019 (so far) was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[joaopintooo]

Annotated bibliography

http://calle35.com/robert-walker-c/ 

Colour is Power - Hardcover (book)  Robert Walker, 9 September 2002.

The book “Colour is Power” was made by Robert Walker who was born in‍‍ ‍Montreal, where he‍ ‍studied painting at‍‍ ‍Sir George Williams University. Which later developed an interest in‍‍ ‍street photography, moving to‍ ‍New York City in‍‍ ‍1978.

Robert published four books, three of them with the same name “Colour is Power” and the other called “New York Inside Out” whereupon all of them had been made of photographies from the big city of New York.

I inspired myself in this book for my work using a lot of images from it for my own work, I chose them carefully first then I scanned them and used for my collages. I found this book really interesting in the way that is made because the whole book is made of photography prints without descriptions, just separated in chapters with different colours distinguishing different parts of the city which made it easier to choose where to take images from for my work.

The name “Colour is Power” is really suitable for the book because all the photographs are full of colour, that was a big factor me to choose this book in order to put colour in my work and make the contrast with the monotone world we would have if there were only robots. I used pictures as the billboard I have in my practical work because the colour was strong and vivid, in my work, the billboard has an advert from Coca-Cola with a women with lipstick and a shape of Coca-Cola bottle in her mouth, the colour of her skin is really vivid which influenced me to use it.

Another factor the attracted me in this book was the city environment that contains loads of affairs I could use for my practice as clocks, people, cars, buses among others. The billboards and advertisements in the metropolitan photos in Robert Walker's book inspired me to create my piece in the way they influence people to what they are selling so I used it as if they were selling an Artificial Intelligence world.

The last factor that made me choose this book to take pictures from it and influenced me on my work is the technology all around the city as radio satellites and cellphones that are all connected and relates with my theme of the internet.

The only thing I don’t like about this book is that I would like some descriptions for some of the images to understand the photograph ideas and why he choose to take the picture there at that moment, it would be nice as well to have a contrast from the centre city to the suburbs but overall I was impressed with this book and its quality.

In conclusion I used this book more as a source of resources to make my collages, I took around thirty images from it and printed them in colors and black and white to be able to make a mix and show a contrast between human world (colour) and robot world (dark), the biggest inspiration this book gave me was in colourway because of it strong colours as I said before.

Words: 524

http://sagg.info/event/werner-herzog-lo-and-behold-reveries-of-the-connected-world/  By: ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (documentary) Werner Herzog 27 of October 2016. 98min

"Lo and Behold” is an American documentary film directed by Werner Herzog where he considers the existential impact of Artificial Intelligence, Internet, Robotics, The internet of things and impact on human life.

This documentary starts in California LA where the internet was born where Leonard Kleinrock, internet pioneer from UCLA shows us the room where was created the first computer and the first computer. The documentary follows on into the explanation of the creation and development of the internet along it first years. The name “Lo” from the documentary comes from the firsts word passed from a computer to the other will trying to type log in the computer crashed after "L O” so they named the documentary “Lo and Behold” like what comes after that.

This is divided into ten chapters about different types of technology but the ones I focus myself for my work was the internet of things, the robots and the AI.

About the internet of things Sebastian Thrun gives an interview about the self-driving car where he explains that there is already cars that can drive themselves, a question is asked that is, “what if there is an accident, who do you blame?”, in which Sebastian answered that if an accident happens all cars will be aware of it because it automatically passes the information for all cars, even car not yet “born” and the same type of accident won’t happened again. The car is oriented by dots on GPS transmitted by WiFi showing where people, cars and points of energy are so it doesn’t crash.

In the VIII Chapter Danny Hillis, Computer Scientist comments in the topic of Artificial Intelligence that it may follow the will of people that establish its utility function, in other words, people that program their optimisation options.

That means that AI if programmed by the wrong person can cause a lot of damage, machines are faster our brains.

Sebastian Thrun says in his interview, “We are looking for machines to make things for us but we are changing our moral and what means to be human”. What he means with this is that if we make a robot human, the human word loses value because machines should be just machines and not have feelings or consciousness, we shouldn’t play god.

Danny Hills still ads a comment, “ Computers are the worst enemy of deep critical thinking, we use machines to replace examination of the things they are observing, they don’t understand what they are looking at, they depend on the internet to tell them, they look at the numbers instead of ideas, they fail to understand concepts.” Which means if there is a variable the “computer” is not programmed with it may crash or fail in the service.

With this documentary I was able to see that there are more people worried about AI, and I could understand better the technology development that is so fast that is scary, Sebastian Thrun said something that I found interesting, "if machines develop love for each one probably a dishwasher could fall in love with the washing machine and they would be dating instead of cleaning plates or clothes and I would be angry." And I agree, machines are made to facilitate our life and not for loving each other, they don’t need emotions.

Words: 527

http://calle35.com/robert-walker-c/

Ex Machina (feature film) Alex Garland. 21 of January of 2015. 108min.

“Ex Machina” is a movie directed by Alex Garland with the participation of the main actors Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander and Oscar Isaac.

In the course of the movie, we get to know the code programmer called Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) who won the opportunity to meet the first intelligent robot called Ava. Called meets Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), CEO of the company which is creating the Artificial Intelligence in secret due to the information be very valuable and he wants Caleb to perform the “Turing Test”.

This test is, in “standard interpretation” when the interrogated (Caleb), is given a task which resembles on trying to determine which Ava, in this case, is recognised as a computer or human with some given questions. Usually there is a human and a computer (robot) to compare both answers but in this case, Caleb only met Ava and he could tell it was a robot because of the body full of machinery but the dialogue was like a human. In order to pass the test, the computer must be recognised as human.

The house where Caleb is being hosted looks like a house from the future covered in tech with the wall lined with electricity cables and top automatic security, the doors are open by cards and when the electricity goes off the house gets into lockdown for precaution that no one is able to get inside when that happens.

Caleb has several sessions to test Ava where he is monitored by Nathan that wants to understand if Ava is genuinely capable of thought and consciousness and whether he can relate to Ava despite knowing she is artificial. Along with their sessions, they begin showing feelings for each other and especially the desire of experience the outside world together and with this Ava begins to trigger to power outages that deactivate the surveillance system so that they can talk in private and Ava tells Caleb how bad and lier Nathan is. Caleb starts to be more aware of Nathan and in order of being in love with Ava, when he finds out that Ava is just one more robot prototype and may be turned off after the test, he gets upset and during a power cut in a session with Ava he plans to get Nathan drunk and escape with her looking Nathan inside the house by changing the system and at 10 am Ava would perform a power cut to run.

The plan doesn't go well but at 10 am the doors open with the power cut and Ava escapes, kills Nathan and leaves Caleb lockdown in the house which shows that Ava managed to fake emotions and play with a human emotion in order to escape and still killed her creator.

In this movie I noticed how dangerous might be to create a robot with emotions and intelligence able to lie , that's the things that distinguish us from them and in the movie we can see a robot deceiving and killing a human just to escape and how they can make people fall in love with them if needed and I relate my work to the notion of afraid of artificial intelligence and how they may harm the human being. They can be used as weapons, spies everything if we don't notice it is a robot so it would be extremly dangerous in my opinion and after watching this movie I agree even more.

Words: 549

Ex Machina (feature film) Alex Garland. 21 of January of 2015. 108min.

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (documentary) Werner Herzog 27 of October 2016. 98min

Colour is Power - Hardcover (book)  Robert Walker, 9 September 2002.