Ray Kurzweil: Here’s why solar will dominate energy within 12 years | KurzweilAI "Many analysts extend growth linearly from that sort of pattern, concluding we’ll see 0.5% annual growth in solar in the future, reaching 12% solar share in 20 years. But linear analysis ignores what Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns — that as new technologies get smaller and cheaper, their growth becomes exponential.
So instead of looking at year over year growth in percentage terms, Kurzweil says we should look at the rate of growth — the fact that solar market share is doubling every 2 years.If the current 2% share doubles every two years, solar should have a 100% share of the market in 12 years."
Cheery Friday App "Receive weekly book recommendations from Barbara Oakley, author of the New York Times best selling science book A Mind For Numbers, and co-creator of the world’s most popular online course “Learning How To Learn.” Download on the App store
According to Google, Brotli uses a whole new data format, which makes it incompatible with Deflate but ensures higher compression ratios. In particular, Google says, Brotli is roughly as fast as zlib when decompressing and provides a better compression ratio than LZMA and bzip2
Data Newsletter - O'Reilly Media "...Notebooks and workflow tools will continue to evolve. Jupyter Notebook is widely used by data scientists because it offers a rich architecture of elements that can be used and recomposed for a broad range of problems, including data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, and machine learning. (O’Reilly uses Jupyter Notebook as the basis for Oriole Interactive Tutorials, for example.) It’s useful for data teams because you can create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and explanatory text. And by connecting Jupyter to Spark, you can write Python code with Spark from an easy-to-use interface instead of using the Linux command line or Spark shell.
Data professionals continue to use a variety tools. Beaker notebooks support many programming languages, and there are now multiple notebooks that target the Spark community (Spark Notebook, Apache Zeppelin, and Databricks Cloud). However, not all data professionals are using notebooks: they aren't suited for managing complex data pipelines—workflow tools are better suited for that. And data engineers favor tools used by software developers. With deep learning and other new techniques entering the data science and big data communities, we anticipate that existing tools will evolve even more."
"Notebook-style development provides a more exploratory way to write code than with traditional IDEs. Notebook interfaces are comprised of a series of code blocks, called cells, which can stand alone or act in unison. The development process is one of discovery, where a developer experiments in one cell, then can continue to write code in a subsequent cell depending on results from the first. Particularly when analyzing large datasets, this conversational approach allows researchers to quickly discover patterns or other artifacts of the data."
Tesla Autopilot’s new radar technology predicts an accident caught on dashcam a second later | Electrek "...One of the main features enabled by the new radar processing capacity is the ability for the system to see ahead of the car in front of you and basically track two cars ahead on the road. The radar is able to bounce underneath or around the vehicle in front of the Tesla Model S or X and see where the driver potentially can not because the leading vehicle is obstructing the view. That’s demonstrated clearly in this real world situation on the Autobahn..."
Original video, authorisation from the owner. Essential, no one could predict the accident but the radar did and acted by emergency braking. pic.twitter.com/70MySRiHGR
"WebHooks provide a simple pub/sub model for wiring together Web APIs and services with your code. A WebHook can be used to get notified when a file has changed in Dropbox, a code change has been committed to GitHub, a payment has been initiated in PayPal, a card has been created in Trello, and much more..."
"....whether we acknowledge it or not the attention merchants have come to play an important part in setting the course of our lives and consequently the future of the human race ...
the future will be nothing more than the running total of our individual mental states
so that's why you call attention to what you want us to think about it
... our attention in a way really is all is the only currency we have to spend as human beings ...
your life really is the sum total of what you paid attention to ... a proven 3-stage technique, successfully used by religions, governments, advertisers and apparently by Trump:
Win a battle for attention (no arguments!): being outlandish, extremely forceful, looking strange
Give voice to deeply help unconscious fears or desires by reading the audience ("tell people what they want to hear")
Offer your product (or yourself) as the solution in confident way"
Some background info about Azure Notebooks:
it comes from Microsoft Python VS team, it is free,
it is running on Docker Containers on Linux.
Supports Python, R and F#, more to come.
"Performance of native, discoverability of the Web The Angular Mobile Toolkit makes it easy to build snappy Web apps that load instantly on any device, even without an internet connection. Take advantage of the searchability, shareability, and no-install-required-ability of the Web without compromise.
Automatic Progressive Web Apps Build Progressive Web Apps with ease using Angular CLI and Angular Mobile Toolkit. Plugins and libraries for App Shell, Service Worker, and Application Manifest make it easy to create installable, offline-capable, mobile-network-friendly apps in minutes."
Windows on Github "This repo contains the foundational samples that demonstrate the features of the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). These code samples are designed to run on desktop, mobile, and future devices that support the UWP."
This project is a tutorial demonstrating the capabilities of the web platform on Windows 10. The browser is a sample app built around the HTML WebView control, using primarily JavaScript to light up the user interface. Built using Visual Studio 2015, this is a JavaScript Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app.
Raspberry Pi's gorgeous Pixel desktop can now reinvigorate old PCs and Macs | PCWorld Pixel (Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight) is a Linux desktop experience based on Debian Linux... The great thing about the Pixel desktop is that it can run on almost anything—especially older hardware. To run Pixel you’ll need at least 512 Megabytes of RAM..."
Surviving The App Store by Amir Rajan [Leanpub PDF/iPad/Kindle] "Ridiculously detailed insights to "making it" in the App Store. From the creator of a minimalist text based RPG that conquered the App Store and took the #1 spot across thirteen countries. This book will help your games survive and thrive in a flooded market."
Over the five month period Android App made $12,717.
During that same time period iOS App made $57,600.
"This site is fully copied from You Might Not Need jQuery, an excellent resource for vanilla JavaScript created by @adamfschwartz and @zackbloom. But this time, we take a look at the power of modern native HTML and CSS as well as some of the syntactic sugar of Sass. Because, you might not need scripts for that task at all!"
"How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself."
Do you write and publish what you think is most newsworthy, or what will get the most attention on social media?
Do you use the format that will do the most justice to the subject (a deep, authoritative piece of research, a so called "longread"), or do you decide that it's more profitable to harvest attention with short, punchy articles that generate higher views and more advertising dollars?
Do you choose video over text, even when text would let you do a better job?"
"First you have to say what the huge problem is you’re trying to solve. You have to be able to describe it in order for it to have any chance of taking root at X.
And there has to be some articulatable, hard but potentially solvable, technology problem at the middle of it.
Once that’s true, we go down a path where instead of saying, “What’s most fun to do about this or what’s easiest to do first?” we say, “What is the most likely reason this project won’t make it?” (solution)
HTTPS is enabled by default on Azure Web Apps when running on default shared "azurewebsites.net" domain, but with custom domain one needs to add a custom SSL certificate to enable HTTPS. That feature is available to purchase for $70/year from Azure portal,
or one can use a free certificate instead. The configuration is not trivial, but it is possible
as described in the article below.
That was true until about a week ago, when Simon ingeniously packaged up ACMESharp in an Azure Site Extension called _Azure Let's Encrypt_, and published it to the Azure Site Extension gallery."
A clevel specialized solution, like IFTTT for email marketing, or like BizTalk for B2C.
Now that BizTalk features are included in Azure Logic Apps similar solution could be custom built.
"$6,999 for the 55-inch version and $19,999 for the 84-inch version ... higher than expected demand (in particular of the 84-inch version) meant the company needed to change its manufacturing capabilities. The company also hiked the price of both models by $2,000, to $8,999 and $21,999... The average Surface Hub customer is buying about 50 devices for each deployment, and the company has achieved more than 2,000 customers."
Another six will follow over the next few weeks.
Expect to hear about additional learning opportunities over the next few months.
Microsoft also is investing in a variety of technical training, tools and resources, including the Microsoft Virtual Academy, the Cloud + Enterprise University Boot Camps, and the Microsoft Professional Program, to name a few.
Make the right career choices, and you can help solve the world’s most pressing problems, as well as have a more rewarding, interesting life.
We’re here to give you the information you need to find that fulfilling, high-impact career. Our advice is all free, tailored for talented graduates, and based on five years of research alongside academics at Oxford."
"This is Amazon's grocery store of the future: no cashiers, no registers, and no lines"
"...it's designed so that shoppers will use an app, also called Amazon Go, to automatically add the products they plan to buy to a digital shopping cart; they can then walk out of the building without waiting in a checkout line.
The idea is that Amazon's machine-learning technology can automatically identify when a product is added to your cart, so you don't have to do it yourself. When you leave the store, Amazon automatically charges your Amazon account."
Next:Economy Newsletter - O'Reilly Media "If you thought Amazon would bring about the death of brick-and-mortar stores, think again; it's actually reinventing them. This week the behemoth online retailer unveiled its concept for Amazon Go, a real-life, app-enabled grocery shopping experience that obviates the need for checkout lines and cashiers. Amazon will use cameras, sensors, and machine-learning technology to identify every product you take off the shelves and leave with, automatically charging it to your Amazon account, so you can actually grab and go. The first store, in Seattle, is currently in beta, open only to Amazon employees, with plans to open to the public in early 2017." + Amazon.com: Vehicles
"Find reviews, specs, images, and more for thousands of new and classic cars, trucks, SUVs, and vans."
"Amazon has launched Lightsail, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) service to compete with companies like Digital Ocean, Linode and the multitude of Low End Box providers. The service bundles a basic Linux virtual machine with SSD storage and a bandwidth allowance."
"Smaller AWS EC2 instances have competed with VPSs for some time, and particularly those within the free tier for new users, such as the t2.micro. The main issue has been the cost of bandwidth, as a successful project can easily consume terabytes of bandwidth costing hundreds of dollars, and free tier provides only 15GB/month. The entry level $5/month Lightsail instance comes with 1TB of bandwidth, which would cost $89.91 on EC2 (or $88.65 for a free tier user)."
Having goals and plans is a very effective way to achieve progress
and experience happiness in perusing worthy ideals and goals.
There is an art and science in "right-sizing" the goals, and that can be learned.
"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized.
Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die..."
- quote from Daniel Burnham (an architect and urban planner)
That is to say it is best to have ambitious, challenging, goals.
On the other side, if a goal is too challenging, it is self-rejected and not helpful.
A good goal is one that you can believe can be achieved if you work very hard. The magic number is "4% above your current maximum ability"
There is a real science behind this, it is not just a belief.
