From Schneier on Security
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration
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B. Schneier| February 29, 2024
One of the most common “data type” in programming is the text string. When programmers think of a string, they imagine that they are dealing with a list or an array...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | October 20, 2020 at 11:21 AM
Computer vision (i.e., artificial intelligence) and cameras are used in London to monitor citizens with respect to social distancing. A fecal transplant from old...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | October 17, 2020 at 10:59 AM
In most programming languages, the value 0.1 + 0.2 differs from 0.3. Let us try it out in Node (JavaScript): > 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 false Yet 1 + 2 is equal to 3. Why...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | October 9, 2020 at 08:35 PM
The mortality rate for kids under five have fallen by 60% since 1990. Samsung new storage drives are both affordable and really fast (up to 7GB/s). Alzheimer’sContinue...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | October 3, 2020 at 12:10 PM
Integers in programming languages have a valid range but arithmetic operations can result in values that exceed such ranges. For example, adding two large integers...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | September 23, 2020 at 02:23 PM
A large city dating back 4,300 years has been discovered in China. It predates the Chinese civilization. At its center was a wide pyramid supporting a 20-acre palace...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | September 19, 2020 at 01:00 PM
Programmers often need to convert a string into a floating-point numbers. For example, you might get the string “3.1416” and you would like to get the resulting...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | September 10, 2020 at 02:37 PM
It is often believed that learning is a simple matter of collecting answers and replies. I suspect that “learn mechanistically how to answer the questions” isContinue...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | September 7, 2020 at 12:08 PM
Single cells are able to navigate complex mazes. E.g., it works with mouse pancreatic cancer cells. Body builders and athletes sometimes take a supplement called...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | September 5, 2020 at 12:10 PM
A standard trick in programming is to use “sentinel values”. These are special values that represent metadata efficiently. The C language represents strings asContinue...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | September 2, 2020 at 10:11 PM
In children, higher video game time is positively associated with cognition (i.e., kids who play more video games are smarter). Note that it does not follow that...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | August 29, 2020 at 11:47 AM
The BBC reports that diversity and anti-bias training is of little use and may even be counterproductive if the goal is reduce biases: “The effect of bias training...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | August 9, 2020 at 11:24 AM
I started programming professionally when Java came out and right about when C++ was the “hot new thing”. Following the then-current fashion, I looked down at C...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | August 8, 2020 at 02:46 PM
In Japan, a large dam is being constructed almost entirely by robots. Naked mole rats are mammals that do not age in the sense that their fitness and mortalityContinue...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | August 1, 2020 at 10:24 AM
I was taught that human beings only arrived to America recently (15,000 years ago). It turns out that it is wrong. There were human beings in America 30,000 years...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | July 25, 2020 at 11:43 AM
When processing strings, it is tempting to view them as arrays of characters (or bytes) and to process them as such. Suppose that you would like to determine whether...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | July 21, 2020 at 02:50 PM
I was given a puzzle recently. Someone was parsing JSON files downloaded from the network from a bioinformatics URI. One JSON library was twice as fast at the other...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | July 17, 2020 at 04:48 PM
For high-performance software, it is sometimes needed to use different functions, depending on what the hardware supports. You might write different functions,Continue...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | July 16, 2020 at 08:36 PM
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts said Richard Feynman. Feynman had a Nobel prize in physics. He was a remarquable educator: his lecture notes are...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | July 12, 2020 at 12:22 PM
Some upcoming Mercedes cars will have augmented reality head-up displays. Intel’s new standard for high-speed cables (thunderbolt) supports 3 GB/s bandwidth. (This...Daniel Lemire From Daniel Lemire's Blog | July 11, 2020 at 11:32 AM