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"decentralised" entries
Offline First, Winograd Schemata, Jailbreaking Nest for Privacy, and Decentralised Web Cache
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Offline First is the New Mobile First — Luke Wroblewski’s notes from John Allsopp’s talk about “Breaking Development” in Nashville. Offline technologies don’t just give us sites that work offline, they improve performance, and security by minimizing the need for cookies, http, and file uploads. It also opens up new possibilities for better user experiences.
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Winograd Schemas as Alternative to Turing Test (IEEE) — specially constructed sentences that are surface ambiguous and require deeper knowledge of the world to disambiguate, e.g. “Jim comforted Kevin because he was so upset. Who was upset?”. Our WS [Winograd schemas] challenge does not allow a subject to hide behind a smokescreen of verbal tricks, playfulness, or canned responses. Assuming a subject is willing to take a WS test at all, much will be learned quite unambiguously about the subject in a few minutes. (that last from the paper on the subject)
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Reclaiming Your Nest (Forbes) — Like so many connected devices, Nest devices regularly report back to the Nest mothership with usage data. Over a month-long period, the researchers’ device sent 32 MB worth of information to Nest, including temperature data, at-rest settings, and self-entered information about the home, such as how big it is and the year it was built. “The Nest doesn’t give us an option to turn that off or on. They say they’re not going to use that data or share it with Google, but why don’t they give the option to turn it off?” says Jin. Jailbreak your Nest (technique to be discussed at Black Hat), and install less chatty software. Loose Lips Sink Thermostats.
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SyncNet — decentralised browser: don’t just pull pages from the source, but also fetch from distributed cache (implemented with BitTorrent Sync).
Neglected ML, Crowdfunded Recognition, Debating Watson, and Versioned p2p File System
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Neglected Machine Learning Ideas — Perhaps my list is a “send me review articles and book suggestions” cry for help, but perhaps it is useful to others as an overview of neat things.
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First Crowdfunded Book on Booker Shortlist — Booker excludes self-published works, but “The Wake” was through Unbound, a Threadless-style “if we hit this limit, the book is printed and you have bought a copy” site.
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Watson Can Debate Its Opponents (io9) — Speaking in nearly perfect English, Watson/The Debater replied: “Scanned approximately 4 million Wikipedia articles, returning ten most relevant articles. Scanned all 3,000 sentences in top ten articles. Detected sentences which contain candidate claims. Identified borders of candidate claims. Assessed pro and con polarity of candidate claims. Constructed demo speech with top claim predictions. Ready to deliver.”
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ipfs — a global, versioned, peer-to-peer file system. It combines good ideas from Git, BitTorrent, Kademlia, and SFS. You can think of it like a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging Git objects, making up the web. IPFS provides an interface much simpler than HTTP, but has permanence built in.. (via Sourcegraph)