Billionaire Masayoshi Son–not Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg–has the most audacious vision for an AI-powered utopia where machines control how we live. And he’s spending hundreds of billions of dollars to realize it. Are you ready to live in Masa World? It’s a bright September morning in San Carlos, California, and Masayoshi Son, … Continue reading The most powerful person in Silicon Valley
Author: Eric
Inside Facebook’s ‘cult-like’ workplace, where dissent is discouraged and employees pretend to be happy all the time
More than a dozen former Facebook employees detailed how the company's leadership and its performance review system has created a culture where any dissent is discouraged. Employees say Facebook's stack ranking performance review system drives employees to push out products and features that drive user engagement without fully considering potential long-term negative impacts on user … Continue reading Inside Facebook’s ‘cult-like’ workplace, where dissent is discouraged and employees pretend to be happy all the time
Python Decorators
In short, a decorator takes in a function, adds some functionality and returns it. This feature in Python is very similar to what is in Ruby. You open up a class and add feature to it - monkey patching. Python has an interesting feature called decorators to add functionality to an existing code. This is … Continue reading Python Decorators
*args and **kwargs in Python
In Python, there are two special symbols that you can use when defining functions to allow them to take in a variable number of arguments. The syntax is to use the symbol * to take in a variable number of arguments; by convention, it is often used with the word args. What *args allows you … Continue reading *args and **kwargs in Python
Why It’s Hard to Escape Amazon’s Long Reach
In 1994, soon after Jeff Bezos incorporated what would become Amazon, the entrepreneur briefly contemplated changing the company’s name. The nascent firm had been dubbed “Cadabra,” but Bezos wanted a less playful, more accurate alternative: “Relentless.” (Relentless.com redirects to Amazon.com to this day.) Twenty-four years later, perhaps no adjective better describes Bezos’ empire than the … Continue reading Why It’s Hard to Escape Amazon’s Long Reach
Captcha if you can: how you’ve been training AI for years without realising it
All those little visual puzzles add up to AI advances Congratulations are in order. You, yes you, dear reader, have been part of something incredible. Thanks to your hard work, millions of books containing pretty much the sum-total of human knowledge have been successfully digitised, saving their texts for future generations. All because of you. … Continue reading Captcha if you can: how you’ve been training AI for years without realising it
How I Quit Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon
A reflection on my month without Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, plus a how-to guide if you want to quit the biggest companies in tech. It was just before closing time at a Verizon store in Bushwick, New York last May when I burst through the door, sweaty and exasperated. I had just sprinted—okay … Continue reading How I Quit Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon
