Github Repository Activity

This Week in Web #26

Sixty Years of AI

It was the summer of 1956 when a team of computer scientists convened at Dartmouth college for the first summit on artificial intelligence. Since then the predictions made at the conference (which was based on the assumption that a handful of researchers could crack the problem with a few years of work), have come tantalizingly close to true, if much longer than originally expected.

The advent of virtual humans is nearly upon us. There will invariably be other missteps on par with or beyond Microsoft Tay, who took after Twitter users that taught the bot to be racist and inflammatory in just one day. Pretty soon, AI will be coming for my job as well, not just taking over trucking with self-driving vehicles, but building websites better and faster than I can for many use cases.

The next six years will surely bring more advancement in this excitingly terrifying field than the past sixty. Perhaps I can use it to write newsletters for me by then?


Facebook to Change News Feed to Focus on Friends and Family

Mike Isaac and Sydney Ember, New York Times

First Facebook reels in every major news company with Instant Articles and the higher traffic numbers that come from sharing articles in their walled garden. After everyone was well and hooked, Facebook slowly started ratcheting back the reach of posts made by businesses and pages, and continued to make it harder to interact with people who expressly choose to consume your content without paying for the privilege.

Facebook has just updated their News Feed update blog to announce that they want to make sure that you never miss stories from your friends and family, by pushing them higher on the news feed. That’s a great concept, but in practice, it means an even harder time for groups and pages who have fans to share their content. The move means that even more companies will have to make the switch to live video, as well as encourage their fans to share content, as opposed to just interacting with it on their own pages.

Facebook already has a problem with blocking content that may not be contentious for a variety of reasons, despite what their own guidelines say. This news should be a reminder that you cede all control when you enter someone else’s platform, as many organizations who tie their fortunes to Facebook feeds find.


Researchers Sue the Government Over Computer Hacking Law

Kim Zetter, Wired

Speaking of seeing things online, researchers and First Look Media have filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department in an attempt to invalidate parts of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that they believe violates both the first and fifth amendments. The researchers believe that the need to create fake profiles on websites to investigate things such as racial bias among AirBNB hosts, or even worse, in criminal profiling and bail setting.

It is a necessary step, as with ombudsmen and public institutions, to allow the study of the effect of increasingly important algorithms and data systems on our lives. The most insidious biases are those invisible ones that function by the fact that we cannot notice their existence.


Chatbot lawyer overturns 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York

Samuel Gibbs, The Guardian

At 19 I was coding, but I wasn’t creating anything that was allowing over a quarter million people to contest parking tickets, with a 64% success rate and $4 million in saved fines. That’s what self-taught coder Joshua Browder has done, with his chatbot service DoNotPay, that currently works in NYC and London, with plans to expand to other cities.


Github Repository Activity
Github Repository Activity Over Time

The heartbeat of open source projects can be heard with GitHub data

Steven Max Patterson, Network World

Github posted on their blog last week about how popular Open Source projects are managed and contributed to on the platform. It makes sense that comments and pull requests grow in comparison to commits, as more popularity for a project leads to more group decision making, and less direct oversight by one individual on updates.


Apple gets patent to disable cell cameras at concerts, and it’s super evil

Apple’s been working on this for years, and it’s not terrible at all. I mean, when besides concerts would anyone ever want to disable recording equipment on all cellphones in a given area? Heck, why would we ever want to allow it at concerts either, let alone the many places that this technology would very definitely be abused?

This story was submitted by @lmelegari. If you’ve got any cool net scoops, send them over!


Posted

in