Daily Shaarli

All links of one day in a single page.

07/07/19

Link collection from "souvenir"

Interesting links on technology and programming.

Moreover, the shaarli showcases the use of a plugin to suggest the top 5 related links to each bookmark.

Chris Siebenmannm's blog

Blog Chris Siebenmann is a Unix sysadmin who now works at the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto.

This New ‘Fake Text’ AI Is Even More Terrifying Than Deepfakes

Fake Text uses AI to analyze text and then generate incredibly detailed and realistic written responses to it, giving the impression that an exchange between humans is taking place. The AI analyses text patterns to put together disturbingly lucid text, typified by this Reddit thread.

Launched by leading global AI research lab OpenAI, Fake Text is already recognized as so potentially dangerous that even its inventors have publicly warned about it.

Hong Kong Protests 'Show The Dangers of a Cashless Society'

Tens of thousands of Hongkongers took to the streets to protest what they saw as creeping tyranny from a powerful threat. But they did it in a very particular way. In Hong Kong, most people use a contactless smart card called an "Octopus card" to pay for everything from transit, to parking, and even retail purchases. It's pretty handy: Just wave your tentacular card over the sensor and make your way to the platform. But no one used their Octopus card to get around Hong Kong during the protests. The risk was that a government could view the central database of Octopus transactions to unmask these democratic ne'er-do-wells. Traveling downtown during the height of the protests? You could get put on a list, even if you just happened to be in the area.

So the savvy subversives turned to cash instead. Normally, the lines for the single-ticket machines that accept cash are populated only by a few confused tourists, while locals whiz through the turnstiles with their fintech wizardry. But on protest days, the queues teemed with young activists clutching old school paper notes. As one protestor told Quartz: "We're afraid of having our data tracked." Using cash to purchase single tickets meant that governments couldn't connect activists' activities with their Octopus accounts. It was instant anonymity. Sure, it was less convenient. And one-off physical tickets cost a little more than the Octopus equivalent. But the trade-off of avoiding persecution and jail time was well worth it.

What could protestors do in a cashless world...? If some of our eggheads had their way, the protestors would have had no choice.

karpet: Library for fetching coin/token historical data, trends, tweets and more.

Karpet is a tiny library with just a few dependencies for fetching coins/tokens metrics data the internet.

It can provide following data:

  • coin/token historical price data (no limits)
  • google trends for the given list of keywords (longer period than official API)
  • twitter scraping for the given keywords (no limits)
  • much more info about crypto coins/tokens (no rate limits)
python_autocomplete: A simple neural network for python autocompletion

A toy project started to see how well a simple LSTM model can autocomplete python code.

It gives quite decent results by saving above 30% key strokes in most files, and close to 50% in some. We calculated key strokes saved by making a single (best) prediction and selecting it with a single key.

We do a beam search to find predictions, upto ~10 characters ahead. So far it's too inefficient, if you are wondering about editor integration.