Things I read this week and some personal notes (8/9/17)
Aug 9, 2017 · 2 min read
Books:
- looking forward to start reading Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming, by Paul Hawken. Title sums it up.
- Just finished The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O by Neal Stephenson. Loved it.
AI:
- FB AI Research: Voice Synthesis for in-the-Wild Speakers. Essentially, train a machine with publicly available speech, and let it read out any text you want. Link. paper here.
- AI creates highly realistic fake videos of Obama using existing audio and video clips of him . Here. paper here.
- So yes, it’ll soon be possible to create realistic video and audio using software. Sam Lessin writes about the future of truth here.
- FB announced that all of their translations are now being powered by neural machine translation models, replacing our older, phrase based models here.
Tech News:
- Snap: Went to work at Snap after 2015? Your stock options are worthless. Less than 100 employees have made any money. Link.
- The NYTimes added more than 400,000 digital subscribers in the first six months of 2017 alone. Over 2m digital subs. Link.
- First deliveries of the new Tesla Model 3 took place. Lots of good first impressions.
- Cryptocurrency: bitcoin fork here.
- Building self driving vehicles is tough (caption obvious). Insights from John Deere. Link.
- Cruise is running an autonomous ride hailing service for employees in SF. Link.
- A google employer wrote a piece that’s making waves in the valley: “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber” here. He was soon fired by Sundar Pichai here which started a whole debate about freedom of speech in America. Susan Wojcicki’s response is pretty solid here.
Music
