«Coloro i quali mancano d'immaginazione si rifugiano nella realtà. Resta da sapere se la non-idea contamina l'idea.» -- Jean-Luc Godard /Colonna sonora: ``Yann Tiersen - Enez Nein''/ ``No Silver Bullet - essence and accident in software engineering'', Fred Brooks -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Articolo e pietra miliare dell'ingegneria del software, una perla divertente e triste allo stesso tempo per immergervi nella lettura se ve lo siete lasciato scappare negli ultimi due decenni: «Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. Much of the complexity that he must master is arbitrary complexity, forced without rhyme or reason by the many human institutions and systems to which his interfaces must conform. These differ from interface to interface, and from time to time, not because of necessity but only because they were designed by different people, rather than by God.» ``Life is Terrible: Let's Talk About the Web'', James Mickens ------------------------------------------------------------- «It's been known for years that JavaScript is a dangerous, unholy language that is banned in 27 countries and most fine restaurants. In this talk, I will use deeply personal and completely biased examples to describe why I hate JavaScript. I will then provide additional reasons why the entire web stack is a thing that should not be tolerated by moral human beings. I will also describe some of my futile research efforts to make web browsers moderately less the worse thing ever.» ``Why AI Makes It Hard to Prove That Self-Driving Cars Are Safe'', Andrew Silver ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- «Car manufacturers will have difficulty demonstrating just how safe self-driving vehicles are because of what's at the core of their smarts: machine learning. [...] Koopman is one of several researchers who believe that the nature of machine learning makes verifying that these autonomous vehicles will operate safely very challenging. Traditionally, he says, engineers write computer code to meet requirements and then perform tests to check that it met them. But with machine learning, which lets a computer grasp complexity - for example, processing images taken at different hours of the day, yet still identifying important objects in a scene like crosswalks and stop signs - the process is not so straightforward. According to Koopman, "The [difficult thing about] machine learning is that you don't know how to write the requirements."» ``Why Do So Many Digital Assistants Have Feminine Names?'', Adrienne LaFrance --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- «The simplest explanation is that people are conditioned to expect women, not men, to be in administrative roles - and that the makers of digital assistants are influenced by these social expectations. But maybe there's more to it.» ...e: «If men are often the ones building digital assistants, and those assistants are modeled after women, "I think that probably reflects what some men think about women - that they're not fully human beings," Kathleen Richardson, the author of An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines, told Lewis. This may also be part of a larger tendency for the makers of anthropomorphic technologies, like robots, to play up cute and non-threatening qualities as a vehicle toward social acceptance. The funny thing is, some of the world's most powerful and destructive technologies have been given female names, too.» L'intero articolo è comunque interessante quindi consiglio di leggerlo! ``How Do We Stop Our Social Feeds from Being Spied On?'', Jamie Condliffe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ «Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram supplied police in Ferguson and Baltimore with data that was used to track minorities, according to an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union. But such snooping is increasingly inevitable, unless our use of social media changes.» ...fa molto riflettere anche l'idea proposta da Tristan Harris di una sorta di giuramento di Ippocrate per gli ingegneri del software. ``A Computational Approach to Automatic Prediction of Drunk Texting'', Aditya Joshi et al. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ «Alcohol abuse may lead to unsociable behavior such as crime, drunk driving, or privacy leaks. We introduce automatic drunk-texting prediction as the task of identifying whether a text was written when under the influence of alcohol. We experiment with tweets labeled using hashtags as distant supervision. Our classifiers use a set of N-gram and stylistic features to detect drunk tweets. Our observations present the first quantitative evidence that text contains signals that can be exploited to detect drunk-texting.»