"I want to go off grid with solar and batteries!"

I hear this, or some variant, increasingly often. It seems to be a more and more popular concept, especially after some of the recent events in which people were left without power for long periods of time. And, quite often, I assume the people asking are genuinely interested in what they see as the benefits of off grid power. They're just not familiar with enough details to really have an understanding of what they're asking, or what it asks of them.

This post is my humble attempt to put a lot of information in one spot, such that I can link people to it when they ask about off grid power. There are quite valid reasons for off grid power, but it's not as easy or as simple as people tend to think. And it's certainly not as cheap as people assume it will be.

Parking spaces are everywhere, but for some reason the perception persists that there’s “not enough parking.” And so cities require parking in new buildings and lavishly subsidize parking garages, without ever measuring how much parking exists or how much it’s used.

This series of posts is about the Commodore Amiga. Thousands of words have already been written on the Amiga, and I will not add anything but "milestone" to the adjectives used to describe it. This post and the following ones are not intended to be a complete and well-organised review of the architecture. Instead, they will be more a set of "lab notes" for myself that I write while I explore the platform. I put them on the blog in the hope that they will be useful for other programmers that try to crack the same problems.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

This text gives an overview of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and its implications for artificial intelligence. Specifically, we deal with the question whether Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem shows that human intelligence could not be recreated by a traditional computer.

A lot of evidence suggests that in cases of this kind, employers will stubbornly trust their intuitions — and are badly mistaken to do so. Specific aptitude tests turn out to be highly predictive of performance in sales, and general intelligence tests are almost as good. Interviews are far less useful at telling you who will succeed.

In the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled. So why are children being taught to behave like machines?

Welcome to fast.ai’s 7 week course, Practical Deep Learning For Coders, Part 1, taught by Jeremy Howard (Kaggle’s #1 competitor 2 years running, and founder of Enlitic). Learn how to build state of the art models without needing graduate-level math—but also without dumbing anything down. Oh and one other thing… it’s totally free!

It may come as an even greater surprise that bushido once received more recognition abroad than in Japan. In 1900 writer Inazo Nitobe's published Bushido: The Soul of Japan in English, for the Western audience. Nitobe subverted fact for an idealized imagining of Japan's culture and past, infusing Japan's samurai class with Christian values in hopes of shaping Western interpretations of his country.

Though initially rejected in Japan, Nitobe's ideology would be embraced by a government driven war machine. Thanks to its empowering vision of the past, the extreme nationalist movement embraced bushido, exploiting The Soul of Japan to pave Japan's way to fascism in the buildup to World War II.

This article outlines the scale of that codebase and details Google's custom-built monolithic source repository and the reasons the model was chosen. Google uses a homegrown version-control system to host one large codebase visible to, and used by, most of the software developers in the company. This centralized system is the foundation of many of Google's developer workflows. Here, we provide background on the systems and workflows that make feasible managing and working productively with such a large repository. We explain Google's "trunk-based development" strategy and the support systems that structure workflow and keep Google's codebase healthy, including software for static analysis, code cleanup, and streamlined code review.