https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/rise-of-the-machines

This week in neural networks... PyTorch, which provides tensors and dynamic neural networks in Python with strong GPU acceleration, released a preview of their 1.0 release this week. In conjunction with that release, fastai v1 was released, which provides fast and accurate neural nets using modern best practices. Google Cloud also announced their new deep support for PyTorch. If you want to start with the basics of neural networks, check out this walkthrough of building one from scratch in Python.

Mr. Squishy creates Pokémon Red INSIDE Minecraft after 21 months of work and ~357,000 lines of code. Seeing the program and data laid out physically is fascinating.

Plans for the Next Iteration of Vue.js - it'll be written in TypeScript, natively support class-based components, a Proxy-based observer to provide better debuggability (among other benefits). It'll also smaller, faster, and better-support tree shaking. Don't expect the new major release 'til 2019 at the earliest though.

Grindr Will Now Have to Sue Fuckr to stop the project. Moving right past the subject of these apps, it is import to consider if we, as a community, support companies leveraging the DMCA to restrict open source projects that access their API. It's one thing to ban those apps, but another to use tools with substantial legal ramifications to stop an open source application.

Don't sign a Contributor License Agreement [Orange Site] - Nothing good comes from these. The Linux developer certificate of origin seems like the best solution to the problem supposedly at question (attribution / certification of originality). CLAs will continue to be used to abuse contributors.

Should you use Kubernetes for personal projects? The Surprisingly Affordable Platform for Personal Projects [Orange Site] and No Thanks [Orange Site] disagree. It's probably overkill unless you are following a well established happy path.

Komposition, the Haskell-based video editor built for screencasters has been open sourced. It looks like a really un project, and I cannot wait to play with it!

Kieran Maher wrote the popular Why I Use NodeJS for Basically Everything I Do, but his argument is essentially 'I like JavaScript'. He cites Node as non blocking for I/O, and touts GC in V8, but doesn't consider that some alternatives (like Python) are absolutely better for the types of single-use scripts described. JS is a language we are all forced to write, but that doesn't mean we should use it everywhere.

Node.js Foundation & JS Foundation intend to merge - This sounds like it could decrease administrative overhead for both projects, which is wonderful. No one seems to talk about what the real world implications of this could be N years in the future, but it seems like a good thing.

The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job && [Orange Site] && [Blue Site] - I feel like this article is setting up a class warfare argument where there isn't one. If you can automate your development job, you should, and move on to harder problems for your company. That's how you ensure job security and create leverage for more compensation.

A sneak peek at Ecto 3.0: breaking changes and query improvements. I'm excited by both posts, but I'm most looking forward to abandoning positional binding in queries.

What the heck is going on with measures of programming language popularity? - Jon Evans looks at flaws in TIOBE and PYPL indexes of programming language popularity. Jon argues that these are poor indexes based upon bad metrics, and instead refers us to the annual GitHub studies on the same subject--where the results are vastly different.

https://twitter.com/vboykis/status/1047199422772391936

by Adam Dill