Thousand Robots

The Unicode Consortium kicked off a revolution of internet proportions when it introduced the skin tone modifier to a handful of emoji in 2015. Since then, the executive body behind all our emoji (and a million other characters) has extended skin tone support to a bunch more emoji, including at least a dozen hand gestures.

But the skin tone modifier is notably missing for one particular hand-themed emoji: 🤝.

It’s a mystery that has troubled Redditors for years. Determined to get Reddit the answer it deserves, I set out on a quest to find out why that is.

“What makes

When it comes to saving the planet, the question of where to start can be overwhelming. And while larger, governmental change is urgently needed, we can all individually contribute to being  part of “the solution” rather than “the pollution.”

Savvy consumerism is no longer reserved for staunch eco-warriors, and it’s easier than ever to make “green” choices. There are plenty of examples: Veja creates fashionable sneakers from recycled plastic bottles, organic cotton, or wild rubber from the Brazilian Amazon. Personal care brand By Humankind delivers shampoo bars in paper boxes and provides refills for its deodorant. Whether it’s sustainable fashion

Only a few years ago, when we talked about infrastructure we meant physical infrastructure: servers, memory, disks, network switches, and all the cabling necessary to connect them. I used to have spreadsheets where I’d plug in some numbers and get back the specifications of the hardware needed to build a web application that could support thousands or even millions of users.

That’s all changed. First came virtual infrastructures, sitting on top of those physical racks of servers. With a set of hypervisors and software-defined networks and storage, I could specify the compute requirements of an application, and provision it and

As 2021 begins to appear on the horizon, most people will be happy to see 2020 in the rearview mirror. Despite the pandemic and all its chaos and uncertainties, 2020 was the year of the cloud. Pandemic-weary enterprises rushed to the cloud for safety, scalability, and agility.

We still have some architectural obstacles to overcome. There’s no time like the present to review the two architectural problems on the top of my list.

First would be the edge data and knowledge tiering problem. When a tiered architecture includes an edge device, we need best practices and processes to figure

As Google faces at least four major antitrust investigations on two continents, internal documents obtained by The Markup show its parent company, Alphabet, has been preparing for this moment for years, telling employees across the massive enterprise that certain language is off limits in all written communications, no matter how casual.

The taboo words include “market,” “barriers to entry,” and “network effects,” which is when products such as social networks become more valuable as more people use them.

“Words matter. Especially in antitrust law,” reads one document titled “Five Rules of Thumb for Written Communications.”

“Alphabet gets sued a lot,

In order to create effective machine learning and deep learning models, you need copious amounts of data, a way to clean the data and perform feature engineering on it, and a way to train models on your data in a reasonable amount of time. Then you need a way to deploy your models, monitor them for drift over time, and retrain them as needed.

You can do all of that on-premises if you have invested in compute resources and accelerators such as GPUs, but you may find that if your resources are adequate, they are also idle much of the