Changelog Master Feed

Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community. This week we discuss BERT, a new method of pre-training language representations from Google for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Then we tackle Facebook’s Horizon, the first open source reinforcement learning platform for large-scale products and services. We also address synthetic data, and suggest a few learning resources.

Google UX Engineer Adam Argyle joins Jerod and KBall to share all the details on VisBug, his just-released Chrome Extension that “makes any webpage feel like an artboard.” Adam is passionate about doing for designers what Firebug (and later DevTools) did for developers. In this episode, he shares that passion and how it’s driven him to create and open source VisBug.

In this special crossover episode of Founders Talk, Adam talks with Donald Fischer. Donald Fischer and the team at Tidelift are on a mission of making open source work better — for everyone. To pay the maintainers of open source software they are putting a new spin on a highly successful business model that’s a win-win for the maintainers as well as the software teams using the software. In this episode we dig into that backstory and Donald’s journey.

There hasn’t been a new episode in a few weeks so I wanted to give you a small update. We’ll be back with new episodes on December 4th.

We recently met up with Cormac Brick (Intel) and Mike Del Balso (Uber) at O’Reilly AI in SF. As the director of machine intelligence in Intel’s Movidius group, Cormac is an expert in porting deep learning models to all sorts of embedded devices (cameras, robots, drones, etc.). He helped us understand some of the techniques for developing portable networks to maximize performance on different compute architectures. In our discussion with Mike, we talked about the ins and outs of Michelangelo, Uber’s machine learning platform, which he manages. He also described why it was necessary for Uber to build out a machine learning platform and some of the new features they are exploring.

NESTED LOOPS is a JavaScript band that combines music and video with web tech to perform live at JSConf. In this episode, Jerod and Suz are joined by Jan Monschke and Kahlil Lechelt, which comprise 2/3 of the group. After sampling one of their tracks, we hear the story of how they got the band together, the journey of building a tech stack for their first live performance, and how that stack was then rewritten to be “good” for their second performance. Suz is at awe with the technologies at play. Jerod wonders if there’s room in the world for musicians directly targeting JavaScript devs. A good time is had by all.

This week Adam and Jerod talk with Brian Bondy, Co-founder and CTO of Brave. They talked through the beginnings of Brave and how BAT (Basic Attention Token) could be driving the future of how we offer funding and tips to our favorite websites and content creators. Of course, they go deep into the historical and the technical details of the Brave browser and their march to Brave 1.0. The last segment of the show covers how BAT works, how it’s being used, and also their interesting spin on an ad model that respects the user’s privacy.

Brett Gaylor joins Chris and Daniel to chat about the recently announced winners of Mozilla’s creative media awards, which focuses on exposing the impact of AI on society. These winners include a film that responds to the audience (via AI recognized emotions) and an interesting chatbot called Wanda.

In this episode, Nick talks with Ives van Hoorne about his project CodeSandbox. They chat about Ives deciding to work on it full-time, how CodeSandbox is built, some of its best features, and what lies ahead.

This week we talk with Manish Jain about Dgraph, graph databases, and licensing and re-licensing woes. Manish is the creator and founder Dgraph and we talked through all the details. We covered what a graph database is, the uses of a graph database, and how and when to choose a graph database over a relational database. We also talked through the hard subject of licensing/re-licensing. In this case, Dgraph has had to change their license a few times to maintain their focus on adoption while respecting the core ideas around what open source really means to developers.

Himani Agrawal joins Daniel and Chris to talk about how she got into data science and artificial intelligence, and offers advice to others getting into these fields. She goes on to describe the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning within AT&T and telecom in general.

Safia, Nick, Jerod, and Chris get together to talk about documentation. Documentation is essential in our work but it can be difficult to get buy-in. The crew talks about how you can get others to care about it in your organization, tools that make documentation easier, and some examples of companies doing it right.

Adam and Jerod talk with Angie Byron, a core contributor and staple of the Drupal community. We haven’t covered Drupal really (sorry about that), but the call with Angie was inspiring! From the background, to the tech, the usage of the software, the communication at all levels of the community — Drupal is doing something SO RIGHT, and we’re happy to celebrate with them as they march on to the “Framlication” beat of their own drum.

In this new and updates show, Daniel and Chris discuss, among other things, efforts to use AI in art and efforts to make AI interfaces look human. They also discuss some learning resources related to neural nets, AI fairness, and reinforcement learning.

Adam, Jerod, and Tim get together to put a spotlight on Apple’s October 30th Mac/iPad event from a developer’s perspective. They cover the specs of the new MacBook Air and the viability of having it as a development machine, the new Mac Mini in the ever popular Space Gray, and whether or not Tim will be able to stop pulling his hair out to find an affordable, yet powerful desktop machine with it, and the gorgeous new iPad Pro.

Disclaimer: no servers were harmed in the taping of this show. We hosted a special discussion with Jeremy Daly, Kevin Ball, Nick Nisi, and Christopher Hiller on the ideas around serverless, managed services, Functions as a Service (FaaS), micro-services, nano-services, all-the-services!

Joseph Jacks, the Founder and General Partner of OSS Capital joined the show to share his plans for funding the future generation of commercial open source software based companies. This is a growing landscape of $100M+ revenue companies ~13 years in the making that’s just now getting serious early attention and institutional backing — and we talk through many of those details with Joseph. We cover the whys and hows, why OSS now, deep details around licensing implications, and we speculate the types of open source software that makes sense for the types of investing Joseph and other plan to do.

Lindsey Zuloaga joins us to discuss bias in hiring, bias in AI, and how we can fight bias in hiring with AI. Lindsey tells us about her experiences fighting bias at HireVue, where she is director of data science, and she gives some practical advice to AI practitioners about fairness in models and data.

KBall, Nick, and Suz MC’d a live show at Node + JS Interactive in Vancouver with Tierney Cyren (Node Foundation) and Dave Methvin (JS Foundation) to discuss the proposed merger between the JS Foundation and the Node Foundation. What’s happening with the merger? What does this merger mean for everyday JavaScript developers and the ecosystem?

Jerod invites Richard Feldman back on the show to catch up on all things Elm. Did you hear? NoRedInk finally had a production runtime error, the community grew quite a bit (from ‘obscure’ to just ‘niche’), and Elm 0.19 added some killer new features around asset optimization.