it is very disturbing that
@TwitterSupport
is engaging in a conscious effort to suppress information about Google's election interference.

@HawleyMO @ftc #freeperegrimmer https://t.co/sKbpXW5kaX

time to get back to "repairing" old computers

The funny thing about making the 8-bit-guy into a meme about "repairing" computers with powertools is that the obvious heightening joke would, like, the "8 rounds guy", who fixes computers with firearms

but that would also be him, given that he's also a big gun enthusiast.

so it's inherently hard to satirize the repairing-computers-with-dremels guy, since they're also the guns-guy.

you'd have to go up to like a mythbusters level of overkill.

"this hard drive from 1986 won't spin up. We tried freezing it, tapping it with a rubber hammer, and opening the case to lower the friction... there's only one option left: GET OUT THE C4 EXPLOSIVES!"

Yoga employs more Americans than coal. But compare and contrast 1/2

and 2/2

I think many of us carry in our minds an image of the US economy that looks like this

when the reality is this

and this

If you're interested in DB internals, stop what you're doing and watch @CMUDB Quarantine Talk from Nico+Cesar about @SQLServer's Cascades query optimizer: https://t.co/FCdsbHHEaD

Many talks this semester were good. This one is the best. My thread provides key takeaways

[6:50] Microsoft hired Goetz Graffe in the 1990s to help them rewrite original Sybase optimizer into Cascades. This framework is now used across all MSFT DB products (@SQLServer, @cosmosdb, @Azure_Synapse).

[14:43] The optimizer checks whether it has stats it will need before cost-based search. If not, it blocks planning until the DBMS generates them. This is different than other approaches we saw this semester where DBMS says "we'll do it live!" with whatever stats are available.

[21:05] Their Cascades' search starts small/simple and then they make decision on the fly whether to expand search based on the expected query runtime and performance benefit from more search.

[26:33] They explicitly have a property for Halloween Problem. Operators specify whether they protect from it and then optimizer ensures property is satisfied. This is mindblowing. I have never thought about using the optimizer for this but it makes sense.

Here's an overview of key adoption metrics for deep learning frameworks over 2020: downloads, developer surveys, job posts, scientific publications, Colab usage, Kaggle notebooks usage, GitHub data.

TensorFlow/Keras = #1 deep learning solution.

Note that we benchmark adoption vs Facebook's PyTorch because it is the only TF alternative that registers on the scale. Another option would have been sklearn, which has massive adoption, but it isn't really a TF alternative. In the future, I hope we can add JAX.

TensorFlow has seen 115M downloads in 2020, which nearly doubles its lifetime downloads. Note that this does *not* include downloads for all TF-adjacent packages, like tf-nightly, the old tensorflow-gpu, etc.

Also note that most of these downloads aren't from humans, but are automated downloads from CI systems (but none are from Google's systems, as Google doesn't use PyPI).

In a way, this metric reflects usage in production.

There were two worldwide developer surveys in 2020 that measured adoption of various frameworks: the one from StackOverflow, targeting all developers, and the one from Kaggle.

Let's be clear about what @Google, @Apple & @amazon instantly destroying #Parler's ability to be the free-speech version of Twitter is. At its core, this is about the ability to freely communicate one’s thoughts to others — once considered a hallmark of "The American Way." 1/13

What Big Tech is doing is as if Ma Bell in 1973 (ask grandpa) decided what you're saying to a friend on a landline phone was “dangerous." So they cut off the line in the middle of the talk and then sent someone over to physically cut your phone line. That's Stasi shit. 2/13

I realize that a personal conversation is not the same as a public tweet, but the principle is the same. The company that "owns the wires" for your speec — and has special govt rules protecting them due to their position — cuts off your call due to what you are saying. 3/13

If this analogy doesn't work for you, imagine someone tackling and punching you for speaking on a soap box in a public park and then setting your soap box on fire. And the govt being OK with that in a country that has a First Amendment. Moving on ... 4/13

Big Tech shadow banned people for years to just do it "halfway." That way, they could continue to paint an increasingly thin patina on their original govt-protected pledge to promote the free exchange of thought. #freespeech 5/13