Did you know there's a field called computational aesthetics? Neither did I. It's cool though.

• 51%: of billion-dollar startups founded by immigrants; 2.8 billion: Twitter metric ingestion service writes per minute; 1 billion: Urban Airship push notifications a day; 1.5 billion: Slack messages sent per month; 35 million: server nodes in the world; 10: more regions will be added to Google Cloud;  697 million: WeChat active monthly users; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Dark Territory: When officials in the Air Force or the NSA neglected to let Microsoft (or Cisco, Google, Intel, or any number of other firms) know about vulnerabilities in its software, when they left a hole unplugged so they could exploit the vulnerability in a Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or some other adversary’s computer system, they also left American citizens open to the same exploitations—whether by wayward intelligence agencies or by cyber criminals, foreign spies, or terrorists who happened to learn about the unplugged hole, too. 
  • @xaprb: If you adopt a microservices architecture with 1000x more things to monitor, you should not expect your monitoring cost to stay the same.
  • The Swrve Monetization Report 2016: almost half of all the revenue generated in mobile gaming comes from just 0.19 percent of users.
  • Nassim Taleb: Now some empiricism. Consider that almost all tech companies "in the tails" were not started by "funding". Take companies you are familiar with: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook. These companies started with risk-taking. Funding came in small amounts, way later.
  • @leegomes: In a big shift, Google says a go-anywhere self-driving car might not be ready for 30 years.
  • Google’s Eric Schmidt: Machine learning will be basis of ‘every huge IPO’ in five years.
  • @brendangregg: "Memory bandwidth is the number one issue we see today" Denis at Facebook
  • @ogrisel: PostgreSQL 9.6 will support parallel aggregation! TPC-H Q1 @ 100GB benchmark shows linear scaling up to 30 workers 
  • @sarah_edo: The hardest part of being a developer isn't the code, it's learning that the entire internet is put together with peanut butter and goblins.
  • @beaucronin: "Cryptocurrencies are an emergent property of the Internet – almost a fifth protocol"
  • Thomas Frey: We are moving toward an era of megaprojects. We’ll finish the Pan-American Highway with a 25-mile bridge over the Darien Gap in Panama. 
  • @samphippen: “Do you expect me to talk?” “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be willing to relocate to san francisco"
  • @brendanbaker: Outside of the core people, who actually know what they're doing, AI is talked about like gamification was three years ago.
  • @RichRogersHDS: Did you know? The collective noun for a group of programmers is a merge-conflict." - @omervk
  • @jbeda: This is how you know Google is serious about cloud. Real money on real facilities. 
  • Farhad Manjoo: The lesson so far in the on-demand world is that Uber is the exception, not the norm. Uber, but for Uber — and not much else.
  • @DKThomp: Airbnb woulda made a killing in 1900: One third of urban families used to make 10%+ of their income from "lodgers" 
  • @AstroKatie: "We can make 'smart drones'!" "Your chatbot became a Nazi in like a day." "OK good point."
  • @adrianco: I agree GCP are setup for next gen apps, think they are missing out on where most of the $ are being spent in the short term.
  • @EdwardTufte: Like book publishers and Silicon Valley, the further the distance from content production, the greater the money. 
  • Biz Carson: Slack grew from 80 to 385 employees in 14 months
  • Chip Overclock®: One of those things is being evidence-based. Don't guess. Test. Measure. Look and see. Ask. If you can avoid guessing, do so.


• Impressive demo of the new smaller, less dorky looking Meta augmented reality headset. Here's a hands on report. The development kit is $949. This most likely will be the new app store level opportunity so it might be smart to get on it now. The Gold Rush phase is still in the future. The uses are obvious to anyone who reads Science Fiction. This is a TED talk, so of course no details on performance, etc. What are the backend infrastructure opportunities? Hopefully they'll keep all that open instead of building another walled garden.


• Is artificial intelligence ready to rule the world? IMHO: No. You would need a large training set. The problem is we have so few good examples of ruling the world successfully. You could create an artificial world in VR with a simulated world to generate training data, but that's just another spin on in the long history of Utopian thinking. We should probably learn to govern ourselves first before we pitch it over to an AI.


• "It's better to have a media strategy than a security strategy." That's Greg Ferro commenting in an episode of Network Break on Home Depot's paltry $19.5 million fine for their massive 2014 data breach. Why pay for security when there's no downside? It's not like people stopped shopping at Home Depot. 

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