Linked List: July 19, 2017

Wednesday, 19 July 2017

Called It 

Yours truly on Google Glass back in 2013:

And the idea that people will wear things like this everywhere (as opposed to special specific scenarios, such as workers in an environment where their hands are otherwise occupied, like, say, surgeons) strikes me as creepy as hell.

Samsung Describes Its Male and Female Bixby Assistants With Sexist Descriptions 

Alejandro Alba, writing for Gizmodo:

After months of delays, Samsung’s much ballyhooed voice assistant Bixby is here — and users on social media are already noticing the company’s loaded, sexist characterizations of its female and male voices.

Inside Bixby’s “language and speaking style” menu, Samsung describes its female voice as “chipper” and “cheerful,” while the male voice is described as “confident” and “assertive.”

Not a new problem for Samsung.

Apple Machine Learning Journal 

New publication from Apple, where Apple engineers can publish their work and research on machine learning. The writing is more accessible than a peer-reviewed technical journal, but alas (but unsurprisingly for Apple), the articles are un-bylined. The approachability without avoiding nitty-gritty technical details reminds me of Dr. Dobb’s Journal back in the day.

My assumption here is that this doesn’t replace publishing in established peer-reviewed journals, but rather acts as a public-facing, more accessible filter for research that Apple engineers publish in peer-reviewed journals — perhaps along with original content at some point.

(Also: no RSS feed. Update: There is an RSS feed — the URL just isn’t published anywhere in the HTML. Update 2: The site now has a <link> tag with the URL for the feed so you can just point any feed reader at its home page to discover the feed. Nice.)