Suggested readings week 40/2023

The Data Delusion

Surveying a million books on ten thousand shelves is a nightmare

This is J. C. R. Licklider, a chief engineer and pioneer of the early Internet, in 1965. He wrote the book Libraries of the Future fter two years of research, in which he envisioned a future with automatic management of information instead of manually consulting books.

We're there, since a considerable amount of time, and this fascinating essay depicts a situation where useful data mining and discovering is not a solved problem.

Incidentally one only used hard copy of Licklider book is found on catalogues (and highly priced), while its PDF version is freely available...

The Great Cybersecurity Switch-over Has Begun

Post Quantum Cryptography is here.

Quantum Computing is the possibility of reaching extremely high speed in computing, by leveraging quantum physics. A few years ago being an immaginable frontier, now business applications are at hand.

Cryptography (the ability to keep secrets while communicating and sharing information over the Internet) is largely based on the inability of computer to reach such high speeds. Now that this is clearly possible, a new advancement in cryptography is needed. Here's how affected companies should react.

A program synthesis agent that autonomously fixes its output by running tests

An automatic coder that corrects its output by running tests: if this is difficult for whom's not into coding, think of an automated book writer (ghost writing agent) that also double check the result by automatically getting feedbacks from sample readers.

Novel NASA Battery Tech

I call it the barbecue test

When heated on a fire, these batteries based on hydrogen and specially crafted electrodes inside a pressurised cylinder can never explode: instead the hydrogen recombines into water and plain steam escapes the battery. This looks like the holy grail of electric energy storage, at 30000+ cycles durability.