Drones and rescues

Drones and rescue and helping save lives during natural disasters.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eu-and-south-korea-award-8-3-million-to-respondrone-project-to-apply-drone-fleets-to-control-natural-disasters-300851536.html

Distributed computing CALM - ness or not

Distributed computing and coordination is not a necessary evil, it is an incidental requirement of a design decision

The key insight in CALM is to focus on consistency from the viewpoint of program outcomes rather than the traditional histories of storage mutation. The emphasis on the program being computed shifts focus from implementation to specification: it allows us to ask questions about what computations are possible.

Interesting article and some good insight. Worth a read.

https://blog.acolyer.org/2019/03/06/keeping-calm-when-distributed-consistency-is-easy/

Why so many Fake artificial intelligence companies

     Quite interesting that 40% of these "AI" firms don't use artificial intelligence at all. Do some even know what tensorflow or mxnet or neural networks even means ?  

Also funny how Google decided this post had issues.  Real products with real artificial intelligence would make sense. But hype and marketing fake news sells I guess. 

https://www.ccn.com/40-percent-ai-firms-europe-never-use-ai-vc-says

Exempt crypto security laws

https://www.coindesk.com/us-lawmakers-file-bill-to-exempt-cryptocurrencies-from-securities-laws

Could be good , time will tell what regulations will proceed and which ones will not.

"
The “Token Taxonomy Act” was introduced Thursday by Reps. Warren Davidson and Darren Soto, a move that comes months after a roundtable in Washington, D.C. that sought input about regulatory measures for the industry. According to the text, the bill – among other items – seeks to exclude “digital tokens” from being defined as securities, amending both the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934."

Of course fake volume

https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/12/20/only-coinbase-binance-have-300k-users-fake-volume-on-most-crypto-platforms

Most of these others need eyeballs, but don't offer much value in a bear Market.  Click bait everything as a thing these days. 

Ibm ibm ibm ... And hyperledger

https://www.coindesk.com/tensions-emerge-between-hyperledger-blockchains-biggest-supporters

IBM has become a marketing engine with very little substance behind any of their products and services these days.  Sad really.  But it's interesting to see sawtooth being pushed forward and not just some centralized on IBM dlt Product.

Will EOS be a target of SEC ?

https://blockmanity.com/news/cardanos-founder-says-that-the-sec-will-target-eos

Most of these were securities or flat out scams.   And EOS was interesting till it was just a joke of a "company".  But can the SEC target Companies that didn't actually offer tokens or do an ICO in the US or to US citizens? 

Penny lane quantum computing

https://pennylane.readthedocs.io/en/latest

Quantum computing and pennylane sandbox.

Decentralized internet

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/12/its-time-to-take-back-your-data-from-google-and-facebooks-server-farms

I agree a decentralized internet is needed, but many people don't like paying for things anymore or don't have an extra buck to send an individual email.  The other reality is companies like at&t and Comcast collect just as much data and are forgotten, ignored or thought to be the cost of living. 

Skynet and 1984 and big brother has been freely given away and created and we didn't care.   

Chatbots are terrible

https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/12/11/consumers-go-cold-automated-chatbots-finds-acquia-research

" Widespread dissatisfaction with the service provided by chatbots has done nothing to dent the enthusiasm of marketers, with 80% of CMOs either already using the technology or planning to do so by 2020 according to a separate Oracle survey."

I played around with chatbots and smart chatbots a couple years back.  I still lived in California when a friend and I thought about a health and wellness chatbot for new and expecting parents.  Never figured the monetary business model for it though and it was early stages before things like dialogflow basically abstracted away natural language processing (NLP).

It was interesting how you had to come up with a natural conversation flow script.  Otherwise it be kind of a dumb chatbot like we had in the early 90s.  

Fast forward to the world of Alexa and Google home and Siri and even my kids call Alexa dumb.  At least Google hole explores the internet a little better.   But I don't think it's  Technology problem as it's a customer centric problem.   Companies have offshored support to places like India for years.  And you'd speak to a Tom Smith who wasn't a Tom Smith pretending to live in the same state as you.   And they spoke English very poorly and read from a limited script. 

     They were the human version of a dumb chatbot, sadly.  Deviate away from that script and it was a useless phone call and nothing good would come out of it.  But wow, pay nothing to create a dumb chatbot with the same weak script and little programmatic or NLP or rules and you get a worse version of the offshore customer support human being that people hated for years.   No wonder chatbots are useless.

A tier one, two, three model makes sense , but a dumbed down version of a cheap Sweatshop like human being customer support center becomes a get what you pay for and why most of these chatbots offer a few lines and not much else . 

Blockchain to change the world ...

From the report,

"
blockchain has the potential to significantly cut trade costs by increasing transparency and facilitating processes automation, including financial intermediation, exchange rate costs, coordination, and other aspects. “The removal of barriers due to blockchain could result in more than $ 1 trillion of new trade in the next decade
"

https://cointelegraph.com/news/report-blockchain-deployment-could-add-3-trillion-in-international-trade-by-2030

Rent smart contract storage

https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-developers-are-quietly-planning-an-accelerated-tech-roadmap

  Interesting possibilities in 2019.   But accelerated roadmaps and timelines make sense If more developers are involved, otherwise it's a system already with vulnerabilities probably adding more because they want speed over quality. Happens all the time everywhere, but not always good thing.

  The other interesting tidbit is renting costs for the storage of smart contracts. I understand why they need to do it.  1TB isn't something most people are going to want to download as a miner or eventual staker.  But if you build a dapp and have to pay  digitalocean for the front end web  mobile app portion; then pay for gas; and pay for storj or ipfs for regular file storage; and then pay to rent space for your smart contract ...

At some point it's an expensive experiment and gets into why would anybody build real applications on it ?  Most companies and startups aren't going to benefit a ton compared to the costs of these new systems.   And it's already a challenge to get normal people to want to use blockchain and crypto.  

The bigger challenge is not everything needs to be written to the blockchain. So you can avoid certain gas like Costs.  I guess you can say not everything needs to be a smart contract.  But the more things like  state channels and side chains and JavaScript front end logic is needed, what exactly is decentralized about most of it ?  

Blockchain and big Consulting firms

https://www.coindesk.com/deloitte-blockchain-chief-bad-crypto-headlines-are-making-clients-nervous

" If you’re building free proofs of concept, but you’re missing the business context around it, like regulatory, AML/KYC, tax and all the other stuff, you really aren’t servicing the client holistically,” Pawczuk went on, without naming names. “Another thing that makes me nervous is proofs-of-concepts being built by students that have never had to coexist in the environment where large high volume transaction systems do exist. Blockchain does not replace all core systems.”

I find it rather interesting the leaders and partners of these Consulting companies are worried about students and newbies doing POCs,  yet many of the big firms like Deloitte are people under 27 who aren't usually hardcore techies and computer science or Cryptography guys.  The big shot partners usually don't know anything about the latest tech.

They are good at selling it , but dig into technical conversations and it's usually a lot of keywords that sell to the masses, but if you're into the tech, you just role your eyes.  In fact, a lot of times the techies are pushed aside for the more business and charismatic biz Dev sales folks. 

   Big Consulting firms love to charge big dollars for POCs and have mostly non cs people who implement them.   Or send 26 year old communication majors  with 15 years of experience in a 5 year old Technology.    That's why she fears free POCs.  

The Deloitte's of the world are really why public blockchain systems are needed.

Why a better system and blockchain are required now !

This is where some new system, maybe blockchain, far more transparent, far more beneficial needs to be Implemented now. Not later.

  Who knows what kind of shady backwards stuff went on or not.  You can't ever have someone like Kemp again.  Control the elections, step down after , and have people believe there isn't some backwoods racist politics and fraud going on ? 

However the election turned out has nothing to do with who won or what people voted for in this instance. Kemp should have been forced to step down or leave the governor's race.

Could blockchain and digital voting help ?   Maybe.   A more decentralized less biased and fraudulent system is definitely needed.  This Kemp government is a prime example of corrupt politicians and government and processes. 

https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/09/how-brian-kemp-hacked-georgias-election/

AI beats lawyers. But ...

It's NDAs, which are mostly copy and pasted and kind of thrown in to cover everything at times.  I wonder how much effort most lawyers actually put into them anymore?  And many companies just use some legalzoom like NDA template anyway. 

So a win for AI or irrelevant hype?

https://www.techspot.com/news/77189-machine-learning-algorithm-beats-20-lawyers-nda-legal.html

Redhat sells out to IBM

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-the-cloud-wars-forced-ibm-to-buy-red-hat-for-34-billion/

The one real big open source success story and example for every business who wanted to be like redhat just lost the biggest example.   Who knows the entire story here , but if Redhat was forced to or wanted to sell to big blue IBM, it kind of kills the philosophy that you can actually run a legit open source business and make money.  And Redhat sold licenses so it wasnt even like they operated as Apache or MIT. 

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.  Probably a good move by IBM. 

Don't use Coinbase.

https://mashable.com/article/sec-coinbase-complaints-fraud/

There are many stories like this. And worse.   Coinbase has been great for getting average non Technical users into crypto with their ease of use and mobile app.  But they are worse than the banks people complain about.  And with none of the actual benefits the big banks offer. 

The reality is coinbase has no legit customer service or the support either doesn't care or can't do anything.  They overcharge and blame others.    They hold money for months.  Their shift card partner is another terrible company in itself and money seems to disappear or charges  get denied and you have to delete and reinstall and configure over and over. 

The sad reality is coinbase could have pushed crypto and blockchain to the masses in a great way, instead they are just more overlnflated egos from wall street who founded a company and created a wall street like company without the wall street  benefits.  

Stay away from Coinbase.  

Nonsense blockchain articles

https://www.businessinsider.com/ioex-iot-solution-cut-costs-2018-10

This article sounds like a sales pitch with random key words thrown together and there isn't anything in the article that actually tells you what or how it works or will work.  But it's really the norm now and the fake nonsense marketing news is all we get from the shills.  And the fan lemmings who bow down to nothing and don't even know what they are talking about. 

   The IOT space has a ton of challenges and new and old Technologies. As well as legacy philosophical mindsets at times.  Many challenges won't be technological at all, but political and psychological.  Add to that some blockchain and crypto and AI and RPA and then you read nonsense articles that Proclaim they have conquered it all in an open source world , yet offer nothing to where they actually solved any of the problems in one space much less ten different verticals. 

  I spoke with one company who basically blocked me from asking any more questions because I was honestly interested in how they solved the Ethereum scaling and latency challenges as well as the computational challenges AI presented.   And they solved iot security vulnerabilities.  It was really promising if they figured any of them out. Yet they had nothing of value to add and honestly didn't even seem to realize any of these challenges existed in the first place.  At a certain point it's obvious many of these companies are just full of nonsense.

Walmart blockchain .. hyperledger really

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/walmart-sam-s-club-start-mandating-suppliers-use-ibm-blockchain

  So Walmart is forcing their suppliers to use hyperledger fabric blockchain.  It's heavily IBM influenced, probably some kickbacks with them, but being hyperledger is open-source, there could be some valuable ways to integrate and use. 

Proof of stake ... A better way ?

Has pos, and not just theoretical, been figured out ?

https://www.coindesk.com/the-creator-of-proof-of-stake-thinks-he-finally-figured-it-out/