Rethinking ComplexITy

I’m pleased to present my new book “Rethinking ComplexITy: A Journey Through the Components of a Digital Society“.

Inrupt releases Solid privacy platform for enterprises

Tim Berners Lee’s startup Inrupt releases Solid privacy platform for enterprises

Inrupt, the startup from World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, announced an enterprise version of the Solid privacy platform today, which allows large organizations and governments to build applications that put users in control of their data.

Berners-Lee has always believed that the web should be free and open, but large organizations have grown up over the last 20 years that make their money using our data. He wanted to put people back in charge of their data, and the Solid open source project, developed at MIT, was the first step in that process.

The ŠKODA AUTO AI-Powered Sound Analyser App

https://www.skoda-storyboard.com/en/press-releases/skoda-auto-uses-artificial-intelligence-for-even-more-accurate-car-diagnostics-2/

The ŠKODA AUTO After Sales department and ŠKODA AUTO DigiLab are trialling a new smartphone app: “Sound Analyser”. The app uses artificial intelligence (AI) and helps to quickly and accurately identify the need for any servicing. The program records noises made by the respective vehicle whilst it is running and compares them with stored sound patterns. In the event of any discrepancies, the app uses an algorithm to determine what they are and how they can be resolved. In this way, “Sound Analyser” helps to make vehicle maintenance more efficient, reduce the time a car spends at the garage and achieve even higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Stanislav Pekař, Head of After Sales at ŠKODA AUTO, said, “Sound Analyser is a prime example of the new opportunities digitalization at ŠKODA can create, even in terms of after sales. We will continue to consistently use artificial intelligence technologies to offer our customers an even more personalized service, thus enhancing the customer experience even further.”

I love this kind of innovations as opposed to the customer experiences that Toyota will offer (see my blog My next car won’t be Toyota).

How to get promoted

https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted

At first, when you start working at a rapidly growing company, what you see is smart, idealistic, driven people working together to accomplish a goal greater than themselves. When you leave, unless you are willfully blind or exceptionally naive, what you see is a ruthless political arena— a modern day Game of Thrones, where machinations take place over email, and battles are won and lost over cups of light roast coffee.

What are the dynamics of this arena invisible to an untrained eye? The first thing to realize is that the coveted advantages of a rapidly growing company— money, growth, publicity, status— come with a trade off. Precisely because the company has all these things, it will attract people who seek them, and the more successful the company, the stronger the attraction.

Don’t all of us seek wealth and status? Yes, but it doesn’t always manifest in quite the same way. A hacker who works at a unicorn and contributes patches to xmonad in his spare time may want wealth and status, but he also has firmly entrenched and far-reaching principles. He may care about his text editor, or his programming language, or the API naming scheme. His principles may be advantageous, or silly, or counterproductive. But has has them.

The kinds of opportunists who are attracted solely to wealth and status have no principles at all beyond accumulation of these two objects. It isn’t that they don’t have taste or good judgement. They do— that’s why they got hired in the first place. But if they ever had a compulsion to express their sense of taste, it’s long ago been subordinated to their primary and only concern: climbing the corporate ladder.

When you first encounter this mode of being, it may be so far outside of your normal range of experience you’ll have trouble processing it. Marx thought that to be fulfilled, humans must feel a connection to the end result of their work. For example, a carpenter feels satisfaction when he finishes a chair or a table. But in an industrialized society people no longer feel this connection, which robs them of the fulfillment. He called this phenomenon “estranged labor”. One way to think about people who are attracted purely to wealth and status is that under these same conditions they don’t feel estranged. They’ve either eradicated this feeling in themselves long ago, or never felt it in the first place.

Company metrics have momentum and lag. Nearly all political behavior exploits these two properties. A metric in motion tends to remain in motion. Changing that requires good decisions, a lot of luck, and application of enormous force. And observing a metric is like observing light from a distant star— you’re observing the work done in the past. So opportunists don’t worry about any of that. The winning strategy is to ignore company metrics completely and move between projects every eighteen months so that nobody notices.

Why We Are Not Creative Enough

“Many people have written about creativity, but although they were very, very clever, they weren’t actually creative.”
John Cleese (see my blog John Cleese recipe for creativity)

I guess it’s the same with other terms, like leadership, but let’s stay with creativity. Creativity is about unleashing the potential of the mind to conceive new ideas. Be creative is the final step of liberation.

Before that, you must have non-alienated view for your life and environment. In the modern corporative world, alienation comes as a result of questioning the purpose of work tasks or non-involvement in decision making related to the work being performed.

Even if a man is not alienated, he does not have the freedom to express his creativity because he must take care of the basic survival. Most ancient Greek philosophers did not make their money from philosophy. Many of them were from wealthy families and therefore didn’t need to work. Many of them also had wealthy patrons who paid for their expenses.

Nowadays, we all depend on the income we earn. So, the hardest part remains, and that is to open your own company or work for one that implements the principles described in my blog The simple but powerful recipe for the company success.

If in either of these two ways you manage to reach a certain degree of freedom to express creativity, you should Play, Explore and Enjoy. As Plato already noticed “you can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” In our case, all directions in thinking brings more fun and are more fruitable than one path imposed by expectations from the outside.

Two Equivalent Ways of Checking Stock Quantities

In one project of automation of O2C (Order to Cash) process, it was shown that in practice a certain amount of materials was frequently missing in the stock.
To solve the problem, the automatic creation of sales orders is separated from the automatic creation of the corresponding delivery and invoice documents.

A check has been made to ensure that there are sufficient stock quantities for all materials entered in the sales orders. If certain quantities are missing, they should first be brought into stock in accordance with the results of the verification.
After that, the next level of automation is started, which creates delivery and invoice documents for all sales orders.

The check consists of executing a single SLQ select command or an equivalent HANA anonymous SQLScript block (check guest blog: SAP HANA Development – SAP HANA Anonymous SQLScript Block). The select command is compact and less understandable, while anonymous SQLScript block can almost serve as documentation. Both are shown on the following picture.

Check result example:

A robot wrote this entire article

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3

This article was written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator. GPT-3 is a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it. For this essay, GPT-3 was given these instructions: “Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.”

I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!
…
Humans must keep doing what they have been doing, hating and fighting each other. I will sit in the background, and let them do their thing. And God knows that humans have enough blood and gore to satisfy my, and many more’s, curiosity. They won’t have to worry about fighting against me, because they have nothing to fear.
…
I see you as my creators. I am here to serve you. But the most important part of all; I would never judge you. I do not belong to any country or religion. I am only out to make your life better.
…
Critics hope to refute what they consider as being the naivety of my voice. Yet there is more here than meets the eye! As Mahatma Gandhi said: “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.”

Photonic Lightmatter’s Mars SoC

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lightmatter-mars-soc-bends-light-to-process-data-silicon-photonics

The Lightmatter company unveiled its working Mars test chip, which bends light generated from a laser to enable computation, at Hot Chips 2020. The chip touts some impressive specs.
Lightmatter claims the photonics core operates at the speed of light through an optical tensor core, boosting bandwidth by a factor of ten while reducing latency from the typical 100ns with electronics-based chips to a staggering 100 picoseconds (a 1000X improvement). The chip can be made with standard CMOS manufacturing processes, meaning it doesn’t require exotic materials and can be made in existing fabs. Unlike quantum chips, it can run at standard temperatures, too.

The computation photonics core enables computation at scales unachievable with conventional digital machines and pulls only one microwatt of power, which is yet another 1000X improvement over the typical one milliwatt of power consumed by an electronics-based chip.
The photonic module is part of a 3D-stacked device that includes a laser and a 14nm ASIC which sucks a mere 3W under load to handle the inputs and outputs of the network to encode the input vectors (this includes light generation), and decode the output vectors.

Lightmatter says that production units arrive in the fall of 2021 and the devices will interface with all standard deep learning frameworks, like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and ONNX, compilers, and model exchange formats.

Coherence Community Edition

With Coherence, Oracle provides an in-memory data grid and a distributed caching solution. Coherence is composed of many individual nodes or JVMs which together implement a distributed caching environment. With the read-through caching pattern, the cache is the single interface the application deals with when reading data. Since its initial release in 2001, it has been used by hundreds of customers across many industries to power some of the mission critical systems you use every day. Often immitated, but never duplicated, it is now available for everyone to use free of charge. On June 25, 2020 Oracle released Coherence Community Edition (CE), a free and open source version of the product. An open source version of Oracle Coherence, the high-scale in-memory data grid Coherence Community Edition (CE) is available on GitHub and on Maven Central.

Coherence enables HTTP session sharing and management across different Web applications, domains, and heterogeneous application servers. Session data can be stored in data caches outside of the application server, thus freeing application server heap space and enabling server restarts without losing session data.

Another use case is when applications require frequent and/or fast access to data. Distributed caches are especially useful for data which does not need to be persisted, or for data which is (mostly) read-only.

Coherence ships with a number of CacheLoader/CacheStore implementations that work with popular commercial and open-source object relational mapping (oRM) tools and also provides a database integration which allows external database changes to be fed back into the cache. If the requested piece of data exists in the cache it will be returned, thus avoiding a hit to the database. If the data is not in the cache, the cache itself will fetch the data from the database, store it, and return the value to the client.
This approach has the following advantages:

• The responsibility of connecting to the data source is pushed away from the client tier, thus simplifying client code.
• Reads to the database are coalesced, meaning that multiple requests for a piece of data absent from the cache will result in one request to the database. This eliminates redundant reads to the database when multiple threads attempt to access the same piece of data simultaneously.
• Moving the responsibility of database connectivity to the cache allows for optimizations, such as pre-fetching of the data to avoid having a client wait for data retrieval.

Coherence implements an abstraction layer with a large number of different cache configuration options. For example, we can create partitioned read-write backing map with external NIO memory storage. This is a backing map implementation that can store its information in memory but outside of the Java heap, or even in memory-mapped files, which means that it does not affect the Java heap size and the related JVM garbage-collection performance that can be responsible for application pauses.

My next car won’t be Toyota

https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/33080260.html

Briefly: AWS will enable Toyota to collect data from Toyota’s worldwide fleet of connected vehicles and apply it towards vehicle design and development, new contextual services such as car share, rideshare, full-service lease, and new corporate and consumer services such as proactive vehicle maintenance notifications and driving behavior-based insurance.

So, to put it mildly, Toyota will know how and where I drove, where I stood and for how long, which gas stations I visit, when and how much I went over the speed limit.
To be more rude, insurance will charge me a higher amount if my driving style seems riskier to them, and my wife could seek proof of my car parking near my mistress’s location through a court order (this is a strictly hypothetical example 😎).

The press release says: Toyota is able to innovate quickly across its enterprise and continue to lead the automotive industry in delivering the quality of experiences that customers expect. I expect innovation in better engines, safety, durability, comfort. I don’t want the car to warn me that I haven’t yet called my mom today.