Docker is a wonderful technology to manage environment consistency. It delivers on the promise of Vagrant without having to use Vagrant. All the things that you thought you’d be able to do with virtual machines are easy with Docker.
In this post I wanted to see how long it …
read moreAs of March 28 it still isn’t for sale. Kanye’s newest album, The Life Of Pablo, was “released” on February 14, but not for sale – it could only be heard through the streaming platform Tidal.
You can download an illegal copy, of course, but you won’t get …
read moreDebugging Spark can be quite painful. The error that you see in your application, or even in your job, might not reflect the underlying problem. Here’s how I dig into the executor logs to find what (might) be really happening.
From the YARN job list, find your job. If …
read moreWhen I first moved to the USA I had the strong impression that the health care system was designed to deliver quality care – the outcomes were good. It’s well acknowledged the the US Healthcare system is the most expensive in the world with annual costs of almost $10k per …
read moreAndrew Ng, professor at Stanford and founder of Coursera (one the first and most popular online schools, where Andrew’s Machine Learning course is extremely popular), recently discussed the difficulty of retraining people as their positions are transformed or made redundant through technology.
read moreHistorically technology has created challenges for labor …
Today we figure that production of goods is a highly competitive business, especially in cost of production. Most people are familiar with the offshoring / outsourcing trend over the past 40+ years. Many people are also aware of the progression of low cost providers: the initial outsource provider was Japan; after …
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It wasn’t that long ago – within my lifetime – that most work at factories and on assembly lines was done by humans. I’ve seen video from the 80s of plastics manufacturers and car factories; hundreds of people working with their hands. Compare with a modern cutting edge factory, where …
read moreI often talk to people about the future, about automation and the capabilities of robots in today’s and tomorrow’s world. Predictions about the future can overestimate (flying cars) or underestimate (video phones) the eventual reality. I don’t doubt that we could have flying cars if it was …
read moreWhat is Soylent? My new minimum-effort food.
This is half a meal of Soylent 1.0 with ice. Soylent bills itself as ‘liquid food’, and it seems like a protein shake / diet drink. In fact it’s designed to be everything you need and you should be able to live …
read moreI’m an immigrant, and it’s exhausting. I try to call my parents once a week. I try to call my brother every couple weeks. I try to call someone else when I can – friends, family.
But at the same time I’m trying to be present in the …
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Blueberry season comes and goes too quickly. I love blueberries. This year I was given a membership to a CSA / community supported farming group as a birthday present, which resulted in over 20lbs / 10kg of blueberries. That’s a lot of blueberries – but I am still loving them, even as …
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