Demographic changes, abortion, technology (video games, cashless society, security systems), and economic changes. And maybe also some lead in the air.

ROFD beats Blockchain every time. Regular Old Fucking Database.

AI == machine learning. All of these are machine learned systems. AI doesn't mean thinking magic. And yes, we do actually have DNN-based models that do simple reasoning now. Look up the Facebook bAbI challenge, for example, or question answering systems like FlowQA.

"AI" generally just means machine learning these days. And all of those are machine learned, statistical model-driven systems, not algorithmic systems. While things like SVM or Naive Bayesian classifiers have been around for years, DNN-based systems that perform well on much harder tasks that require large amounts of data to learn have only existed since 2011 or so.

Most of those billion Google Assistant devices were software updates pushed by Google to existing Android devices. This can be better thought of as the count of Android devices, and a small percentage of Google Home devices. Most of the 100 million Alexa devices, on the other hand, are actual devices sold with Alexa enabled, many of which were purchased specifically for use with Alexa.

It's all about the GDP/IQ ratio.

Apparently they missed "startups 101" - the goal is to sell your company to a bagholder before the exponential growth dies off. Failure to find a bagholder is also known as "failure" in Silicon Valley.

This has nothing to do with AWS auto-scaling. The system that had issues doesn't run in public AWS. I can't say more than that unfortunately, but some random professor speculating based on leaked posts without any knowledge of the actual systems involved is a terrible source of information.

Source: I work at Amazon.

What about 1) traffic caused by bad drivers 2) hours of our lives wasted every day by having to focus on roads while we commute.

What I said was nobody wants to use it as currency. There are plenty of people who want to buy it and sell it as speculators. They are just betting that there is a greater fool down the road.

Equities actually represent a claim to a potential future income stream. Some may be very boring and predictable, some may be super speculative and risky - but there is some meaning to them.

Gold and oil have value as commodities because there are alternative uses of these commodities. So yeah, there is plenty of speculation, but you can take gold or oil and "do stuff" with it.

Bitcoin is an investment asset without any meaning sincere there is still no alternate use. Currency use has vanished to near zero while speculation, hoarding, and cybercrime make up essentially all of the transactions.

There's no "reason" because there's no rational valuation mechanism. Cryptocurrency without a mechanism for value stabilization is a scam. Blockchains are clearly useful for certain kinds of distributed trust problems, but Bitcoin is merely one instance that was always marketed as a cryptocurrency but has zero use as a transaction mechanism. Nobody wants to use a currency that may be worth 20% more, or 20% less the next day.

The only valid use case for Bitcoin I've heard described is as an improved version of the offshore banking system. In other words, a mechanism for rich people to launder and hide money. Of course, a cryptocurrency with value stability would sure as hell be a lot more useful and trusted for even this grey market purpose.

Ultimately, Bitcoin's value is driven by grey and black market activity. Money laundering, cybercrime, etc. Investing in Bitcoin is essentially investing in a residual claim on this underbelly of the economy, in the same way that regular fiat currencies are residual claims on national economies, with a healthy dose of mindless speculation and bubblemania thrown into the mix.

Some top-level surfacing of skills has already launched publicly. Can't say anything more than that, other than that this was addressed in the Alexa keynote at AWS re:Invent last week. If you are interested, I encourage you to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Both Google Home and Amazon Alexa have speaker ID - they can differentiate between different voices speaking to them. And some functions can be tied to specific individuals rather than accounts, with more speaker-specific capabilities popping up now.

With PEP 484, you can annotate typed method signatures. And with PEP 526 you can annotate variable types too. If you're willing to go with straight up Python 3.6+ syntax, it's pretty nice looking. mypy can do pretty reasonable type-checking, which is supported in PyCharm and Atom via plugin now.

What's great is you can use it where you want extra checks (more complicated infrastructure code) and just stick with plain old duck typing where you don't (fast and loose scripts).

Sure. But Alexa isn't that. You can turn the mic off any time you want, there's a button for that.

And Amazon has committed publicly and legally to not sharing your audio with third party developers. That isn't going to change.

This story is completely false. Somebody misunderstood something they read or just wrote it as pure clickbait to rile up the privacy crowd.