Software Engineering Daily

Religious extremists use technology to recruit vulnerable individuals to a violent cause. Google is developing ways to combat this extremism through its platforms, namely YouTube. When a user looks for inflammatory religious or supremacist content, YouTube’s “Redirect Method” instead sends those users toward anti-terrorist videos.

Google’s fight against extremism compelled writer Lochlan Bloom to write an article called “The Coming Battle: AI, Extremism, and the New War of Ideas.” Lochlan joins the show to discuss the societal implications of giant internet providers controlling our information flow.

Lochlan is a science fiction writer, most recently of The Wave, a book that mixes existentialism with quantum physics. Our reality is defined by what we observe, and this theme courses through our conversation–from religion to Twitter to artificial intelligence.

The Coming Battle: AI, Extremism, and the New War of Ideas

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The Internet runs on advertising. Advertising is subject to fraud–but then again, so is every system of online transactions. The amount of money lost in electronic payments fraud and ecommerce scamming is probably much greater than what is lost due to ad fraud. So why do we keep covering advertising fraud on Software Engineering Daily?

More of our audience needs to know about ad fraud. Few people realize how much fraud there is in online advertising. In previous episodes of Software Engineering Daily, we have explained, how advertising fraud works, why it is absurd and disgraceful, and why nobody talks about.

We also cover ad fraud because I personally find it interesting and sometimes hilarious. Those are the same reasons I invited Shailin Dhar to speak at the third Software Engineering Daily Meetup. Shailin has been on the show twice before and he will be on again in the future. He has made it a full time job to expose ad fraud, and he gives a great presentation on the topic in this episode.

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Building and nurturing a developer community is hard work but it is vital for the growth of a country’s technology ecosystem. When communities coalesce around programming languages, tools or programming methods, what follows is a network of conferences, meet ups and other similar events.

Juan Pablo Buriticá, VP of Engineering at Splice, has spent the last decade building developer communities in his home country of Colombia and across Latin America as well as running distributed engineering teams. He has helped to launch a number of conferences, meet-ups and more recently, an online meet-up providing advanced technical information for native Spanish speakers.

In today’s episode, Juan returns to Software Engineering Daily to speak with Carl Mungazi about the benefits of having a distributed engineering team and hiring developers from developing nations. He discusses how Colombia came to have the largest Spanish-speaking JavaScript community in the world and the importance of good communication when building software with a team of developers based around the world.

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Quantum computing is based on the system of quantum mechanics. In quantum computing, we perform operations over qubits instead of bits. A qubit is a vector, which can take on many more values than 0 or 1. The technology used to implement quantum computers is advancing such that it has its own Moore’s Law, but it can also leverage the classical advancements of Moore’s Law.

If classical computing advances at the exponential pace of 2^n, quantum computing advances at the pace of 2^2^n.

Quantum computing will advance technology in ways that will take us by surprise. If things feel like they are moving fast now, just wait until developers have access to quantum processing units. Machine learning, simulated chemical synthesis, and NP-complete problems are ripe for quantum computers.

Vijay Pande is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a board member at Rigetti Computing, a quantum computer company. In this episode, we explored what software engineers today need to know about quantum computers and some of the application domains that developers will be working on as quantum computers become available.

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Patents allow individuals and company to lay creative claim for an invention. A patent can provide protection from having its idea being used without giving credit to its creators. Of course, is that patents can be filed and not turned into products, inhibiting innovation. Patents can also be used offensively in a practice known as patent trolling.

Large companies like IBM and Google have so many patents that they have trouble keeping track of them all. And if your company has many different hardware and software products, how can you be sure that your patent collection protects you from a patent troll?

Nicole Shanahan is the CEO of ClearAccessIP, a product that indexes patents, looks for vulnerabilities in a corporation’s patent strategy, and finds opportunities in a patent collection for further value. The large text corpus of a patent collection is the perfect place to apply machine learning.

We discussed the nature of patents, the intersection between law and software, and the product development process of ClearAccessIP.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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