Tag: author_name|Andrew Tarantola
Hitting the Books: How SNAP’s digital services became an online quagmire
Nobody said dragging one of the largest government bureaucracies to ever exist into the digital era was going to be easy but the sheer scale and myriad variety of failings we have seen in recent decades have had very real, and near universally negative, consequences for the Americans reliant on…
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Hitting the Books: How hackers turned cybercrime into a commercial service
As anyone who regularly games online can attest, DDoS (dedicated denial of service) attacks are an irritatingly common occurrence on the internet. Drawing on the combined digital might of a geographically diffuse legion of zombified PCs, hackers are able to swamp game servers and prevent players from logging on for…
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Researchers give robots roly-polies for hands
The human hand is a marvel of evolutionary development, offering 27 degrees of freedom and unrivaled touch sensitivity. But it’s the same aspects that make our hands so, well, handy, that also make them an absolute nightmare to recreate robotically. That’s why one team of researchers has abandoned human-derived gripper…
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How do you prevent an AI-generated game from losing the plot?
Did you ever get to the end of Wizard of Oz and have notes – the nagging intuition that you could have taken down all those pesky flying monkeys or handled the backstabbing intricacies of Munchkin guild politics more effectively than Dorothy and her band of misfits did in the…
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Hitting the Books: Why AI won’t be taking our cosmology jobs
The problem with studying the universe around us is that it is simply too big. The stars overhead remain too far away to interact with directly, so we are relegated to testing our theories on the formation of the galaxies based on observable data. Simulating these celestial bodies on computers…
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Hitting the books: Why you shouldn’t blog about asking a cop to go shopping for you
You get free stuff, you get free travel, you get the nifty cool title of “brand ambassador,” what’s not to love about being an internet influencer? There’s the consequences, for one. Not even just the warranted consequences of your actual actions, mind you, but also those arriving unbidden based on…
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