How many subscribe to scholarly things like 'Communications of the ACM'? or the 'IEEE Spectrum'?
I then I took it one step further and sat at a table by myself down at the club, and read it cover to cover. With a beer or two.
And something that hasn't happened in a long time, or well, ever, I got called out as a sterotype: looking like a geek from San Francisco. Well, that was what the woman, who also had no conversational partner, used to strike up a conversation.
Anyway, back to the magazine, who would have thought, that in the CACM, you see such interesting things like:
"Divination is the practice of occultic ritual as an aid in decision making", on page 7 no less. Which goes on to say that "... divination truly allows us to consult the divine, we can view it simply as a form of randomization, which is recognized as a powerful construct in game theory, and algorithm design." ... "randomization is a powerful way to deal with incomplete information" ... "they are simply randomizing in the face of uncertainty about rain, pests, and more, but this randomization comes with a belief in the divine source of the decision".... "when the accept/reject decision pivots on issues such as significance and interestingness, which can be quite subjective".
Another article: "Assuring Software Quality by Preventing Neglect".... which is a 'grayhat' problem when compared to blackhats (hackers who deploy software as a weapon with malicious intent) and whitehats (setting safeguards against defective products)". With a few interesting conversation starters being, I think: ".... during maintenance cycles, they do not correct the old source code comments, seeing such edits as risky and presumptuous". ... "it is a failure of degree, a failure to pay enough attention and take enough trouble" ... which leads to a theory of "ethics of care which displaces the classical agent centered morality of duty and justice, enduring patient-centered morality as manifest real-time in relationships".
And, well, something which probably everyone knows, but has been evolving through a series of articles in the magazine, is that machine learning algorithms require training time via "generative adversarial networks", which means you need to introduce some sneaky garbage to improve the odds of appropriate machine learning and matching black boxes.
And another, in which I can personally associate: "Multitasking Without Thrashing". "Human context switching is more complicated than computer context switching. Whereas the computer context switch replaces a fixed number of bytes in a few CPU registers, the human has to recall what was 'on the mind' at the time of the switch, and, if the human was interrupted with no opportunity to choose a 'clean break', the human has to reconstruct lost short term memory" ... "if you have several important tasks, your brain can get stuck in a decision process that can take quite a long time to decide -- a situation known as the choice uncertainty problem". ... "thrashing happens to human multi-taskers when they have too many incomplete tasks. They fall into mood of 'overwhelm' in which they experience considerable stress" ..... "context switching is _not_ the cause of thrashing. ... the cause of thrashing is the failure to give every active task enough space for its working set" ... "when a task's working set is in your workspace, protect it from being unloaded as long as the task is active .. analog: protect working sets of active tasks and do not steal from other tasks". ... which leads to the rather obvious conclusion: "to exit the thrashing state, you need to reduce demand or increase your capacity".
Ok one more: "what we have instead is a society moving towards prosthetic brains that can be monitored at all times by the state, without the inconvenience of having to have everyone check in each day at the police station". When you read this, were you thinking "this isn't me! This isn't now!"? Well, even in present time, this is visible by what we write, where we write, what we read, where we read, who we interact with, what we interact with, ....