fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
35 Actionable Tips to Grow Your Medium Blog
By: Ali Mese
Tags: Tech, Startup, Writing, Entrepreneurship, Blogger

1.

T I M I N G

Publish on a Saturday morning to increase your chances of standing out. You will quickly notice you will even be able to make it to the Medium Top 20 during some weekends with just a few recommendations.

2.

P U S H

Bring your first audience from outside. It is way easier for your story to get noticed on Medium after some initial exposure. Email your close friends and also share your article on your social media accounts.

3.

B A C K L I N K

Place links back to your website (or CTAs) at the end, or integrate them smoothly into your story. Use Google’s free UTM tool to track links to see which posts drive the most traffic back to your website.

4.

B R A N D I N G

Getting your author or brand name noticed can be difficult on Medium’s minimal design. You can insert your name and link it to your website, as I did at the top of this article. Or, Paul also does it in a smart way as below:

5.

I M A G E S

Link images. Click on an image in the editor and press Ctrl+K or ⌘+K to insert your link. (You can also drag and drop an image.) Also optimize your images using a free website like www.compressor.io

6.

G R I D

Upload two or more images at the same time and you have a beautiful image grid. Below is an example with my Instagram pictures linked:
This Is My Problem Not Yours
By: Sylvia Wohlfarth
Tags: Blue Insights, Mental Health, Motivation, Poetry, Creativity

This Is My Problem Not Yours

Losing It

I open my personalized home page

and feel madly overwhelmed

my whimsical escapism caged.

Underscoring my guilt-ridden conscience

I cannot cope with the suggestions presented

of poems and prose and stories from writers

I follow, appreciate and admire but have

increasingly less time to savour and devour.

I read and I clap, and now rarely respond

as a time-consumer like this might trigger

the need for a reciprocal reply — No time to bond

A never-ending story of guilt and pressure

and dwindling pleasure I cannot deny.

More than a three-minute read from a writer

whose work I admire, often disappears

into my writer’s archived graveyard — for later.

I shove back the mountain of poems and stories

with an invisible hand. ‘Push back, push back’

my inner me cries as I try to hop and not skip.

My writing, I note is beginning to suffer

Not as concentrated, or creative as I ride

the production bandwagon. I’m losing my grip

I often make do with ‘whatever the form,

just write a story and tick the obligatory.’

Exhausted, I will rest and recuperate

from reader’s block and a medium meltdown

and rekindle my joy away from the conveyor

belt and the purported ploy — My desire

to clap for all, remaining unsolved.

Oh yes, and you my new followers, grant me

time and I promise to check what wonders

you create and follow you back at a later date.
25 Quotes by Toni Morrison That Will Inspire You to Write
By: Cheryl Brown
Tags: Writers On Writing, Writing Tips, Creativity, Motivation, Writing

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) born on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, and named Chole Anthony Wolford at birth.

Morrison was a highly acclaimed American novelist, book editor, essayist and college professor. Her writing focused on her perception of the black experience within black communities, specifically the black female experience.

In 1970 her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published, and in 1977, The Song of Solomon helped her gain national recognition when she won the National Books Critics Circle Award.

She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for her novel Beloved. She was the first African American woman awarded the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

All writers have days when we need a little writing inspiration. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a novel, website content, a blog post or a Facebook ad; we all experience times when the words won’t flow, and the little tricks we use to move us in the right direction aren’t working.

Those are the times when I need my comfort food.

My comfort food consists of writers that I read, respect, and admire the most. They provide a unique blend of the right insightful words that can clear my mind, motivate me, and lift me high above the crippling funk called writer’s block.

So, at times, if you too struggle with writing, here are twenty-five quotes from one of the best that will inspire you to write.
Risks and Benefits of Artificial Intelligence on Climate Change
By: Oliver Zatch
Tags: Sustainability, Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change, Future

Artificial intelligence — a potential solution?

To start off, let's listen to Jack Ma. We have a bright future with AI relieving some of the many burdens for humans. It seems as though the market is on the rise and that AI will be a part of our society more and more. According to this site, in 2020 the AI market is expected to grow by 54%, likewise in 2021. This could lead to some advancement in many fields, one of which is climate change.

Firstly, many use machine learning (ML) and AI synonymously, I know this is frowned upon by some. Although after reading this article I got the sense that ML is a part of AI but without the ability to perceive, and behave. Also in this article, ML is referred to as a part of a “broader AI”. So, for simplicity ML is in this article seen as a form of AI.

The massive amount of data that exists on climate change warrants the use of AI and is in fact used to some extent already. For instance, pictures of coral reefs are analyzed using ML to determine their status. Also, data on temperature and humidity is used to determine the wellbeing of forests.

One of the sectors that dump the most greenhouse gas into the atmosphere is the electric power sector, to reduce this we need green energy. One problem with many renewable sources though is reliability. For instance, solar power needs the sun, wind power needs wind, and so on. However, using ML to predict the weather, or adjust the propellers of windmills according to the wind, can decrease some of the fluctuations and maximize the output in renewable energies.

There is also hope that the entire electrical grid will become a “smart grid” in the future. Making it possible for the grid to (without human involvement) detect outages and redirect electricity to avoid large blackouts. Also, it could detect massive storms and solar flares and adapt accordingly. It would also be easier to include renewable energy into a smart grid. This would make electricity more reliable and efficient, which is good for the economy and the environment.

There is a lot of data related to climate change that are used to model and “predict” the future. But by using AI or ML to analyze data, predictions could be done with higher accuracy and maybe at a lower cost. One example of an area that needs better modeling is the Antarctic ice sheets that lack the accuracy needed.

There are other areas where AI or ML can be used, including urban planning and optimizing energy use in buildings. It can also be used in discovering new materials, which might speed up the process and lead to new findings that could for instance create solar fuels to store solar energy.

So, it seems as AI could be used in many areas, all from smart sustainable cities to finding new materials to help us adapt to climate change.
You are Rediscovering Yourself. And the epiphanies of lockdown are many
By: A Singular Story
Tags: Society, Mental Health, Self, Psychology, Social Media

Everything around you bears witness to life but you do not always see it that way. Once you begin to notice it, the ordinary turns every moment into a scavenger hunt for of joy replete with the promise of more. A rainbow appears in your kitchen, bright blue with a yellow handle bursting with multicolor packaging. What looked like rubbish a blink ago doesn’t anymore: Your gaze has transformed it into art.

Sheltering in place during the pandemic is a refresher course about what matters most.

The tap tap tap of fingers on a keyboard as minds think out loud in machine and human language is the reassuring soundtrack to your days. The enthusiastic gurgle of the kettle forecasts the imminent arrival of gentleness in liquid format. Soup simmering on the stove splashes bright yellow over the kitchen tiles, smelling of fresh mint and love. Every cauldron of caring kitchen magic is a three-course meal: Anticipation as an appetizer, soup as an entrée, gratitude as dessert.

Stay put for a while and the aching beauty of ordinariness will make itself known. Contentment is a lot more accessible than you thought. This realization smarts. All that time spent chasing shiny and getting frustrated with how elusive it remained could have been joy.

It’s not too late to tune in.
This Foodie Startup Grew to $27 Million While Saving the World
By: Esther Brhlik
Tags: Marketing, Innovation, Sustainability, Food, Entrepreneurship

Connecting the Right Parties and Scaling Up

There is something Uber, Airbnb, and Couchsurfing all have in common. Something that the team of Too Good To Go presumably observed and implemented. As a matter of fact, successfully implemented.

Uber connects people who own a car with individuals who would like to go somewhere. Airbnb connects people who own a summer cottage with travelers. Couchsurfing connects the locals who have a couch at their home with brave travelers who are not afraid to spend the night on a stranger’s couch…

And Too Good To Go connects restaurants and shops that have remaining food with hungry individuals.

The platforms connect parties who would mutually benefit from a business transaction.

And all these platforms connect parties that would otherwise not be able to meet. Or at least not that easily. And definitely not that safely.

A key common feature of these platforms is the rating system. Each party can tell their opinion about the other and give a score, usually ranging from one to five. Ratings keep the affected people accountable for their actions and for the quality of the service. Surely, I wouldn’t choose a Uber driver or an Airbnb host with only one star…

Too Good To Go implemented something similar. Buyers can rate the restaurants by the quality and quantity of the food they get. And also by the friendliness of the staff. That’s a big success factor!

The network effect

Without users from both sides, these companies would be useless. Imagine Uber without drivers or Airbnb without accommodation providers…

So the more users that are on both sides, the more valuable the company is.

Too Good To Go seems to be doing an amazing job here. In just one year, their outreach grew exponentially. Today, they have more than 49,000 partners and 20 million users, and they are still available only in Europe!
Fix broken Docker Development on Apple Macbook M1
By: Andreas Heissenberger
Tags: Docker, Startup, Apple, Software Engineering, Programming

Docker Is Not Supported on Apple M1 MacBooks/Mini

Docker is based on Golang and needs virtualization support. Getting Go to support the new architecture is not a problem and will be solved soon.

The big problem is virtualization support, which was always a problem for Docker on windows where Windows Home had no support and not all chips used for PC had the required chipsets.

Docker has written a blog post that explains all the problems that need to be solved:
🍷 Everyone Was Drunk that Day
By: Rolli, Https, Ko-Fi.Com Rolliwrites
Tags: Humor, Nonfiction, Life, Books, Coronavirus

E S S A Y

🍷 Everyone Was Drunk that Day

Or an old lady

Illustration by Rolli

War and Peace was overdue again so I carried it back to the library with both hands.

It was October, but it was snowing.

Everyone was drunk that day or an old lady. Three drunks asked me for money, though I only had a pair of quarters on me. The first drunk needed antibiotics for his dog. The second was distraught over his dog needing hip surgery. The third said she had twelve pups and they’d all had puppies. I gave her one of the quarters.

“Riffraff,” said an old lady into her scarf, as she passed. I wasn’t sure if she meant the pup-woman or me.
Inspired Writer’s Christmas Challenge Winners Announced!
By: Joe Donan
Tags: Writing, Nonfiction, Challenge, Creativity, Writing Tips

Inspired Writer’s Christmas Challenge Winners Announced!

The best of the best of our third writing contest

Image source: Massonstock on Freepik — Caption: Canva

We’re happy to announce that our third writing challenge was a success and that we have chosen our winners!

Thanks to all those who participated and went the extra mile to make their stories shine like diamonds! You gave me and our dear chief editor Kelly Eden a wonderful time as we immersed ourselves in your creative and thought-provoking stories. That alone makes all of you winners in our hearts.

Naturally, having dozens of outstanding entries to choose from, it was tough to make up our minds for our twelve finalists. Selecting the winners was even more challenging. To see what I mean, imagine being asked which of your children you love most. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that hard or dramatic, but you get the idea.

Before we unveil the names of our winners, we would like to thank The Writing Cooperative for making this possible. It was great to see so many of you in The Writing Cooperative’s Facebook group supporting each other with entries.

Enough chit-chat! Here’s what you came here for: These are Inspired Writer’s 2020 Christmas Writing Challenge winners, editors’ pics, and honorable mentions!
Starbucks’ Founding Story Teaches Us to Leave Our Egos at the Door
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Life Lessons, Startup, Startup Lessons, Marketing

With each passing day, the heaviness on Howard’s shoulders kept accumulating. He saw a world of opportunity and couldn’t let his moment pass away. He decided to leave Starbucks and build his own chain of espresso bars.

As I’m learning about the story of what became synonymous with an American classic, our loved-to-hate, yet beloved hangout spot, I’m pondering on an idea cemented by determination and audacity. It’s a story founded on humbling self-trust; on believing so much in something that it borders infatuation, a conviction of the heart that breaks away from the comforts of complacency and into the expanse of possibility.

“There’s a fine line between self-doubt and self-confidence, and it’s even possible to feel both emotions simultaneously. Back then, and often enough today, I could be overwhelmed with insecurities, and at the same time have an abundance of self-assurance and faith.” — Howard Schultz

As Howard is due to teach us, there is no ego in greatness, but only humility and nimbleness, coupled with a deep focus on doing what’s best for the business or project at hand, whatever that may be.

When Howard founded his espresso bar in April 1986, he named it ‘Il Giornale,’ after one of the largest newspapers in Italy. He reasoned that Italian giornale, translating to daily, distilled his vision of building a loyal following that would learn to appreciate great coffee. Under the mantra ‘Everything mattered,’ Howard directed the operation like a fine orchestra conductor: opera playing in the background, international newspapers neatly displayed on rods, carefully-selected Italian descriptors spotlighting the espresso creations, and servers accessorized with bow ties.

However, even a well-executed performance could fall short of the audience’s expectations: people started expressing their dissatisfaction with the loud music, the staff felt the bow ties were impractical, only very few could read and understand the Italian terminology.

Regardless of what your vision may be, it needs to be tailored to what your customers want. Educating your audience requires you to gather them in your store in the first place, and you only do that by creating an environment they want to be in. This is a life lesson, as much as it holds true in business: to get someone to listen, you first need to build an audience. And you only do that by listening first.

This is tough for an entrepreneur, or anyone who’s ever had to share an idea. You have a vision in mind that unfolds perfectly into the accumulation of your decisions, almost robotic movements that are difficult to part with. You spend all waking hours obsessing over every single detail, and once deliberated, you’ve already formed the emotional bond that prevents you from letting go.
Toxic solutioning, form vs function, blurred vision
By: Fabricio Teixeira
Tags: Product Design, Design, Startup, Productivity, UX

The UX Collective is honored to have been recognized as the Best Design Publication of 2020 at the Brazil Design Awards. 💙

The results of the State of CSS survey are out, and the State of JS survey is now open.

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices, reaching over 401,100 designers every week. Curated by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga

I disguised as an Instagram UX influencer for 4 months; this is what I learned →

By Teisanu Tudor

Form vs. function: when is it okay to be weird? →

By Jason Brush

The problem of toxic solutioning →

By Nathan Robinson

Do stories make social media more addictive? →

By Anna E. Cook

Learn like a scientist, think like a PM, work like a designer →

By Boon Yew Chew

More top stories:

News & ideas

Look to speak →

Google’s tech lets you speak with your eyes.

→ Google’s tech lets you speak with your eyes. Yahoo’s icons →

Refining Yahoo’s weather icon suite.

→ Refining Yahoo’s weather icon suite. Alternative maps →

Intriguing maps that reveal alternate histories.

→ Intriguing maps that reveal alternate histories. Going deeper →

Non-obvious ways to have deeper conversations.

Tools & resources

Platform abuse →

A guide for safer product development.

→ A guide for safer product development. Octopus →

Generate visual sitemap from any sites.

→ Generate visual sitemap from any sites. Awkward convo →

A framework for having design conversations.

→ A framework for having design conversations. Blurred vision →

Stark’s new burred vision simulator tool.
Meet Angela Friedman the invincible 102 year old from New York.
By: Rejoice Denhere
Tags: Covid 19, Wellness Coaching, Wellness, Health, Coronavirus

Image by Obi Onyeador on Unsplash

Meet Angela Friedman the invincible 102 year old from New York. She's beat Covid-19 twice, and she lived through the flu of 1918 as a baby.

Joanne Merola, Angela’s daughter, says her mother was first diagnosed with the corona virus back in March 2020 whilst in hospital for a minor procedure. She spent a week in hospital followed by a period of self-isolation, and recovered fully.

In late October, Joanne received a call from the nursing home where her mother lives. She had tested positive for the virus yet again, and had symptoms.

Fortunately, after a period of isolation and treatment, on 17 November she tested negative.

Maybe living through the flu of 1918 is what has made her invincible!
Permissionless Professors #5: Nat Eliason
By: Gary Bailey - Monetization Manifesto
Tags: Growth, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Monetization

We believe monetization is a hidden secret. Secrets hiding in plain sight. From the psychology of anchoring, the mathematics of power-law pricing tables, the application of demand elasticity, and the market positioning of your price — your path to better monetization awaits.

Follow
new writing resource
By: Nicole Bianchi
Tags: Inspiration, Creativity, Productivity, Writing

Hi there,

Hope all of your writing projects are going well. I just wanted to let you know about the latest article published at Copywriting Secrets:

A Look Back at August: new projects, the best books I read, writing & creative inspiration, and more!

This is a different guide than usual. I’m sharing a recap of my August: new projects I’m working on as well as books and articles that I enjoyed that I thought you’d enjoy as well.

Here are some of the things you’ll discover in the new article:

what we can learn from the classics about creating influential work

how difficult the writing process was even for famous writers like J.R.R. Tolkien

a fantastic book that will help you boost your creativity

quotes to keep you going when writing gets tough

I hope you enjoy the article. Have a fantastic week!

Cheers,

Nicole
How I Sold More Membership Cards Than Any Other Store Clerk
By: Geraint Clarke
Tags: Sales, Business, Startup, Marketing, Psychology

How I Sold More Membership Cards Than Any Other Store Clerk

The exact scripts to use

Photo by Christiann Koepke on Unsplash

In 2007, when I was a 17-year-old sales assistant in a clothing store, I sold more store cards than entire store ‘clusters’ put together.

A cluster, in this example, was all of the staff in all of the stores for each area — competing against me. So I wasn’t just first, I was so far ahead that the company itself actually asked me to re-train its sales assistants on my technique.

After it became immoral to sell people into retail credit-agreements (post-2008), these skills transitioned into my other ventures of sales and marketing. Less used for selling ‘finance’ or ‘payment plans’ and instead focusing on making products look, sound, and feel more attractive to buyers.

You see, marketing is sales. Marketing is the efforts you make to create, support, or close the sale. Today, I’m going to tell you exactly what it was that helped me do so well, so in turn, you can use these tactics in your own careers too.
Content Means Nothing Without Context
By: Niklas Göke
Tags: Social Media, Marketing, Creativity, Content Marketing, Writing

One of the first things I did as a writer was to put together a series of three articles showing people how to use Google to answer nearly any question. It was a massive guide.

I was proud of it, and I got some positive feedback from the few readers I had at the time. It must have gone to my head, because I instantly turned that praise into my next mistake: I decided to publish the guide as a book.

I spent a week laboring over it, expanding it, improving it, making screenshots — the whole nine yards. I designed everything myself (another mistake) and self-published it on Amazon.

The result? Crickets. Even at my low hourly rate at the time, I’m still waiting for that one to recoup its investment.

There were many reasons why my book was a flop, but the main one, I think, is that I broke the cardinal rule of creating in an online world:

Content is king, but context is God.

You can’t just tweet out your article and expect to get an extra 1,000 shares. You can’t just transcribe a video and hit ‘Publish.’ What does well as an article won’t automatically sell as a book.

Like the kings of history, our work can only do well insofar as it is empowered by the context around it. If a people stopped believing its king was God’s messenger, they chopped his head off. That’s exactly what happens to our content if we distribute it across dozens of platforms like a firehose, not thinking about the culture and context of each one: It dies immediately.

Why do we do this in the first place? “Because I said so.”

Influencers, trend reports, pseudo-experts, they all tell us the same thing: “Nowadays, you gotta be everywhere. Be on Instagram. Be on Facebook. Make a TikTok account. Hell, that one’s new — make two!”

Bullshit.

The only thing that happens if you promote yourself anywhere and everywhere is this:

Image courtesy of the author, based on Greg McKeown’s Essentialism

If you look at the history of how most influencers become towering giants on multiple social media platforms, you’ll see that they worked really hard on one of them — until they exploded and eventually took their giant crowd elsewhere.

It’s really easy to get 100,000 Twitter followers if you have 1,000,000 on Youtube. But to go from 0 to 100,000 on both at the same time? That’s really hard.

Each platform has its own, unique context. If we ignore it, we’ll drown.

Twitter is built around wit, around humor, sass, information density. Medium offers long-form, transformative reading experiences — people spend hours there, but only if they love words. Instagram is visual. It doesn’t require words at all, but it’s also superficial.

This doesn’t mean you can’t share your work around the web, but it’s a reminder to acknowledge context wherever you go.

If you share an article on Twitter, quote the top highlight. Deliver a 2-sentence pitch on why I should read it. Or turn it into a tweet storm and give me the whole thing!

Whatever you do, don’t walk naked into a pub. Read the room, or we’ll shoo you out the door.
Try These 20 CNN Headline Templates to Draw in Readers
By: Cynthia Marinakos
Tags: Headline Hacks, Business, Writing, Productivity, Startup

Try These 20 CNN Headline Templates to Draw in Readers

I browsed their site for 1.5 hrs

Illustration by Cynthia Marinakos.

You know how it is. You’ve got that huge to-do list to get through when you get online outside of work: an article to write, the banking, canceling an appointment, finding a gift for your cousin’s newborn, emailing a business for a refund…

You log into your email account with the intention of emailing that business who annoyingly billed you after the trial period — and you hadn’t decided to subscribe. But then you see all the new emails that have come in overnight, and curious, you pick out the ones that seem most interesting. Half an hour later, you forget why you logged in.

You begin researching the article, and gosh, there’s so much interesting stuff out there. You jump between papers. You get caught up on YouTube, “Ooh a new TEDTalk.” “Hey, those boots I was looking at last week are on sale.” And before you know it, an hour and a half has gone by and you’re only a quarter of the way through your research.

Why is it so hard to stay focused online?

One reason is there are people out there who are so damn good at writing headlines we can’t resist: for articles. For email subject headers. For videos. Books. Ads.

And there’s one industry whose existence depends particularly on writing compelling headlines:

The media.

Without magnetic headlines, their readership numbers drop. Without strong readership, they won’t attract big advertisers — advertisers that want to reach the right audience to sell their products and services. Without big advertisers, they can’t afford to investigate, write, and distribute content to the masses.

Magnetic headlines make all that happen.

We can learn a lot from CNN’s headlines because they write with credibility and simplicity. They grab attention — but not through clickbait. The problem with clickbait is it entices readers with over-the-top, vague, or misleading headlines where content doesn’t deliver.

That’s a problem because the worst we can do is waste our readers’ time and trample on their trust.

You and I wouldn’t dream of deceiving our readers for the sake of a click, would we? You and I know that constant sensational headlines that don’t deliver would turn off readers and damage our reputations long-term, just as it has for dodgy used car salesmen.

So CNN is a great place for us to learn about the type of headlines we want to share with our readers. Here’s what we’ll run through today:

See real CNN headlines that work

Get templates to create your own impactful headlines

Understand what makes the headlines so powerful

Get a simple summary of what’s common between CNN headlines

All this so you can add these templates to your writing swipe file — to get the readership you deserve for your precious words.
13 Games I Play to Continuously Crush My Writing Goals With Ease
By: Shajedul Karim
Tags: Writing Prompts, Writing, Marketing, Creativity, Writing Tips

13 Games I Play to Continuously Crush My Writing Goals With Ease

Writing is hard, playing isn’t

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash

Ugh. It happened again.

Just before you slept yesterday, you were excited to wake up, brew your favorite coffee, and start writing a new article today.

But today, you feel like sleeping. Writing doesn’t seem exciting anymore. It seems tedious.

Not able to finish your writing goal today, worse, not even at least opening the doc to start writing, is sucking the energy out of you. You feel like you are procrastinating. You feel like you are missing something. You feel like you are a loser who doesn’t get things done.

It just feels bad. You want to write, but you can’t.

You are tense. You’re frustrated. You’re losing hope.

But wait! This is actually a good thing — it’s a necessity for success. We can’t avoid it, nor skip it, and can’t even suppress it. It happens whenever it has to happen. I call this “The Writer’s Mind-Building Period.”

This actually comes with a lot of benefits. A few are:

You start to think more clearly when that period ends. Because you’re fresh, you’re fully energetic, and you’ve got a newer, better perspective now. You get more motivated to write and make up for your lost time.

However, it comes with some drawbacks too:

Laziness is addictive. You become addicted to that — not writing. You feel like giving up and you might, actually, give up even though you know that it’s a temporary period.

The good news? That period will end whether you write or not. It just happens. So when that period comes, it’s better to write than to waste time, right?

I play a few games and those help me get my writing tasks done really easily in those periods. It’s fun.

Wanna try those?

Cool. Let’s do it. Let’s make our writing journey fun.

Remember, every writer is different. You have the choice to choose your own game (I’m a weird kind of writer, every game works for me in different scenarios.)
Noam Chomsky Has Weighed In On A.I. Where Do You stand?
By: Dan Lovy
Tags: Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, AI

Noam Chomsky on Artificial Intelligence| Towards AI

STRINGER Mexico / Reuters

There is a core A.I. question. Can we create cognition? Is there a path by which our machines can possess any true understanding? Our best A.I. efforts are still stored mannikins. They create a lifelike illusion but there is no life behind the blank stares. We have technology that looks like the thought but in actuality, is not. Are we on the right path? If not, what is the path?

Last May, Noam Chomsky spoke on this issue at an MIT symposium. It is highly critical of the current directions in A.I. It’s a terrific read in The Atlantic. In fairness, here is a rebuttal by Google’s director of research, Peter Norvig.

There are two basic schools of thought on A.I. and the road to cognition.

Statistical Big Data — This approach makes use of some intense mathematics to sift through large amounts of data to recognize complex patterns. It can look at a picture and say that it is more likely to be a cat than a goldfish. Combined with cloud infrastructures and lots of computers, you get Siri and Facebook can recognize your friends in that beach photo. This is a simplified summary of how this works.

Bio-Based — This approach says that all earth-based intelligence, from worm to man, has certain organizational and structural features that can be understood and machine implemented. It can only be understood by looking at how earth brains are wired. This understanding will lead to a mechanical recreation of cognition. Let’s use biology and neuroscience to crack this code.

The contrasting arguments look something like this.

Statistical Big Data

Our AI is inspired and works much like nature. It is a parallel set of nodes (neurons) arranged in a network each processing small aspects of the larger whole.

True, it is not a model for cognition yet, but it’s early. Give the technology time to grow and mature. It provides the best path for the emergent behavior of cognition. We are doing things that seemed impossible a decade ago. Watch what happens in the next decade.

Bio-Based

Current commercial neural net technology does not, in anyway model cognition. It does not, cannot and will not. While inspired by natural neural networks, they work nothing like brains (including ours) that are found in nature. The path to cognition lay in structuring these networks to work more closely like real brains. There is a chasm that won’t be crossed.

We are being fooled by mathematical trickery and that Google server that is recognizing pictures of kittens has no idea what a kitten is, and never will. Nature provides excellent, fully functional models for cognition. Let’s get back to nature, do some more science and figure this out.

Where do you stand?
8 Ways To Hack Your Nutrition. Research-based hacks and insights to…
By: Alexandra Walker-Jones
Tags: Productivity, Food, Lifestyle, Health, Nutrition

There is a lot of information on food out there — like A LOT a lot. I know this because I write some of it, and certainly consume just as much, whether it’s through nutrition courses, diet and lifestyle books, or my favourite foodie recipe blogs.

The tricky thing is that it can be impossibly hard to sift through the pages upon pages of information and decipher exactly what is going to benefit you most in the long-term. I emphasize the phrase ‘long-term’ here because healthy living is not, and will never be an over-night process, a quick fix, or a fad diet.

“Of all the knowledge, that most worth having is knowledge about health! The first requisite of a good life is to be a healthy person.” — Herbert Spencer

So, instead of making recommendations on what you should or should not be doing in your life, this article is designed to teach you how to do exactly what you’re currently doing — but better!
Before It Goes
By: Rebeca Ansar
Tags: Writing, Creativity, Poetry, Ideas, Writer

a part-time writer’s frustration

is the state of brimming with

ideas threatening to disappear

you

searching for nooks and crannies

of time in the workday’s drudgery

everything is drudgery, after all,

compared to writing

to jot it down, the brilliance

that has possessed you.
AWS Encryption SDK in Baby Steps
By: Albert Niderhofer
Tags: Aws Sdk, Python, Encryption, AWS

How to protect customer data from physical and applicative data breaches is a challenge that every developer will face sooner than later.

When developing a cloud application based on AWS, the responsibility of protecting customer data is shared between the AWS infrastructure and the application developer. The AWS infrastructure supplies the infrastructure for encryption at rest, against physical data breaches and data protection in transit, while the application developer implements a Client side encryption.

In reality, designing a client side encryption solution is a challenging task with lots of considerations to take care of, like managing the encryption keys’ lifecycle, complying with encryption industry standards, choosing the encryption library, etc.

Luckily, AWS developed an open source solution — the AWS Encryption SDK that applies encryption industry best practices and innovations, while hiding most of the complexity in a simple set of APIs and configurations. In addition, the SDK integrates natively with the AWS Key management service.
4 Books to Help You Become a Seasoned Python Programmer
By: Yong Cui
Tags: Machine Learning, Python, Artificial Intelligence, Software Development, Programming

4 Books to Help You Become a Seasoned Python Programmer

A review of some of the best Python books

Photo by Link Hoang on Unsplash.

I know, I know. The internet has been around for many years, so why on earth are there people who still want to read books? There are tons of free resources online. Who is “stupid” enough to pay $30-40 or even more to buy a book on programming?

I’m one of the “stupid” people who have bought many books on Python to improve my coding skills, and they have benefited my work as a scientist whose job has lots of coding requirements.

In this article, I’d like to share four Python books that I find to be more useful than others.

Disclaimer: I’m providing Amazon links to these books for your convenience. They’re not affiliate links and I have no conflicts of interest to declare. The discussion of these books is solely based on my personal learning experience.
Things to Consider When Choosing a Component Library
By: Ali Kamalizade
Tags: Programming, JavaScript, React, Angular, Software Engineering

Things to Consider When Choosing a Component Library

A wrong choice can lead to bad, hacky code

Photo by Oliver Roos on Unsplash

Modern UIs are composed of multiple components. Popular component libraries include components like:

Buttons

Forms: input fields, select elements, checkboxes, radio buttons

Dialogs, modals, and popovers

Cards

Tabs

Some of the most important things to consider when picking a component library:

Maintainability: Who are the people behind the library? Is it a company, a group of passionate open-source contributors, or a one-man army?

Flexibility: To what degree can this library be customized to your needs?

Ease of use: How difficult is it to use and integrate this library into a project?

Popularity: Is this library used by millions of developers or just a few developers in one company?

Dependencies: How much does this library depend on other third-party libraries?

Documentation and resources: Where and how can I get tutorials and other information about this library?

In this post, I want to take a closer look at this with a real-life example. The project will be an Angular web application and I’ll use the following component libraries:

Angular Material: A framework that contains material design components for Angular.

Bootstrap 4: The most popular CSS framework, originally created by Twitter.

ngx-bootstrap: An implementation of the popular Bootstrap framework which is intended for Angular applications.

Nebular: A customizable Angular UI Library with multiple components, themes, and further feature modules like Auth and Security.

While we’re taking a closer look at component libraries many of these aspects apply to libraries and frameworks in general.
How to Configure AWS Route 53
By: Serguey Arellano Martínez
Tags: Aws Route53, AWS, How To, Microservices, Tutorial

by Serguey Martinez, Staff Engineer

Photo by Procreator UX Design Studio

If your architecture is based on microservices it’s a really good idea to buy a domain in Route 53 and make the connections with API gateway so that you can enjoy URL’s like:

dev.mydomain.com/docs dev.mydomain.com/microservice-basePath dev.mydomain.com/another-microservice-basePath prod.mydomain.com/docs prod.mydomain.com/microservice-basePath prod.mydomain.com/another-microservice-basePath

In this quick tutorial, I’m going to show you how to configure AWS Route 53. The first step is to buy a domain:

Next, go to AWS certificate manager and request certificates for the subdomains that you will need. Heads up that AWS requires you to have TLS encryption.

So, choose the email owner to verify the certs:

Then, wait for them to get issued…

Once you have the certificates issued let’s go to API gateway -> custom domains -> create .

The domain name here should be something like dev.mydomain.com or api.example.com depending on the certificates you requested.

Choose the appropriate certificate and create the custom domain:

You can map now which API rest will handle which basePath.

In the example below if we try to access the URL https://dev.mydomain.com/docs it will delegate the request to swagger-dev API:

In this case, swagger-dev has the following structure. Remember that if you are mapping X basepath in this case docs , then you don't need to create another X basepath in the API where the requests are being delegated.

The last step consists of creating a record in Route 53 hosted zones. Whenever you buy a domain a hosted zone is created for you automatically. You can see your name servers (NS) and start of authority (SOA). On very rare occasions you have to touch those configurations — be careful not to do it now.

Go to Route53 -> hosted zones -> your domain -> create record -> simple routing . As the record name you should put the name of the subdomain: api , dev , etc.

In route traffic to , choose the API gateway alias you created in custom domains for a specific service:

Summary

We just created the recommended flow that will support a microservices development with Route 53 and API gateway. Due to the limit of cloud formation resources set to 200 we can split our services into microservices with dedicated business logic.
Building a Design System Package With Storybook, TypeScript, and React in 15 Minutes
By: Dennis O'Keeffe
Tags: Programming, React, Typescript, Design Systems, JavaScript

Building a Design System Package With Storybook, TypeScript, and React in 15 Minutes

A design system will make you more productive and help you build new features and components faster

Background photo by Nils Johan Gabrielsen on Unsplash.

When building out a UI component library for my own work, I ran into a couple of pain points while searching for how to create a simple workflow that “just works.”

Most tutorials I saw for TypeScript component libraries made use of build tools (which at times caused headaches) and my current job took the opposite extreme of publishing the UI component library as TypeScript and relying on individual projects to transpile it to JavaScript directly from the library itself (if you are from my company… you didn’t read anything).
Making Grids in Python
By: Keno Leon
Tags: Programming, Python, Coding, Data Science, Software Engineering

Making Grids in Python

Hip to be square

Photo by the author.

At some point, you might need to make a grid or grid-like visual structure for a project or coding interview question (mazes, search). A grid is also the foundation for placing objects on a canvas surface in an orderly manner and more complex cases like isometric views and tiled games.

This article is meant to take us both from zero grids to Intermediate Gridology in a hopefully painless way.

Note: The code and concepts discussed here are somehow interchangeable between languages, but some languages provide a better native experience and primitives are needed for grids. Python is notorious for not having a native/simple GUI solution, so I’ll use the next best thing: pygame (install it if you want to code along):

pip install pygame

Or:

python3 -m pip install pygame==2.0.0

Pygame is not really a GUI library but rather a simple game engine you can install and understand in a few minutes and then adapt to your GUI or language of choice. See the following section for a crash-course snippet…
How to Set Up Your Own PaaS Within Hours
By: Jimmy Soh
Tags: Programming, Technology, Software Development, Startup, Software Engineering

How to Set Up Your Own PaaS Within Hours

Five simple steps to quickly set up your very own private PaaS environment using available free open-source technologies

Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash

There are many useful and free open-source software on the Internet, we just need to know where to look.

The PaaS setup that I’m going to recommend works well for private/on-premise setup as well. There’s no coding involved, just some CLI configurations.

Having your own PaaS is useful if you’re running a team of engineers requiring flexibility, privacy, and data ownership. I mainly use it for rapid prototyping purposes and hosting my own suite of web applications with minimal traffic.

I would not recommend this setup for production purposes with high load unless you really know what you’re doing.

I’ll keep the article short and list down the high-level steps as the instructions on the websites are very easy to follow. I’ve done a couple of setups with minimal issues and they are usually done within a few hours.

Assuming you’re starting from scratch with the intent to deploy in the cloud, here are the five simple steps:

Setup a cloud account and rent a VM (e.g. AWS/EC2) Register a domain from a provider (e.g. AWS Route53) Set up the PaaS by following simple steps (CapRover) Create and deploy open-source applications out of the box (Wordpress, Jenkins, GitLab, and many more) Configure backups just in case

Please note that I’m not paid in any way by any of the companies listed in this article. I’m recommending them soley based on positive experiences.

#1: Setup a cloud account and rent a VM

You’ll need a virtual machine to host the applications. There are a variety of cloud providers that you can choose from. Here are some of the popular ones with 1-year free-tier option(s)/credits:

You can click on any of the above links to set up a new free account.

After creating the account, provision a virtual machine—recommended server setup to be Ubuntu 18.04 with at least 1GB RAM.

#2: Register a domain name

Applications will be deployed under a sub-domain, e.g. appone.apps.domain.com, apptwo.apps.domain.com, etc. so it’s essential to have your own domain.

Here are some websites which I’ve used for my domains:

If you’re using a cloud provider, e.g. AWS/Azure, it may be more convenient to register your domain with them to have everything managed centrally.

#3: Set up the PaaS

This section forms the main bulk of the setup. Although there are a number of available open-source PaaS available, e.g. Dokku, CapRover, Flynn, etc. I’ll be using CapRover as an example.

I’ll further break down this portion into four steps:

The steps above should get your PaaS up and running.

#4: Create and deploy applications

Here comes the fun part. After logging into the CapRover dashboard, navigate to the Apps screen via “Apps” at the left sidebar.

Click on the “One-Click Apps/Databases” button.
Interesting AI/ML Articles On Medium This Week (Dec 5)
By: Richmond Alake
Tags: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, AI, Data Science

Interesting AI/ML Articles On Medium This Week (Dec 5)

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning articles that might have flown under your radar.

We are officially in the last month of 2020, and what a crazy ride it has been.

I have to say that amidst lockdown and a year of limited to no social activity, Medium has been, and continues to be a platform where you feel connected to different areas of the world.

Medium is one of my source of connection to the world of Machine Learning. There’s no shortage of interesting AI/ML/DS articles written by machine practitioners and AI enthusiasts.

Below are four articles that have mainly stuck out to me for either the high quality of the information provided or the relevance of the content of the article to ML practitioners. There is definitely an article or two with information that is of value to ML practitioners of different levels.

Happy reading.
A Next Level Webpack Dashboard
By: Indrek Lasn
Tags: Programming, JavaScript, Vuejs, React, Webpack

A Next Level Webpack Dashboard

Level up your webpack using webpack-dashboard

Beautiful webpack dashboard inside the terminal

Webpack-dashboard has over 13,000 stars on GitHub, yet I almost never encounter developer teams making use of the plugin.

Why not take advantage of this great plugin?

Note: Don’t forget you can pretend you work for NASA if someone shoulder peeks!

When using webpack, especially for a dev server, you are probably used to seeing something like this — according to webpack-dashboard GitHub page.

We’re all familiar with the webpack log above. Although sometimes I wonder — who exactly is this screen for? A vastly superior alien race?

This is why the webpack log desperately needs a new friendlier UI, and webpack-dashboard does that.

Webpack-Dashboard to the Rescue!

This plugin improves your visuals for the webpack logs. Now when you run your dev server, you basically work at NASA.