Microchip Design, Netflix Personalization, and Facial Recognition: Lux Recommends #282

Editor
2 min readJun 11, 2021

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By Sam Arbesman, PhD

Welcome to Lux Recommends #282, this week’s edition of what we at Lux are reading and thinking about (want to receive this by email? Sign up here).

Articles

A Brief History of Netflix Personalization: “From startup in 1998 to today, a detailed history of the strategy, metrics, and experiments Netflix executed to develop a personalized experience focused on delivering its members movies they’d love.” — Sam

How to stop AI from recognizing your face in selfies: “A growing number of tools now let you stop facial recognition systems from training on your personal photos” — Cameron

The Classicist Who Killed Homer: “How Milman Parry proved that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not written by a lone genius.” — Sam

Amazing case report. The medicine of tomorrow. 5 week old boy admitted to NICU. Within 37 hours he had his whole genome sequenced, gene defect identified, treatment ordered and received by patient. Within 6 hr symptoms resolved. Rahul

AI system outperforms humans in designing floorplans for microchips: “A machine-learning system has been trained to place memory blocks in microchip designs. The system beats human experts at the task, and offers the promise of better, more-rapidly produced chip designs than are currently possible.” — Sam

This Tiny Creature Survived 24,000 Years Frozen in Siberian Permafrost: “The microscopic animals were frozen when woolly mammoths still roamed the planet, but were restored as though no time had passed.” — Sam

Everything Is Overcomplicated: “An internet outage exposes the gap between how we think technology might work and how it actually does.” — by Sam

Books

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee: “This is the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the plane and the rigid airship — huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky.” — Sam

Videos

Simone Biles, in extreme slow motionAdam K

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