Kotlin developers who want to get into data science: these articles are for you! They’re about using Jupyter Notebook, but with Kotlin instead of Python. Why should Pythonistas make all the big bucks?
Read the articles, which appear on RayWenderlich.com (the premier mobile development site, and it’s where I learned iOS and Android dev) in this order:
Beginning Data Science with Jupyter Notebook and Kotlin: Once you’re familiar with krangl, it’s time to get familiar with data frames and working with datasets. This article will help you get started by exploring real data, crunching it, and even getting some insights from it.
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, March 21 through Sunday, March 27, 2022.
This list is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog,Global Nerdy! For almost five years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
This week’s events
I try to keep this list up-to-date. I add new events as soon as I hear about them, so be sure to check the latest version of this week’s list on Global Nerdy!
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles.
Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
Russian agents came to the home of Google’s top executive in Moscow to deliver a frightening ultimatum last September: take down an app that had drawn the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin within 24 hours or be taken to prison.
Google quickly moved the woman to a hotel where she checked in under an assumed name and might be protected by the presence of other guests and hotel security, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The same agents — believed by company officials to be from Russia’s FSB, a successor to the KGB intelligence service — then showed up at her room to tell her the clock was still ticking.
It turns out that the same demand was made to an Apple executive in the similarly threatening manner.
It’s one thing to feel pressure from a government official or a street-level thug in their employ, but it’s entirely something else to get an ultimatum delivered by a member of the world’s most notorious spy agency (or, more accurately, the agency that the world’s most notorious spy agency turned into), especially after they’ve bypassed the security arrangements of two of the world’s best-heeled companies and have been known to poison politicalenemies (including Alexei Navalny, after whom the app is named).
The Navalny app
As mentioned earlier, the app gets its name from Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition leader and general thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side. He’s also the leader of the Russia of the Future party, which is described as pro-reform, anti-Putin, anti-corruption, and pro-European. He also has the dubious distinction of being a survivor of a Putin poisoning attempt.
The Navalny app is a backup for a website that presented strategic voting options during the 2021 election in Russia. The idea was to prevent the election of Putin’s party, United Russia. If you went to the site and chose your electoral district, it would tell you which of your district’s candidate had the best chance of defeating the United Russia candidate. The Russian government could easily block the site, which is on the open internet, and could be blocked by forcing ISPs to filter it out, or possibly through ASN blocking.
The app had the similar functionality as the site, but since it was available only through the walled gardens of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, it can’t be directly censored by a state. It would take indirect — and, as we’ve seen, downright nasty — action to make an app unavailable.
The perspective from a few months ago
You may remember that back in September, there were a number of stories about Apple and Google “caving” and removing the app. Some of them were very critical of both companies for the move:
And there’s Rachel Maddow’s scathing piece on the matter (see above).
What this says about the limits of big tech’s power
From xkcd. Tap to view the original comic.
Russia’s solution to the problem of the Navalny app was a variation on the crudely descriptive euphemism of rubber-hose cryptanalysis. In practical terms, it’s the extraction of the decoding key for an encrypted message through intimidation or torture, the latter of which can include beating the key holder with a rubber hose.
It’s probably why Russia passed a law last year requiring big U.S. tech companies to open offices in Russia by the start of 2022. By opening local offices, there would be local management, who could then be subjected to rubber-hosery. In light of this story, we can expect these offices to close soon, if they haven’t already.
In case you didn’t get the “hired goons” reference…
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, March 14 through Sunday, March 20, 2022.
This week contains both the Ides of March…
…and St. Patrick’s Day:
This list is a weekly service from Tampa Bay’s tech blog,Global Nerdy! For almost five years, I’ve been compiling a list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events happening in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas. There’s a lot going on in our scene here in “The Other Bay Area, on the Other West Coast”!
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
This week’s events
I try to keep this list up-to-date. I add new events as soon as I hear about them, so be sure to check this list’s page on Global Nerdy often!
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
If you have doubts about cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and web3 in general and need some more convincing, you might find these arguments helpful. If you’re a true believer, these are the arguments you’ll have to counter. Either way, enjoy!
The “You’ll be running with a crowd of terrible human beings” argument
Tap to view the original tweet
The article Bitcoin Goes to War in The New Republic has a subtitle that explains its thesis a little better: “For some crypto holders, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an opportunity—and a validation of their increasingly radical beliefs.”
However, I feel that the best summary comes from a sentence in the middle of the article, which reads “For some right-wing libertarian-minded coiners, the right to freely trade crypto takes precedence over opposing a Russian invasion of a sovereign nation.”
Nothing drives this point home better than investor Mike Alfred’s Twitter response to Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, who asked:
He points out that the blockchain data structure isn’t anything revolutionary, but instead is based on decades-old, well-documented structures: hash chains and hash trees (a.k.a. Merkle trees):
He also talks about the excuses that crypto-fans make for its massive power consumption…
…how easy it is to steal or grift from other people…
…that it just created a new business model for VCs…
If you (or someone you know) has heard of cryptocurrency and NFTs but doesn’t know much about them or why they’re getting a lot of hype, Dan Olson’s Line Goes Up — The Problem with NFTs explains everything quite well.
Don’t let the 2-hour 18-minute runtime scare you off — it’s broken into chapters and presents its material so well that you won’t even notice the time passing.
02:13:21 13. I Know It’s Rigged, But It’s The Only Game In Town
The artsy English-accented argument
English Youtuber and musician Georgina “munecat” Taylor does a wonderful takedown of the entire Web 3.0 scene, and while the video clock in at over an hour and forty minutes, it’s a very entertaining and informative watch.
The “Fucked Company” argument
If you were around during the dot-com bubble’s burst, you might remember a website called Fucked Company (whose name s a parody of Fast Company) that chronicled the ongoing failures of dot-coms with maximum snark.
There’s now a Web3 version: Web3 is going just great, and it’s part of my daily cautionary reading. Check it out.
