As the cost of AI drops, things which aren't currently thought to be solvable through prediction will suddenly be viable – and this will primarily be complimented with human judgement. Computers predict better than people can, but then these predictions will be "handed off" to a human to use judgement to determine the response (such…

The demise of the retail store may have been (greatly) exaggerated. Yes, many big box stores are disappearing, being unable to compete on cost or selection with online vendors, many companies are turning to technology to survive the change by inviting themselves directly in to customers' homes, or optimising their supply chain and product ranges…

“That some big-name apps have removed their Apple Watch apps isn’t a sign that the Apple Watch is failing as a platform: It’s a sign that the platform is evolving [as developers learn what the new form factor is truly useful for]” https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/apple-watch-popular-apps-are-leaving-the-platform-is-that-a-bad-sign.html It joined Twitter, Amazon, Google Maps, and Slack, among others.

An innovative saving product: “With myAgro’s Mobile Layaway platform, farmers save for seeds, fertiliser and specialised training via scratchcards – in the same way they might buy phone credit” https://www.theguardian.com/social-entrepreneurs-solving-problems-around-the-world/2018/apr/04/developing-mobile-technology-manage-funds-farmers-poverty-myagro-anushka-ratnayake-skoll-social-entrepreneurship-awards Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship winner: Anushka Ratnayake, myAgro

An interesting concept – obvious when explained, but of course, many of the good ones are: “While paradigms like imperative or functional programming characterize certain underlying aspects of our mental model of program, gradual programming describes a process by which a mental model is formed” http://willcrichton.net/notes/gradual-programming/ Programming is a fundamentally incremental (or gradual) process, and…

A fascinating tool to support developers. I'm proud to say they had  only a few recommendations and findings from my code/repositories (although i have subscribed, so i'll get notifications for others in future too) – and i can see how a tool like this could really help developers to produce better, more supportable, more secure code.…

While IBM's latest figures show that perhaps the elephant can't dance after all (https://www.ft.com/content/84dfe694-432f-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fd), Microsoft's pivot from a software to cloud services company is really starting to pay off – reporting revenue nearly $1bn higher than market expectations last year. Changing the direction has clearly been hard (e.g. disbanding the Windows Engineering team, previously the…

Scratch is a great tool for introducing young children to programming, so I’m glad to see it continues to evolve and grow. https://medium.com/scratchteam-blog/3-things-to-know-about-scratch-3-0-18ee2f564278 A new version of Scratch is coming this August!

Construction sites are perfect examples of chaotic environments – a massive number of moving parts, unpredictable environmental conditions, hundreds of people – and there’s a very real risk of injury or even death for every human present. Automation therefore is highly complex, but the first steps are starting to be taken, with robots moving parts…

Most power outages are due to failures in the transmission network (storms, broken power lines), not instability in supply. Making the move to newer, cleaner energy solutions is going to be difficult and take time – and cause pain for those involved. But that's not a good reason to prop up old, dirty, under-utilized coal…