Conference talks worth your timeInfoQ
Randy Shoup details how eBay's 2020-2022 velocity initiative moved 5,000 engineers from 35th to 75th percentile on DORA metrics, yet eBay's GMV grew only 1.5x over 15 years vs. 8x for US e-commerce. He attributes the gap to waterfall planning, innovator's dilemma, and a pathological culture of fear and empire-building that technical wins alone couldn't fix.
Devoxx UK
Walks through how transformers work from binary storage through weighted sums, ReLU activations, and softmax probability outputs. Covers gradient descent, MSE loss, and why GPT-3's 175B parameters demand 700GB RAM—then explains how int8 quantization and GPU parallelism make deployment practical.
Stanford Online
Scott Nolan argues energy, not chips, caps AI scaling—and nuclear is the only viable baseload option. The US produces under 0.1% of global enrichment capacity after its last facility closed in 2013, creating a dependency on Russia and Europe that General Matter's enrichment rebuild targets directly.
BSides San Francisco
By capping outbound bandwidth to ~100 Mbps at perimeter routers with per-service token buckets, Anthropic forces full-weight exfiltration—terabytes—to take weeks under assumed full-cluster compromise. The rollout cut egress 98% while keeping research workflows intact, buying detection time until TEEs and confidential compute mature.
Stanford Online
Rather than foundation models, the approach builds differentiable physics simulations (position-based dynamics) to infer tissue elasticity from video in real time, enabling model-predictive control for cutting, suturing, and hemorrhage management. Also covers humanoid deployment in hospitals and a haptic glove for teleoperation-to-autonomy transfer.