Books with category 📱 Technology
Displaying 8 books

Money

2020

by Jacob Goldstein

The co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs. Money only works because we all agree to believe in it.

In Money, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of years, from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century.

At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin.

One thing they all realized: what counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad. Lively, accessible, and full of interesting details (like the 43-pound copper coins that 17th-century Swedes carried strapped to their backs), Money is the story of the choices that gave us money as we know it today.

T-Minus AI

2020

by Michael Kanaan

Late in 2017, the conversation about the global impact of artificial intelligence (AI) changed forever. China delivered a bold message when it released a national plan to dominate all aspects of AI across the planet. Within weeks, Russia's Vladimir Putin raised the stakes by declaring AI the future for all humankind, and proclaiming that, "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world."

The race was on. Consistent with their unique national agendas, countries throughout the world began plotting their paths and hurrying their pace. Now, not long after, the race has become a sprint.

Despite everything at risk, for most of us AI remains shrouded by a cloud of mystery and misunderstanding. Hidden behind complex technical terms and confused even further by extravagant depictions in science fiction, the realities of AI and its profound implications are hard to decipher, but no less crucial to understand.

In T-Minus AI: Humanity's Countdown to Artificial Intelligence and the New Pursuit of Global Power, author Michael Kanaan explains the realities of AI from a human-oriented perspective that's easy to comprehend. A recognized national expert and the U.S. Air Force's first Chairperson for Artificial Intelligence, Kanaan weaves a compelling new view on our history of innovation and technology to masterfully explain what each of us should know about modern computing, AI, and machine learning.

Kanaan also illuminates the global implications of AI by highlighting the cultural and national vulnerabilities already exposed and the pressing issues now squarely on the table. AI has already become China's all-purpose tool to impose authoritarian influence around the world. Russia, playing catch up, is weaponizing AI through its military systems and now infamous, aggressive efforts to disrupt democracy by whatever disinformation means possible.

America and like-minded nations are awakening to these new realities, and the paths they're electing to follow echo loudly, in most cases, the political foundations and moral imperatives upon which they were formed.

As we march toward a future far different than ever imagined, T-Minus AI is fascinating and critically well-timed. It leaves the fiction behind, paints the alarming implications of AI for what they actually are, and calls for unified action to protect fundamental human rights and dignities for all.

Ansibles, perfiladores y otras máquinas de ingenio

2020

by Andrea Chapela

En los futuros donde suceden estos diez relatos, una colecciĂł de dispositivos como pings, ansibles, lentillas, perfiladores o telones sensoriales -algunos de ellos instalados dentro del cuerpo humano- permiten a las personas conectar sus mentes en una nube digital, compartir sus pensamientos y memorias, ponerles filtros a sus percepciones o calcular el Ă©xito de un romance, mientras comen tacos de canasta o navegan sobre las calles de una Ciudad de MĂ©xico totalmente cubierta por el agua.

Con una inteligencia arrasadora, Andrea Chapela enfrenta a las protagonistas a realidades donde el conocimiento científico, la tecnología de punta y la vida cotidiana interactúan de forma cada vez ms intrincada e inevitable, de modo que incluso en la intimidad de la mente ya no reina la voz de la propia conciencia. La tecnología deja de ser un fetiche técnico para mostrar su capacidad de moldear los afectos y los vínculos humanos.

Las protagonistas son mujeres que se encuentran en una disyuntiva en sus relaciones personales a partir de un dispositivo de tecnologĂ­a mental o de asimilaciĂłn de la realidad que, a pesar de que deberĂ­a facilitar la vida, amenaza con volver ms asfixiantes, impredecibles o peligrosas las interacciones humanas. La mente y sus secretos, la percepciĂłn y la duda de si percibimos solo lo que deseamos, los lĂ­mites de la intimidad; estos son algunos de los temas que trata el libro.

System Design Interview - An insider's guide

2020

by Alex Xu

The system design interview is considered to be the most complex and most difficult technical job interview by many. This book provides a step-by-step framework on how to tackle a system design question. It includes many real-world examples to illustrate the systematic approach with detailed steps that you can follow.

What's inside?

  • An insider's take on what interviewers really look for and why.

  • A 4-step framework for solving any system design interview question.

  • 15 real system design interview questions with detailed solutions.

  • 188 diagrams to visually explain how different systems work.

Always Day One

2020

by Alex Kantrowitz

An acclaimed tech reporter reveals the inner workings of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft, showing how to compete with the tech titans using their own playbook. At Amazon, "Day One" is code for inventing like a startup, with little regard for legacy. Day Two is, in Jeff Bezos's own words, "stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death." Most companies today are set up for Day Two. They build advantages and defend them fiercely, rather than invent the future.

But Amazon and fellow tech titans Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are operating in Day One: they prioritize reinvention over tradition and collaboration over ownership. Through 130 interviews with insiders, from Mark Zuckerberg to hourly workers, Always Day One reveals the tech giants' blueprint for sustainable success in a business world where no advantage is safe. Companies today can spin up new products at record speed -- thanks to artificial intelligence and cloud computing -- and those who stand still will be picked apart.

The tech giants remain dominant because they've built cultures that spark continual reinvention. It might sound radical, but those who don't act like it's always day one do so at their own peril. Kantrowitz uncovers the engine propelling the tech giants' continued dominance at a stage when most big companies begin to decline. And he shows the way forward for everyone who wants to compete with--and beat--the titans.

Black Hat Go

Like the best-selling Black Hat Python, Black Hat Go explores the darker side of the popular Go programming language. This collection of short scripts will help you test your systems, build and automate tools to fit your needs, and improve your offensive security skillset.

Black Hat Go explores the darker side of Go, the popular programming language revered by hackers for its simplicity, efficiency, and reliability. It provides an arsenal of practical tactics from the perspective of security practitioners and hackers to help you test your systems, build and automate tools to fit your needs, and improve your offensive security skillset, all using the power of Go.

You'll begin your journey with a basic overview of Go's syntax and philosophy and then start to explore examples that you can leverage for tool development, including common network protocols like HTTP, DNS, and SMB. You'll then dig into various tactics and problems that penetration testers encounter, addressing things like data pilfering, packet sniffing, and exploit development. You'll create dynamic, pluggable tools before diving into cryptography, attacking Microsoft Windows, and implementing steganography.

Are you ready to add to your arsenal of security tools? Then let's Go!

The Future Is Faster Than You Think

From the New York Times bestselling authors of Abundance and Bold comes a practical playbook for technological convergence in our modern era.

In their book Abundance, bestselling authors and futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler tackled grand global challenges, such as poverty, hunger, and energy. Then, in Bold, they chronicled the use of exponential technologies that allowed the emergence of powerful new entrepreneurs. Now the bestselling authors are back with The Future Is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next ten years of rapid technological disruption.

Technology is accelerating far more quickly than anyone could have imagined. During the next decade, we will experience more upheaval and create more wealth than we have in the past hundred years. In this gripping and insightful roadmap to our near future, Diamandis and Kotler investigate how wave after wave of exponentially accelerating technologies will impact both our daily lives and society as a whole. What happens as AI, robotics, virtual reality, digital biology, and sensors crash into 3D printing, blockchain, and global gigabit networks? How will these convergences transform today's legacy industries? What will happen to the way we raise our kids, govern our nations, and care for our planet?

Diamandis, a space-entrepreneur-turned-innovation-pioneer, and Kotler, bestselling author and peak performance expert, probe the science of technological convergence and how it will reinvent every part of our lives—transportation, retail, advertising, education, health, entertainment, food, and finance—taking humanity into uncharted territories and reimagining the world as we know it.

As indispensable as it is gripping, The Future Is Faster Than You Think provides a prescient look at our impending future.

2030

Once upon a time, the world was neatly divided into prosperous and backward economies. Babies were plentiful, workers outnumbered retirees, and people aspiring towards the middle class yearned to own homes and cars. That world—and those rules—are over. By 2030, a new reality will take hold, and before you know it:

  • There will be more grandparents than grandchildren

  • The middle-class in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will outnumber the US and Europe combined

  • The global economy will be driven by the non-Western consumer for the first time in modern history

  • There will be more global wealth owned by women than men

  • There will be more robots than workers

  • There will be more computers than human brains

  • There will be more currencies than countries

According to Mauro F. Guillen, the only way to truly understand the global transformations underway—and their impacts—is to think laterally. That is, using peripheral vision, or approaching problems creatively and from unorthodox points of view. Rather than focusing on a single trend—climate-change or the rise of illiberal regimes, for example—Guillen encourages us to consider the dynamic inter-play between a range of forces that will converge on a single tipping point—2030—that will be, for better or worse, the point of no return.

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