Flights around SFO August & September 2019
Two years ago I saw a friend walking around with a one of these blue things in his laptop bag
I’d never seen one before so I asked him what it was — it’s a Software Defined Radio (SDR). Specifically a NooElec NESDR Mini 2 SDR & DVB-T USB Stick (RTL2832 + R820T2) with Antenna and Remote Control
He let me borrow his for a week and I was amazed at the information that can be captured. I got my own and have been using it to capture information on the planes flying near our house.
Live data https://flightaware.com/adsb/stats/user/wasauce#stats-106041
Historical data and a write-up: https://github.com/wasauce/piaware-flightdata
With just the radio above, open source software and a little python code to capture and format the data — we can see the flight routes in and around the Bay Area. While I have been told airplanes fly effectively on highways in the sky — seeing is believing:
Full video here:
Want to play with the data in Kepler.gl (The visualization engine)?
Computer learning how to play/master hide and seek
Watch the full video. I’m (again) amazed at the unreasonable effectiveness of machine learning — this is an on-going mantra.
OpenAI’s full write-up is here and worth the read: https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/.
The use of tools and discovery of novel solutions (block surfing) both makes sense that a computer would discover via enough gameplay — and is eye opening to how effective what I will call the combination of brute force + learning can be.
OpenAI does an excellent job with these visualizations to humanize what we are seeing and make what I would call an optimization function seem intentional and person-like.
The Uber Book
I wouldn’t recommend this book. It is a fast paced overview of all the bad that Uber has done. Not much to learn that hasn’t already been reported around the bad actions and systemic problems. It reads more like a soap opera.
Yes it talks about how the company structure afforded city managers and teams within Uber incredible autonomy and that with that autonomy people did many inexcusable things — but I had hoped for a book shining a light on how Uber accomplished all that they have — and how they ramped so quickly.
The Bay Area has had a string of ginormous start-ups that spring to life and then dominate, each in under a decade: Google -> FaceBook -> Uber. What’s next?