All Hands on Data #34
Welcome to AHoD #34! If you saw our message from yesterday, we are allowing community submissions to join our articles each week. If you wrote/read something great last week, click the button below!
Nuclear-powered data centers are on the horizon
Small modular reactors (SMR) are proposed by the authors as a potential energy source for our ever-increasing demand for data centers in the U.S. Nuclear energy, particularly in a smaller form factor, fits well with this use case as the technology is proven and its size allows for, essentially, colocation. Knowing Shipyard could be nuclear powered is pretty slick! - John Forstmeier
Disney's New De-Aging AI Raises Concerns for Animators
Continuing my trend of being interested in how AI is impacting the entertainment industry and the content we consume... this article takes a look into Disney's FRAN (Face Re-Aging Network), which sounds like it came straight out of a science fiction Disney movie. The software allows them to make an actor look older or younger, with pretty good results. - Joseph McDermott
Transform Your Data Team into a Performance Powerhouse
Most data teams focus a lot on the basics. Ingestion. Transformation. But what would happen if you focused on driving business results? I loved the take on steps you could take to avoid your data team becoming a cost center. - Blake Burch
How is Linear Algebra Applied for Machine Learning?
Although speedy, this is a really good ramp up or review of linear algebra and how it eventually applies to deep neural networks. I'm pleasantly surprised by the definition of tensor and how it relates to the data space - it finally "clicked". - Eric Elsken
The Data Generalist's Vision Quest
I thought Stephen Bailey’s talk at Coalesce this year was one of the best of the conference. I’ve always felt like I don’t really fit into the mold of a specific role in the data space. He calls a person like me a generalist. If you feel like you fit in that space as well, Stephen offers some great encouragement in this talk. - Steven Johnson
Economics of Ethics: Is Ethics Ultimately an Economics Conversation? Part III
In addition to the Asimov reference, I generally enjoy the complicated topic of ethics. While the article (the third in the Economics of Ethics series) begins with examples of the unintended devastating consequences of well-intentioned decisions, Schmarzo tries to layout guidelines for formal training and stakeholder engagement to work towards ethical decision-making. I suppose that ethics is in the trying, if sometimes not in the succeeding. - Katt Baum
The Future of the Modern Data Stack in 2023
There are a lot of articles about trends in the data space and they are not always informative. What I found compelling about this article is their thoughts on how economic recession will affect the field. Perhaps most surprising to me, they forecast that modern data stack companies will turn towards creating connections to legacy on-prem systems that many enterprise companies still maintain. I'll be interested to see how many of their predictions come true! - Jon Davidson