Learning Concepts with Energy Functions

We’ve developed an energy-based model that can quickly learn to identify and generate instances of concepts, such as near, above, between, closest, and furthest, expressed as sets of 2d points. Our model learns these concepts after only five demonstrations. We also show cross-domain transfer: we use concepts learned in a 2d particle environment to solve tasks on a 3-dimensional physics-based robot. Many hallmarks of human intelligence, such as generalizing from limited experience, abstract reasoning and planning, analogical reasoning, creative problem solving, and capacity for language require the ability to consolidate experience into concepts, which act as basic building blocks of understanding and reasoning.
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Scaling Time Series Data Storage—Part II

In January 2016 Netflix expanded worldwide, opening service to 130 additional countries and supporting 20 total languages. Later in 2016 the TV experience evolved to include video previews during the browsing experience. More members, more languages, and more video playbacks stretched the times series data storage architecture from part 1 close to its breaking point. In part 2 here, we will explore the limitations of that architecture and describe how we’re re-architecting for this next phase in our evolution.
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gRPC Load Balancing on Kubernetes without Tears

Many new gRPC users are surprised to find that Kubernetes’s default load balancing often doesn’t work out of the box with gRPC. For example, here’s what happens when you take a simple gRPC Node.js microservices app and deploy it on Kubernetes: While the voting service displayed here has several pods, it’s clear from Kubernetes’s CPU graphs that only one of the pods is actually doing any work—because only one of the pods is receiving any traffic.
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20 Best YouTube channels for AI and machine learning

What are the most interesting and informative YouTube channels about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning? Subscribe to these 20 high-quality channels today to stay up to date with the latest AI and machine learning breakthroughs. Siraj Raval: The School of AI is a growing learning community that aims to offer a free, world-class AI education to anyone. Arxiv Insights: Xander Steenbrugge is a machine learning researcher at ML6. His channel summarizes the key points about machine learning, reinforcement learning, and AI in general from a technical perspective, while making them accessible for a bigger audience.
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A Netflix Web Performance Case Study

Netflix is one of the most popular video streaming services. Since launching globally in 2016, the company has found that many new users are not only signing up on mobile devices but are also using less-than-ideal connections to do so. By refining the JavaScript used for Netflix.com’s sign-up process and using prefetching techniques, the developer team was able to provide a better user experience for both mobile and desktop users and offer several improvements.
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Debugging and Monitoring your Kubernetes Services with Linkerd 2.0

Linkerd 2.0 brings dramatic improvements to performance, resource consumption, and ease of use to Linkerd. With its minimal footprint and incremental approach, it’s designed to give service owners and platform owners the critical tools they need to be successful in a cloud native environment. In this webinar, William Morgan, core maintainer of Linkerd shares a demo and introduces new Linkerd 2.0 features. William is joined by Ben Lambert, CTO of Just Football, who describes how Just Football uses Linkerd 2.
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Breakpoints for Kubernetes? Rookout provides easier container debugging

Debugging inside containers can be a nightmare. Looking for an easier way? Rookout adds breakpoints to Kubernetes and might just change your entire container game. Find out why breakpoints in Kubernetes can save you precious time. A bird makes a good de-wormer, but how about a good debugger? Rookout cuts debugging time down with rapid production-grade debugging. The news is out: the little purple bird now integrates with Kubernetes. We take a look at what this debugging tool can tool, and why it is the perfect match for Kubernetes.
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If you want to check in on the microservices in your Istio service mesh, Kiali’s got you covered

A match made in heaven? If you’re wondering what the microservices in your Istio service mesh are doing, Kiali’s got you covered. This new project helps you visualize the service mesh topology, and offers visibility into features like circuit breakers, request rates and more. Have we mentioned it runs on OpenShift and Kubernetes? Let’s have a closer look. Source: jaxenter.com

Modernizing your build pipelines

Doing Continuous Integration is a lot easier if you have the right tools. In our project at a german car manufacturer, we were tasked with developing new services and bringing them to the cloud. We had a centralized Jenkins instance, shared by all the teams in the department. It didn’t fit our needs and made it harder for us to deliver software quickly and reliably. The problems with the clients existing Jenkins instance included: It was a snowflake, which meant that understanding its configuration was hard.
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Who Is Running My Kubernetes Pod? The Past, Present, and Future of Container Runtimes

Container runtime choices have grown over time to include other options beyond the popular Docker engine. The Open Container Initiative (OCI) has successfully standardized the concept of a container and container image in order to guarantee interoperability between runtimes. This article looks at the past, present, and future of container engine implementations. Source: infoq.com