Unfortunately, human errors are bound to happen. Checklists allows one to verify that all the required actions are correctly done, and in the correct order. The military has it, the health care sector has it, professional diving has it, the aviation and space industries have it, software engineering has it. Why not artificial intelligence practitioners?

The accuracy of a model is often criticized for not being informative enough to understand its performance trade offs. One has to turn to more powerful tools instead. Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) and Precision-Recall (PR) curves are standard metrics used to measure the accuracy of binary classification models and find an appropriate decision threshold. But how do they relate to each other?

Transformers are giant robots coming from Cybertron. There are two Transformer tribes: the Autobots and the Decepticons. They have been fighting each other over the Allspark, a mythical artifact capable of building worlds and mechanical beings. Well, there is also another kind of Transformers, but those are not about warfare. However they are pretty good at language understanding. Let’s see how!

The situation where an unskilled user can enjoy a well-working computer does only last so long.¹ Either the user becomes good at maintaining the computer, or it will stop working correctly. That’s because computers are not reliable. If not used carefully, at some point, they will behave unexpectedly or stop working. Therefore, one will have to get their hands dirty and most likely learn something along the way.

Some operating systems are more prone to gathering cruft, though. Windows computers are known to decay over time. This is caused by file system fragmentation, the registry getting cluttered, OS / software updates,² or unwanted software installation. Furthermore, users can install software from any source. As a result, they have to check the software quality by themselves, whether it’s compatible with their system, perform the installation procedure and the maintenance. This may create problems if any of these tasks are not done well. Conversely, despite giving users a lot of power, GNU/Linux is more likely to stay stable. Even though it depends on the distributions policies, software installation and updates are done through package manager repositories that are administered and curated by skilled maintainers. Breaking the system is thus more difficult, but not impossible. After all, with great power comes great responsibility.

Biometric systems such as fingerprint readers or facial recognition may be appealing, but they have drawbacks worth mentioning. Their attack surfaces are larger than commonly believed, they make it hard to enforce good security rules and are not guaranteed to work all the time. These flaws should be considered when assessing the value of biometric authentication.

If you want to distance yourself from the craziness of the world around and happen to be a computer geek, only a few things are more satisfying than blasting hordes of demons on Doom. Here is how to install GZDoom - an OpenGL port of Doom released under the GPLv3 license - and a mod called Brutal Doom on Fedora 31.