How to get web articles on your kindle
... and what to read over the holiday
I tend to save interesting articles to read when I have some downtime - but often they sit in a list forgotten. The upcoming Christmas holiday is a great time to dust those links off, load them up on your kindle and read them while lounging on the beach. This year, AI featured heavily in both my thinking and reading, and that is reflected below. If you are wondering how to get articles like this on your kindle, I’ve written up how I do it at the bottom.
Here are a few on my list:
By Nada R. Sanders and John D. Wood from the Harvard Business Review, this article summarises a 5 year study of organisations leading in AI and explains that being successful in AI takes more than just being better at technology.
“Too many business leaders still believe that AI is just another ‘plug and play’ incremental technological investment. In reality, gaining a competitive advantage through AI requires organizational transformation”
What Is GPT-3 And Why Is It Revolutionizing Artificial Intelligence?
Everyone is talking about GPT-3. This Forbes article takes an honest approach to explaining what it is, what the promise is and what some of the problems are.
“If you ask it a question, you would expect the most useful response would be an answer. If you ask it to carry out a task such as creating a summary or writing a poem, you will get a summary or a poem.”
There is no “technology industry”.
Anil Dash’s August article provides a high level look at what we call the ‘tech industry’ and how it’s no longer useful to call it that.
“Put simply, every industry and every sector of society is powered by technology today, and being transformed by the choices made by technologists.”
Advancing AI for Earth Science: A Data Systems Perspective.
An interesting explanation of how AI is being used in Earth Science.
“Because extreme weather events and impacts of climate change are rare or unseen in training data gathered from historical observations, machine learning models usually struggle to provide accurate predictions of scenarios involving such events or impacts.”
TrojanNet – a simple yet effective attack on machine learning models.
We often hear about all the positive aspects of AI, but like any technology, it can be exploited by bad actors - and due to the ‘black-box’ nature of AI and ML, it can be hard to detect. Here is a good detailed explanation of one such attack.
“Currently, there is no common and effective detection method. Once the trojans have been implanted, the detection work will be extremely challenging.”
Software Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report—April 2020.
From Infoq, this is a good summary of upcoming software architecture trends.
“As microservices become more widely adopted, and practitioners find more benefits and drawbacks, patterns emerge to reinforce what has worked well and make the next generation of microservices more successful.”
Getting articles synced with your Kindle
I use the free service, instapaper. This strips the article from the original website, removes adverts and autoplay videos, puts it in standard formatting and bundles it up into a single document that is then sent to your kindle, like your every own, custom newspaper (hence the name). There are probably other ways to do this (automate, flow, IFTTT) but I find this the simplest.
- Sign up to instapaper here: www.instapaper.com
- In instapaper settings, under ‘Kindle settings’ add your kindle email address
- Add the instapaper email address to your “Personal Document Settings” in your kindle preferences.
- Install the instapaper browser extension: Chrome, Firefox
- Start saving webpages using the browser extension. Just click the “I”. Your articles will sync with your kindle at the frequency you set.
Have a great holiday.