For decades it felt like society was growing more accepting of the LGBTQ community, but in the past few years, hospitals have faced bomb threats, drag story hours have been beset by armed protestors, and queer spaces have been violently targeted. What happened?
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Two year anniversaries in Washington mean a new Congress, but this year January also brings the echoes and the legacy of January 6. These intertwine most intimately, as the end of the old Congress necessitated the windup of the January 6 Commission, a report, some referrals, and all sorts of constitutional questions. Meanwhile, it also brings a new Speaker election and why should anything be simple in Washington these days? If that wasn’t spicy enough, the usually routine seating of the new House brings Representative-ish Santos to Washington with all of his chameleon-like mendacity. We have to talk a bit about that, too.
Over the past five years, Intuit went through a total cloud transformation—they closed the data centers, built out a modern SaaS development environment, and got cloud native with foundational building blocks like containers and Kubernetes. Now they are looking to continue transforming into an AI-driven organization that leverages the data they have to make their customers’ lives easier. Along the way, they realized that their internal systems have the same requirements to leverage the data they have for AI-driven insights.
Episode notes
Wadher notes that Intuit uses development velocity, not developer velocity. The thinking is that an engineering org should focus on shipping products and features faster, not making individual devs more productive.
No, the robots aren’t coming for your jobs. Wadher says their AI strategy relies on helping experts make better insights. The goal is to arm those experts, not replace them.
In terms of sheer volume, the AI/ML program at Intuit is massive. They make 58 billion ML predictions daily, enable 730 million AI-driven customer interactions every year, and maintain over two million personalized AI models.
Intuit’s not here to hoard secrets. They’ve outsourced their DevOps pipeline tool, Argo. They found that a lot of companies used it for AI and data pipelines, and have recently launched Numaproj, which open sources a lot of the tools and capabilities that they use internally.
In this episode, Here & Now's Robin Young talks with author Andrew Sean Greer about his new novel Less is Lost, the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Less. This time, Greer's protagonist Arthur Less takes a tour of America in a van, and in the process learns about what it means to be an author today. Less is disappointed by how things are going, but doesn't realize how good things actually are for him. Greer says that he almost didn't write a second book, but by satirizing the literary crowd, he saw the importance of critiquing himself.
Speaking to Short Wave from about 250 miles above the Earth, Josh Cassada outlined his typical day at work: "Today, I actually started out by taking my own blood," he said. The astronauts aboard the International Space Station are themselves research subjects, as well as conductors of all sorts of science experiments: Gardening in microgravity, trapping frigid atoms, examining neutron stars. Then, there's the joy of walks into the yawning void of space. Speaking from orbit, Cassada told fellow physicist and Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber about research aboard the station, what it takes to keep the ISS going and which countries' astronauts make the best food.
Curious about the other goings-on in space? Beam us an email at shortwave@npr.org — we might answer it in a future episode!
WHY do we dream? What do dreams mean? What parts of our brain are working after-hours? We sought out UC Santa Cruz researcher and professor Dr. G. William Domhoff, a world expert on the topic, for this dream-come-true episode. Learn about historical dream research, dream researchers collect dream reports, how neurodivergence affects dreaming, why you should set an alarm to go to bed, how remembering dreams can help solve problems, and more about REM myths! We’ll be back next week to answer all your questions and dig even deeper. Also teeth dreams: WHY.
The House descends into chaos as Kevin McCarthy fails to win the race for speaker on the first three ballots, Republicans prepare to swear in a new member of Congress who made up his entire life story, and the last Congress ends by making Donald Trump's tax returns public and asking the Department of Justice to charge him with multiple crimes. And later, Jon, Jon, and Tommy kick off the new year with a round of Take Appreciator.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Ravi and Rikki kick off the new year by addressing Rep.-elect George Santos’ list of lies, deceptions, and fabrications. Ravi delves into these revelations and debates if Congress can hold him accountable for his dishonesty. They then switch gears to address a provocative piece in The Atlantic, which argues that real estate should be treated as consumption, not an investment, and Rikki questions whether homeownership should still be synonymous with the American dream. Finally, Ravi and Rikki discuss snow days – should schools still have them? Or does remote learning render them obsolete?
The most valuable crypto stories for Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2022.
The former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is set to appear in person at a Manhattan federal court this afternoon. The Wall Street Journal reports that the disgraced crypto exchange founder will likely plead not guilty to fraud at his arraignment. Plus, a closer look at why Solana (SOL) is climbing, while other cryptos like bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH), were little changed following a flat weekend.
