Should We Be Scared of an Intelligent Internet of Things?

Last week was IoT week on SitePoint which saw us publish a plethora of articles focused on the intersection of the internet and the physical world. We covered some seriously great stuff! Among my favorites was this article by Christopher Pitt on combining an Arduino, Minecraft and PHP (yup, PHP) and this article by SitePoint's Alex Walker and Jude Aakjaer on creating a motion-sensing, meeting-room-reserving Arduino platform.

Now, I don't mind admitting that I'm a bit of an IoT skeptic. As I've written in the past, it worries me that in the rush to get the latest, greatest IoT products out of the door, security is often an afterthought. I also have zero confidence in those large data-thirsty corporations who, given half a chance, would use my IoT devices to gather as much personal data as they possibly can. Oh wait, they're doing that already, you say? Well, dang!

Anyway, that's why a third IoT week post struck a particular chord with me. This is a post in which Elio Qoshi cautions against the potentially dangerous combination of the IoT and artificial intelligence (AI). Now we've all heard the warnings about AI, right? World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking believes that thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence, and technology entrepreneur Elon Musk considers AI to be "potentially more dangerous than nukes". But surely that's just hyperbole. We're already using AI in our day-to-day lives (for example whenever we interact with a virtual assistant such as Siri or Cortana) and the world hasn't ended quite yet. In fact, for most people it just got more convenient.

Continue reading %Should We Be Scared of an Intelligent Internet of Things?%

by James Hibbard via SitePoint

How to Create an Xcode Source Editor Extension

Quickly Process API Requests with Shoryuken and SQS

Rail's has lots of solutions for background jobs. One of these is a brilliant Gem called Sidekiq, which we have written about before on Sitepoint.

Sidekiq is great and can solve most developer needs. It is especially useful as it takes over the heavy lifting from Rails. However, it has a few shortfalls:

• If you are not a Pro user ($750 per year) and your process crashes, you will lose your jobs.
• If your job load increases, you will need a more powerful version of Redis which costs more money and resources.
• You need to host its dashboard in order to monitor what is happening with your jobs.
  *
  Another approach you may want to consider for processing queued jobs is Shoryuken, which works in conjunction with Amazon's SQS (Simple Queue Service). This is a basic store of messages that you can process later via Shoryuken workers. These workers then work outside of the main Rails processes. With SQS and Shoryuken, you create a queue for your workers to use and these workers cycle through the jobs until the queue is empty.

Continue reading %Quickly Process API Requests with Shoryuken and SQS%

by William Kennedy via SitePoint

Introduction to Google DFP: Optimizing Revenue

Multi Picker jQuery Plugin

Multipicker is jQuery plugin for selecting days, numbers or other elements, it supports multi selecting (like checkboxes) or single element selection (like radio buttons).

The post Multi Picker jQuery Plugin appeared first on jQuery Rain.

by Admin via jQuery Rain

jQuery Cascading Drop-down Menu

jQuery plugin, which allows you to populate a set of form drop-down menus based on the previous selection.

The post jQuery Cascading Drop-down Menu appeared first on jQuery Rain.

by Admin via jQuery Rain

SSD Confirm : jQuery Confirmation Plugin

Simple confirmation plugin for jQuery.

The post SSD Confirm : jQuery Confirmation Plugin appeared first on jQuery Rain.

by Admin via jQuery Rain