@RadioFreeHPC Has Entered The Building

First things first, you can call us @RadioFreeHPC now, thanks to our new Twitter account. We decided maybe this social media thing is not a fad after all. We are also pleased to inform you that our Twitter account is almost as heavily followed as the podcast itself. Thank you! We should be up to about 6 or 7 followers by the time you read this. Good thing we allocated 64 full bits to track the number.

FinTech and HPC-AI

Shahin gives an update on the HPC-AI on Wall Street conference. We discuss the well-received Cryptocurrency panel that he moderated, the challenges of using of AI in financial services, the emerging computational storage, and advanced HPC-class modeling that helps venture capital investors decide whether to invest in a startup.

Check out his blog on the panel and top-10 crypto topics of the day here:

Top-10 Crypto/Blockchain Topics

Why? What’s the big deal?
Blockchain or Crypto?
ICOs
Political Support
Libra
Apps
Security
Other Coins
Digital Assets
Smart Contracts

Henry Newman’s Why No One Should be Online, Ever.

Once again, Henry actually has good news, and once again, it’s the kind of good news that highlights the bad news.

Man Who Hired Deadly Swatting Gets 15 Months

An Ohio teen who recruited a convicted serial “swatter” to fake a distress call that ended in the police shooting an innocent Kansas man in 2017 has been sentenced to 15 months in prison. “Swatting” is a dangerous hoax that involves making false claims to emergency responders about phony hostage situations or bomb threats, with the intention of prompting a heavily-armed police response to the location of the claimed incident.

Catch of the Week

Shahin talks about France and Germany planning to block the Libra cryptocurrency. Henry and Dan think this is a good time to say “we told you so”! Nobody’s surprised, though Shahin thinks this is the beginning of this, not the end.

Germany’s Scholz: We cannot accept parallel currencies such as Facebook’s Libra

German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said on Tuesday policymakers could not accept the emergence of parallel currencies such as Facebook’s planned Libra, adding that Berlin would reject any such plans. Facebook’s planned Libra is the most well-known of the stablecoins, a certain form of cryptocurrency backed by assets such as traditional money deposits, short-term government securities or gold.

Henry doesnt know whether to laugh or cry as he describes some of the “ignoble” prize winners and wonders how they ever got funded.

Magnetic cockroaches, dirty money, wombat poo and posties’ balls: It’s the Ig Nobels 2019

This year’s theme was ‘habits’ and they were baaaaad
The Annals of Improbable Research held its annual award-giving ceremony – the Ig Nobel Prize – on Thursday night at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, and the entries were as worthy as ever.

Dan talks about the call-center scammer whose plea deal backfires:

Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice

But I only expected to pay $250,000, wails scumbag to wall of blank faces. A call-center scammer has lost his appeal to overturn a $9m fine – after a court pointed out the crook had specifically waived the right to appeal when he pleaded guilty.

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

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