Hello again. Check out this week’s content:
Links of the week
Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning
“Although the Dota 2 engine runs at 30 frames per second, OpenAI Five only acts on every 4th frame which we call a timestep. Each timestep, OpenAI Five receives an observation from the game engine encoding all the information a human player would see such as units’ health, position, etc. OpenAI Five then returns a discrete action to the game engine, encoding a desired movement, attack, etc.”
“Go’s simplicity and concurrency model make it an appealing choice for backend systems, but the larger question is how does it fare for latency-sensitive applications? Is it worth sacrificing the simplicity of the language to make it faster? Let’s walk through a few areas of performance optimization in Go (…)”
Djed: implementing algorithmic stablecoins for proven price stability
“Djed is a crypto-backed algorithmic stablecoin contract that acts as an autonomous bank. It operates by keeping a reserve of base coins, and minting and burning stablecoins and reserve coins.“
If you are really interested on the specifics, here is the paper too.
Who Is Thinking About Open Source Firmware?
“Secrets that move from software to firmware are still secrets, and even those among us who are the most staunch proponents of open source have closed hardware and firmware paths in our computers.”
Securely Scaling the Myriad APIs in Real-World Backend Platforms
“These days, the most standard way to secure APIs is via access tokens, which use the JSON Web Token (JWT) format. Although there are many online tutorials about receiving and validating JWTs, these do not usually convey how to manage security on a larger scale. In this article, I will explain how to scale the use of JWTs to real-world backend platforms, where there are many APIs and clients.”
Leader Election in Distributed Systems
“Leader election is a powerful tool for improving efficiency, reducing coordination, simplifying architectures, and reducing operations. On the other hand, leader election can introduce new failure modes and scaling bottlenecks. In addition, leader election may make it more difficult for you to evaluate the correctness of a system.”
Book of the week
“The Software Engineering at Google book (“SWE Book”) is not about programming, per se, but about the engineering practices utilized at Google to make their codebase sustainable and healthy.”
Hope you enjoyed the links. Have a nice week ;)