The sports story of the fortnight happened in a hotel at dawn: Swiss police raided FIFA, arresting officials on US corruption charges, decades of bribes around World Cup hosting and marketing rights. Then Sepp Blatter won re-election anyway, then resigned four days later as the walls closed in. The organization running the sport I learned to love during Brazil 2014 was apparently corrupt at the protocol layer. The engineers’ lunch take: FIFA had no code review, no audits, and root access for thirty years. Governance is infrastructure. It fails like infrastructure.
Palate cleanser: the Champions League final is set for Berlin this Saturday, Barcelona vs Juventus, the MSN trio vs the old guard. Juventus is carrying a roster of veterans and tactical discipline after injuries and might do it anyway.
Also of note: Google Photos launched at I/O with free unlimited storage and search that finds “dog at the beach” in your photos. Machine learning stopped being a research demo and started organizing my camera roll. The models are coming for every boring task, quietly, one product at a time.
TIL: what “ML inference at scale” costs. A Google engineer’s talk mentioned the photo models run on custom hardware. Custom chips for recognizing dogs. Sometimes the future announces itself in infrastructure line items.