Page 129 - The Black Box Book

Figure 7: Black Box (2020).
Detail of the links of relations between
the groups. Retrieved from https://cer-
na-skrinka.cz/ai-curator

CODING BLACK-BOX WEB IN DAWN
OF MACHINE LEARNING AKA WE
USE CODE TO COMPILE CODE

As a little joke, the programmer Oliver Staša set up the loading
console on the website to dump JSON-like content. Entering the page,
the user can see a black box filled with passing text on the top before gRPC (Protobufs) are faster, cleaner and less energy-consuming . JSON
3
the content is loaded. This console showdown was done to allow visitors is part of a data transfer API family REST. It is a kind of human-readable
to see a part of what is happening when the website is being loaded and data format that states the key name and its allocated value in a strictly
constructed. Code-like, this is how data gets transcribed from a database formatted string: {“ key”: “allocated value”}, which decoding is widely
of strings to formattable content (e.g. HTML DOM ) every time we visit supported and also makes common sense. In terms of big-data, REST
2
1
a modern website. This is currently the most common way of exchanging is the least effective way to go, but since websites are primarily about
data between the back-end (server) and front-end (user) app layers. It is simple text content, this is the most widely used method across small
also easily set up, maintained and supported by a wide variety of program- string-type data passing. When the app gets bigger, energy consump-
ming languages, although other methods like GraphQL or even better tion to pass the data becomes larger roughly by linear O(5n) and slower
by O(10n) compared to gRPC, which is one of the reasons why big-data
companies do not use REST APIs and save computing time and energy
1 String is data type described as text (non-numerical type to be on a large scale, abandoning the human readability attribute of JSON.
transcoded according to character table like ASCII or UTF-8).

2 HTML DOM is a set of elements making up the page the user sees 3 With gRPC, less bytes are required to transfer the same data for the
rendered in the browser. price of not being readable by a human.
128 129