DeepCheapFakes
Back in 2019, Ben Lorica and I wrote about deepfakes. Ben and I argued (in agreement with The Grugq and others in the infosec community) that the real danger wasn’t…
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DeepCheapFakes
Checking Jeff Bezos’s Math
“If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume. Your goal should be to create value for everyone you interact…
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Checking Jeff Bezos’s Math
The Wrong Question
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow The deplatforming of Donald Trump and his alt-right coterie has…
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The Wrong Question
Patterns
A few months ago, I said that “making everything into a design pattern is a sign that you don’t know what design patterns really are.” So now, I feel obliged…
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Patterns
What is functional programming?
It has long seemed to me that functional programming is, essentially, programming viewed as mathematics. Many ideas in functional programming came from Alonzo Church’s Lambda Calculus, which significantly predates anything…
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What is functional programming?
On Exactitude in Technical Debt
If software is such stuff as dreams are made on, how do we talk about nightmares? Software is not the tangible, kickable stuff our senses are tuned to, so we…
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On Exactitude in Technical Debt
Multi-Paradigm Languages
The programming world used to be split into functional languages, object-oriented languages, and everything else (mostly procedural languages). One “was” a functional programmer (at least as a hobby) writing Lisp,…
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Multi-Paradigm Languages
Our Favorite Questions
“On peut interroger n’importe qui, dans n’importe quel état; ce sont rarement les réponses qui apportent la vérité, mais l’enchaînement des questions.““You can interrogate anyone, no matter what their state…
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Our Favorite Questions
AI and Creativity
The release of GPT-3 has reinvigorated a discussion of creativity and artificial intelligence. That’s a good discussion to have, primarily because it forces us to think carefully about what we…
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AI and Creativity
Pair Programming with AI
In a conversation with Kevlin Henney, we started talking about the kinds of user interfaces that might work for AI-assisted programming. This is a significant problem: neither of us were…
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Pair Programming with AI