Epstein Barr and the Cause of Cause
One of the most intriguing news stories of the new year claimed that the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is the “cause” of Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and suggested that antiviral medications or…
The Human Web
A few days ago, I recommended that Tim O’Reilly invite someone to our next FOO Camp. I thought she had been to a prior FOO event, though I didn’t meet…
Andy Warhol, Clay Christensen, and Vitalik Buterin walk into a bar
In 1962, Daniel Boorstin crystallized a notion that had been around since at least the 1890s, writing of the new kind of celebrities: “Their chief claim to fame is their…
Remote Teams in ML/AI
I’m well-versed in the ups and downs of remote work. I’ve been doing some form thereof for most of my career, and I’ve met plenty of people who have a…
The Quality of Auto-Generated Code
Kevlin Henney and I were riffing on some ideas about GitHub Copilot, the tool for automatically generating code base on GPT-3’s language model, trained on the body of code that’s…
Two economies. Two sets of rules.
At one point early this year, Elon Musk briefly became the richest person in the world. After a 750% increase in Tesla’s stock market value added over $180 billion to…
Code as Infrastructure
A few months ago, I was asked if there were any older technologies other than COBOL where we were in serious danger of running out of talent. They wanted me…
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…
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…
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…