An Agent of Change
The Covid-19 pandemic has changed how people and businesses spend and operate. Over the coming pages we’ll explore ways in which our current world is already very different from the…
The Least Liked Programming Languages
StackOverflow’s 2020 developer survey included a table showing the “most loved, dreaded, and wanted languages.” Loved and wanted languages are, well, sort of boring. The programming languages we dread are…
Power, Harms, and Data
A recent article in The Verge discussed PULSE, an algorithm for “upsampling” digital images. PULSE, when applied to a low-resolution image of Barack Obama, recreated a White man’s face; applied…
AI, Protests, and Justice
Largely on the impetus of the Black Lives Matter movement, the public’s response to the murder of George Floyd, and the subsequent demonstrations, we’ve seen increased concern about the use…
Society Centered-Design
A World of Individuals Our world is on fire. For too long we have been complicit, maintaining the status quo. This must change. I’m writing this as we’re living through…
COVID-19 and Complex Systems
In various mailing lists about the COVID-19 pandemic, I’ve seen several discussions of “complex systems theory” as, possibly, a way to understand how the pandemic is playing out in different…
Decision-Making in a Time of Crisis
In the 1996 cult classic film Swingers, two friends, Trent and Mike (played by Vince Vaughan and Jon Favreau, respectively) make an impromptu trip to Las Vegas. At the blackjack…
Machine Learning and the Production Gap
The biggest problem facing machine learning today isn’t the need for better algorithms; it isn’t the need for more computing power to train models; it isn’t even the need for…
The Business of Open Source
In a recent Twitter thread, Adam Jacob (co-founder and former CTO of Chef) talked about Chef’s switch from an “open core” model to a a “Red Hat” model for licensing…
On COBOL
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