Building a Better Middleman
What comes to mind when you hear the term “two-sided market?” Maybe you imagine a Party A who needs something, so they interact with Party B who provides it, and…
Identity problems get bigger in the metaverse
If the hype surrounding the metaverse results in something real, it could improve the way you live, work, and play. Or it could create a hellworld where you don’t get…
Recommendations for all of us
If you live in a household with a communal device like an Amazon Echo or Google Home Hub, you probably use it to play music. If you live with other…
Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3
There’s been a lot of talk about Web3 lately, and as the person who defined “Web 2.0” 17 years ago, I’m often asked to comment. I’ve generally avoided doing so…
MLOps and DevOps: Why Data Makes It Different
Much has been written about struggles of deploying machine learning projects to production. As with many burgeoning fields and disciplines, we don’t yet have a shared canonical infrastructure stack or…
Ethical Social Media: Oxymoron or Attainable Goal?
Humans have wrestled with ethics for millennia. Each generation spawns a fresh batch of ethical dilemmas and then wonders how to deal with them. For this generation, social media has…
A Way Forward with Communal Computing
Communal devices in our homes and offices aren’t quite right. In previous articles, we discussed the history of communal computing and the origin of the single user model. Then we…
Defending against ransomware is all about the basics
The concept behind ransomware is simple. An attacker plants malware on your system that encrypts all the files, making your system useless, then offers to sell you the key you…
Communal Computing’s Many Problems
In the first article of this series, we discussed communal computing devices and the problems they create–or, more precisely, the problems that arise because we don’t really understand what “communal”…
Thinking About Glue
In Glue: the Dark Matter of Software, Marcel Weiher asks why there’s so much code. Why is Microsoft Office 400 million lines of code? Why are we always running into…