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…
Hand Labeling Considered Harmful
We are traveling through the era of Software 2.0, in which the key components of modern software are increasingly determined by the parameters of machine learning models, rather than hard-coded…
Communal Computing
Home assistants and smart displays are being sold in record numbers, but they are built wrong. They are designed with one person in mind: the owner. These technologies need to…
AI Powered Misinformation and Manipulation at Scale #GPT-3
OpenAI’s text generating system GPT-3 has captured mainstream attention. GPT-3 is essentially an auto-complete bot whose underlying Machine Learning (ML) model has been trained on vast quantities of text available…