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…
The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?
High-profile entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, venture capitalists like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, and big companies like Oracle and HP Enterprise are all leaving California. During COVID-19, Zoom-enabled tech workers…
Product Management for AI
A couple of years ago, Pete Skomoroch, Roger Magoulas, and I talked about the problems of being a product manager for an AI product. We decided that would be a…