The Open/Closed Problem in AI I went to the ninth MLSys conference in Seattle. This is a conference of people in research and industry building ML systems. The vast majority of work that I saw is building systems that train and use LLMs. The biggest focus was on efficiency. How do you train LLMs more
ai Let the Information Monopolies Crumble! I've been programming for 30 years. I spent a lot of time acquiring both the skill and knowledge to build software systems. If you look at any well paying profession like tech workers, doctors, and lawyers, you see a common thread that binds them which is information monopolies.
Entering The Architecture Age Software development over the last 60+ years has been the equivalent of pyramid building. We see the great pyramids today and marvel at their scale, but their shape is a necessary shape because the people at that time had not yet discovered architecture. Architecture is about making previously unseen structures
An Abject Horror: Abject: A self-aware object runtime using the Ask Protocol I May Have Created Something Horrible I may have solved a long standing problem with Object Oriented systems. Today I'm announcing the world's first self-aware object runtime called Abject and a new protocol called the Ask Protocol
Money is a Technology I often tell people money is a technology. That's a strange notion to many people because we think of technology as computers, cell phones, and other electronics. This article is for technologists, people who love technology, or anyone who wants to understand what money actually is and what
What the Argentina bailout is really about Even though Halloween has passed I have a ghost story to tell. The US government is providing $20 billion in emergency assistance to Argentina through a currency swap and another $20 billion in private financing under discussion. The official narrative is emphasizes supporting President Milei's free-market reforms and
Don't Be a Sucker, We are In This Together If you think immigration debates don't affect you, consider this: the people building the technology you use every day are now advocating for who deserves to be here, and you might not make the cut. Masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles are now detaining people on the streets
Why AI Has Knowledge But Humans Have Creativity The real constraint on human creativity isn't talent, it's time and autonomy. There's a popular narrative that AI is more creative than humans. I understand why. Ask ChatGPT for a poem, and it delivers instantly. Request code, and it produces working solutions. But we&
The Cynic Wasps in the Beehive We call her the Queen Bee, evoking images of large hats, courts, and command. In reality the Queen Bee is a slave to the hive, laying thousands of eggs a day. She does not command anything. Bees function through a complex system of chemical communication in a deeply decentralized fashion.
ai A Different Kind of Camera When the camera was invented, painters were worried they would be replaced. Upon seeing an early photograph, French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed “From today, painting is dead.” We now know that painting has not died. Painting is alive and well. However, the camera did change what kind of paintings we
ai All Watched over By Machines of Insanity In Adam Curtis’s TV series “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace”, he outlines a future where machines create a static and powerless world. A recent paper published in Nature demonstrates how AI trained on data AI itself generates leads to model collapse. Maybe Adam Curtis was wrong!
AI Efficiency and the Acceleration of Everything Imagine preparing for a really long hike. There are bears and cougars out there. You need to decide whether to bring bear mace and a gun. They take up precious space in your backpack and over a long hike will slow you down, make you use more energy, and therefore
Accessing Dell Server Remotely Using iDRac Do you need to access a Dell server remotely using iDRac outside it’s intranet? iDRac, or Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller, is a powerful tool that allows for remote management. It uses a dedicated IP and operates through a web interface on HTTPS (port 443). Here’s a step-by-step
Bugs Faster than the Speed of Thought I got access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 last year and one of the first things I did was prompt it with a C++ interface struct and have it write the implementation. I was generally surprised by the results. Some of the completions were even code that was clearly from Github
Tools Were Made & Born Were Hands If you haven’t read the famous old school rant Worse is Better from Richard Gabriel, you should. Richard never really decided if he was right or wrong, and even wrote a rebuttal under a pseudonym called Worse is Better is Worse. After over ten years of thinking about it,
Deep Latent Space Maps As I watch my children grow up, I am always amazed at their pace of learning. It turns out by 18 the average person learns about 60,000 words which average about 9 words a day. Typically these new words are learned by as little as one example of the
computer industry We Must Become System-System Thinkers Everyone building software must become a system-system thinker. A system-system thinker is someone who understands that the system they are building is part of a larger whole of other systems. The software we build is part of a more significant system that extends beyond the computer screen and network packets.
Bar Charts With Julia I was writing a new article for Merit and I wanted to make some charts and graphs. I used to use gnu octave for my data analysis needs but recently saw a tweet from Grady Booch about trying Julia which has a matlab esque sytnax. However, it being like matlab
philosophy The Reality Making Machines This short essay is for computer people like me. Meaning, people who make software. If you don’t make software, you are going to find this very boring. OK, now for the boring fun stuff. It is impossible to talk about what is really out there (I am talking about
My bet is on Chomsky My bet is Chomsky is right in the Chomsky vs Norvig debate and Geoffrey Hinton just provided some amazing fuel on the fire. If you don’t know what the Chomsky vs Norvig debate is, it started with Chomsky deriding AI researchers about heavily relying on opaque probabilistic models for
perl6 Rejection Sampling with Perl 6 Perl 6 provides a way to create lazy lists using the gather/take keywords. What I wanted to do was create an infinite list of samples from a known distribution of values. A simple way to sample from a known distribution is to do Rejection Sampling and doing this in
Total Recall I learned programming computers before I had the internet. While technically I am a Millennial, unlike most younger Millennial programmers I had a completely different experience than they did learning how to program computers. Programming became an obsession for me as a child when I accidentally pressed the wrong button
We are Not Children I am not a woman/man child. I don’t need games and toys to be motivated to do my work. I don’t need sugar snacks and soda pop. I take my work seriously and find inherent joy in it. Companies often use hackathons to “motivate” employees. This only
The Fox in the Henhouse Slogging I’m writing a new time series DB in C++ called Henhouse and this is a story about a bug and my heroic battle with it. Actually, it’s not really a story about a bug, but more of a way of finding bugs and preventing them. I hope
The Mother Software Not the Earth I am writing this on earth day, but this isn’t about the earth. On way to work I was riding the bus. And as usual, I was catching up on my reading as I was glued to the phone. During a stop, as many of you
