Technology Commentary

The convergence of IoT, Big Data, and Machine Learning is changing the way businesses operate, and it's only starting.

In Perspective Software Development, API development, Indutrial IOT

An explanation of why managers do not need to code, and probably shouldn't.

Online culture sure feels like it’s in a transition phase, doesn’t it? To understand what we learned this week, let’s compare it to some prior digital shifts.

Apparently if you put Time Machine on a USB APFS drive instead of HFS, it does crazy shit. I guess it's hidden in a secret partition, and when you list the volume, only the most recent copy is visible? Can someone explain to me the relationship between these directories: /Volumes/Time\ Machine/*.previous /Volumes/.timemachine/*/*.backup (mostly empty directories, but one is a weird mount ...

If you’re not a REST expert, you probably use the same HTTP codes over and over in your responses, mostly 200, 404, and 500. If using authentication, you might perhaps add 401 and 403; if using redirects 301 and 302, that might be all. But the range of possible status codes is much broader than that and can improve semantics a lot. While many discussions about REST focus on entities and methods, using the correct response status codes can make your API stand out. 201: Created Many appli

How I moved from freelance developer to tech lead roles such as software architect, Tech Lead, and fractional CTO.

I have a dirty secret.

Steve Jobs' own words from emails, speech, and interviews have been assembled into a slick new "memoir," published free online by the official Steve Jobs Archive.

I used to write 5 second reviews that were just about the same size as Twitter posts. For example, here are my reviews of left- and right-wing politics: A liberal knows exactly what’s right for you and is eager to conduct a grand social experiment to prove themselves wrong. A conservative … optimistically believes “it’s always been done this way” because someone in the past hit upon the best possible solution. (Of course, that person must have been a liberal.) Predictably my experiment i...

Imagine a world without platform lock-in, where no ban or billionaire could take down your social network. That’s what ActivityPub has planned.

This post is meant to create more awareness about state machines in the web application developer crowd. If you don’t know what state machines are, please read up on them first. Wikipedia is a good place to start, as always. State machines are awesome The main reason for using state machines is to help the design process. It is much easier to figure out all the possible edge conditions by drawing out the state machine on paper. This will make sure that your application will have less bugs and...

Will non-developers be able to build software using ChatGPT and large language models? Yes, if they can master "conversational programming".

On Sunday The New York Times reported that Google is furiously working to incorporate conversational AI into its core search products – not exactly news, but there was a larger takeawa…

Let's see how much my copyrights have been infringed within the ChatGPT training data: Rank Site Tokens Percent 20,032. jwz.org. 700k. 0.0004% 244,596. dnalounge.com. 93k. 0.00006% 11,317,461. dnapizza.com. 270. 0.0000002% Hey, I outrank Stormfront and 4Chan! So at least there's that. See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart: Tech companies have grown secretive about ...

Long before there were podcasts, there were attempts to use the radio as a way to distribute educational programming.

About two years ago, I wrote that "it’s difficult to know which 'intermediate goals' [e.g. policy goals] we could pursue that, if achieved, would clearly increase the odds of eventual good outcomes from transformative AI." Much has changed since then, and in this post I give an update on 12 ideas for US policy goals[ref]Many

Noting these come from Luke Muelhhauser, and he is not speaking for Open Philanthropy in any official capacity: Software export controls. Control the export (to anyone) of “frontier AI models,” i.e. models with highly general capabilities over some threshold, or (more simply) models trained with a compute budget over some threshold (e.g. as much compute as […]

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has created a private “Supreme Court,” or so he says. Since 2021, his company’s Oversight Board has issued verdicts on...

This Article argues that content moderation should instead be understood as a project of mass speech administration and that looking past a post-by-post evaluation of platform decisionmaking reveals a complex and dynamic system that needs a more proactive and continuous form of governance than the vehicle of individual error correction allows.

Introduction In Content Moderation as Systems Thinking, Professor Evelyn Douek, as the title suggests, endorses an approach to the people, rules, and processes governing...

AI isn’t going to replace developers, but it will change software development forever.

We just wrote about Substack’s issue with content moderation and the Nazi bar problem. As I highlighted in that piece, any centralized service is going to be defined by their moderation choices. If…