Technology Commentary

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…

Netflix executives this week announced that they would finally be putting their traditional DVD rental service out to pasture starting on September 25 after 25 years of little, red envelopes. From …

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Y’all ready for a story about one of the wildest fuckups production outages I ever took part in? Buckle up; we’re going for a ride far, far away from any...

As a Machine Learning Engineer, I remember feeling uncertain about the path ahead when I first started out. Back then, I had no idea that…