Category: technology
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Framework for Creator’s Outputs
Creation takes many forms. Being able to see those forms accurately and arrange them in a way that makes it clear is important. Mechanization didn’t make this less important, but it did integrate better into the world because what it created it remained atoms. Computation does not integrate into the world because what it creates…
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the eight factories every city needs to build before it’s too late
When we talk about climate, collapse, or resilience, we usually end up in the same cul-de-sac: we need better leaders, better policies, better apps. But we don’t. What we urgently need is physical infrastructure that lasts. Infrastructure we can control, repair, and replicate. Not another app. Not another subsidy. Not another committee hearing on “resilience.”…
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The mobile internet that fits my notion of that the mobile internet is
The Mobile Internet is just The Internet. The Internet is just the Network of Networks. Networks are just “computers connected to one another so they can send messages to one another”. “Computers connected to one another …” is just Ethernet. The Mobile Internet I want is just Ethernet. Like WiFi. Like WiFi but with long-distance…
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when open doors let in all the wrong people
Bots use up more CPU cycles on the average Web site than humans, and bots are increasingly not there to help. Where in days gone by, a bot might be indexing for a search engine to help people you don’t know find your site, today the mostly exist to feed giant statistical machines that calculate…
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private data, public data, public information
If you have a pile of data, you have three choices:
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too abstract
Abstraction is the practice of peeling away the unnecessary, the unimportant, and the unwanted to arrive as some ideal, yet unreal representation of where you started. It happens in any discipline where we try to represent the real world in a fabricated realm of ideas or concepts. In computing, abstraction takes on a guise of…
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humans interacting with computers
I was first introduced to the concept of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in the spring of 2002 while working on a system that would ostensibly tell Congress where the money they allocated to the Intelligence community in the “black budget” was going and whether or not it was producing valuable returns. This, of course, was never…
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The Source of Truth
When we use truth and fact synonymously we lose the very precision that folks who care about things enough to want a “source of truth” are seeking in the first place.
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Solving the problem
There are lots of voices bemoaning the use of copyrighted materials in the training of large language models, how much energy and water is consumed by their creation, and how they are enclosing a commons to create a new generation of robber barons. Congress could, if they were a functioning part of human civilization, enact…
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On the management of the operations of information systems
or how to monitor your *aaS Operating any software is an expensive, mysterious, and terrifying proposition. For most people software is an arcane craft and the people who author it are witches. Operating software at any scale is to summon dark forces and try to harness their power as your own. Operating software to provide…