Tag: technology
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kudzu
In 1876, the Japanese government brought a vine to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. It had broad leaves, purple flowers, and a growth rate that seemed miraculous. Americans planted it everywhere. The Civilian Conservation Corps seeded it across the South to control erosion. The government paid farmers eight dollars an acre to grow it. In other…
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The Cavendish Theorem
On Monocultures, Viable Systems, and the Architecture of a ComingCatastrophe The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw Variety absorbs variety. W. Ross Ashby, Law of Requisite Variety I. The Banana There…
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How do LLMs work?
“Artificial Intelligence is a term for a technology that does not work. As soon as it starts working, you give it a new name.”— Richard Campbell, at NDC Oslo in 2021, in a talk titled The Next Decade of Software Development. More than one person has asked me the title question, so here is a…
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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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Governing AI Is the Least of Our Problems
This week I attended the Seattle University Ethics & Tech Conference; a half-day affair with a focus on “the legal and political frameworks shaping AI governance”. Just the kind of boundary spanning problem that I love to sink my teeth into. Easily the best conference of the year you didn’t attend. For me, it felt…
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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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chores
AI+robotics should make everyone’s life easier by doing the things in our lives that are necessary, time consuming, and annoying; basically, as the saying goes, they should be doing our chores so we can have more time to enjoy our hobbies. Chore is one of those odd words who’s meaning emerges from some kind of…
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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: