Serving you via log, lead & lookout
Our first encouter with AI in the form of LLMs, within the product of ChatGPT was very much like an oracle. You ask a question, the oracle speaks, and that is the transaction. This story of course has been less and less applicable as we march on to the glorious future of agentic AI which, somehow, does things -- maybe even computes . The original framing for machine learning was function…
As we software engineers grow up, we are taught early on (like in kindergarten) to associate Turing (equivalent) machines with computation per se : It's the paradigm that the vast majority of programming languages aspire to and that many more which don't aspire to fall into accidentally . If you grew up like me, you probably came to believe that Turing completeness was necessary to build any…
The RPG from Hell Role-playing games seem to have an obsession with underground lairs full of monsters. ( Dungeons & Dragons even has it in the name.) As a kid, I remember watching my brother playing Diablo II on his PC. Everything was droopy, gloomy, scary and dark. -- And that was just at the surface level! Then he descended into one of the dungeons, where the real action was! It was…
I've been attending a lot of video conferences lately. Some of them meet the definition of a meeting : 3-20 people in a room, with one person speaking while everyone else listens. This is a well-understood UX paradigm, decently served by the likes of Zoom, Google Hangouts and Jitsi and originated in the business world as a natural corollary to conference calls over the telephone. Zoom parties are…
So you're entering lockdown mode and now you have two questions: How long will this last? And how bad will this be for the economy? Here I provide my answer to the second question: the economic and political effects of the pandemic . In the first part of this series I give an estimate of how long it will take and what it will be like for us to live through this grand experiment. After months of…
So you're entering lockdown mode and now you have two questions: How long will this last? And how bad will this be for the economy? Here I will give my answer to the first question: how long it will take . The second part of this series deals with the political and economic ramifications of the pandemic. After months of underestimating COVID19, the pendulum is finally swinging the other way.…
As a Data Scientist you usually do one of two things: 1. You comb through a pile of numbers derived from a SQL database, S3 or an HDFS cluster, in order to answer questions like "what keeps customers from converting?" and make predictions like "How much is a given user worth?". 2. You build Machine Learning models that do actual ongoing work in deployed applications. For both of these task groups…
Many (maybe most) of us Software Engineers are deeply involved in projects where UI and UX are very important concerns (or at least they should be). Throughout the short history of our profession, we have become more and more focused on understanding and serving the people who will actually be subjected to the stuff we build: users . In many cases, this focus on UI/UX isn't because we particularly…
This is yet another attempt I'm making to start a blog. This time will be different! Also this is a test post.