Byte-sized and more frequent articles from Ibrahim Diallo
The aliens arrived, and their first instinct was to check our networks. They accessed one of our most important websites. A government website. Unfortunately, they were met with a reCAPTCHA. Are you a robot? They are not robots. But after fifteen minutes of squinting and trying to select all the fire hydrants and traffic lights, they gave up. Defeated by a checkbox, they returned to the stars.
A couple weeks ago, the CEO of Snap was all over the news in the US because he and his wife made a large donation. The weird part about it was that every news outlet that covered it had an acrobatic title where they didn't specifically say how much they donated, yet insisted on that $550 Million amount. When you read the article a bit deeper, you can do the math. They donated one hundredth of that…
I think I finally figured it out. That is, the reason why AI written articles suck: Both the author and I are reading the article for the first time. When an article is insightful I don't even mind the emdashes or that the stark truth is not X, but Y. A good take can transcend even llmism. But then you have questions, and somehow the author doesn't even know what you are talking about, it's simply…
It's hard to write a whole book. So for now at least, I've turned the prologue of my book into a short video. I hope you enjoy it.
I am a father of twin boys. There is a question I often think about. It often appears as a midlife crisis where I am not sure when I became a man responsible for a family. It looked so easy for my father. It was as if he was born into it. He was a leader, a strong man, one that an entire community could rely on. When does that kick in for me? When do I become this leader? Or have I already become?…
Well that was weird. I just received an Amber Alert and the link led to a spammy looking website. Spam? The link leads to a 3gp file converter which is highly unusual. But the more I look at it, I have the impression it's a mistake. Most likely, they have exceeded the maximum number of characters for the Emergency Service alert. Here is the message: AN AMBER ALERT HAS BEEN ACTIVATED BY THE…
I made a joke online. Based on Internet upvote points, it was pretty funny. OK, I didn't come up with the joke, but it was a perfectly timed reference. A few days back, Cliff Stoll, of the Klein bottles, submitted a post on hackernews titled: Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated First of all, I was surprised that Cliff frequents hackernews. Second, I didn't know that he was supposed to be…
Last year, I used AI to help me write articles. As I've mentioned before , it's convenient when you are doing so because it saves you time. But the problem comes up when you try to quote those articles back. Whatever you think you wrote is not what's in there. I always cringe when I read them back. As I've said before, I'm rewriting those articles so that they capture my voice, and so that I can…
#NoFollowUpNecessary A couple weeks back, I was arguing that when people come up with ideas, the satisfaction is in the telling , not in building. And I was making this statement generally for idea sharing. But then, I also mentioned that people share their "ChatGPT plan" with me now. Rather than sharing the idea, they share the business plan on how to achieve the idea, entirely generated by AI.…
I must have been the last developer still confused by the AWS interface. I knew how to access DynamoDB, that was the only tool I needed for my daily work. But everything else was a mystery. How do I access web hosting? If I needed a small server to host a static website, what service would I use? Searching for "web hosting" inside the AWS console yielded nothing. After digging through the web, I…
Of all the days to start a blog, I chose April Fools' Day. It wasn't intentional, maybe more of a reflection of my mindset. When I decide to do something, I shut off my brain and just do it. This was a commitment I made without thinking about the long-term effects. I knew writing was hard, but I didn't know how hard. I knew that maintaining a server was hard, but I didn't know the stress it would…
Be healthy, be young, fall ill. You have a great job of course, you have insurance. It would be ok if the worst thing about health insurance in America was it is hard to navigate. No! The actual problem is that your insurance is incentivized not to cover you at your most vulnerable moment. You pay them every month. That's money that goes from your paycheck, into their pockets. Now if they cover…
In many sci-fi shows, spaceships have a teleportation mechanism on board. They can teleport from inside their ship to somewhere on a planet. This way, the ship can remain in orbit while its crew explores the surface. But then people started asking: how does the teleportation device actually work? When a subject stands on the device and activates it, does it disassemble all the atoms of the person…
For me, being part of an online community started with Digg. Digg was the precursor to Reddit and the place to be on the internet. I never got a MySpace account, I was late to the Facebook game, but I was on Digg. When Digg redesigned their website (V4), it felt like a slap in the face. We didn't like the new design, but the community had no say in the direction. To make it worse, they removed the…
This blog runs on two servers. One is the main PHP blog engine that handles the logic and the database, while the other serves all static files. Many years ago, an article I wrote reached the top position on both Hacker News and Reddit. My server couldn't handle the traffic . I literally had a terminal window open, monitoring the CPU and restarting the server every couple of minutes. But I learned…