Development

Incident Report: Site Outage 07 October

Multitasking got to the best of me today when I distractedly decided to update my web host server from Ubuntu 20.04 to 24.04. At or around 11:15am EST, I brazenly went forth on my attempt to update my AWS instance. As I was running apt update I realized that I should created at least one backup of the instance, and took a snapshot. It’s a good thing I did, or I wouldn’t be here today.

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Philosophy

Is the Singularity already here?

I’ve had a hypothesis for several years now that we’re already well within the fabled technological singularity. The quest for a super-intelligent, self-modifying computer is openly promoted in Silicon Valley. It makes sense that we would look for computational intelligence that looks like human intelligence – but what if we’re looking at this the wrong way?

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Development, Machine Learning, Philosophy

Chat-based Interfaces, Trust, and Guilt

Trust can be found between individuals, within organizations, and between an individual and an institution. When we consider the concept of trust, we might think about people we trust to be vulnerable around when we are going through a difficult time in our lives. We might think about the trust that we have with the institutions in our lives, such as trusting that we will be able to access medical care when it is needed. As of 2023, Generative AI was trusted more than any institution – which includes church, Congress, the military, businesses, and schools.

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Business & Leadership, Philosophy, Random Thoughts

Leadership, Management, and Parenthood: Navigating work-life harmony as an expecting EMBA

One of the most challenging moments as a leader can be confronting the moment when you know that you are no longer able to continue down a particular path you had been following. For me, a moment like this came on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2023, when I sat down in an empty room in the Palais de Congres conference center in Montreal and submitted my leave of absence request for my fifth term at CBS.

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Business & Leadership, Machine Learning, Random Thoughts

I Finally Signed Up for ChatGPT – Here’s Why

I’m no stranger to being a contrarian – so when ChatGPT exploded onto the scene a few years back, I resisted the urge to start using it for everything and instead decided to go as long as possible without. At the one year mark, I wrote about how my non-use of ChatGPT was going. The TL;DR – the ethical concerns related to large-scale, hosted LLMs around copyright, labor in training, climate, and monopolization/market capture led

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Development, Machine Learning

TIL: Writing a Custom AdBlocker Ultimate Filter to hide LinkedIn’s AI Feature Upsell

On the list of “things that annoy me about AI”, trying to upsell AI features as part of a service is close to the top. I’ve recently noticed that my LinkedIn feed has been shoving an AI icon and related “coaching prompts” into my feed, and my solution of hiding every post that had the icons on them wasn’t actually filtering the system the way that I wanted. Today I spent a few minutes learning

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Development

Extending Ubuntu via GNOME Shell Extensions in 2024

The “personal computing” market has dramatically shifted from the original visions evolving out of Xerox PARC and the innovation labs of the past into a multi-level mediated… mess.

Thankfully, open source operating systems are thriving, and the barrier of entry into an actually personal computing experience that is tailored to your own environment is lower than ever. With that in mind, in December, I started looking at how I could start to extend my Ubuntu desktop.

This was a really fun project to take on, and I’m itching to start doing more of this as I think through what kind of ways that I want to expand and customize my personal computing environment.

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Machine Learning, Philosophy, Random Thoughts

One Year In – I Still Don’t Use ChatGPT. Here’s How it’s Going.

As an autistic and queer individual, the role that technology plays in identifying, surveilling, and categorizing acceptable behavior within society is not lost on me. Despite using machine learning technology since 2014, I have used ChatGPT one time. The challenge that has come from not using OpenAI products and ChatGPT has actually been in the way that it impacts my relationship with people more than anything else.

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Business & Leadership, Machine Learning, Philosophy, Random Thoughts

Eigenvectors as a Representation of Nuance? (Or, How I’m Re-Visiting all of my Freshman Year Math Classes To Explain my Brain) – Pt. 1

One decision that many organizations may be making right now is how to develop a corporate policy about artificial intelligence. Could, perhaps, an eigenvalue be calculated against a matrix of perspectives within an organization, to represent a new form of communicating the nuance and fluid nature of these complex, multi-cellular entities in which we house business endeavors? To evaluate this idea, I took a small (9 person) survey of team members and asked them to share their perspectives on AI innovation.

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