Musings on the Future of the Internet
2024 was a year where I had to complete reinvent myself into a new person, which has been powerful, exciting, scary, lonely, invigorating, marvelous, and awesome (in the true sense of awe).
Cassian’s birth – eight days past his due date – marked the beginning of the rest of my life. No experience of my life prepared me to so graciously and willingly say goodbye to a version of myself that felt unshakeable.
Read moreI wanted a version of Tetris that had a logarithmic board instead of a square grid. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, so I turned to AI.
Read moreMultitasking 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.
Read moreI’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?
Read moreTrust 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.
Read moreOne 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.
Read moreI’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
Read moreOn 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
Read moreThe “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.
Read moreAs 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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