Hot Take 🌶
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🏏 Ending superstar culture in Indian Cricket
The current coach of the Indian national cricket team is on a simple mission: to end the team’s “superstar” culture. He is accomplishing it, by becoming the center of attention.
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The Weekly: Being Obviously Wrong
… also in this issue: life of legos and eggs, a brief crosspost, and a nagging question. Being obviously wrong, i.e., in a manner that is obvious and clear, can be a strength for automated systems. Because when a machine breaks — digital or mechanical — with a lot of sound and drama, it becomes…
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The Weekly: Schools need to teach Art History
… also in this edition of The Weekly: a dance of water and light and a quick kook at Microsoft’s original logo. Here is an unsubstantiated thesis: One reason society does not invest in art or pay artists is because we do not teach about art or art history in school, like we do math,…
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Threads Dev Interview #20: A fun conversation about Software, AI and No-code
I recently took part in an edition of the Threads Dev Interviews. Ryan Swanstrom conducts these awesome interviews, nearly every day on Threads, where he connects with developers on Threads, and interviews them — on Threads! It is a remarkable format, and I have seen nothing like it. These interviews have become part of my…
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Spatial Computing does not scare me. Artificial Intelligence does.
The past six to eight months have been a study in contrasts, in tech. Roughly eight months ago (may have been earlier), OpenAI put out a simple looking demo, backed by incredible engineering and technology, but little to no product finesse. ChatGPT was a roaring success. It heralded a new age in AI, a new…
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Productivity gains swing both ways
Productivity gains that we make with technology, apply to both good and bad actors of this world. I was watching Skyfall yesterday. It is my favorite Bond movie. I love the scene when M quotes Tennyson to a Parliamentary hearing, while fending off questions about the relevance of the double-O section. It is a well…
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A (pithy) case for skipping GenAI while composing emails
When the goal is communicating or collaborating with another human to get something done, I suspect that nothing will substitute the manual acts of reading and writing (pithy?) emails. Think about that for a moment … are we really going to automate away the acts of reading and writing to machines? And whatever happens to…
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News sources are poor at building trust
I just got roped into a user survey by the NYTimes. And one of their questions was pretty revealing: “Of the following sources, which do you think is the most trustworthy for news? Select one.” I picked “other” and wrote in Wikipedia. And I skipped every other news source that was listed as an option…
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Open source is enabling walled gardens in technology
Millions of people have contributed and curated knowledge and code in places like Wikipedia and GitHub. And they have done this for free, in the name of open source. And now, companies like OpenAI get to just use that open data to train machine learning models and charge money for those AI models? Here is…
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Give me an E.V.; spare me the software updates
Wife was asking me the other day, if I would be still willing to buy and drive around in a Tesla, after what Elon has been doing at Twitter. And my answer was simple: I was not willing to buy a Tesla *before* Twitter 2.0 happened (after having considered it seriously and nearly hitting the…
Winter Rant 