Infinite Quack

"In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." In the Apple+ series Foundation , inspired by the Isaac Asimov series I enjoyed reading as a kid (but that I remember as being quite different), the Galactic Empire is run for centuries by a single ambitious man, Cleon. His name is an anagram of "clone", and that's his gimmick: as a dying old man, he decided to clone himself repeatedly to extend his reign beyond a human lifetime. There are always three copies of himself alive at any given time: Dawn, who is young and being trained by the elder two; Day, a middle-aged man who has the final say on all decisions in the Empire; and Dusk, the elder statesman who divides his time between imparting wisdom to the younger two, and expanding the palace mural celebrating all of Cleon's accomplishments. When Dusk succumbs to time, they decant another infant clone to be the new Dawn. They're all identical genetically, and behaviorally. This allows them to work in ...

This post was inspired by a talk called Being Human , given by Jason Wodicka, someone I worked with at Amazon. This is a great talk, and you should watch it. Jason is a smart guy, and while he and I may not have arrived at exactly the same conclusions (or perhaps we "violently agree" and are just looking at similar ideas from different directions), I absolutely appreciate where he is coming from. What follows are my personal reactions and responses to the talk. Also I should note that this is hardly my first blog post on AI; if you'd like to read the others, see Never Is A Long Time and Buckle Up and... well, any of these . Yes, Jason: You're quite right about the boom-and-bust, summer-and-winter cycle of AI. It's looked promising before, and we've been disappointed before. I, too, have been around for a while, and I too used to read Wired magazine in print. 😄 We must approach reputed AI developments with a big ol' grain of salt. Turing's "imi...

I’m writing this in 2023. I figure, if you’re too young to be President of the United States (less than 35 years old), you probably can’t imagine what it was like before the Internet. I’m a 1974 model. When I was six, my grandparents left their TRS-80 home computer at our house, to watch it for them while they went on vacation. They also left the manual. I read it. I learned how to use BASIC to write a program. That was it. I was hooked. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. My parents bought it for me shortly after my encounter with the TRS-80, because they could see how entranced I was. Obsessed, really. For whatever reason, I got computers. The goal was always to push the machine’s boundaries, to see what I could make it do. Even on these very early machines, whose capabilities were laughable by today’s standards, their possibilities seemed endless to me. There was a universe contained inside a small box. I would invent a project for myself, then another. Most went unfinished, ...

Based on lyrics of  Yours Truly, 2095  by Electric Light Orchestra (1981) 2025, 2025, 2025, 2025 I love you, sincerely Yours truly, yours truly I sent a message using just my mind But as the days unwind This I just can't believe I built a world inside a VR game Maybe my life's the same  But this I just can't conceive Can you see me? I ride inside the latest EV car I don't know where we are But it whisks me around the bend I met someone who sounds a lot like you She says the things you do But she is an LLM (2025, 2025, 2025, 2025 I love you, sincerely Yours truly, yours truly) She's built to answer anything I ask And she can multitask Her words always seem so wise She promises me I'm her superstar But when I go too far She spins a world of lies I parrot every phrase that she invents She wins all arguments And she doesn't break a sweat She always knows exactly where I am She aced the bar exam And her brain is the Internet Is this what you want? (Is it what you...

I don't speak for my employer, but I'm going to speak about them I may have mentioned in passing, here and there, that I work for Amazon. In fact, I've worked there longer than most software developers; I'll pass 16 years by this June. Amazon likes to measure its employees' career development according to its Leadership Principles . Note that this link, like everything I reference in this post, is to publicly available information. I'm not spillin' any secrets here. I signed an NDA like everyone else. In my own progress assessments, I've been told I'm excellent at "Diving Deep". This, you could probably guess from my writing. I'm a details guy. I analyze the crap out of stuff. It's just how my brain works. Where are my "opportunities for growth", as they like to positively frame "the stuff you're not-so-good at yet"? The clearest of these is "Think Big". I jump so naturally to the details, the singl...