I’ve begun to notice that a lot of endlessly repeated statements about AI by the vendors of hosted AI inference and their sympathizers are strongly contradicting reality, and yet, they keep making these statements. A short list of the ones I’ve seen recently (there may be others as well):
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When I was 17 and a high school drop-out I went to work for a bank. My mom was ecstatic, I had a job, in spite of my failure to ‘get an education’. Never mind that the job that I got was mailroom gofer. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being a mail runner for a bank. And run I did. So fast that…
Web developers the world over are always terminally worried about whether or not their application will scale orders of magnitude without keeling over.
I often get the question what it is exactly that I do for a living and usually I can’t really talk about it due to non-disclosure agreements and possible fall-out but in this case I got permission to do a write-up of my most recent job.
Looking at the site earlier today I suddenly noticed a couple of links to sites that I would never ever think of endorsing through my blog.
In case you landed here without any context and have no idea who I am or what this article is about this article should give you some background.
This is a series of pages that guide you through the creation and operation of a successful consulting business. I’ve written this after running a fairly successful consultancy business in the mid-90’s and reviving this business in 2008. I’m primarily active in software, so some of the things in here will be skewed in…
Apple just won in their case against Samsung and Tim Cook has posted a memo to Apple employees. I’m not one of those but I feel pretty upset about the stupidity of this lawsuit, the verdict and patents in general. Here is the text of the memo with my comments: Today was an important day for Apple and for innovators…
In 1992 I had bought a license to a little known real time micro kernel based operating system called QnX.
In this post I’m going to try to give potential and actual CEO’s (and other C level execs to some extent) some actionable advice when it comes to how they conduct themselves in the hope that this will at some future date save some of you a great deal of misery and in some cases charges of misconduct or worse. My hope…
Volkwagen is a house in deep trouble. The dieselgate scandal just doesn’t seem to go away and even though the company is now under new management it seems that things are getting worse and worse as time goes by. What I really don’t get is this: Does Volkswagen actually believe the nonsense that they put out in order…
A couple of years ago I got wind of the fact that geocities was about to die and along with many others I did my bit to save geocities, the site now lives on (or as much as I could save of it) as reocities.com.
Some dumb lawyer figured it would be fun to give GDPR trolls a form letter to use to inflict maximum damage on unsuspecting companies. The reason why this is dumb is simple: the GDPR serves a legitimate need but by decreasing the signal:noise ratio handcrafted requests from users with a legitimate concern can get…
In the early days of computing, computers were physical monsters, occupying large rooms or even whole buildings. Acess to them was closely guarded, you were lucky if you had access at all, let alone close-up and personal access. That was reserved for the system operators, the people tasked with the relatively boring…
There is a lot of material about the not-so-nice VCs who take advantage of young and inexperienced founders. But the reverse also happens, founders that try to get money out of VCs for projects that have zero chance of every coming to fruit. Or worse still, founders that pretend to have something on the go when they…
Over the last couple of weeks I've been working off-and-on on a little side project. The idea is that there are lots of people that are not in a position to visit a university or that don't have a public library with 'access' at their disposal but that do need to be able to read scientific papers. Ever since the…
Back when the web was only a limited affair and the most exciting thing on it in the realm of imagery was the ‘coffee pot webcam’ I came up with a way to make a real live video stream that worked in a browser. A few months earlier I’d made a very basic version of this using ftp upload of images to a server and then a…
Recruiters are not my most favorite people in the tech eco-system. They’re the people that will contact you on behalf of some client (the company that pays them) in order to try to find new employees. They typically get paid a fairly hefty sum per employee found and if ever there was a moment when the ‘you are the…
For a while now there have been tantalizing hints that Elon Musk is at it again. His usual way of approaching a problem is to look at an industry, find some fatal flaw in it, fix that flaw and then leave everybody else in the dust, wondering why they didn’t do what he did. He’s one of the most interesting people on…