Portable Document Format is a useful tool for creating printer consistent documents. In a print-centric world, they made a ton of sense. The output should match the designer vision. The assumption was the Internet was just the vehicle to get instructions to the printer. The world has changed. After my printer died 5 years ago,…
Stumbled on an article about the job market will demand data skills because of A.I. A big part of that is that it will rely on good, quality data, which will require people who can ensure that the systems are fed that. Specifically this caught my eye: “Data underpins all of the large language models.…
Reading an email about C3 AI being developed to locate extremists. This nugget to start put me off. Siebel: This is the first time we’ve done things in computer science that weren’t a mathematical certainty, other than random number generators. Everything else we’ve done in computer science, up until this day, has been deterministic. Every…
About 6 months ago, I played a bit with large language models. It was interesting. The responses were like a middle school kid didn’t read the book, but tried to summarize the Cliff Notes. The past couple days, there has a been a problem in another IT area affecting my ability to do my work.…
A prior habit saved so many possibly interesting things that I mostly never returned to. Think of it like instead of hundreds of open tabs, I collected thousands of items. Most recently the tool to collect them was Pocket, but I’ve abandoned huge troves of items in other bookmarking sites or apps. Evernote, Diigo, Instapaper,…
The United States uses foreign policy to save money. Wars are expensive. A single Hellfire missile costs more than my annual salary. That’s one shot. It doesn’t include the operational costs to get the missile in place to fire it. The superior firepower makes winning likely, but we don’t have a great track record of…
Who is the most famous or infamous person you have ever met? Well, sort of. My daughter was an exploring toddler. And, perhaps running for Congress? She greeted everyone. One outing to a restaurant with outdoor seating with friends, she was antsy. She wandered as I shadowed to keep her away from dangers. Pretty typical…
My home router’s security feature blocked some things when I was web browsing in increasing frequency. It got really bad. The AP and NBC News both experienced redirects to a page spoofing my ISP asking personal questions to give me a smartphone in the same hour. Obviously fake. Obviously a scam. Maybe phishing. These were…
Watching the United States government hash out a budget and looming shutdown, I worry about the blackhat hackers exploiting it. Not enough of those protecting us from these threats are essential workers. Agencies I depend upon, like CISA, furlough 80% of their workforce, leaving whitehats in the dark about what they’ve detected. Their research feeds…