Month: June 2024

There is, understandably, a lot of excitement these days about chatbots. They seem magical (although one quickly learns their limitations), and major companies such as Apple and Google are embracing them in the user interface.

But there is something counterintuitive about a future in which we rely on chatbots. Over time, the most successful technologies are the ones that do not require our attention. Think for a moment about your kitchen appliances, plumbing, home HVAC system, phone switching network, and many other subsystems that you use every day.

In the long run, the successful support technologies are the ones that we don’t need to think about at all. They do what we want without requiring us to focus our attention on them.

I suspect that after this temporary focus on chatting with computers, things will move on. Our AI-enhanced computers will get better at figuring out what we want without us needing to continually spell things out for them.

Eventually we will start to forget that our computers are continually providing us with high quality AI support. And that will be the sign that they are doing a great job.

I’ve lived in various places — sometimes in the countryside, other times in the heart of Manhattan. In some years I had a suburban existence, and I spent one long lovely stretch of time living near the beach in Rio de Janeiro.

I believe that these different environments have drawn out different aspects of my personality. When I am a country mouse, I am definitely not the same as when I am a city mouse.

One thing that I am curious about how permanent these changes are. When we move to a different place — desert to mountain, hot to cold, urban to forest — does that create long term changes in our personality? Or do is the opposite true: Do we quickly morph our inner being to match our environs?

I wonder whether anyone has done any long term studies to work out the answer to this question.

I love watching plays by Shakespeare, especially if performed by great actors. I will often go onto YouTube just to watch a scene by one of the greats — Olivier, Dench, Gielgud or Jacobi, to name a few.

And I have often pondered the effect of the language. Shakespeare was writing his plays more than four centuries ago. Needless to say, the English language has evolved quite a bit since Elizabethan times.

On the one hand, this language difference can create a barrier to comprehension for modern audiences. Although to be fair, in the hands of a great actor, Shakespeare’s prose is remarkably easy to understand.

But perhaps the very strangeness of the language is part of the appeal. All of those odd phrases and cadences create room for mystery. Audiences are, in a sense, invited to interpolate meanings of their own, in a way that might not be the case for a play written and performed in modern English.

Ironically, audiences of today may be experiencing the richness of Shakespeare’s language in a way that Elizabethans of his own day could not.

Most people don’t realize that 80% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Today I spent quite a bit of time tracking down a software bug. The bug was puzzling because as far as I could see it was completely impossible — there was no way it could exist — yet there it was.

Then at some point I realized that if what I was looking at was impossible, then I must be looking in the wrong place. So I started looking in completely different places, and eventually I found the true culprit — and promptly fixed the bug.

I realized at that point that Sherlock Holmes had figured all of this out a long time ago. He said, and I quote “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

I am pretty sure he was talking about debugging computer programs — or something very much like it.

I got together today with a dear old friend whom I had not seen in decades. We spent hours happily catching up and remembering old times together.

And at some point it occurred to me that a time machine is not just something that you find in science fiction.

The other day I wrote some software to solve a specific problem. But then I asked myself “what next”?

And I realized that what I really wanted to do was make it generic. That is, I wanted to take the most interesting part of it — the core algorithm — and turn that into a software library for solving lots of other problems.

That meant a bit of rewriting of the code. But once that was done, I had a shiny new toy to play with, which I can now use for lots of different things.

And maybe that’s the best part.

Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is nothing at all.

I wonder if
sometime in the future
people will pay good money
for the privilege of spending
large amounts of time
with no access to
the internet

I started my day this morning using one of those fancy automated coffee machines that serves coffee / espresso / Americano / latte / cappuccino at the magical press of a button. Somebody just needs to put the whole beans in the top, and every once in a while remove the used coffee grinds.

As I was taking my freshly brewed Americano from the machine, I turned to a man who was also standing by the machine, and I told him “In the future, these machines will go to the store and buy the coffee beans for you. And whenever necessary, they will even throw out the used coffee grinds.”

The man nodded in agreement. “It is my dream,” he said.