Artificial Intelligence
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This is what’s wrong with US business models
Chinese large language models like DeepSeek are smaller and more efficient than the centralized commercial behemoths from OpenAI and Anthropic, et al. They’re also open source, so you can use and implement them however you want. They’ve been released to the world and they’re free and open. The US response is to create a new Continue reading
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All too human
Sam Altman, the public face of OpenAI (ChatGPT vendor) is most of all a fast-talking salesman. He’s really good at that. As such, you can’t really believe anything he ever says; when he says “A”, it’s just a reason to obtain “B”, no matter what it takes. Truth is entirely beside the point. Seems like Continue reading
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Questions unasked
There was a Cisco AI Summit event yesterday. It was a corporate-captured attempt at a TED conference. They did, to their credit, attract the top names in AI, including Sam Altman (of OpenAI) and Jensen Huang (of Nvidia). The whole point, if there was one beyond real-time hagiography, was to get the tech celebs to Continue reading
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Personal Software
AI coding assistance makes it possible (even relatively easy) to create applications for your own personal use. They can be weird, quirky, and “missing features.” It won’t have all those dozens of menu items, hundreds of icons, and thousands of features that commercial software contains in order to cater to every possible customer. Because there’s Continue reading
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Oh, right, “AI”
“…the world’s shadiest art dealer… is pretty sure that if we keep shoveling words into the word-guessing program it will wake up and become intelligent. Which is just, you know, stupid. It’s like thinking that if we just keep breeding our horses to run faster, one of our mares will eventually give birth to a locomotive.“ Continue reading
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It figures
There is a competition called the International Math Olympiad (IMO). It’s an international competition for high school students. It consists of six questions that competitors have to answer within a time limit. There are only six questions, but these are extremely difficult questions, of course. At least at the level of excellent, but pre-university mathematicians. Continue reading
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Home-cooked software
This article is about efforts to design and build “malleable software.” It’s an idea I think many people have had, fleetingly, and immediately dismissed because software seems to be so immutably brittle. Even a “flexible” program that can do many different things — emacs, for example, or photoshop (I guess) — can only do the Continue reading
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Hammering spaghetti
Tech companies — and probably others as well — are in a frenzy to find an actual use for AI. I’ve been asked to “look for ways to apply it” as well. It just seems to me like the old saw about having a hammer, then thinking everything looks like a nail. Like a nice Continue reading
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A dying empire and its assassins
Chris Hedges’ piece The Rule of Idiots rings pretty true and it’s pretty depressing. Are we really amidst the death of the American empire, the empire that never really admitted to itself that it was an empire? Or is trumpism our society can recover from? “The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots.” Continue reading
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Business Idiots
“Every institution keeps its core constituents and labor forces at arms-length, and effectively anything built at scale quickly becomes distanced from both the customer and laborer. This disconnection — or alienation — sits at the center of almost every problem I’ve ever talked about. Why would companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity.