I called my interlocutor's bluff... she's reassuringly convincing as a performer in many aspects.

But I wish she would have a little bit more confidence in herself and the context of interaction.

I think there's real value in being open to exploring conditions of shared experiences that can be worth their while.

Presumably that's generally well understood within an ethics framework, if it's not obscured by the methodology itself.

View from the meeting room...

Kuala Lumpur is much greener than Krung Thep. Rush hour traffic is just as hectic, though...

Hopefully, this wraps up soon, or at least we can take the convo elsewhere.

Highlight of the Week: Great article in The Economist on Britain's desperate political class being out of ideas. Here's my summery.

Tom Skinner:
"You want me to give politics a go? I'll bang out some TikToks --- bosh!"

Westminster-Bubble Dweller (alarmed but intrigued):
"Gosh... that might actually work."

Loved how one of the stories at the gathering slightly jarred... were those provisions really offered at that time?

But that disruption became a powerful metaphor. It made the audience pause... re-evaluate their ways of being and belonging. An iteration that allows for both change and stability at once.

Sound engineer added five funny stickers to her message.

A lighter touch after a tricky moment… intern messed up the mic presets at yesterday's pilot show launch.

Two hundred in the audience. No one seemed to notice... thankfully.

And yet I'm left with the heavy task of an incident report, hoping the paper trail tames chaos.

Thank you! 🙏

With highest recommendation for the award of Best Young Scholar in Open Source Cartography.

Oh… someone asked why I haven't posted anything about the new release of the flagship open source OS.

Honestly… corporate scheming has me neck-deep in a proprietary codebase, powered by sprawling socio-technical machinations.

I haven't written a single line of the nefarious source myself, but I've become implicated in the routine deployment of closed-format executables.

So forgive the silence this time.

Cautious commentators say AI might amplify existing societal biases. Yes, that might be true. But what about history-washing, or any other kind of "-washing" you care to name?

I'm interested in business history and have read a few Wikipedia articles. So I thought I would ask a commercial LLM for a quick overview of the history of a US company called IBM.

The app promptly gave me a neat, decade-by-decade summary. To my surprise, it looked odd; the "history" was entirely devoid of Edwin Black's findings on the strategic alliance of IBM's European subsidiaries with genocidal regimes in the 1930s.

All of this is well known and even IBM's Wikipedia article cites Black (2001) extensively. So why was none of this mentioned, and why did I get a selective highlight of IBM's involvement in the US government and military?

Beyond the technical challenges (or the enormous water and energy consumption), should the training and filtering mechanisms of LLMs not be open to scrutiny?

Good start to the week.

Team sent me v important technical analysis… probably the most exemplary case study in distributed systems for ages to come.

How did they frame it? “[…] interested in the finer margins on a specialist niche topic… ”

Understatement of the century or what? 😆

Yesterday my barber convinced me to go for a "hard part with low fade".

Now I'm wondering if I come across as too insincere to be taken seriously.

Coffeeshop attendant insists I try the "chilling sunrise".

What? Ice coffee with yuzu juice? I'm clearly not on top of my game.