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The impending first era of AI

There’s an article in WSJ about the imminent ‘AI Boom’ and how a couple of companies, the ones that have already been both enabling and controlling our existence, to a large extent, are bound to become even more powerful. It’s interesting to ‘see’ the interplay if you’ve been working in computing technology for the past decade or so. Christopher Mims, the author of the WSJ article, posits that the computing requirements of large language models, latent text-to-image diffusion models and so on, are so high that only the very few companies with massive data centers in their possession could afford/succeed…

The ‘West’ is losing. How could it not?

I’m pretty sure that February 24th, 2022 is going to be found in the history books of the future; if those books ever get written and we don’t end up witnessing how a nuclear winter really looks like. The predictability of a Europe, and later United States-dominated world, where the ‘West’ ruled and enjoyed unprecedented levels of comfort, material wealth and peace and the rest of the world either suffered or very gradually developed, feeding from the leftovers of Western consumption and interests, is no more. Like an engine whose gears are slowly becoming loose, one by one the basic…

Regression 11

Months before Windows 95 came out in late August 1995, a number of screenshots from β versions of the much touted and eagerly awaited operating environment had circulated both on the, then nascent World Wide Web, and the computing press. Among the most profound changes from earlier incarnations of Windows was the introduction of the ‘Start’ button and accompanying menu, that replaced the earlier ‘Program Manager’ and provided easy access to documents, applications, settings and system features from a single place, conveniently accessed through an obvious button located at the bottom left of the computer screen. The significance of the…

Oh that’s bad!

– How many of you are from consulting? Oh, that’s bad! Yeah. A mind is too important to waste. You should do something! – Why is it bad to be in consulting? – The only consultants I’ve seen that I think are truly useful as the ones that help us sell our computers, but other than that, seriously, I don’t think there’s anything inherently evil in consulting; I think that without owning something, over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s…

EVs – For the Few.

For several decades, automobiles have been synonymous with the democratization of mobility both within and beyond the city, for billions of people across the globe. You would think that by switching to Electric Vehicles (EVs) en masse, we’d be replacing ‘traditional’ cars with something better, cleaner, faster and cheaper to run, but also easier to operate and maintain. But, as countries, manufacturers, universities, associations of all kinds and the press alike, tout, support, subsidize and extol the virtues of Electric Vehicles, I struggle to see how exactly EVs, by themselves, will help anyone, but the top single percentiles of the society,…

Re-clamping the 52/10

Thirty years ago my mother bought me a (now vintage) Faber Castell 52/10 ‘Sharpening Machine’. To the 10 year old me this was a very welcome gift, that has adorned all of my desks ever since and helped sharpen hundreds of pencils throughout my life.