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Algorithms

A collection of 20 issues

Love in the Age of the AI Tech-Bro Gigolo

Each day brings a new jolt, not from our planet’s shifting tectonic plates but from the disorientating sensation of becoming dislodged from what we previously perceived as objective reality. Whenever I see anybody today proclaiming an unerring foreknowledge of what the future holds, I cannot resist a derisive snort.

When it Comes to AI, Clear-Eyed Pragmatism Beats Slaphappy Optimism

After my return from vacation, I had a lot on my plate these last few days. The preceding sentence is my way of apologizing for not providing a post earlier this week. Still, I’ll attempt to make amends, offering this post today and another tomorrow (on Nvidia GTC . . . for

Annihilation or Utopia? AI Likely to Land Somewhere Between the Two Extremes

A couple recent articles got my attention, and I thought I’d offer thoughts with which you might enthusiastically agree or vehemently disagree. Either reaction is acceptable. The only unacceptable reaction would be apathy and indifference. We’re here to think critically, not to sleepwalk. The topic of AI is

Nvidia’s Results Were Good, But the Market is Full to Bursting

And Now for A Very Different Take on the DeepSeek Cause Célèbre

A media storm raged in the wake of news that China’s DeepSeek open-source AI models were capable of equaling or surpassing the performance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is decidedly not open source. In the past few days, arguably too much has been written and said about the emergence

The TikTok Mouse and the Elephant in The Room

We’ve reached a point, here in the fast-moving eddies of the digital era, where snapshots of a given point in the space-time continuum are nearly impossible to capture. Time doesn’t present itself as an orderly sequence of discrete blips, like the ellipses that follow a stray thought, but

And Now The News: Stuff that Perhaps Only I Care About

Quantum Mania: Amid the Present Puffery, A Seemingly Bright Future

You could say that it’s the best of times, the worst of times, and practically the non-existent times for quantum computing. The sentence I’ve just typed is paradoxical, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The information-technology industry seems to be forming a consensus that quantum computing

The Danger Zone: When Societies Struggle to Adapt to Technological Change

I’ve thought a lot lately about how previous generations, during prior periods of major technological change, dealt with being caught between the tectonic plates of past, present, and future. Most of us assume, I believe, that tomorrow will be much like today. For the most part, that’s true.

In Praise of Uncertainty: A Resolution for the Year Ahead

We learn, if we’re fortunate and observant, from the past, even though we can never know precisely what happened in the past. We live, of necessity, in the present. We look forward to the future, often in hope more than fear. We can’t know the future, though. We