The New York City mayoral election is shaping up to make Ranked-Choice voting shine. They held the primary yesterday and the super progressive candidate won. The model where there’s a primary and there’s no winner with 50% triggering a run-off typically sees far fewer people show up for that run-off. I think that makes a…
At work, I post perhaps too many memes. I like them because a picture “says a thousand words.” And, sometimes, the picture works better in my haste to express raw emotion. Most of the time, these come from intense frustration, so the humor of a meme interjected into the seriousness helps me feel better. The…
A scene I love from The Hunt for Red October was the communication through sonat pings. Later, when I worked in IT, the use of SNMP pings became a core part of my troubleshooting an issue. I thought of this scene every time. These days, another form is most of my work with humans. These…
People aspiring to work in information technology may think they just need to learn to read and write software, learn databases, networking, operating systems, and similar. They may overlook how important literary tools are to the above. Metaphors are everywhere in IT. It’s a crucial part of the language and context around the things we…
Back in the wake of Obergfell v Hodges, I talked with some friends about a news story of a court person refusing to sign off on gay marriages after the Supreme Court allowed them. My friends were confused. They wanted to know: How can they refuse the authority of the Supreme Court?!?! I had a…
As data moves to the cloud, the security moves from my computers to someone else’s. That’s fine. Even with “MY” computers, I don’t have full control over everything, so rather than trusting my coworkers to do the right thing, I’m trusting others. My clients operate in an ecosystem. At my start here, we were highly…
Stumbled on an article about the job market will demand data skills because of A.I. A big part of that is that it will rely on good, quality data, which will require people who can ensure that the systems are fed that. Specifically this caught my eye: “Data underpins all of the large language models.…
Reading an email about C3 AI being developed to locate extremists. This nugget to start put me off. Siebel: This is the first time we’ve done things in computer science that weren’t a mathematical certainty, other than random number generators. Everything else we’ve done in computer science, up until this day, has been deterministic. Every…
Watching the United States government hash out a budget and looming shutdown, I worry about the blackhat hackers exploiting it. Not enough of those protecting us from these threats are essential workers. Agencies I depend upon, like CISA, furlough 80% of their workforce, leaving whitehats in the dark about what they’ve detected. Their research feeds…