To be a great hiring manager don’t be distracted by rockstar engineers, study up on network theory.
As a manager I like to build teams out of spare parts. I hire candidates who are rejected from other pipelines, I pick up people with middling performance in other teams, sometimes I…
After months of struggling through generating LLVM IR in Go the only thing I know for sure is how much I don’t understand.
A few months ago someone asked me how I managed to devote so much time to working on my programming language Fault. Was my work sponsoring it…
Social networks are full of fake accounts, tracing their networks and observing their behavior can reveal interesting things about how the world works. But only if you can find them!
I have a long running fascination with scammers. From the very first moment my father introduced me to the film…
Thousands of fake Instagram accounts are powering scams targeting influencers. The scams are run by different people, but are the bots?
I was in the middle of a work trip — the first since Covid — when an obvious bot account claiming to be a scout for a streetwear brand left a comment on a honey trap I had set up to study Instagram bots. “Collab? DM @ vincerewears”
The single most impactful thing you can do to boost your intelligence is learn how to effectively self-soothe
When I was about seven years old I was diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder. At the time, such disorders were classified as learning disabilities. The way learning disabilities are diagnosed is by administrating an IQ test and an achievement test that focuses on skills like reading, writing and math…
People don’t make better decisions when given more data, so why do we assume A.I. will?
On a warm day in 2008, Silicon Valley’s titans-in-the-making found themselves packed around a bulky, blond-wood conference room table. Although they are big names today, the success of their businesses was hardly assured at the time. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon operated on extremely tight margins and was not profitable. They had…
Programming in logic can help you produce better optimized, more secure, bug-free code … if only you knew how to do it.
It took me about two years to write my first program in Z3. I had done some tutorials, wrote code to solve other people’s example puzzles, but I…
Silicon Valley’s ethics via opt-out isn’t going to work anymore
Last week I wrote a piece for the popular military theory blog, War on the Rocks, about what Silicon Valley has learned about the impact of automation on complex systems and how that should shape the military’s goals.
Discussing the military use case for technology with other technologists is often…
If I’ve seemed quiet lately, it’s because I’ve been working on guest pieces for other publications (and the second series of my exploration into program language design, Marianne Writes a Programming Language). This year I’ll be doing a small series for BuiltIn on abstractions and architecture. …
The more software eats the world, the more critical safety is … but what exactly does that mean?
Software engineers are bad at safety because software engineers are not used to the idea that software can injure. All around the industry, the mantel of technical leadership has been passed to…
