I love Brad DeLong’s writing, but I did a double take when he recently commented “‘A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer’ continues to recede into the future“. The Primer he’s referencing is an electronic book from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age novel, an AI tutor designed to educate and empower children, answering their questions and shaping their...

Photo by Gopal Vijayaraghavan My startup, Useful Sensors, has all of its money in Silicon Valley Bank. There are a lot of things I worried about as a CEO, but assessing SVB’s creditworthiness wasn’t one of them. It clearly should have been. I don’t have any grand theories about what’s happened over the last few days but I wanted to share some...

When I think of a museum with “craft” in its name, I usually imagine an institution focused on the past. San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design is different. Their mission is to “bring you the work of the hand, mind and heart“, and Bull.Miletic’s Proxistant Vision exhibition is a wonderful example of how their open definition of craft...

If you’ve heard me on any podcasts recently, you might remember I’ve been talking about a Gesture Sensor as the follow up to our first Person Sensor module. One frustrating aspect of building hardware solutions is that it’s very tough to share prototypes with people, since you usually have to physically send them a device. To work around that...

Years ago I used to write regular “Five Short Links” posts but I gave up as my Twitter account became a better place to share updates, notes, and things I found interesting from around the internet. Now that Twitter is Nazi-positive I’m giving up on it as a platform, so I’m going to try going back to occasional summary posts here instead. ...

Photo by Ian Sane Last week I had a question from a colleague about reproducibility in TensorFlow, specifically in the 1.14 era. He wanted to be able to run the same training code multiple times and get exactly the same results, which on the surface doesn’t seem like an unreasonable expectation. Machine learning training is fundamentally...