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Source Code: Bill Gates’ Harvard Days

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Gates Source Code BookWith the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk dashing about, we crouch for shelter now in an era where well-funded high-tech bros can live a life that was once reserved only for Doctor Strange.

That tends to make Bill Gates’ “Source Code: My Beginnings” (Knopf, 2025) a much more warmfy and life-affirming book than it might otherwise have been. In this recounting of his early days, and founding of Microsoft, he paints a colorful picture of a bright and excitable boy making good. Much of Source Code is set in “the green pastures of Harvard University.”

The boy wonder to be was born in Seattle in 1955, when computers were room sized, and totally unlike the consumer devices  which humans now ponder like prayer books as they walk city streets.

His family was comfortable and gave him a lot of room to engage a very curious imagination. His mother called it precociousness, and it’s  a trait he dampered down when he could. He had a fascination with basic analytical principles, which held him in stead when the age of personal computers dawned. [Read more…] about Source Code: Bill Gates’ Harvard Days

March of Analogies and AI neural networks

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Hopfield circuit

Analogies provide us the tools to explore, discover, and understand invention, and  to communicate about the invention itself. Draft horses of old still stand fast as such an analogy.

In the 19th Century, James Watt estimated that a strong dray horse could lift 33,000 pounds by one foot in one minute. That provided a comparative measure for the steam engine, and it carries right through to the engines under the hoods of today’s F1 speedsters and NASCAR racers.

While a commonly accepted measure of AI performance is still developing for ChatGPT and other Generative AI systems, there is an analogy at work, and it lies in the neural firings of the brain.

Lift the hood on Generative AI and you are looking at the neural network, which is an equivalent electrical circuit model of workings of the brain. It is an equation or algorithm that is rendered in software. The software runs– these days – on a GPU (graphical processor unit).

The neural net analogy gained the sanction of the academy with the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics (2024). That went to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” Both men formulated neural networks in the 1980s, that built on a near-half century of previous work.

The Nobelists would be first to admit the limits of analogies are always evident, although the rapid rise and hype of Generative AI –now called “Agentic AI” – obscures that from the general public. [Read more…] about March of Analogies and AI neural networks

Family Affair: Through the Elon Darkly

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There’s not a lot of wailing in grief this week for Elon Musk, who loses $100-billion-plus in stock value as Stop Wall Streeters spray paint his show room windows; and as some investors call for his removal at the company Tesla’s helm. What’s a prototype man of the future to do? Who cares?

I’d venture that most Americans have seen enough of him, and even President Donald Trump seems tired of Musk’s presence. Mike Meyers hilarious parody of this Nerd for All Seasons has knocked him from his very high horse.

But let’s flash back. It was just a few years ago that Musk was a paradigm of modern engineering, conqueror of the realms of electric cars and rocket propulsion. He was set to implant helpful silicon chips in needy craniums, and to bore a vacuum sealed tunnel all the way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

[Read more…] about Family Affair: Through the Elon Darkly

Observations: Need real-time analytics? There’s a StarTree Cloud for that

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Led by former LinkedIn and Uber hands, Mountain View, California-based Star Tree looks to drive wider use of real-time analytical applications based around the Apache Pinot OLAP engine. This kind of technology has many uses in a world where great volumes of data arrive at ultrahigh velocity.

TECHNOLOGY EMPLOYED
If “OLAP” had marketing magic, that was a long time ago. OLAP was an early attempt to go beyond relational database and data warehouse limitations, but Apache Pinot today is probably better described in today’s parlance as a column-oriented data store, and its competition can come from any of the many databases to arise in recent years. Apache Pinot is designed to handle fast ingestion of data, and fast joins on users’ SQL queries. Since the StarTree focus is on cloud computing — its found in the three big cloud providers’ marketplaces – it can and also has been called a Database As A Service (DBaaS). [Read more…] about Observations: Need real-time analytics? There’s a StarTree Cloud for that

VP Vance runs AI scrimmage – takes on EU bureaucrats

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JD Vance last month dressed down the Euros at Grand Palis AI Summit. Here, an old tech hand reckons with memories of AI policy efforts. Sees surprising devolution.

By Jack Vaughan

Booted footsteps in the hall at night. Coming closer as in an old radio drama — but real. The steps still resound in corners of Europe.  Where some memories of oppression are hard-wired.

The bootsteps might be KGB, Gestapo or Stasi. These were secret police, compiling dossiers and worse.  The US has had its secret agencies tracking its citizens. [Read more…] about VP Vance runs AI scrimmage – takes on EU bureaucrats