Progressive Gauge
Media and Research
It’s early to tell whether the recent generation of AI advances will go beyond recommendation engines and fraud detection—the two shining stars of the big data era. The distinction is simple: If I fudge a recommender, I lose a possible sale; if I fail a fraud detection, I lose money I already have. [Read more…] about Random Notes: Polar Vortex Watch – Jellification – They Call the Winter Storm “Fern”
With 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
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.
This first ran in January on my Medium Blog.
It’s been something of an afterthought since the US Apollo program ended in December of 1972, but the Moon is moving into the public spotlight again.
What’s becoming clear is that a new Moon race is well underway, one with plenty of participants but one most pointedly pitting China against the US.
The competition has a different character than it had in the now distant past — it’s become more a long-running endurance race and less the clearly defined sprint it was in the 1960s, when fear of Sputnik tended to unite sentiment in the US. [Read more…] about China Moon Racing
Details vary in different telling, but all agree that Unix operating system co-creator Ken Thompson developed grep while at Bell Labs. His impetus came from a request by a manager for a program that could search files for patterns.
Thompson had written and had been using a program, called ‘s’ (for ‘search’), which he debugged and enhanced overnight, the story goes. They nursed it and rehearsed it and grep sprung forth. “g” stands for “global,” “re” stands for “regular expression, “p” stands for “print.” To get something to display on screen in those days you used “print.” Thompson coming up with a software tool, and sharing it throughout the office, and perhaps beyond; to me that captured a moment in time.
I picked up on this based on an assigned mini-series for Data Center Knowledge. Also in this mini-series was a look at the roots of the kill command and the birth of SSH security. [links below]. I knew bits of the early Unix history but had to dig for this one.