The inside story of ChatGPT

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

At the center of technology and research is people who dare building it.

Decades-Old Privacy Problem solved

An advancement that could lead to performing searches over the Internet in fully private mode, without ever revealing what and why we're searching.

Introduction to Cybernetics (1956)

What? Cybernetics in 1956?? And yet, this (very complicated and difficult to read) book was foundational for modern Cybernetics.

Grab a copy, understand its profoundness and try thinking how in those years must have been a shocking read.

Generative AI exists because of the transformer

The Visual Storytelling Team at Financial Times has done a great job by preparing this simple animated explanation of generative artificial intelligence.

Stealing keystrokes with 95% accuracy, during an Internet call

So basically this paper suggests that it might be possible to "read" what you type while being on an internet call (Zoom, Teams or any other) by just "hearing" the sound of keystrokes.

Climate and Energy Summit

So many international gatherings for discussing about climate change and remediations, and so little progress.

Steve Blank and the Quantum Technology Ecosystem

Steve Blank is: E.piphany, Zilog, MIPS Computers, Convergent Technologies, Pixar, Ardent, Rocket Science Games and many other ventures and startups.

He founded his latest startup in his living room and a few years later he retired, in 1999. Since then, Steve Blank has delivered an increidble amount of knowledge for company founders and managers in books, podcasts and blog posts.

Here he talks of Quantum Technology with his cristal clear style.

Rethinking Negotiation

Negotiation is stressful. But is negotiating shouldn't mean taking advantage of the other side or try to look tough: there should be a way for getting treated fairly, both sides.

This is a simple and practical approach to negotiation that goes through logical thinking and being fair. From one of the most empathic university teachers of all times.

Biomolecular intelligence

How to build computing devices by leveraging DNA nanoengineering for nanoscale sensing, diagnostics and therapeutics.

Problem Framing Toolkit

Use the problem framing canvas to explore a problem space and formulate a robust problem statement to ensure you’re solving the right problem.

Innovation Toolkit is a free-to-use repository of tools for innovation and change management developed at MITRE.

MITRE describes itself as an Innovating Company that does not compete with other industries. It was born in 1958 with a sponsorship by U.S. Air Force and since then it served in close contact with Governments as a priviledged bridge across the academic research community and industry.

Digital transformation of the energy system

Towards a decentralised, decarbonised and flexible energy system, thanks also to decentralised agreement technologies.

IBM Research's NorthPole chip: next step forward

IBM is one of those corporations that until now by slowly and steadly innovating has given humanity the building blocks of the greates technology advancements. A new chip prototype from IBM Research’s lab in California might be the next big step.

Reflections on Trusting Trust

In October 1983, or 40 years ago, Ken Thompson talked about software development supply chain security during his Turing Award lecture.

The lecture was later published as "Reflections on Trusting Trust", a three pages paper in the prestigious Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Ken explains how to modify a C compiler binary to insert a backdoor when compiling the “login” program, leaving no trace in the source code. This essay gives a practical implementation of the paper: rather technical and useful for understanding the complex implications of secure computing and the role of scientific research in this field.

Using AlphaFold to predict the impact of single mutations on protein stability and function

AlphaFold is changing structural biology: the study of the molecular structure and dynamics of biological macromolecules (proteins and nucleic acids) and their function.

Company success story: graphics for the masses

An interesting story telling of an enterpreneurship initiative based on sound technical leadership: the history of 3dfx Interactive, maker of high end affordable graphics silicon solutions

Abandoned

The human cost of neurotechnology failure: abandoned electronics implants.

The War on Cars

A podcast about the epic, hundred years’ war between The Car and The City.

Digital Equipment Corporation memories on Licklider

This report honors J. C. R. Licklider for his contributions to computer science research and education in this country. We reprint here two of his papers, originally published in the 1960s, which exemplify his ideas about how computers could enhance human problem-solving.>

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was a founding member of the great community of researchers that enabled the revolution of Computer Science in our recent history.

Biohacking own Life as a knowledge worker

Andrej Karpathy is a founding membed at OpenAI and former Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence at Tesla.

I assume when he speaks about health, exercise, diet and nutrition of an intense knowledge worker he knows stuff: working at both organizations must be an interesting but exhausting experience.

So the narration here is very interesting, revealing insights about our body and health from the perspective of a curious data scientist.

Hardware requirements for Larga Language Models

Here's an interesting breakdown of hardware requirements for running Larga Language Models in production, from the knowledge of and experienced someone actually working at this.

Poisoning data: a tool for artists

By adding almost invisible changes to an image before uploading it on a public internet space, artists can prevent it from being effectively scraped and used for training generative models.

This means a lot for artists, because if this proves to work it can be make it impossible for images generative models to build new artifacts from artists' creative work.

The linked paper goes in much more details.

We're behind on policies to cut carbon emissions

Coal must be phased out seven times faster than is now happening.

The Cyber Resilience Act for dummies, and Everyone involved in Open Source Development

The Cyber Resilience Act was introduced by the European Parliament in September 2022. It will establish cybersecurity requirements for devices and software sold inside the European Union market.

Which means that anybody who places digital products in this market will be responsible for security related obligations, such as fixing vulnerabilities, providing software updates, and auditing and certifying the products.

The implications for Open Source development are not clear at this point, but must be taken care of.

The CT Scanner was invented in a Record (Music) Company

The computed tomography (CT) technology was born after a casual conversation between a medical doctor and a research engineer while on vacation in the 1960s. The research engineer worked at Electrical and Musical Industries in Hayes, England at that time: the same EMI best known for producing and selling Beatles records, but also electronics devices.

How to fix conversations over the Internet

Every other week, someone discovers that the Internet is broken. Very few of them explain in a detailed essay why and how to react.

This is one of those few.

A mathematical advancement on Shor's algorithm could break public cryptography very soon

Peter Shor in the mid-1990 developed an algorithm set to threaten security on the Internet (and not only).

In his paper Shor showed how a (then hypothetical) quantum physics computer could break large numbers into their prime factors very fast. For those not into cryptography, this is a classical way for breaking very robust and largely in use security mechanisms. An example would be making it possible to sniff your conversations over any communication channel, unless upgraded to future-proof algorithms.

A new variant of Shor's algorithm recently published is faster in a fundamentally new sense.

2023: tenth consecutive year at above 1°C

This was the prediction by the Met Office (UK) at the end of 2022, and was surpassed by reality.

The Story Behind the Business Model Canvas

Alexander Osterwalder is best known as the inventor of the Business Model Canvas, a graphical and guided scheme for building a business model by gathering and grouping relevant information.

He's indeed a theorist of Business Models Onthology and Organization, and he first published the results of his research in his Doctoral Dissertation and in a following collective paper. Starting from here he built his knowledge, teaching topics and landmark books on Business Model Canvas.

Uncomfortable Messages from Don Norman

What distinguishes designing for humans vs for humanity is externalities — unintended consequences of our decisions, outside of our zone of focus

Donald Arthur Norman (also known as Don) is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego. And the famous author of several interesting books on User, Human and Humanity Centered Design.

Memory Bits Flipping

Did you know that modern computer memory chips can be tricked into changing their content in unintended portions and ways? It was first discovered in 2015 and led to vulnerabilities, and the story continues.

Focus on writing

Engineers can be good writers of code, but focused writing is important for brain organization.

Dmitry Kudryavtsev is a Senior Software Engineer, Tech Lead and Consultant from Israel, occasionally giving talks and now living nomadic.

Climatewatch: Can the market get us to net zero?

Marco Magrini is an editor at Geoghraphical, the official magazine of the Royal Geographical Society published since 1935. Marco is in charge of the Climatewatch section of the magazine.

Creativity and Leadership

Leadership is not Management, nor Coaching. Leadership as a practice, role and posture has been examined and dissected in a multitude of books and seminars since forever.

Here a totally new approach is suggested, that embraces Empathy and Creativity as traits of the effective Leader. The recently published book by Gianluca Cinquepalmi uses also the word Love, which is interesting and disruptive in this field. Worth reading and having.

DNA nano engine

What? DNA nano engine? Yes, this is a very small engine (a nano engine) driven by a clever mechanism, the result of a research now published in the Nature Nanotechnology journal.

Announcing the NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty

Long story short, a handful of elliptic curves that modern cryptography is based upon were generated in the late ‘90s by calculations over seeds (words or numbers) provided by the American National Standards Association (or NSA).

The history of how those now lost seeds got generated contains a mistery, and now a group of scientists and industries decided to announce a bounty for whom might be able to re-discover the values of those seeds. And I really mean discover, because reverse calculating them is (shall be) impossible. This turns out to be is an historical password cracking challenge.

Byte Magazine

Byte, The Small Systems Journal, was started in 1975 with the dawn of the microcomputer revolution and quickly became a leading computer magazine, known for a wide variety of technical articles and commentary.

A must read for whom is interested at the early advancements of computing for the masses. Byte Magazine was also home to a column written by Jerry Eugene Pournelle (1933-2017), scientist, science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers of the history of the Internet (back in 1998!).

Byte Magazine ceased publication after the July 1998 issue. Before closing, each issue was in the range of 200 to 400 pages. Each month.

Book Review: Algorithms to Live By

The Computer Science of Human Decisions: an exceptional book on how decisions are taken, described in a fascinating review.

When done with reading the review you will want to read the full book, highly recommended!

Where Does Growth Come From? | Clayton Christensen | Talks at Google

I find this Google Talk by Clayton Christensen relaxing, super interesting and moving at the same time. Unmissable. I believe he was the first to talk about Job to be Done instead of Propensity to Buy Something.

No fear of theories, because:

a theory is a statement of causality

Scientists and politicians on surging temperatures

Scientists have been sounding the alarm over unusual temperatures, but politics have different priorities.

Future quantum codebreakers goldmining from the past

it’s possible that some bad actors are already hoarding encrypted messages in anticipation of being able to break them when a suitable quantum machine arrives

Wouldn't you do that? The timeline for a widely available quantum computing capability is measured now in a few years or months, but still uncertain.

Still, it's time for post-quantum (or quantum-resistant) cybersecurity algorithms to be deploied everywhere, and particularly in places where past messages and stored information could potentially be breaked and be useful from here to a few years.

This is a kind of time-delayed threat that has nothing in common with well known vulnerabilities and weaknesses of the past and present.

Case studies of automation in services

This is a very very (repeated intentionally) interesting research and review of the intentions and effects of introducing automation in labour-intensive industrial processes.

Interviews have been conducted across many factories in Italy, and the results include the consideration that humans remains crucial in activities that require flexibility, adaptability and reconfiguration of physical tasks. Moreover, the role of trade unions is nowadays unclear or not considered by companies that decide to introduce a new technology.

Perhaps these topics have an important impact when considering automation by artificial intelligence.

You own your data, in spite of the cloud

by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users

This is a call for action that calls for going back to local-first software applications. A way for enhancing privacy and continuity, for whom cares about them.

Your car, gone in 90 seconds

Modern and complex luxury cars can be stolen using a very simple tecnique that involves cabling a small device to the vehicle CAN Bus wiring, and injecting fake messages. Looks like cybersecurity has not penetrated the car manufacturers industry properly.

Antarctica ice will not recover

Around 40% of Antarctica's ice shelves shrunk in the past 25 years, without signs of recovery: this is huge.

Mapping Any Unknown Industry in ten steps

Steve Blank on mapping an industry for building a business plan on top of the map, in a few weeks of investigation (or lunches).

TimeGPT-1: GPT for time series

One of the trending topics in generative machine learning research is how to leverage the predictive capabilities of these algorithms for time series modeled events. Disclaimer: this is still a highly controversial discussion.

The Cell as an Embedded Computing System

In this paper, we identify the cell as an embedded computing system and, as such, demonstrate that systems biology shares many aspects in common with computer systems engineering, electrical engineering, and chemical engineering.

French government call for action on post quantum cryptography

This is one of the several different ongoing initiatives by governments, institutions, research centers and standardization bodies for the awareness of a change of paradigm in cryptography and security.

Quantum Computing is soon coming available on all desks, and with it the end of everything we know about privacy thanks to asymmetric cryptography. Not a big deal for messaging operations but the worst will happen with connected devices.

The generative world model for autonomous driving

GAIA-1 is the first proof of concept of a mind blowing idea: using a generative model for autonomous driving.

The model does not plug itself directly into the driving algorithm, but instead it builds a model of the next five to ten seconds of the external world (around the car) while autonomously driving. Great idea indeed!

Climate model approximation

Carbon warning, degradation, water cooling, everything is connected.

The Data Delusion

Surveying a million books on ten thousand shelves is a nightmare

This is J. C. R. Licklider, a chief engineer and pioneer of the early Internet, in 1965. He wrote the book Libraries of the Future fter two years of research, in which he envisioned a future with automatic management of information instead of manually consulting books.

We're there, since a considerable amount of time, and this fascinating essay depicts a situation where useful data mining and discovering is not a solved problem.

Incidentally one only used hard copy of Licklider book is found on catalogues (and highly priced), while its PDF version is freely available...

The Great Cybersecurity Switch-over Has Begun

Post Quantum Cryptography is here.

Quantum Computing is the possibility of reaching extremely high speed in computing, by leveraging quantum physics. A few years ago being an immaginable frontier, now business applications are at hand.

Cryptography (the ability to keep secrets while communicating and sharing information over the Internet) is largely based on the inability of computer to reach such high speeds. Now that this is clearly possible, a new advancement in cryptography is needed. Here's how affected companies should react.

A program synthesis agent that autonomously fixes its output by running tests

An automatic coder that corrects its output by running tests: if this is difficult for whom's not into coding, think of an automated book writer (ghost writing agent) that also double check the result by automatically getting feedbacks from sample readers.

Novel NASA Battery Tech

I call it the barbecue test

When heated on a fire, these batteries based on hydrogen and specially crafted electrodes inside a pressurised cylinder can never explode: instead the hydrogen recombines into water and plain steam escapes the battery. This looks like the holy grail of electric energy storage, at 30000+ cycles durability.

Self-supervised learning: The dark matter of intelligence

Humans rely on their previously acquired background knowledge of how the world works, and build new knowledge based on experience and simula.

How do we get machines to do the same? Self Supervised Learning is one step in this direction. Instead of teaching an algorithm about what to search for, we prepare clever algorithms that (sort of) discover patterns and behaviours in data before applying learning.

here's why self-supervised learning is one of the most promising ways to make significant progress in AI

RISC-V - Part 1 : Origins and Architecture

Berkeley did it again.

After contributing to the initial development of the Unix operating system and so many advancement in modern Physics, from the University of California Berkeley the development of a novel microprocessor core architecure is spreading across the entire world of advanced corporations.

This is the main competitor to ARM (Advanced Risc Machine), another architecture property of ARM Ltd or one of the most powerful technology corporations in Cambrigde, England.

Edsger Dijkstra's One-Day Workweek - Cal Newport

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra has been one of the fundamental computer science researchers for our modern computer-based algorithms advancements.

Today not so many private companies are willing to invest in pure ideas, as it was the case for Burroughs Corporation hiring Dijkstra in the early '70 for the scope of elaborating on his research achievements so far.

Number theory and evolutionary genetics

Number theory, the study of the properties of positive integers, is perhaps the purest form of mathematics

And yet here is an unexptected very practical application of it.

Antarctic sea-ice at mind-blowing low

Without its ice cooling the planet, Antarctica could transform from Earth's refrigerator to a radiator, experts say. Needless to say, United States canceled research projects instead of reacting.

AI and Knowledge Workers: a study

When properly used and managed, Artificial Intelligence in the form of the likes of Generative and Large Language Models enhances knowledge workers productivity and quality, in measureable terms.

Figthting fake cheese with cryptography

Parmesan is very expensive: it does make sense to fight fakes with a bit of cryptography. In the near future perhaps more of physical unclonable functions will be found here also.

B612

Bob Noorda was a graphic designer who lived and worked primarily in Milan, and  a professor in graphic design at several Design Schools across Europe. Among his works are the Milan and New York subways sign and image.

During his career as a designer, Noorda advocated using logos and fonts that are strongly branded while keeping a tangible usability and visibility. The Milan Metro specifically crafted fonts family is a great example of this.

Here is an example of a font family that Noorda would perhaps have appreciated. It was designed for legibility in aircraft cockpit screens, very seriously, and after being opensourced is now available for anywhere fast and secure reading is an added value. Its name B612 is after the imaginary asteroid of the aviator Saint‑Exupéry.

Career ending

I want to talk about ... not planning the end of our careers

As software egineers (and knowledge workers I'd add) career ending is easily among the unknowns to most of us.

Earth out of 'safe operating space'

According also to a report on Science, human activities have already pushed the world out of a Safe Operating Space.

Privacy Nightmare on Wheels

Privacy Not Included (PNI) is an initiative by Mozilla global non-profit organization, that scrutinizes electronic and software products against potential privacy concerning problems.

In its latest edition a PNI bullettin reveals how twenty five car brands collect and share personal data. This includes sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information.

On a separate finding, what students from the Technische Univ. Berlin recently discovered while trying to hack a Tesla vehicle for the good of science, was that it's becoming far easier than in the past to break the protections of a car's software system and reach confidential as well as functional information and commands that of course are not intended to be available to anyone.

Adding innovative functionalities that are enabled by complex hardware and software requires companies to invest a considerable share of profits in cybersecurity, protection and ethical analysis.

Presentation Design Rules

Less Is More is the most important among the rules of a good and useful presentation design as shared by The Noun Project, a (profit) community of designers from all countries.

News about the LK-99 would-be superconductor

The LK-99 room-temperature superconductor excited the world with its potential before many scientists disproved it

Brian Wang, the founder of NextBigFuture.com and analyst for Z1 Consulting, gives here his comments on the latest buzz around superconductivity, with a bit of hope and still a lot of skepticism.

The Forever Pollution Project

Tracking PFAS pollution across Europe.

Computing History at Bell Labs

No need to explain what Bell Laboratories have been for the advancement of humanity in terms of technological discoveries and use cases perfection. Most of the published stuff from the ancient years at the Bell Labs has gone from the easy of reach of its websites, but very often it still surfaces in the works of passionate professionals and from archives.

Changing the definition of an embryo

For the first time in history of science, lab-grown structures with the potential to develop into fetuses should be defined and regulated as embryos.

Hardware Security Modules Done Right

Hardware Security Modules are found inside any portable PC, mobile phone, bank security key, vehicle and all sorts of connected devices. The way they're designed is constantly under scrutiny for weaknesses.

Now this is a drastic opinion, which leads to a better way of thinking and building security. Which requires further scrutiny of course.

Cybersecurity of low-orbit satellites is pretty much absent

A PhD student admits he probably shouldn't have given this talk at Black Hat USA recently.

Black Hat was founded in 1997, and still is the internationally recognized cybersecurity event series providing the most technical and relevant information security research. Giving a talk there might propagate instantly across researchers and newsmagazines.

And this one talks about the absence of cybersecurity for objects that fly above our heads, every day, giving birth to a wealth of very useful and sometimes dramatically needed services.

Idea To Impact

A cynical-but-realistic summary of how I go from idea to impact

Published July 2015, by Kent Beck (Programmer, artist, coach coach, singer/guitarist, peripatetic). How do you measure and manage the impact of your ideas?

EU nature restoration law

MEPs back law to place recovery measures on 20% of EU’s land and sea by 2030 by dozen votes.