I have been obsessed lately with my blind spots in predicting long-term trends. For the last several years I’ve been looking at the past and the present, and evaluating what things I could have predicted and which things I never would have thought possible. And I think I’ve found a pattern. My biggest problem seems […]
Some Thoughts on the Future of Education
I was thinking earlier about how drastically education could change as the result of technology. Here are some random thoughts along that vector: Everything becomes about local learning pods. So it’s any small room with displays, cameras, and a place for people to gather. The content is pre-made and is best of the best, crowd-rated […]
Accessing iCloud Drive via Terminal.app
macOS Sierra introduced iCloud Drive as a deep part of the operating system. It’s easy enough to see in Finder, but I had trouble finding it at the command line. So I went hunting and found out that iCloud files are stored under ~/Library/Mobile Documents at the full path of: ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ Hope this saves […]
A Summary of Trump’s Stumbles in the First Debate
Like many others, I was fairly dumbfounded by how ridiculous Trump sounded in his first debate performance. But the part that fascinates me is how people can think that he won, or that he even did well at all. Here’s a short list of things he did tonight that normally make one unelectable. Clinton calls […]
Unsupervised Learning: Episode 46
Subscribe to the Podcast via: iTunes | Android | RSS | Newsletter [ Click here to get the full companion newsletter with complete show notes from this episode. ] [ Click here to get the full companion newsletter with complete show notes from this episode. ] Subscribe to the Podcast via: iTunes | Android | […]
Authentication’s Last Mile
In communications parlance, the last mile refers to the difficult problem of getting from the street to a consumer’s home, and it’s often the most difficult part. I think there’s something similar we’re facing with computing and security. We seldom have a problem validating that someone did something. And we can do all sorts of […]
IoT + SSRF: A New Attack Vector?
I think we’re going to start seeing a new type of vulnerability in the next 1-3 years that results from the combination of IoT proliferation and Server Side Request Forgery. IoT will introduce billions of internet-facing devices, and Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF) will allow internet-based attackers to extract sensitive information from networks abstracted by […]
Virtual Reality: Past and Future
“It has no relationship whatsoever to anything anchored in some kind of metaphysical superspace. It’s just your cultural point of view […] Travel shows you the relativity of culture.” — Terence McKenna Source: How VR Gaming will Wake Us Up to our Fake Worlds I find this perspective fascinating. Essentially, anyone trying to create an […]
We Are All Battle Mechs for Genes
I’m reading a fantastic book called The Evolution of Everything, and it’s moving the ground beneath my feet. It’s about, well, the evolution of everything. But it starts with a phenomenal introduction into the evolution of life. What it reminded me of were the concepts from Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and The Red Queen, which […]
My Changing Opinion on Edward Snowden
Someone smart once said something like: You shouldn’t debate topics that involve classified information, because you’re simply unable to form intelligent opinions. The problem is when people start seeing what they know as “enough” information to form an opinion, and I may have fallen into that trap myself. I wrote a piece (see the recommended […]
Mobile Pay is Nice, But What We Need is Mobile Auth
I love Apple Pay, and Samsung Pay, and all the other pays. I think they’re great. I do think that they’re steps on an evolutionary path, however, and they’re not very close to the plateau. The plateau is when you don’t do anything—when your identity is passively (but strongly) authenticated using hundreds of data points. […]
Unsupervised Learning: Episode 45
Subscribe to the Podcast via: iTunes | Android | RSS | Newsletter [ Click here to get the full companion newsletter with complete show notes from this episode. ] [ Click here to get the full companion newsletter with complete show notes from this episode. ] Subscribe to the Podcast via: iTunes | Android | […]
Between Two Ravines: Predicting the Future of Human Work
When it comes to predicting what automation will do to the human workforce, there are two popular lines of wisdom. People have said for decades that this or that would remove the need for human work. Marx said it would happen after the industrial revolution. They said computers would do it. Yet here we are, […]
My Thoughts on the 10-year Anniversary iPhone
The iPhone 7 was just released (I got a matte black 7), but I’m already thinking about the next one. And so is everyone else. The iPhone 7 was a punt (a very successful one I think), and I think they’re going to do something spectacular for the next one. Here are some ideas I […]
Some Thoughts on “Out of Band” and “Blind” Vulnerabilities
I was looking through some feeds last week and saw a “Blind SSRF” vulnerability, and it got me thinking about a few vulnerability naming conventions that jostle my fur. It spawned a tweet series that looked like this: Thought: Does “blind” (in reference to vulnerabilities) actually mean the combination of out of band+ delayed? #infosec […]
“Leaning In” With New Technologies
A lot of people have been worried about the feel of the new iPhone button. Either worried about it, or after having tried it they actually don’t like it. I’ve had an interesting experience with it, and I wanted to capture a quick and related thought about it. I love the new way of unlocking […]
“The Fear of AI” Actually Means Two Things
Lots of people are talking about “The Fear of AI”, and whether or not we should. But it’s important to distinguish between two different types of AI here. Machine Learning + Big Data + Automation, resulting in the obsolescence of millions of jobs. Creation of a new, super-intelligent life form, which ultimately attacks, subjugates, or […]
AI Used to Predict the Success of Written Campaigns
I just saw Sonal of a16z tweet out her favorite podcast, so I had to take a look. It was about a particularly interesting application of machine learning—one that’s fascinating to me on numerous levels—the ability to predict the success of a written campaign by evaluating its style, vocabulary, and typography. The research they spoke […]
“Things” and “The Internet of Things” Are the Same
We all know what things are. They’re cars, and chairs, and restaurants, and buildings, and phones, and dogs, and cities. And people. So what’s the Internet of Things? Simple: it’s all those things…connected to each other. So you can ask any question about any thing. Anywhere. At any time. You can get data from any […]
UnifyID and Continuous Authentication
So I was just watching the pitches for the six Disrupt finalists, and there were a couple that had The Glow for me. First, was Carbon Health, which is basically like 90% mobile-device-based healthcare. It’s fantastic. And there were a couple of others, which I will talk about in my show this week that were […]
Skate and Destroy
I skated for the first time in like 25 years today. And I did it at a place where I used to skate a lot when I was a kid—at the park right next to the local library. I didn’t try anything crazy. It took me a few minutes to get my muscle memory back, […]
Creative Output Requires Quality Inputs
Ideas make you think, and not just about what you happen to be working on. Creative people consume good content. I’ve seen and heard this from so many places. Great ideas are like horses kicking up dust, and when you inhale that dust it makes you think about all sorts of things. You might be […]
Evolution, Hormones, Meaning, Story, and Music
This is a half-formed idea. Walk with me. Meaning for humans is all centered around story. Narrative. Boy meets girl. Family is reunited. War ravaged the land. Story matters to meaning because story is how we communicate what to pursue and what to avoid. Stories tell us about enemies, about lovers, and about things that […]
Unsupervised Learning: Episode 44
Subscribe to the Podcast via: iTunes | Android | RSS | Newsletter [ Click here to view the full companion newsletter with complete show notes from this episode. ] [ Click here to view the full companion newsletter with complete show notes from this episode. ] Subscribe to the Podcast via: iTunes | Android | […]
Installing pip on MacOS / OS X
I was having massive drama with installing software from Github on MacOS (and previously OS X) until I found a very quick solution. sudo easy_install pip Now you can use pip to do things like: pip install -r requirements.txt Hope this helps someone!
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