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Red letter day
Almost two years ago, my friends Thomas and Ulli gave me a crossword puzzle book while I was in rehab recovering from a traumatic brain injury. I have been working on that book a little bit at a time since then. For quite some time, I mostly worked on it in waiting rooms for doctors,…
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Expect the unknowns
In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld made this statement about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there…
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MacOS/UNIX tip of the day: Opening many urls at once
Today I needed to use a tool to look up information about 30 or so blogs at work. The tool is a web-based internal tool, which accepts a blog_id as a parameter in the url. I used some UNIX magic to extract these from some other information, so that I had a simple list in…
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The research mindset
Back when I was working at Nuance Communications, we had a yearly internal research conference, in which people would share what they had been working on with other teams. Usually there were about 200 or so people at the conference, which was probably about 1/4 of all the people working in research. I got the…
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non-generative AI should not be forgotten
I have been working on virtual assistants for 15 years now. The first ones I started with were IVR (interactive voice response). These were the phone systems with complicated dialogues. When I would mention it at a party, people would always respond “I hate those!”. Then Siri came out right around the same time, and…