Navigating Public Policy, Technology, Health, Data, and Innovation for a Fairer Future
Uber announced this week that it is cutting roughly 3,300 jobs, about 10 percent of its global workforce, while trimming the ranks of managers by 20 percent. The company framed the move as an effort to get “simpler and faster” and redirect resources toward ride-sharing, delivery, and its autonomous-vehicle ambitions. Something was conspicuously missing from Read More ““Simpler and Faster” May Be the New Term for AI Layoffs”
There are moments in business when the price tells you that you are looking at the wrong thing. NVIDIA is reported to have agreed to pay $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, a company whose annual revenue has been put at roughly $150 million. Reuters carried the story on August 27, relaying reporting from The Information, Read More “The Empire Strikes Back”
Hank Green took some heat recently for using artificial intelligence in his work. Vanity Fair framed the controversy around the anger of some fans who believed his use of AI crossed a line between technological assistance and creative authenticity. One Hank would like to stand up for another. The criticism raises a larger question that Read More “Hank Green, AI, and the Economics of Authenticity”
Over the past several years I put together a set of lecture notes for teaching bioinformatics, pairing classic Python/BioPython methods with AI-assisted workflows so students could see both approaches side by side. I’ve cleaned them up and organized them into a free 14-chapter book: Bioinformatics with AI: A Modern Introduction. It moves from the basics Read More “Bioinformatics with AI: A Modern Introduction”
Every so often a small, unglamorous fact arrives that tells you more about the character of a nation than any speech does. Last week, a company almost nobody outside a narrow community of software engineers had heard of released a piece of software that, on its own modest terms, may matter more than most of Read More “The Quiet Company Challenging China’s Open AI Lead”
A data center does not sleep. It does not observe weather, or seasons, or the particular slant of light at four in the afternoon in November. It draws power at the same punishing rate at midnight as it does at noon. The newest ones, the ones built to train and run artificial intelligence, draw more Read More “AI after dark”
A mail route is one of those ordinary systems that reveals a civilization’s moral life better than most speeches do. Doreen has carried hers for twenty-six years, all of it on the same rural circuit. The route looks, from any administrative distance, like logistics. Addresses. Parcels. Envelopes. Weather. Timing. Fuel. Dogs. Traffic. Scanners. A route Read More “Meaning, the Seventh Moat: What Is Worth Doing”
Most of what matters in technology arrives quietly. Not with a keynote. Not with a countdown clock and a curtain drop. Just a file, a version number, and a few paragraphs of technical notes that almost no one reads. That is what happened on June 3, 2026, when Google DeepMind released a model called Gemma Read More “The Model T moment for AI”
Andrew Morton may have written one of the most important leadership memos of the year, and almost no one outside the Linux kernel community will ever read it. That is partly the point. The memo was not built to be read by the rest of us. It went to a mailing list, it concerned the Read More “Ownership, the Sixth Moat: The People Who Keep the Promise”
Thank you, Andrew Morton. Andrew Morton may have written one of the most important leadership memos of the year, and most people outside the Linux kernel community will never read it. That is understandable. The announcement was posted to a Linux mailing list. The subject was the future of memory-management development. The prose was practical, Read More “Great Systems Outlive Their Heroes”