Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Linux and the financial crisis
On December 2007, the New York Stock Exchange adopted Linux. In late August 2008, we saw one of the worse worldwide stock market crash of the last hundred years...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Better job ads
Before writing your next job ad, look at what companies who recruit talented engineers do. According to a recent Google job posting, here are the requirements to...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Web is killing database systems
A typical enterprise computing architecture relies on databases, professionally managed by DBAs. Developers grow applications which all update or query the same...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast computation of scalar products, and some lessons in optimization
Given two arrays, say (1,2,3,4) and (4,3,1,5), their scalar product is simply the sum of the products: 1
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Usury and the collapse of empires
The American government recently played Russian roulette with its economy by threatening to default on its debt. Of course, nobody actually thought that the Americans...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Pick one: determinism or fairness
Computers changed our life drastically in the last few decades. Correspondingly, I view the world in terms of algorithms. When I think of how the government works...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Scientists are communists
Overconfident individuals often win by claiming more resources than they could defend (Johnson and Fowler). If nobody knows who is strongest, whoever thinks he...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What the Internet wants me to read (summer 2011)
Last week, I asked on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus what I should read over the summer. Here is a quick summary of the recommendations I got: On Twitter: A...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Sentience is indescribable
Arguably, one of the most nagging scientific question is the nature of sentience. Can we build sentient computers? Is my cat sentient? What does that mean? Will...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The myth of the unavoidable specialization
In a recent essay, Malone et al. claimed that we were entering the age of hyperspecialization. Their core assumption: human beings are more efficient when doing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On being happy
What if you could engineer happiness? What if you could redesign your life so that you are happier? With professors in mind, Brian Martin wrote an essay entitled...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Probabilities are unnecessary mathematical artifacts
There has been much philosophical debate about randomness. While people often offer the nature of consciousness as a fundamental unresolved question, we should...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The language interpreters are the new machines
Most Computer Science textbooks assume that algorithms are written directly into machine language for an idealized machine under a Von Neumann architecture. Alas...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is Wikipedia anti-intellectual?
Sander recently posted a provocative piece where he argues that geeks suffer from anti-intellectualism. To some extend, his stance is that democratic sites such...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why I still program
People expect that, as you grow older, you give up practical jobs such as programming for more noble tasks such as managing a team and acquiring funding. This especially...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Automation will make you obsolete, no matter who you are
I was part of the first generation of kids to receive computers as gifts. I was also part of the first generation of professionals to adopt computer-assisted tele...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The perils of filter-then-publish
Why do I prefer the publish-then-filter system, which dominates social media such as blogs, to the traditional filter-then-publish system used by scientific journals...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
You cannot refuse to publish our paper because
I feel strongly that the convention peer review process needs to evolve to a publish-then-filter model. That is, I do not believe that a few select individuals...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Time-saving versus work-inducing software
At a glance, office software like Word, PowerPoint or Excel, are great time savers. Nobody would want to go back to the era before Word Processors? Unfortunately...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog