Peter Cresswell

I’m far from an authority on cybersecurity, but you don’t have to be an expert to understand the magnitude of what’s happening around the world. Intelligence capabilities and cyber skills are advancing to levels that represent a serious threat. This has created fast-moving waters across the cyber landscape. All boats are accelerating in every direction. If you were sinking before (and honestly, only the truly elite among us weren’t sinking at some rate), you’re sinking much faster now.

Almost 25 years ago I read an article on immobots in MIT Technology Review. It stuck: Immobots Take Control. I was a fresh grad at Husky Injection Molding Systems, assigned to improve self-diagnostics on injection moulding machines and their robots. It was a lovely problem. It got me thinking about monitoring systems for errors — and, more importantly, about what an error is. An immobot doesn’t watch a machine from the outside. It carries a model of the machine, compares that model to what the machine is doing, and reasons through the delta. The error is the drift — the gap between what ought to be happening and what is. That reframing has stayed with me for 25 years.

Recent article in The Economist highlighting an important paradigm shift whereby AI is flooding channels in the public sector. That is, there are various channels which governments provide to it’s citizens - complaints, legal filings, Freedom of Information Requests, etc. Those channels are now starting to flood and saturate. This phenomenon hit Open Source Software (thenewstack.io) first. The knee jerk response from some projects has been to slam the doors shut to AI contributions. That’s one option but not a great one. Especially not for governments. Closing access to the modern state is not feasible, both politically or practically.

Back at Waterloo Engineering, a classmate of mine was asked in a job interview: “What’s the one question you like to be asked?” “That question,” he said. The interviewer learned more in those two words than most interviews reveal in an hour: the candidate was quick and comfortable under pressure. Good questions do that. Bad ones produce long answers and no information, and most interview questions are bad. The Economist made this argument recently in its Bartleby column. It sent me back to what I learned interviewing engineers. Three lessons stuck.

JetBrains has recently introduced a new font called Mono and I love it. It’s intelligent in its considerations (ILlo0O all look distinctly different) and its ligatures are perfect for developers (see -> or ### for examples). Just for fun, I’ve switched my entire blog over to using it. Overkill? You bet. But why not show it off. If you’re writing code, I strongly encourage you to have a look. Read more from JetBrains.