Will generative AI re-emphasise the value of software over content? — An important concept in chemistry is that of a limiting reagent. When two reagents are mixed to trigger a chemical reaction, there will always be an excess of one of them. Add a drop of base into an acid solution, and you get a slight less acidic solution with a…

GPT-4 will change the world. — Last December, I played a few chess games against ChatGPT. These always ended the same way: ChatGPT would play an accurate opening, until it forgot where its pieces were and started playing illegal moves, with full confidence of course. The truth is, GPT-3 does not know how to play chess…

Theory of efficient markets applies to the job market as well. — Feeling Zoomed out? Annoyed by the unresponsiveness of coworkers on Slack? Wish we’d all go back to the office like the adults we are? You are not alone. Many bosses seem to agree, and have mandated a return to the office for a set number of days per week. Meanwhile…

Is the tech industry’s downturn an existential risk for engineers? — When I first moved to the United Kingdom in 2016, one of my first tasks was to open a bank account. At the time, this involved visiting a bank branch and listening to a sales pitch from a lovely account manager whose heavy Scottish accent I struggled to understand. After…

Can the world’s most famous language model defeat a software engineer? — ChatGPT is a large language model designed for conversation, that Twitter users around the world have found scarily human-like in its answers. The AI model doesn’t only answer generic questions about facts, but it can also write accurate code in multiple programming languages, as well as debug code written by…

Why reducing decentralisation could reduce risks in DeFi and Web3, and widen their appeal beyond early adopters. — There’s an inherent trade-off between decentralisation and the ability to coordinate things: the fewer participants, the easier it is to agree on anything. …

There are two kinds things we don’t know: known and unknown unknowns. Learning about the first kind is easy: just pick up a book, sign up for a course, or ask someone who knows to teach the answer to you. If you want to play chess but don’t know how…

Is crypto a technological revolution that will remake the world in its image, just like the internet and iPhone did? — If you’re reading this article, you probably need no explanation into what crypto or blockchain technology is (if so, feel free to skip to the next part). But to recap, a blockchain is an append-only transaction log that guarantees the immutability of transactions in previous blocks. This guarantee is protected…

Here’s why Go uses returned errors over exceptions — How should a programming language treat errors? For example, a function that opens a file with a given name and reads it to a buffer could fail for many reasons: the file might not exist, the opening program might lack permissions to open it, or it could be too large…