Adam Caudill

Developer Tools & Productivity

Technology improves and advances ceaselessly, new tools are created and change how people work. Some are small and simple, making people somewhat more productive. Others revolutionise the way people work. These revolutionary tools may come along only once or twice in a generation, and when they do, they tend make people uncomfortable. They can make people question their role, their skills, their future, and their place in the industry. I would like to take a few minutes to talk about a revolutionary change in how developers work.

On AI, Art, Writing, and the Distillation of Creativity

Can generative AI create art? Two years ago I took my first swing at answering that, at least from my perspective.1 As AI systems become more advanced, this question, and the issues surrounding it have become of greater import. With a new release from OpenAI, it’s become a topic of great passion, and one prime to revisit for me. I would like to explore this topic more deeply than I did previously, both in terms of cultural impact, and historical context.

When AI Becomes I

The challenge of defining life when intelligence goes non-biological.

One of the many joys of being human, is that we constantly face questions about our existence, from the seemingly simple (why is the sky blue), to the labyrinthine (what is the meaning of life, does pineapple go on pizza). Thanks to growing up watching Star Trek, one of these that has fascinated me is the question of artificial life. Thanks to a character named Data, a character that’s both relatable and entirely different, many have found themselves wondering if that’s what the future holds.

Millions of Jobs

or: On AI, Job Creation & Destruction, and The Race to Oblivion

It has been 20 years since I first used machine learning to solve a complex business problem. The underlying problem was simple: the company was selling a new service and wanted to know who was most likely to buy it. We had millions of records, and each record had hundreds of fields. A vast amount of data, but no idea how to extract insight from it. Countless hours from various data analysts had been invested into finding a pattern, but none was forthcoming.

Security Is a Shell Game

In the world of security, everything comes down to trust; sooner or later you have to trust something. Often, this something is a human. While we are busy building advanced cryptosystems that will survive the heat death of the universe, sooner or later, digging down layer by layer, you get down to a human and their limited memory. While we may build software, hardware, and other systems to protect this chain of trust, it almost always ends with a human.

Whose CVE Is It Anyway?

The latest vulnerability causing headaches across the world is CVE-2023-4863, issued by Google Chrome and described as “Heap buffer overflow in WebP in Google Chrome prior to 116.0.5845.187 allowed a remote attacker to perform an out of bounds memory write via a crafted HTML page”. This same CVE is cited by a number of other vendors as they are impacted as well. But, is this really a Google Chrome vulnerability?

AI: Art Without Expression?

Generative AI1 is changing the world, and is doing so faster than most of us could realise. While I don’t share the fear that it’ll destroy humanity (something we’re doing quite well at, without help), I do see that it’s having an impact on how we work, how we interact, and will have a growing impact on what jobs survive into the next generation. Just as switchboard operators, pin setters, and lift operators are all essentially extinct today, advances in technology will steadily eliminate some jobs, while creating new ones.

Twitter Becomes a Walled Garden

Today is a red letter day in the history of Twitter, though not in a good way. Twitter has a long reputation of free speech, providing a platform for all that wanted it, easily connecting to the powerful, building communities, and organising against tyranny. This didn’t come without controversy of course; in the effort to keep the platform safe, more and more moderation was implemented - sometimes the got it right, sometimes they got it wrong.

On Art, Heritage, Nazis, & 3D Scanners

or: How an 18th century painter saved Warsaw from the Nazis, and how 3D scanners may save Ukraine While researching applications that use the iPhone’s LiDAR scanner or perform more pure photogrammetry, I came across an effort by Polycam - likely the largest player in this space - to help protect the heritage of Ukraine and its people: Backup Ukraine. This is an effort to recruit people in Ukraine to leverage Polycam (provided a no cost as part of this program), to create detailed scans of artwork, buildings, and other items of cultural significance.