Tom So

In the insightful (and accessible) book Design for How People Learn, Julie Dirksen covers five "gaps" that inhibit learning (and applying) something new:Knowledge GapSkills Gap (Knowledge + Practice)Motivation GapHabit GapEnvironment Gap

A natural forest is illegible. A tangle of plants. This is inconvenient from the standpoint of harvesting lumber. How do you quantify yield? Can you even make a meaningful map of this mess? Much easier to clear the forest and plant a legible “scientific” forest. Uniform rows of trees that produce good lumber. Now we can count the trees, make a map,... See more

The important thing from a logging-into-software perspective is not who you are, but what you are authorized to do. So, Keys, not IDs.

The size and sophistication of these models make it impossible to fully understand how they make predictions. They have billions of weights that interact in subtle ways to make a final prediction; looking at them is like hoping to understand psychology by examining individual brain cells. Even in academic settings with well-established models, the... See more