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Web 2.0 and Algorithmic Bias Have you ever noticed that the news — and your YouTube homepage — are becoming more skewed toward the edges? The volume has gone up, but the substance has gone down. Well: a. You're not crazy b. Many people agree with you c. The data supports this phenomenon The immediate question then is: why is this happening? If your answer is “algorithms,” you're not alone. Algorithms are blamed for everything bad about the internet — and often the world. But why are algorithms bad? Is math fundamentally evil? Or are the people designing and tuning algorithms evil? To answer that, we need two things: high-school algebra and basic neuroscience. 1. High School Algebra Let’s say I own a website or an app that makes money from advertising. My obvious goal is to maximize ad revenue. That is my goal Y. To maximize Y, I need to make sure ads are: viewed (CPM) clicked (CPC) and that users spend time on the platform That is my derived goal y. To maximize Y, I must maximi...

Would you kill baby Hitler knowing what he becomes? Recently, the Trump administration committed two acts that have put me into a moral conundrum;  The forced removal of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores from Venezuela. The assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran, by a joint Israeli-US air strike. Neither Maduro nor Khamenei are 'good' people. In fact, they are the opposite; their policies and actions have directly caused irreparable harm to both their citizens, the countries around them, and in Khamenei's case, to the world beyond its borders (i.e. funding Hezbollah and Hamas, supporting the oppressive Assad regime, providing military support to Russia's invasion of Ukraine). Yet, despite this I am deeply troubled by the fact that in both cases, the US didn't bother to follow any rules or norms. The very unilateral nature of the decisions and actions...seemingly justified only by power (and the whims of a President). So today, I decided to delve a li...

the unpaid gift Since last year, I have been coding every single day without exception. I dabbled in coding during middle school, minored in Computer Science in college, and have worked in fields adjacent to coding since 1998. However, I had never actually "built" anything myself, aside from some minor tinkering. When I decided to start an AI startup, I realized that without funding for a full engineering team, I had to dive in and code it myself. It has been a journey filled with ups and downs, enough to fill several books, but today, I want to share one specific realization that shifted my entire perspective on humanity. It is broadly called 'Open Source'. Open Source is software where the source code is made available for anyone to inspect, modify, and distribute without restriction. Today, development is unthinkable without it. We rarely "create" new code from scratch; instead, we find, adapt, and connect pieces built by others. For example, let's sa...