Author: wp

You engage a lawfirm to help review a legal document and, in return, you have to sign a legal agreement with said lawfirm to engage their services. Oy! 

Why the big push for first principles? Because people don’t know how to start a fire and don’t even know what questions to ask to learn how to do so. 

This is figurative, of course, but if people don’t know the base workings of things and don’t know how to ask the right questions to figure out what those are, the results can be overly complicated and possibly even incorrect.

For millenia, life on earth including humanity has adjusted, adapted and evolved as the earth has changed. In some cases external catalysts have caused changes to occurr too quickly and not all life has managed to survive the change. In recent history, this catalyst has been human ignorance (truly lacking knowledge of consequences) and human greed (driven by profits and wealth). Earth, like any other system evolves to the changing equation that defines its environment. It’s unlikely that life as we know it will have an opportunity to adapt to the changes we are catalyzing.

Nature is an equation with innumerable variables. Humans keep messing with these parameters but dont expect the outcome to change. It invariably will. Objectively – nature isnt mad or vindictive. Its simply adaptive. 

The Earth and the rest of the universe are brokers or mediums of change. Ultimately, the relatively macro is indifferent to the changes it accommodates. What’s important is that change happens. It is us humans that observe a change to be good or bad. The brokers just facilitate the results of the equation of a myriad variables.

There are generally three recognized layers to any stack: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

There are glue pieces in between that facilitate interactions and/or try to smooth out implementation differences at layer that can accommodate this (IaaS and PaaS): Infrastructure as code, CNCF interfaces.

The SaaS layer is unique though because thats where a unique, end user consumable is provided. This layer needs to be multi-deployment capable. That is to say, a given generation of the offering must be capable of being deployed at multiple CSPs, on prem and edge locations and must also be able to interoperate as a single unit/mesh if designed with that intention.

This may require iPaaS offerings that can abstract the underlying offerings of the various deployment targets to present the expected resource to the SaaS entity or it may require the SaaS offering to be capable of doing this itself.

I’m always surprised w/ our characterization of today’s development of machine learning and advanced processing of that as Al. To me, that’s like saying each of the human brain’s components, the visual cortex, auditory cortex etc and independently intelligent. Intelligence is the higher level application of reasoning performed by our frontal lobe – the one that doesnt itself process any data from sensors but it applies reasoning, rationale and contemplative thought to all the information processed by our various sensor based cortexes. The most articulate formulation of an application of this notion that I have read can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-should-raise-bar-human-cognition-david-ferrucci-xbkze

Buying means trading one thing of value for another . We all buy money with our time – not everyone gets a good deal 😔.