The changing state of the Internet and related business models

If you’re weary of reading about the latest chatbot innovations and the nine ways AI will change your daily life next year, this series of posts may be for you.

Attribution as the foundation of developer trust

The entire AI ecosystem is at risk without trust.

Ongoing community data protection

Socially responsible use of community data needs to be mutually beneficial: the more potential partners are willing to contribute to community development, the more access to community content they receive.

Identifying hash algorithms

Given a hash value, an you determine what algorithm produced it? Or what algorithm probably produced it? Obviously if a hash value is 128 bits long, then a 128-bit algorithm produced it. Such a hash value might have been produced by MD5, but not by SHA-1, because the former produces

Testing random number generators

Random number generators are subtle. Unless the generator is some physical device, random number generators (RNGs) are usually technically pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs), deterministic algorithms designed to mimic randomness. Suppose you have a PRNG that produces the digits 0 through 9. How might you test the output to see whether

Limitations on Venn diagrams

Why do Venn diagrams almost always show the intersections of three sets and not more? Can Venn diagrams be generalized to show all intersections of more sets? That depends on the rules you give yourself for generalization. If you require that your diagram consist of circles, then three is the

What is Dogwifhat? Why Is This Solana Memecoin So Popular?

Edit distance

I was just talking to a colleague about edit distance because it came up in a project we’re working on. Technically, we were discussing Levenshtein distance. It sounds more impressive to say Levenshtein distance, but it’s basically how much editing effort it would take to turn one block of text

Birthday problem approximation

The birthday problem is a party trick with serious practical applications. It’s well known to people who have studied probability, but the general public is often amazed by it. If you have a group of 23 people, there’s a 50-50 chance that at least two people have the same birthday.

Deedy Das: from coding at Meta, to search at Google, to investing with Anthropic

We chat with Deedy Das, a Principal at Menlo Ventures, who began his career as a software engineer at Facebook and Google. He then dipped a toe in the startup world, spending time at the company now know as Glean. More recently he started a career as a venture capitalist,