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Imagine that you’re using a great new chrome extension that reviews a github repository and summarizes what the code inside it does. You run it on some new very useful Python library, and the report was “this library helps you train AI models”. Nice! You start using it, and unknowingly, you actually installed a bitcoin miner on your very strong EC2 instance. Where did that come from?

Like many others, my feed was also quickly taken over by the excitement around ChatGPT. I must confess, I am also excited about this, and I have a few ideas of my own. Ideas of integrations abound – let’s create a bot that automatically summarizes twitter threads. Let’s create a bot to summarize whatsapp convesations.…

A few years ago I joined a CTO WhatsApp group. I think I was the 14th person there or so. These days this group has more than 270 members. It is an amazing group, with a lot of valuable content. People have repeatedly asked for an easily searchable index of the group’s history, and at…

1. A habit is better than a burst I am a strong believer in building good habits. My approach to language learning (and also fitness) is that it’s better to do a little every day, than a lot just once. A corollary is that it’s easier when you add your language learning to your day-to-day…

Recently my 4.5 year old son started playing “Mastermind”. This is a game where one player picks a 4 color code, and the other player has to guess it. After each guess, the first player lets the guesser know for how many colors both the color and position were correct, and how many only the…

At JustTalkTo, we realized early on that the idea is not deep tech. There isn’t really a good justification for machine learning, deep learning, a kernel driver, or low-level optimizations. What we do have is a kick-ass product and the tech to back it up. One of the more interesting pieces of tech that we…

A couple of months ago I went to Geekcon. For those not familiar – Geekcon is a “conference/hackathon” for makers – you come, build a ridiculous project, eat some food, barely sleep at all, play a bit with other people’s projects, and then go home. The idea about the project being ridiculous – it has…

Over the last couple of months my team at Flytrex had occasion to use intervals more than once, and in both cases the team asked me, “What’s the right way to solve this?”. Since this is a common problem, I thought I’d write a short post about it. Most interval problems seem deceptively simple, while…

It seems common practice to have a staging and production branches for deploying your code. A common pattern is to push (or pull request) to these branches, then merge the changes. Then, some system watching this branch will notice, and deploy to the appropriate environment. (Another way this is done is with tags, but I…

It always starts with an itch. Today, there aren’t really many good apps to teach kids to read Hebrew. The best one is “Kesem’s Monsters” – and when I tried getting my son to play it, it annoyed me. He liked playing it – but I thought it wasn’t teaching reading all that well. About…