Leon on Everything

In the late 1980s, the crime rate in New York City reached an all-time peak.  Attempts were made to understand this crime wave and fight it better. The " Broken Window Theory " was advanced to explain how New York and other major urban cities in the United States have reached this sad situation. The theory gives as an analogy a house with a broken window. Passerby looking at it will deduce that its owners don't care much about it (they didn't fix the broken window) or are absent, and those with malicious intents will tend to damage the house. It might start by breaking another window and drawing graffiti on a sidewall. It will end with the total vandalism of the house and kicking out its inhabitants.  Several experienced software developers can attest to having witnessed a metaphorical broken code window in some of their projects. It might have started with some code copied a few times.   A golden rule here holds that twice is ok, but three times and you...

(A previous version of this essay was published here 5 years go) During these past few years (2014-2020), Artificial intelligence has been mentioned a lot in news stories and movies. This was mainly fuelled by the success of one branch of AI known as Machine Learning, and specifically its subbranch Deep Learning (Neural networks). With these successes and naming the technology “Artificial intelligence”, a lot of experts have engaged in a global discussion about its dangers as well as its potential. The most alarmist voices have talked about Terminator scenarios and the risk to the future of global employment, especially when the day that most white-collar work will be automated by these AIs. Billionaires like Elon Musk are funding projects to make AI safe for humanity . Some famous scientists like the late Stephen Hawking have warned us that the end was near with the advent of the thinking machine. Other computer scientists like Ray Kurzweil have talked up the coming of a t...

Every Lebanese is an economist these days. At home and abroad, they are all proposing solutions to what has become the gravest economic crisis since the civil war’s devaluation of the Lira. The problem has lied dormant for years with the dollar peg which had been artificially maintained at 1500 Liras for 1 dollar. As most Lebanese have come to understand now, the peg was maintained by Lebanese and foreigners depositing their money in local banks for high-interest rates. In return for these, banks would buy high-interest bonds from the central bank (La Banque Du Liban). The latter would use the funds to perform forex operations to maintain the peg. All was well as long as the depositors thought that their money was safe in Lebanon and they kept pouring more money. But the same as a Ponzi scheme it was eventually going to collapse. I remember back in 2001 as a Sophomore at the American University of Beirut, taking my first ever economics class, the teacher – who only had a mas...

The crucible of an adult is how they deal with adversity. Life throws all sorts of disappointments and challenges our way. We should accept that as the nature of reality. No one is shielded from trauma. No one is shielded from sadness. We are introduced early on to death and understand that life will end in tragedy, whether we like it or not. We sometimes look at people from the other side of the fence and think, “Wow, they have got it made. They have a better job. They have more money. They have a better-looking girlfriend. They have healthy smart children”. And then look at ourselves and think we have so much less. Yet, we don’t see the adversity that those neighbors might face: death, disease, divorce, losing a job.   A Christian saying is that we should always be thankful for what we have, lest we anger God and see our lives take a turn for the worse. Some might ascribe this Christian thinking to the slave mentality that Nietzsche so railed ab...