Leon on Everything

The challenge of epistemology “It’s Difficult to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future” — Yogi Berra A thief goes through the window in the middle of the night to make a grand jewelry heist. While tiptoeing inside the apartment, he sees the longcase clock with the time 1.05. He knows that the owners will be back at 1.15 AM. He decides that the safest thing for him is to exit and escape without getting the precious necklace. He can try again later. Unbeknownst to him, the clock had stopped working 12 hours ago, but at that moment, it just happened to be 1.05 AM. After the American philosopher Edmund Gettier, our thief experienced what has been dubbed a  Gettier  problem. These problems’ archetypes challenge the classical criteria for knowledge: justification, truth, and belief. In our example, the thief is justified in believing it’s 1.05 AM, and it is 1.05 AM, and he believes it. Yet he doesn’t have knowledge because the instrument he relies on is faulty. I recently ha...

  Neural Networks hallucinate a mistaken reality Our Cats “meanings just ain’t in the head” — Hillary Putnam You are driving your Tesla Model S down a desert route in the United States. There is no other car or pedestrian in sight. You decide to switch the autopilot as your focus shifts between the road and your partner seated next to you. At the same time, a Space X rocket is safely on the landing trajectory back to earth. All is good! Suddenly a tiny meteorite heading for the earth at just the right trajectory hits the rocket. It knocks it off course and damages its thrusters. Only the force of gravity and the wind resistance are in control of the rocket now. It crash-lands a few feet in front of your car. Tesla’s autopilot doesn’t swerve, and it doesn’t stop. It goes straight through killing you, your partner, and destroying the vehicle and its A.I. computer. What happened? The car hallucinated that the rocket was a plastic bag. Such a case or a similar one never occurred when t...

  I grew up in a highly Francophone area in East Beirut. It was customary during that time to teach French to your toddler before any other language. As such, I spoke French before I learned a single Arabic word. Also, due to my grandfather’s own name change, my parents decided to call me Léon when they registered me and chose my name. This is an old French name, and it is pronounced the way you would in French. Years later I would drop the accent when I wrote emails in English. This is not because I preferred the English pronunciation of the name but rather to make my life easier when I use the qwerty keyboard as well as not to have my English-speaking reader struggle when reading my name. But the name that my parents call me by to this day, or the name I used to introduce myself to my wife when we first met, remains Léon. And it is still pronounced the way you would in French. If you’re an Anglophone, or we are speaking in English I would be perfectly fine with you calling me Leo...

 An AI that is 99% accurate is not good enough. Think of having to digitize some handwritten document with important end-customer data. Does it make sense to use machine learning if on top of that you need human operators? Think of how many times Alexa gets you wrong? Even when it comes to playing the same song you have requested many times before. But Alexa is not a mission-critical system. You don’t care if it’s 90% accurate that alone 99%, but for critical systems, it seems that AI isn’t delivering the value it is supposed to (how far are we from the promised self-driving dream?). How much effort will be saved by a human quality controlling every document vs if a human operator digitized them from scratch? I remember a project I was tangentially involved in years ago in the pre-AI area (in fact over 20 years ago), the project manager decided to use three people to digitize the data and then use text comparison so that if two documents match then an algorithm would drop the third...

A recent article in "the economist" magazine questioned the value of the public cloud altogether. This took place in the Schumpeter section nonetheless. Joseph Schumpeter the economist most identified with capitalism’s creative destruction was transformed into what Peter F. Drucker refers to as a bean counter when it comes to the cloud. This kind of article and thinking will reinforce Information Technology’s old guard’s skepticism of all things new and especially the cloud. At the heart of the article is relating a blog post from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz using the example of how Dropbox managed to save billions and increase stock market valuation by repatriating the public cloud resources to its own datacenters. Indeed, as the theory and studies show there are cases where private on-premises deployments can be more cost-effective than the public cloud (as can be viewed in this lecture on cloud computing from the University of Illinois and Coursera).  The tru...

It seems with 170 plus dead and 5000 injured following the mega blast in the Beirut port on August the 4th 2020, the prime minister of Lebanon has accepted to have early parliamentary elections in two months. Early elections should be welcomed by most Lebanese. As they had been protesting in the streets against the corruption of their government since October the 17 th 2019. However, to truly make a difference, several things need to be done before getting to the elections. To start with, there should be ample time for the opposition to gather themselves into a political party and run for office. Two months is not enough for that. Five to seven months is a more reasonable timeframe. Then, an electoral law that can best translate the will of the people should be drafted. Ever since the liberation of Lebanon from the Syrian occupation in 2005 - in fact, ever since the end of the civil war, if not before -   the Lebanese electoral laws were based on the gerrymandering of district...

After three and a half years in Canada, I found myself once again sucked into the politics of my native Lebanon. Lebanon, since the end of 2019, has been facing a severe economic crisis. Several large-scale popular protests shook its political establishment. People have had enough of the economic situation, the corruption, and the rule of the jungle. Even for some, they had enough of the rule of Hizballah (the Shia Islam radical terrorist group). Yet, I who has renounced Lebanon. Who for years have been trying to leave Lebanon and now finally in Canada. I who am more and more trying to think of myself as Canadian as my citizenship application is being processed. I find myself sucked again into the cesspool that is Lebanon affairs and Lebanese politics. I find myself trying to go on YouTube to find news footage of what is going on in Lebanon. I find myself liking Facebook articles and posts related to Lebanon. I find myself even writing posts about Lebanon. three so far, with this one...