Assorted ramblings
Lately I had some PDF documents that I had to convert to greyscale.
Doing this by hand is annoying if you have to do a lot of them. Thankfully there's a ghostscript command that will help:
gs \
-sOutputFile=output_greyscale.pdf \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sColorConversionStrategy=Gray \
-dProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray \
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \
-dNOPAUSE \
-dBATCH \
-dAutoRotatePages=/None \
input_color.pdf
Technology is moving in such a way that advances in AI will mean that barring massive changes some fraction of people will now be permanently unemployed. This effect of technological unemployment will be most harshly felt in locations with a combination of high wages and high cost of living since the equilibrium forces push more strongly towards replacing labor with capital expenditure in such places. AI is a crucial change because it greatly expands the types of jobs that can be replaced and progress in technology means that the capital expenditure needed to replace labour with technology has dropped. We should revisit assumptions that people who's jobs are destroyed will be able to move to other jobs easily.
Getting deterministic results out of research code is an important part in reproducible research. Unfortunately the incentive structures in many research organizations punish people for putting effort into helping others reproduce their results, collectively we would do better if we could change these incentive structures.
The decrease in the cost of computational power has completely changed the modern world one industry at a time. Banking is no exception. To understand the current banking crisis understanding some of the forces that led us to here will help.
Looking back at the RPA hype cycle at the end of 2023
What's the limits of "no code" solutions? When do you actually need software specialists to work on your projects? What's the consequences of not getting those people on board when you need them?
Yet another rebranding maneuver has come up in the automation/RPA space lately. Some vendors and consultants have started calling power user software with GUI's "no code" solutions.
What does the future of automation products look like?
Computers and the IT industry have literally been built directly on top of automation. As such, Robotic Process Automation (often referred to by the acronym RPA) is perhaps one of the most interesting rebranding stories that the IT industry has ever seen.
Automation has a narrow window in which it is recognized. Too far back and things are taken for granted and too cutting edge means things are not proven or not known about at all. This leaves only a small window in time where people immediately recognize successful automation projects.