Last year, I started teaching a high school computing foundations class that is very focused on AI. In working through things for that course and doing my own tinkering with tech that I am always up to, I learned about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). RAG is a simple functionality that turns generative AI’s (genAI) sloppy intelligence from its large language model (LLM) into expert-level intelligence in whatever subject area you wish.
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We wonder why our society’s leaders don’t share our values. Yet we make it extremely difficult for those leadership positions to be occupied by women, immigrants, people of color, engaged parents, etc. Indra Nooyi, who became CEO of PepsiCo as an Indian-American woman, has been trying to do something about it.
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Did a Hedge Fund Buyout Finally Go Right?
A hedge fund buys out a struggling retailer on the verge of bankruptcy. It’s a story told so much it has become a cliché. Naturally, one would expect that the next step is to gut the corporation, rob the employees of their pensions, and sell off whatever tangible and intangible assets they can get a few bucks for. But in 2019 when Elliott Management purchased Barnes & Noble Booksellers for $638 million, something different happened.
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Book Review: Empire of Pain
Empire of Pain is a multi-generational biography of the Sackler family; it is an expose on one of the biggest business and medicine scandals of the last few decades; and it is a warning about how the tools that the government and our scientific and academic institutions can be manipulated to do people harm for profit.
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