The Local Maximum

I talk to Naomi Brockwell about Bitcoin and Blockchain - the technology of freedom! In addition to her work in popularizing this emerging technology, and some of it's implications on human liberty and global human development, we also talk about her media career, moderating debates, interest in video, popularizing this emerging technology, and her work with John Stossel and on the Hard Fork TV series. Includes a promo for Swarm 6.0 and clips of Naomi's YouTube videos!

With Google's announcement of the impending demise of Google Plus, we discuss various Google products that have succeeded and failed over the years, and what we can learn from it. Also: the security breaches from Facebook and Google Plus, Amazon's AI hiring program and the bias it sustains, and Tim Berners Lee's dream of a decentralized web.

Camille Fournier joins the Local Maximum today to discuss her book on engineering management, Rent the Runway, company culture, engineering ladders, and more! Plus, learn about Foursquare for Good and Max responds to listener messages about ads and censorship.

Now with extra mappers and reducers! I talk to Joe Crobak of the Data Engineering Weekly newsletter about data engineering, and it's importance in modern software projects. We cover: - The definition of data engineering - Hadoop, MapReduce, and Spark - How data engineering has evolved over the last decade. - Joe's experiences working in government vs. startups. The US Digital service, and the paperwork reduction act. Remember to check out the new website at localmaxradio.com, and Joe's site at dataengweekly.com.

The Social Media giants can't handle the fact that they can't control the system they've created. Another "smart" podcaster backs us up on the futility of fixing internet moderation through Machine Learning alone. Also - how are our elections affected by new communications technology? It's possible that our current situation has been repeated many times in history - but it's also possible that the pendulum is swinging more wildly. And Facebook's ridiculous ads system finally hits me personally, where they'll block ads for asinine reasons, and push through bad ones.

Aaron interviews me about what I plan to work on while I take 6 weeks off from Foursquare. We'll talk about the future of this podcast, several prototype ideas that I want to build, and my reading list. Can I get all this done? Probably not ALL of it - but I hope a good chunk of it!

We do things every in the hope that it will cause something good to happen as a result. And we're also bombarded with information trying to convince us on what to buy, who to vote for, and how to live. But most of the time, it's very difficult to tell whether A causes B, or if they are merely correlated. I talk to subject matter expert Shirin Mojarad of McGraw-Hill to break down how scientists can detect causality and what to look for in a causality study.

Some data scientists are attempting to use data and machine learning to predict the outcome of the next season of game of thrones. In this solo show I discuss the merits of this approach, give an overview of decision trees, adversarial problems, and the role of information theory.

Assembly Member Clyde Vanel and I talk about new technology that affect the State of New York and the world! - The rise of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies - The possibility of blockchain technology being used to maintain state government records like birth, death, and voting registration. - Automation and Jobs - Entrepreneurship; the opportunities in the new economy - 3d printing and the Rubik's Cube

Twitter's Jack Dorsey is being pressured by a bunch of social media reporters from CNN to silence voices like Alex Jones; and all of the big socials are caving in fast. It's time to unmask the seemingly reasonable justifications for these bans for what they are - censorship. I add to the voices calling for a freer flow of information, and I call for entrepreneurs, engineers, and product designers to come up with a new generation of platforms that will be better than the old. We also talk about millennial and their avocado toast, rip on Long Island, explain the difference between New York City and Long Island, talking about organizational bias as a way of dealing with it, and my answers on a public interview keeping me up at night. This is sure to be the most controversial Local Maximum to date. Check it out!

Today we dive into the current Bayesian flame wars on Twitter. Do Bayesian priors converge? As Nassim Taleb (@nntaleb) points out, not necessarily until a fat tail or power law distribution. We'll talk about what that means, and the wonders worked by Bayes rule even under some seemingly preposterous priors. Also - the military wants to do machine learning with less data. Is the era of big data over and giving way to the era of the big algorithm? The results of the Twitter Shadow Ban poll, QA bias, the Streisand effect and the Alex Jones banning

Chris Messina and I go over a recent article of his on the evolution of conversational commerce and bots, and how to steer the industry towards better products. Relationship Design, Augmented Reality, and Natural Language.

I may be on vacaction, but I still snuck in some time to put together a show! Decided to go solo this week and focus on Twitter's purging of bots and trolls. There is wide agreement that they need to do something to fix their platform, but there is not wide agreement on what exactly the problem is and what should be fixed. Can they focus on the experience and wellbeing of their enduser, or will they fall victim promoting fashionable political trends and end up with censorship?

Artificially Intelligent Host Christian Hubbs talks to Max about what he's learning in the field of AI through his work. Industries and use cases for AI. When are self driving cars coming? And - what's the end game for humans and machines. We also talk about Christian's interest in reinforcement learning, and how that's being used to have computers play games like go.

Kris Conception talks about Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Understanding, and machine translation. We then go into how we build the taste ontology at Foursquare to supercharge the best city guide in the world, and how it connects concepts through languages and cultures.