Ron's Blog

In the amber glow of a Vienna evening in 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sat hunched over his desk, quill scratching frantically across parchment. His latest composition, "Die Zauberflöte," was nearing completion, but exhaustion clouded his mind. At thirty-five, the composer's health was failing, his once-robust frame now gaunt, his brilliant mind increasingly troubled by premonitions of his own mortality. "Just a moment's rest," he murmured, setting down his quill. As his eyes closed, a strange...

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| | [File: 031bb0dc-cf0a-4890-b816-b2bdc48007b0] | The first sound Ludwig van Beethoven heard was the steady, electronic beeping of his own heartbeat. For a man who had spent nearly two decades in a world of muffled whispers and phantom ringing, the clarity of that simple rhythm was nothing short of miraculous. His eyes remained closed, but his composer's mind had already begun to dissect the sound—approximately 72 beats per minute, a moderato tempo, the pace of a healthy heart at rest. Mein ...

The development of modern AI systems like ChatGPT was built on foundational work in machine learning, which required huge datasets labeled by thousands of human reviewers in the early 2000s. This massive effort was largely made possible with the help of Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which provides a low-cost way to have a large community of people perform work over the Internet. Mechanical Turk is a service that infringes upon my 1999 patent titled "Method and system for distributing a work...

When I lived in Nova Scotia in the '90s, Bill Brydon and I charted a single-engine plane owned by a friend of Bill to fly us out and over Isle Haute. The flight to the island took about 30 minutes and was extremely rough, mainly because the pilot flew very low off the water. Probably less than 100 feet. We flew over the length of the island several times before heading back, also flying very low. Bill and I had no idea why he flew so low until after we landed when the pilot told us that he was ...