Can generative AI create art? Two years ago I took my first swing at answering that, at least from my perspective.1 As AI systems become more advanced, this question, and the issues surrounding it have become of greater import. With a new release from OpenAI, it’s become a topic of great passion, and one prime to revisit for me. I would like to explore this topic more deeply than I did previously, both in terms of cultural impact, and historical context. This is something that is easy to ta...| Adam Caudill
One of the many joys of being human, is that we constantly face questions about our existence, from the seemingly simple (why is the sky blue), to the labyrinthine (what is the meaning of life, does pineapple go on pizza). Thanks to growing up watching Star Trek, one of these that has fascinated me is the question of artificial life. Thanks to a character named Data, a character that’s both relatable and entirely different, many have found themselves wondering if that’s what the future ho...| Adam Caudill
or: How an 18th century painter saved Warsaw from the Nazis, and how 3D scanners may save Ukraine While researching applications that use the iPhone’s LiDAR scanner or perform more pure photogrammetry, I came across an effort by Polycam - likely the largest player in this space - to help protect the heritage of Ukraine and its people: Backup Ukraine. This is an effort to recruit people in Ukraine to leverage Polycam (provided a no cost as part of this program), to create detailed scans of a...| Adam Caudill
Over the years I’ve used most of the major note taking tools around, I’ve been a paying customer of Evernote for over a decade, I’ve used Standard Notes, Good Notes, pen & paper, and a bunch of others I can’t recall now. They were never quite right for my needs — some were close, but none were what I was after. One of the major challenges was that I didn’t know what I needed, and it’s hard to find something when you don’t know what you’re looking for. This is how I found a t...| Adam Caudill
In early December, about a month ago, I had the to perform one of the hardest tasks I’ve ever faced as a leader, letting my team know that a colleague had passed away. She was a friend to us all, and the glue that held the team together; telling them that she was gone was, without question, the hardest thing I’ve had to do in a work setting. What made this so hard was not just what I was telling them, but my own feelings for her as a friend, and the opportunity I had missed.| adamcaudill.com
It has been 20 years since I first used machine learning to solve a complex business problem. The underlying problem was simple: the company was selling a new service and wanted to know who was most likely to buy it. We had millions of records, and each record had hundreds of fields. A vast amount of data, but no idea how to extract insight from it. Countless hours from various data analysts had been invested into finding a pattern, but none was forthcoming.| adamcaudill.com
In the world of security, everything comes down to trust; sooner or later you have to trust something. Often, this something is a human. While we are busy building advanced cryptosystems that will survive the heat death of the universe, sooner or later, digging down layer by layer, you get down to a human and their limited memory. While we may build software, hardware, and other systems to protect this chain of trust, it almost always ends with a human.| adamcaudill.com
This is a short story about death, and what comes after. As is most of my writing, this is somewhat dark. However, it does contain sensitive topics and may be disturbing to some. Humanity has always had a complex relationship with death and the dead, and the most burning question for many people is what happens after we die. As an atheist and as a person with a particular interest in philosophy, this is something that I’ve thought about quite a bit. Not in terms of where we go, but what do ...| Writing on Adam Caudill
This short story is about the pain of wounds that never heal; it discusses suicidal thoughts, depression, and the lengths people will go to in order to escape the pain of the past. Drafting this story began in December of 2022, and was inspired by a research article on human memory which alluded to therapeutic uses of memory alteration. As a long-time student of psychology, and specifically personality disorders, I’ve always been interested in how people deal with trauma and pain.| adamcaudill.com
The latest vulnerability causing headaches across the world is CVE-2023-4863, issued by Google Chrome and described as “Heap buffer overflow in WebP in Google Chrome prior to 116.0.5845.187 allowed a remote attacker to perform an out of bounds memory write via a crafted HTML page”. This same CVE is cited by a number of other vendors as they are impacted as well. But, is this really a Google Chrome vulnerability?| adamcaudill.com
Generative AI1 is changing the world, and is doing so faster than most of us could realise. While I don’t share the fear that it’ll destroy humanity (something we’re doing quite well at, without help), I do see that it’s having an impact on how we work, how we interact, and will have a growing impact on what jobs survive into the next generation. Just as switchboard operators, pin setters, and lift operators are all essentially extinct today, advances in technology will steadily elimi...| adamcaudill.com
Today is a red letter day in the history of Twitter, though not in a good way. Twitter has a long reputation of free speech, providing a platform for all that wanted it, easily connecting to the powerful, building communities, and organising against tyranny. This didn’t come without controversy of course; in the effort to keep the platform safe, more and more moderation was implemented - sometimes the got it right, sometimes they got it wrong.| adamcaudill.com
Productivity and efficiency have been passions of mine from a young age, I’m not sure why, but achieving as much as possible, as quickly and efficiently as possible has always driven much of my thoughts, actions, and plans. I was around 10 years old when I learned that there were people that specialised in worker productivity, which led me to researching process design, why restaurants are setup the way they are, the psychology of work and motivation, and a variety of other related topics.| adamcaudill.com
Where to Find Me I post my work in a variety of locations, for different purposes. Here are the main places you’ll find my work: Portfolio: A collection of my favourite works. About My Photography While I have a true passion for software and security, my other great love is photography. My love of photography came from working as a photojournalist during my teen years for a small newspaper in East Tennessee.| adamcaudill.com