On March 8, 2018, McCulley Marine Services bought 59,973 pounds of steel in various sizes and shapes to repair and maintain one of our barges. The total paid for this steel was $40,710. On March 23, 2018, the Trump Administration’s tariffs on imported steel took effect. These tariffs imposed a 25% duty on steel imports …
Author Archives: Gene McCulley
Misdiagnosing a Carbon Monoxide Leak
Some context might be needed here: For the last 32 months I have been running a tugboat company. I intend to write more about that at some point. We operate a fleet of four tugboats and associated barges, smaller boats, and other equipment. Our tugboats are equipped with, among other safety equipment, carbon monoxide (CO) …
ChatGPT playing Wordle
It just occurred to me to wonder if ChatGPT (GPT-4) might be any good at Wordle. I constructed a prompt and had it choose my moves. I considered the possibility that others had already tried this and deliberately avoided googling for such experiments before doing my own so that my approach would not be tainted. …
Demographic Impacts
A lot of the discussion about COVID’s impact on the labor market (“Great Resignation” or “Great Reshuffle”) misses the longer demographic trend. The growth rate of the U.S. population is the lowest it has been in over 120 years. We have been losing workforce for years relative to the total population due to increasing average …
Mission Critical Coffee Pot
Over the course of a few years I spent a lot of time in a secure environment in a DoD facility to which I had to travel multiple times for a project. The environment, a maze of cubicles filled with computers, had been installed inside a historic building. For historic preservation reasons, the exterior windows …
Ours Has AI!
A lot of technology products claim to use “blockchain” and “AI”. This is generally bullshit but they are expected to use these terms like adjectives on ketchup bottles (“23% spicier! With AI!”) to keep up with their competitors. I was recently pitched a startup that claimed to be using AI in a market that is …
Genes Carrying Memes
The prospect of CRISPR-Cas9 germline editing has many wondering how it will be used on humans. Will there be more Chinese experimental babies? Will there be super babies? Yes, obviously. It is inevitable. How will future generations of cultures interact when some can bestow advantages of health, strength, and intelligence directly to their progeny? It …
Unemployed Donors
A friend of mine brought an article to my attention about untraceable ‘unemployed’ donors. It raises concerns about potentially fraudulent campaign donations. The article shows that, according to FEC records, ActBlue is receiving many donations from the unemployed, more so than another PAC, WinRed. The article goes on to suggest that many donations may have …
Embedded Unit Tests
A standard software engineering practice in Java and other languages is to use a unit testing framework like JUnit and develop tests in a separate file that exercise the public API of the class being tested. While this is a fine practice, I tend to embed a lot of tests directly in classes. This way, …
Artificial Intelligence is a dumb term
The recent boom in machine learning has led to a lot of misuse of the term “artificial intelligence“. This term was invented in 1955 when computer scientists were first starting to grapple with machine representations of human cognition. For decades, it meant trying to understand and render into algorithms what only humans could do. This …