Envelope / Develope

The message is very simple, from the book "Weapons of math destruction", by Cathy O'Neil - our current models used to cut through the data deluge are efficient but biased. People modelling them are biased and there is no incentive to improve them, even if there is collateral damage. Companies selling AI tools are not incentivized on making the "magic-formula" public, open to debate. The users discover the defects after years and after people's life are affected. For the majority there is no feed-back mechanism, or no way to correct the wrong-doing. The book does not offer a solution to the existent AI used in crunching  data. We are biased, but there is hope: openness, dialog and analysis of the results, especially for people who are affected by the algorithms.  Reading the book I remember reading about Google - where they did not know how to use the interviews and post-mortem analysis of the people hired in order to get the right formula of picking the...

This is a post as an entrepreneur, shareholder, observer of the big league M&A. After reading Berkshire Hathaway last shareholder letter a few things jumped at me, due to my past experiences: how to really think about swapping shares in a merger situation looking back to analyze past acquisitions (or post-mortem analysis of acquisitions) how are my next investments judged based on the performance of the actors involved in the past M&A what is the time-horizon to draw a line and judge the benefits of M&A            I have been in both positions (company I worked for being acquired or acquiring). In my direct experience acquiring a company proved to be a bad decision for shareholders. There is a wide spread opinion the larger you are as company the better you are noticed. There were well known cases when number two or three in the industry jumped to swallow number one just because the egos were big and debt was chea...

I was reading through the privacy disaster with Equifax and all the circus of the management on fumbling to handle the situation. There are heads rolling down but not of the executives who sold their shares, before the news popped. And in the light of the news, here is what happened in US, a not so long ago: Trump has signed repeal of the FCC privacy rules . "The decision will allow the Internet providers to compete with Google and Facebook in the online ad market. From that moment, Verizon, Comcast and all other internet providers to gather any data about users and sell it in the $83 billion market for digital advertising." If Equifax was breached, can you imagine the potential for leaks in the future? There are a few takes from those events:  Corporate America has no shame in getting the money and leaving the customers/shareholders in the dust. There are so many examples in the recent past - Wells Fargo , Rite Aid . Nobody is coming after them and the sharehold...

Reading was on of my great escapes, starting with grade one. I was fortunate enough to be "gently coerced" into reading. It was a gradual discovery of an universe which had nothing to do with the daily reality, and in the end one of the great escapes was science-fiction. My country literature was full of different type of genres and, by chance, I was stepping on some of them my mistake. In my childhood, the books were treasured and hunted, some of them passed subversively and amply commented. Maybe I was a by-product of the political environment and less a "free-will" person, in any way. My family helped a lot by sending my in exile in country-side, in the summer-time. Lots of time to kill! Pulp fiction was one of them but was disappearing after the second world two, because the regime was cleansing the society of the "bad fouls of bourgeois thinking". I remember the first time I read "The Decameron" by Giovanni Boccaccio, or soft-porn books...