Skepticism mollified – for specific tasks If you’ve talked to me about AI recently, you’ll know that I’m a bit of a skeptic when it comes to AI being a panacea for the world’s problems. What between hallucinations about academic articles, many inherent biases, lack of training on obscure subjects, stuff that’s just plain wrong,…
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Last month, I helped launch a new web site: The Song Remains, a collection of Yiddish poetry with English translations by Polish-Jewish poets who were killed during the Nazi occupation. The poems come from the eponymous book, anthologised by Binem Heller and published in Warsaw in 1952. There are over 160 poems by 36 authors in total. We will be publishing one poem per week from the collection. You can subscribe (for free) to receive a poem per week in your inbox.
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Sometimes we jokingly ask, “how hard can it be?” Don’t be complacent: even the simplest things can go wrong. Early in my career as a software engineer, I worked on IBM System 360/370 mainframes programming customisations for the MVS operating system in assembler language. Assembler language is not recommended for the faint of heart –…
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People keep asking me:
Who’s side are you on?
Are you good or are you evil?
Are you in or out?
One of us or one of them?
Are you my friend or my enemy?
My talk at the Diplosphere 2023 conference in Wellington. Kia ora koutou, ko Dave Moskovitz ahau. I’m Dave Moskovitz, and I know many you in this room in a variety of contexts, either as an entrepreneur, an investor, a company director, a software developer, and other things too. But today, I am going to be…
Continue reading →I recently spent a month living with my 94 year old parents, after being isolated from them for over two years due to the COVID pandemic. Here are some of the lessons I learned: Fitness Stay physically and mentally active, fit and flexible to the greatest possible extent Get outside frequently. At least every day,…
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A startup’s cap table, or capitalisation table, is an important artifact for investors to evaluate a candidate for investment. In essence, a cap table shows who has put money into the company over time, on what terms, and who owns what. A cap table tells a financial story about the history of the company, and…
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Did you know that you can access all of NZ’s free-to-air TV channels through your computer or mobile phone? It’s super easy, even for non-technical people. It’s true that most of NZ’s TV providers have streaming apps, as well as content buried in their websites. But if you just want to have the equivalent of…
Continue reading →The big cybersecurity news this week is the Apache Log4j zero-day vulnerability nicknamed Log4Shell, which allows an attacker to seize full control of a server by sending a rather innocuous message to a web (or indeed many other types of) server. Surprisingly, it even made the headline news on Radio New Zealand. But what can…
Continue reading →New Zealand Growth Capital Partners (NZGCP), the NZ Government-backed early stage investment fund, ran an interview with me today on their Kōrerorero blog, discussing general approaches to angel investment. I answer questions like: As an Angel investor, what do you look for before investing? What are your top tips for Kiwi companies with high-growth potential?…
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