Month: December 2024

Nexus : en kort historik över informationsnätverk från stenåldern till AI : Harari, Yuval Noah, Retzlaff, Joachim: Amazon.se: Böcker

I’m a big fan of Yuval Noah Harari’s work. A professor who can write books like no one else, one of my role models. I’ve read Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons… now it was time for Nexus.

The book is about information networks and AI. Well, mostly about the information networks and storytelling. AI is there, but not as much as I wanted to see. Not to complain, Harari is a humanist and social scientists, not a software engineer or computer scientists.

The book discusses what information really is and how it evolves over time. It focuses on storytelling and providing meaning for the data and the information. It helps us to understand the power of stories and the power of information – one could say that the “pen is mightier than the sword”, and this book delivers on that.

I recommend this as a reading over X-Mas, as the holidays are coming.

IEEE Xplore Full-Text PDF:

Quantum computing has been around for a while now. It’s been primarily a playground for physicists and computer scientists close to mathematics. The major issue was that the error rates and instability of the quantum bits prevented us from using this kind of paradigm on a larger scale (at least how I understand it).

Now, it seems that we are getting close to commercialization of this approach. Several companies are developing quantum chips that will allows us to use more of this technology in more fields.

The paper that I want to bring up today discusses what kind of challenges we, software engineers, can solve in quantum computing – and it is not programming. We need to work more on requirements, architecture, reuse of software and quality of it. So, basically the typical software engineering aspects.

BTW: On the 12th of December, we have a workshop on Quantum Computing in Software center – Reporting workshop: The end of Software Engineering – as we know it – Software Center