About Tabrez Syed
There’s an old line that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. I’ve found no better way to understand a new technology than to listen for the rhyme: to hold it up against the waves that came before and notice what’s the same, what’s genuinely different, and what everyone is pretending is different because it’s more exciting that way.
I’ve had the luck of watching several waves arrive. I started out at Tivoli when distributed computing was new and CORBA was going to connect everything. Then came Java, then the web, then mobile. I spent eleven years at Spiceworks building a community of six million IT professionals, and after that came startups of my own: real estate, personal finance, data. I’m now on my fifth, working in AI.
That’s the vantage point this newsletter is written from. Every week I take one thing happening in AI and look at it through a lens borrowed from somewhere else: a supply-chain game from the 1960s, a Borges story, the economics of Standard Oil, a potter’s kiln. Not because the old frame is always right, but because a borrowed lens shows you the shape of a thing that’s too new and too close to see directly.
If you want a feel for the writing, these are good doors in:
One essay a week. No paywall.
My other work, the products I build and my digital garden, lives at mandalivia.com. My writing has also appeared in Towards AI, The AI Journal, and Open Data Science. If you’d like me to write for your publication, get in touch.
