SystemHalted — Palak Mathur on software engineering, leadership, and Emacs
Recent posts
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AI Governance Needs Accountability, Not Just Principles
On AI ethics, software responsibility, collective intelligence, and why new technological rights need institutions that can actually enforce them.
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AI in People Management
A measured look at where AI genuinely helps in people management, and where human judgment has to stay in the loop.
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Free Will, AI, and the Limits of Intentionality
A short opinion piece on free will, intentionality, and why narrow AI agents should not be treated as self-determined actors.
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Review: Studying the Wisdom of Crowds at Scale
A review of Simoiu et al.'s large-scale study of crowd judgment, accuracy, consistency, and the risks of social influence.
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Naming as Design: Refactoring an API Model
Taking one badly named order model -- Java record and OpenAPI schema -- through four passes: types that test values, names that reveal intention, duplication removed, and speculative fields deleted.
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What UNO Teaches About Rule-Based Agents
A small UNO-playing production system shows both the usefulness and the limits of rule-based agents.
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Review: How Technological Advances Can Reveal Rights
A review of Parker and Danks's argument that some rights become visible only when technology changes the balance of power.
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Why Doesn’t Wisdom Accumulate?
We are extraordinarily good at accumulating technical knowledge and strangely bad at accumulating behavioral wisdom. What decades of psychology suggest about why every generation relearns patience, prejudice, and restraint almost from scratch.