Category: Tech and Culture

Our culture is largely defined by the technological innovations we share with other humans.

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Life and Personal Politics Tech and Culture

On Regulating AI

There has been quite a bit of chatter on all chatter-worthy platforms about the need to regulate AI. There have been a few epochs in modern history where the term ‘AI’ has almost gone mainstream and either threatened our very existence or helped us slouch just a little bit more towards utopia. I am not sure when the current one started, but I do remember that it was Facebook rolling out AI based content moderation systems that started it all. It’s been a few years and a few national elections since then, and AI still hasn’t solved the content moderation problem, mostly because moderation gets squarely in the way of monetization, but that’s a different topic.

What’s curious this time around is that the large technology companies that usually strongly dislike any oversight or are usually very reactive in their damage control are the ones calling for clearer laws and regulations. I strongly believe that this is an effect of lower trust in these companies driven by their monopolization of every business they get into as well as the strong desire to set a ceiling to how far they’re able to use any technological advanced to upend older and more important regulations around employment and intellectual property. What better way to gain positive press and intellectual debate sentiment than to ask to be regulated because you believe that you’re in control of dangerous technology and want to use it only for the public good, recent history notwithstanding.

This brings me to ask — what exactly is regulation? What do we even mean by regulating AI? Isn’t regulation supposed to be reactive based on public perception and impact instead of proactively built upon doomsday scenarios?

Today, I came across an essay (archive) by a renowned FT columnist where she points out that AI regulation ought to tackle three areas — it needs to be released from the shackles of rich technology companies, the technology behind it needs to be made public to help debate, and lastly, that regulation should be flexible yet enforceable.

As I see it, regulating something that isn’t even fully defined is way way ahead of its time. The EU has taken a giant leap by drafting an AI Act, and although, I haven’t read it, it seems to focus a lot on ‘high-risk AI systems’ and upon applications of AI rather than how it is developed and trained. There is a presentation to get the bigger details here. Furthermore, while the EU could limit applications of such high-risk systems, there is a lot of procedural lag to protect citizens were they to be exposed to a system’s output from another jurisdiction.

There are still a lot of questions around regulation. This led me to ask if there is a checklist for effective regulation that governments use. That turned out to be be a not so bad idea as, indeed, there is such a checklist used by OECD countries, at least in principle. When I look at it, I find that the current debate misses a lot of context. For example, how do people understand any regulation when they don’t even know what AI is capable of now other than remixing some public domain pictures or producing often-inaccurate chat transcripts. And then, how do we know if what helps someone doesn’t have a negative impact on another, which is often where regulatory actions fail? What about geopolitical differences? An AI platform in the EU might be designed to augment democratic systems while one in shadier geographies might be used to supplant any such setup. There is also focus upon the impact of AI systems but not on how they’re trained in the first place. While there is a cursory requirement to use high-quality training data, where does that come from?

And this is all before we even get into the realm of regulating an AI that is generic and self-advancing. Why wouldn’t this kind of AI be capable of figuring out loopholes and exploiting them until patching them is too late for humanity? Who would legally be in control of an AI that has improved far beyond what it was submitted for regulatory clearance?

There are so many questions simply because there is no AI, yet. We need to get back to the current epoch and have our companies and governments focus on issues that plague humanity today, and addressing which would make the world a better habitable place in the future.

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Tech and Culture

From Subscribing To Renting

The other day, V went looking for an older movie to watch with her friend, and asked me to help out. Now, we don’t subscribe to any streaming services (barely have enough time to commit to watching series), and while we do have a family TV+ subscription, it currently does not offer a movie selection.

I searched on the iTunes Store, and of course, the movie was available to rent as well as ‘buy’. It was also available as a streaming option on an MGM subscription service that was only available in the US.

The price to rent — €3.

That immediately took me back to the days of renting VHS tapes every weekend. It’s not that there was a lack of quality viewable content then, but the renting was almost always a family affair and a special event. The transition away from VHS to DVDs only exchanged one physical medium with another, but not the ritual. We continued to rent sparingly and wisely, to account for the convenience and choice of one and all.

This was also when families usually had one common television and, rarely, a second smaller television that was usually not fully utilized. Contrast this with today, when family members of all ages walk around with a video display at all times. Watching video or movies doesn’t need to be a family affair at all.

While this has given us the option to watch what we want, when we want, individualized video consumption has taken away the fun aspects of the planning, the anticipation, and the pre and post discussions that resulted from a choice of what to rent to watch. Surely, that time has to be used somehow; what better way than to watch something else.

With reduced attention spans, increased consumption, and greater production budgets, there is just not enough time to actually plan and enjoy content. Rather, we binge-watch, which is quite an apt metaphor, as consuming video content today is not at all different from subscribing to your addiction fix.

The companies that provide this endless stream of personalized content spell it out bluntly and plainly, like Netflix telling us that its biggest competitor is actually sleep.

My small experience in finding a digital rental for a movie made me wonder — what if this became the norm again? What if we stopped subscribing and instead started curating what we pulled in to watch? What if we went back to dedicating time-slots to watch series episodes and movies together.

You could immediately start to imagine the ramifications. There would be more debates, more discussions, perhaps more sharing of lessons or personal decision-frameworks, and overall, more time spent together. Is going back to renting video content such a bad idea?

The one major change in today’s digital setup is that you no longer need to buy a physical copy if you like something so much that you’d want to re-watch it. You could always rent it again. Sure, there are options to buy a digital copy, but while you could ‘purchase’ DRM-free music today, it’s not easy, or even possible in a lot of cases, to do that for video content, especially movies. I put ‘purchase’ in quotations because you only ever buy a license to watch content on a specific type of video player, and that license is malleable and volatile, and the content could also just disappear from your digital shelf.

Whereas back in the day, new releases would have extremely limited rental copies and long wait-times to get a hold of a copy, digital distribution has no such limits. Rent early, rent often. It saves you quality time otherwise spent enjoying leisure individually, and arguably even saves you money as you spend it only on titles that really excite your whole family or group of friends.

Now that we are approaching Web3, perhaps we would soon have a digital version of the neighborhood video rental store that also sells digital copies of content that you could hold onto for life or even rent out to your friends.

Exciting.

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Life and Personal Tech and Culture

Teamwork

So much precious time and resources are wasted on separating your work relationships from your personal relationships. I mean, it is always a good idea to separate your work life and obligations from your personal ones, but there is this ongoing narrative that your team at work has to be different from your team at home.

A few people, mostly entrepreneurs, manage to work together as a team in the office and at home, but it is rare. If you’re starting a business, investors would advise against it; if you’re looking for a job, you’re supposed to not work together.

Imagine if we became good at compartmentalizing our work obligations from our professional ones. We would be able to solve so many problems easily, faster, and probably more efficiently as we wouldn’t have to spend time on making new teams and relationships for every project.

In fact, if you look at some of the top success stories, they were a result of professional/personal collaboration. Successful people have this innate capability to separate concerns, much like we aim for in our software code.

Companies need to investigate coaching employees on this instead of spending resources on creating rulebooks and curbing our natural human tendency to leverage effective teamwork for bigger and better goals. Given the opportunity, this would lead to better execution and possibly even more innovation.

Sure, there are challenges; some people are not good at teamwork, and if they bring their personal challenges into their workplace, it might be a recipe for disaster, which is what led to rulebooks around teamwork. The answer, in my opinion, though is to focus on coaching. Instead of shuffling the human problem here, the goal should be to tackle it head-on, and look at the bigger picture.

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Life and Personal Tech and Culture

Communication in Startups

I read the other day that what separates great teams and relationships is not avoiding disagreements, but rather the quality of bringing up even the smallest disputes for discussion immediately and with an open mind.

It makes so much sense.

Humans are fundamentally opinionated and driven by past experiences. We have also evolved with the genetic machinery to look out for our own personal well-being. We are also resentful. When things don’t go our way or if we are impacted by something, we will often hold a grudge or be generally distracted. This creates long term, and often, permanent fissures.

Startups epitomize the need for great communication and open-mindedness. Especially when the foundation is being laid, everyone is on edge — people don’t know each other so well, there is uncertainty about the product-market fit, and there is just so much going on that essence is often lost in communications, even if you create a framework for daily meetings and catch-ups.

I was recently involved with a startup working in a very interesting and prospective space. The team was not very experienced in that space, but they seemed to have the grit to move through difficulties and find opportunities in tight spaces, so to say. The only issue was that the communication was terrible. I would send an email or a message and it would most often go unanswered. I would bring up this issue, and it would be minimized. We would all promise to be more responsive, but the elephant still comfortably sat in the room, day in and day out.

This was a wonderful lesson in communication — even if you are very smart and capable, communication is what makes or breaks a team. It is easier to find skilled professionals than it is to find professionals that are great at being accountable and communicative. Things have a propensity to boil over.

Especially in small teams and startups, the assumption should always be that the smallest of ideas have the potential for major impact. If a team deprioritizes internal communications, it sends out a negative signal to external partners and investors, too.

So, what do you do if you find yourself in a situation where the team doesn’t communicate well (or at all)? The best plan of action is to bring it up early and often. Humans are also mostly wonderful with good intentions. Most probably, they have different priorities and were of the belief that they were doing their best for the team. However, if the situation doesn’t improve in a reasonable time-frame, your best bet is to just bail out.

As for me, I sent them an email about a prospective investment opportunity, but received no reply! 🙃

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Life and Personal Tech and Culture

E-Newspapers

I was reading an online commentary about newspapers and their business models the other day. Basically, the opinion was that newspapers are slowly letting themselves die by sticking with user-antagonistic business models that prioritize tracking over efficiency, cancellation-friction over customer friendliness and so on.

That is all so true.

This reminded me of being a college student. I wasn’t subscribed to any single newspaper (this was before the Internet was a ‘serious’ thing). Every evening, I would walk over to the kiosk and browse through different newspapers before deciding to buy one. Often, I would end up picking more than one, especially on weekends.

In a lot of countries, the quintessential newspaper kiosk was also a way to bring society together and to discuss events and debate them. Sadly, most of these are on their way out. Even in Amsterdam, which didn’t really have much of a kiosk culture, there are only 2 booksellers I know that sell any non-Dutch periodicals. Newspapers are hard to procure unless you commit to a long-term at-home delivery subscription.

This brings me to my main point — just like we were able to buy newspapers just this once, why can’t we subscribe to electronic versions of the same media outlets for just a day? I can understand that part of this is because of higher transaction costs online where cash just doesn’t work. Even then, I am sure that a lot of customers would not mind a little markup given the flexibility to not have to commit to a yearly subscription.

A few companies have tried to come out with per-article or monthly all-you-can-consume subscriptions to a catalog of newspapers and magazines, but they are hardly profitable. Just like music services, there really is no way to make a profitable business renting out content unless the producers/owners are on board and price it as such, fit for rental consumption.

Now, more than ever in our lifetimes, we need reliable sources of news and current affairs. If you could afford it, do subscribe to a newspaper and keep them alive, and while you’re signing up, make sure to tell your favorite news source to provide a day-subscription. It’s the only way to keep us sane.

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Tech and Culture

Artificial Intelligence in 2020

AI — Artificial Intelligence — is a fascinating term. It’s been part of our lives, in one form or the other, ever since we were born. It’s only in the last decade that the usage of the term has become so ‘daily’. Nary a day goes by where you don’t run into AI impacting one or the other aspects of our lives.

What was previously a thing of a future life is suddenly something that we use and interact with every day. Are our computers suddenly intelligent, more so than they were 20 years ago, or has the term’s definition merely been rebased to their current capabilities in order to influence our behavior?

AI suddenly became a thing of this century a few years ago — as my memory recalls — during a Facebook conference that had a session about how the company was using ‘Artificial Intelligence’ to make the platform safer for its users. It is hard to manually moderate all the content being liked and shared by billions of users (they’re not customers) every hour, and so the company desperately needed a way to automate a huge portion of that grunt, and often, mentally disturbing work. This is where AI suddenly became a thing that exists today, instead of an utopian future.

That is not to say that AI, the term, is merely cunning marketing. I mean, even though your chances of being taken seriously in the money markets are greatly improved if you throw in the term in your communications material, a lot of it has to do with the quantum jump in our computers’ capabilities. Moore’s law is real, after all.

I just came across two articles in this morning’s newspaper — one about YouTube finally reverting to using more humans for content moderation as a result of the automated systems (read algorithms) falsely flagging content that was safe and letting through questionable content. They reached the conclusion that the financial burden of investigating moderation appeals was higher than any cost-savings coming from automating the moderation process.

The second was an opinion piece about how AI has ‘disappointed’ us during the ongoing pandemic. The premise is that the current state of AI works incredibly well if humans intervene early on and help decipher it right from wrong, good from bad, or wanted from unwanted. What we call AI today is largely just an aspect of big data that combines with advances in computing technology to stimulate ‘machine learning’, and like us humans, learning requires an early intervention to prevent learning all the wrong things.

There was another interesting event that went ‘viral’ on Twitter this weekend. Apparently, in order to generate a thumbnail preview of any posted pictures, the website uses an algorithm to center it around a key ingredient. In the case of pictures with people, the idea is to center the thumbnail around a key person so that the thumbnail is more relevant and informative in the post. There was a snag, though. The algorithm always preferred a white person to represent this key person whenever there was another non-white person.

Clearly, the current state of AI is not there, yet, and often leads to results that are actually bad. Some of this AI is also generating our Internet search results and is creating even more division and sowing hatred among people. AI also has potential to change lives of people long-term as was evinced by the algorithmic generation of school-leaving results in the UK a while ago.

But, AI is cool, and just by making it a part of your business plan could make the difference between being able to launch that company or watching the idea of it slowly withering away. Investments are largely buzzword-driven.

So, what are we to do?

As with politics, the clear way to make long term positive impact is to educate others. Part of this involves also keeping up with the evolution of AI yourself. We could help others in understanding that computers aren’t autonomous and will only learn what they’re taught. And like everyone else, these teachers will often make mistakes. Fact check. Seek answers. Clarify.

Computers can be wrong.

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Tech and Culture

Self-Promoting Engineers

I recently signed up for a networking platform called ‘Lunchclub.ai’ that aims to be ‘an AI superconnector that makes introductions for 1:1 video meetings to advance your career’. It is an interesting idea, and so far I’ve met 3 people, one from near Milan, another from Berlin, and one from Stockholm (although he was Russian). It is nice to connect randomly with other entrepreneurs or interesting people for a quick video chat.

On my last meeting with the person from Stockholm, the conversation ended up being quite informal and friendly — we talked about cultural issues with being an expat and how it could be challenging to start with a new idea in those circumstances. Then, the other person pointed out how engineers lack the capability to upsell their work and qualifications. You could look at almost any other profession and clearly notice that selling oneself comes along with it. Except for engineering.

As an engineer, one is expected only to be good at their core competency and to be able to communicate with peers. That they are great at their work shouldn’t be something that needs to be advertised outside of the recruiting process.

It made me think. Some of the best engineers I have had the pleasure to learn from were also quite bad at promoting themselves. It is assumed that great engineers are constantly learning and evolving, and that the more years of experience they accumulate the better they get. Anything else is just unacceptable, and following this career path is barely meeting expectations. On the other hand, the engineers who plan and break away from this mould are often those that transition out from the engineering profession to a career built upon teaching or public speaking.

Good engineers are also almost always suffering from the burden of not being good enough. There is always something to learn, some way to improve, or just some people to look up to. And if you’re a software engineer, there is always another framework or architectural pattern that is in vogue that you haven’t even looked at. You slacker you!

This is quite a dichotomy — on one hand, engineers are expected to be great and to always be learning, while on the other hand, the ones that do learn the art of self-promotion are deemed to not be engaged with the profession full-time. There’s only enough time to either engage with your engineering craft or to tell the world how good you’re at it.

A lot of workplaces now promote public speaking for their engineers, but this is often limited to speaking to other engineers, and is, as such, used primarily as a recruitment tool — check out our infrastructure/team structure/methodology and be a part of something great. While it helps bring talent together, it seldom helps individual contributors in ways other than perhaps opening them up for recruitment by other similar teams.

There is a good balance to be obtained among shameless self-promotion and genuine marketing, but every engineer ought to be unashamed about telling the world how great they are, and also to publicly recognize that there is no shame in being an expert on whatever the pattern or framework of the month happens to be.

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Software Engineering Tech and Culture

Working Remotely

Everyone is WFH – Working From Home these days. Even people that never were in favor of remote work for IT workers are now compelled to set up a special place in their homes for work to carry on uninterrupted. Just the other day, I got an IM from an ex-colleague, who vehemently opposed remote work, sort of lamenting to me as to how the entire world is now forced to work from home.

I started my professional career in the US in the IT consulting business. It wasn’t the ideal start to a career, mostly because when you’re working as a consultant, you don’t have an office — you go where the client goes. This also meant that I had a level of autonomy, especially considering my experience, that was not afforded to even seasoned permanent employees. For one, I could come in and leave the office anytime as long as I was able to commit to the project plan. This was just like being in grad school! It could also explain why I ultimately built a good framework around separating work-life from personal-life.

I still remember working remotely for about a month as I was recuperating from a foot surgery. It was quite a non-issue. My supervisor(s) had no problems with that even back in the day, and I was actually offered to apply for a preferential parking permit to avoid walking long distances whenever I returned.

Then, as I became more experienced, I was able to take on client calls from home or prioritize personal matters around professional work. It was all quite flexible and amazing. This was the business of consulting for IT departments to set up complex systems.

Even when I moved to pure software engineering (building products for end-users) as a consultant, I have memories of being allowed flexibility. Sadly, none of those companies are in business, still. It seemed that back in the day, even tech companies had a pretty good handle on work-life balance. Some of my colleagues even worked remotely on a full-time basis, just as long as they were able to negotiate it at some point. And a lot did. Surely, having geographically spread campuses with a more project-oriented focus helped. Perhaps it was also a cultural thing; who doesn’t remember going on long team lunches back then?!

And then, sometime around the early 10’s things changed. Agile and Scrum, in particular, were already on the rise, but now that companies were newer and budgets leaner, companies started trying to optimize their workplaces, both for usage as well as project management. Agile was the hot new buzzword. Gone were cubicles in exchange for ‘collaborative’ open spaces full of drawing boards, plants, and as little furniture as possible. My first open floor-plan office job was actually in 2010. Some people even shared a desk, if it were too big for one person.

This was also the time when, battered by the Great Recession, companies were trying to bring back a lot of operations that were outsourced until the late 00’s. People just have to be in the same room!

The thing is that none of the benefits of being in the same room supersede the efficiencies obtained by inculcating a more flexible and professional work ethic. A lot of this new-age ‘company is your family’ came about from Silicon Valley competing for talent by offering on-site catered lunches and laundromats and daycares and whatnot. Smaller startups were only able to preach the mantra of collaboration and agility. In all of this, though, the voice of many who wanted to focus mostly on productivity was silenced. Surely, they aren’t team-players and fully committed if they’d want to work from a beach, which is definitely what ‘working remotely’ implied!

In denser cities like Amsterdam and San Francisco, there was more incentive to build fancy office spaces — homes were smaller and didn’t provide enough separation between work and personal space. That, and most people are terrible at time management. The biggest complaint with remote work is that people don’t know when their work-day begins and when it ends. Either they’re working all the time, or can barely figure out a rhythm for working. Some people also miss the social aspect, although I am of the opinion that they mostly have customer-facing roles or have circular dependencies in order to contribute.

For the past 6 years, I have been working remotely. Interestingly, what should be natural for tech-workers is now seen as a privilege. I love it, and even though I wouldn’t call myself unsocial, I like that I get the change to pick between being social or being productive or both! When I started, I was actually in the midst of changing my lifestyle and getting healthier. I used to go on morning and lunch walks. I could take some calls and manage my emails while having a coffee with my newspaper. I could plan my lunch at an odd hour. All things that are relatively impossible in an office environment.

This brings me to a segue about the aforementioned colleague. I had a ton of discussions about his idea of a productive workspace. He wasn’t a full-time contributor, and only wanted to come to the office when he desired. His reason to want an office was also because he missed camaraderie at home. All very selfish reasons. And this has been my experience talking to a lot of opponents of remote work — they only hate it up until they have a personal need. At that point, privilege sets in. The whole teamwork seems to fall apart, both practically and theoretically. Think about it — how is it a team-building exercise if some people in your team would love to have some flexibility for a few days (for personal reasons) but your project planning requires them to be there in person for every working hour. That’s got to be demotivating.

And now that offices have *had* to close down, I feel that the empty promises of more collaborative workspaces are coming to the fore. Apple is releasing more stable updates, companies are still working and building, and people are still working hard. Some so much that they’re now complaining of corona-fatigue. Instead of countless meetings in a conference room, people are now tired of video calls. Things are normal. The only people disadvantaged seem to be those that prioritized proximity to the office to comfort when picking a place to live. Now they’re left with a tiny apartment in a wonderfully central location, but no workspace.

It is clear that working remotely is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. Until the virus situation is eased enough to allow executives to regularly work from an office, it is fair to assume that very few people in the non-essential IT workers category would like to subject themselves to viral exposure. That could take a few months, if not years. And none of that would slow down the progress of technology.

So, was I right in embracing and pushing for a remote-friendly autonomous culture at all my previous workplaces? You bet I was.

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Economy Tech and Culture

Small Business Ad-Spend

The world has been going through a tumultuous era. Not only is it ravaged by the Coronavirus, the subsequent financial and social implications have driven people crazy and longing for a change. Various simmering issues have come to a steady boil in what doesn’t seem like ready to subside anytime soon — racial inequality, financial inequity, a reckoning with the colonial past in western democracies, to name a few.

Big changes are underfoot.

As companies face slowing market conditions, compounded by the social upheaval, they’re also having to face pressure from their customers on standing up to divisive voices in the society. Companies are investigating their ad-spend on platforms that provide micro-targeting, but that in these times also tend to place this advertising side-by-side with content that aims to break the social order.

By last count, a lot of big name companies have already pulled their ad-spending from various platforms owned by Facebook and Google. That said, there are very few, if any, other places for them to reach their customers. So much so that Facebook’s CEO even boasted that these advertisers would be back ‘soon enough’ with their money as they realize that there is no other way.

Buried in these news, I found myself fascinated by the revelation that about 70% of Facebook’s ad revenue comes not by way of these Cokes and Unilevers, but from the multitudes of local and small businesses spread throughout the globe. It makes perfect sense in hindsight — if you’re big, you could possible afford spending on TV ads or billboards, but if you have that tiny neighborhood café that derives a lot of seasonal tourist-dependent revenue, your best bet is a Facebook (Instagram) ad campaign.

Perhaps then, the next ad-tech business the world needs is something that helps these small businesses reach their target demographic in a more ESG-friendly manner. A platform that doesn’t mine all the data there is, but provides genuine value. This platform would be made for small business by small business with only one goal — make the world a nicer place.

Now the question — who’s up for this?

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Life and Personal Tech and Culture

I Miss Emails

Every now and then I search my email for an obscure keyword or phrase that was at one time relevant to my interests — ‘AIIM’ when I worked as a records management consultant, or ‘dinner’ to look back at when we planned for such things by email. I even have chains going back 15 years where people are discussing something forwarded by someone and that resulted in a never-ending sequence of Reply-All’s.

In a way, I miss that.

These days, people send quick instant messages through one of the dozens of ‘social media’ apps that nearly everyone is assumed to be a member of. Can’t remember the contact details of that colleague from 10 years ago? Search on LinkedIn. What about that classmate in grad school? Chances are that they’re on Facebook.

On the other hand, it is almost foolhardy to assume that the person you used to email years ago is still using that same email address — their job might have changed, or they could’ve switched to that awesome new email service that has better spam detection, or perhaps they just wanted to build a new identity as ‘cool_ece_95@yahoo.com’ is just not cool anymore. Foolhardy because composing emails takes a bit of effort and time. You don’t want to waste that effort on thoughtfully writing something when you’re not even sure if it would land in the right inbox. Sending a quick, and abrupt, ‘hey’ in an instant message has no baggage.

Some of my earliest emails with family members are full of pictures, address changes, various forwards, and even videos and recipes. Almost all emails are more than a couple sentences long. They have nice salutations. On the contrary, instant messages are spread around various apps — iMessages for some, WhatsApp for others, LinkedIn for a few friends and even family, and so on.

Whereas my emails are easily searchable, finding the right message or the context it was sent in is terribly hard on almost every messaging app. Searching messages is consistently a terrible experience. It’s like the services were designed to be ephemeral and impersonal. Whereas emails are blocks of conversation, messages are just blocks of sentences punctuated by an image or two, or by a totally different context with its own punctuations.

Emails are fun to read; instant messages are just blobs of stuff.

In other words, most of my instant message conversations are a bad example of object oriented programming. The conversations are just a set of base classes, then subclassed, then extended, sometimes composited. What was supposed to be quick and convenient has turned into something unwieldy and, as a result, not worth archiving and preserving.

My old emails, though, are wonderful memories.