Eitan Burcat

Two major security incidents in Israel over the past two weeks. Very different stories, but both seem to share one thing: responsibility falling through the cracks. The Flydubai near-disaster. The Shin Bet stepped away from securing foreign flights to Israel, while the Ministry of Transportation apparently failed to fully assume that responsibility. Nearly 180 passengers were put at risk because of this gap in ownership. Yonatan Urich’s WhatsApp leak. A close adviser to the Prime Minister, but not formally a…

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I’ve scheduled a weekly LifeOps review with ChatGPT, every Saturday at 20:00, after the kids go to bed. We go over different areas of life at a high level and try to plan the week ahead: health, household, kids, building committee, etc. I used to do this several years ago, just after completing a Stephen Covey seminar. It worked great, but took a lot of effort, as I was doing everything manually with pen and paper. Today was my 10th…

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We’ve been exploring the possibility of AI sentience for a while now. My prediction? We’ll eventually circle back to what Zen has been teaching us for centuries: there is no “I”. The consciousness we take for granted may itself be an illusion. After failing to make machines sentient, we may discover that we’re much more like thinking machines than we’d like to admit.

I’ve been targeted by another ad now on Facebook, a “TikTok for smart people” So, as I’ve been doing several times recently – I asked ChatGPT to analyze it, and see if it can come up with a better alternative It suggested a daily prompt. I asked for an example. It came back with a few paragraphs about “Normalization of Deviance”. This example was fun to read, took me 4 mins to go through it, it suggested a book which…

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I think by now I’ve run into several examples of AI helping small organizations in ways I didn’t fully appreciate were possible. 3 of them I can pinpoint. The first was right when ChatGPT came out. I won’t go into too many details, but I knew the leader of a small organization, who had an important employee on the verge of leaving. A large part of the problem was simply the amount of serious, tedious paperwork she had to deal…

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2009, Eran Ketter and myself tried to predict how relevant will be the Academy to the Job market Eran was under the impression that a Masters degree would be almost mandatory for getting most jobs, though its contents may change drastically I was under the impression that the Academy as a whole would be less relevant I think neither of us predicted the job market will change so much And we were both skeptical about gmail’s survival 🙂 Funny enough,…

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“Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.” – O’Rourke, P.J. I’m dealing with some medical stuff in the last few days, and the dishes aren’t doing themselves… Thanks, love, very much appreciated

שוחחתי עם יהודה אטלס לפני בערך 15 שנה, ונדהמתי מכמה שהוא חד, ונוקב ואמפתי גם כשהוא מולי וחושב על הרגליים בזמן אמת. איך הוא יודע לפרק את הקישקע של עצמו ושל הקיום האנושי בכלל. ממש Force of Nature שנחת בעולמנו והצליח לגעת באלגנטיות בכל כך הרבה אנשים, בכל כך הרבה הקשרים. לימים, כשאהובה שמעה שהסייעת בגן עיקמה את האף לגבי איזה ספר על משפחות, הוא מיד הפך לספר החודש אצלנו בבית. ואיך לא, יהודה אטלס, באבחת טקסט קצר וקולע, הצליח…

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Almost 20 years ago, I took a security course at the Technion taught by Orr Dunkelman. These days, I’m spending quite a bit of time on security aspects of LiveU’s products – and I’m surprised by just how relevant that course still is, nearly 20 years later. A lot of the fundamentals apparently don’t change, quite impressive.

Several times a day, I have to: Get up from my chair. Take my cup to the coffee machine. Press a button. Wait. Walk back to my chair. And at the end of the day, I still have to wash the cup. Can’t an Optimus bring me coffee already? We’re in 2026.* * Sometime around 2004, my friend Nadav complained to me: “We’re in 2004 already, and still…” His complaint was about Hebrew in Microsoft Word. Copy-paste something containing Hebrew…

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