@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net
There is (I assure you there will be, donāt know what it is yetā¦) a price to be paid for this convenience.
Exactly prologic, and thatās why Iām negative about these sorts of things. Iām almost 50, Iāve been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they donāt trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. Itās a societal cancer.
All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. Theyāll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They wonāt stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.
Thatās a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for decades. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesnāt make sense. Itās insane.
@carsten@yarn.zn80.net @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I also think it is best called fake. Art is created by human beings, for human beings. It mediates a relationship between two people, and is a means of expression.
A computer has no inner life, no feelings, no experience of the world. It is not sentient. It has no life. Thereās nothing āinā there for it to express. Itās just generating pixels in patterns weāve learned to recognize. These AI technologies are carefully crafted to fool people into experiencing the things they experience when they look at human-made art, but it is an empty experience.
Tillitis TKey
The Tillitis TKey, which I first wrote about in September last year,
is now available for sale at the the Tillitis webshop.
The TKey is a small bare-bones RISC-V computer in a USB stick form
factor with no persistent storage that measures apps uploaded to it
and derives a deterministic secret every time the same app is started.
You can use it, for instance, as a security token to keep your private
key and do signing operations. Everyt ⦠ā Read more
Mozilla, OSI, & the memory-holing of Computer History
Listen now (23 min) | The Lunduke Journal of Technology Podcast - April 18, 2023 ā Read more
@prologic@twtxt.net yeah. Iād add āBig Dataā to that hype list, and Iām sure there are a bunch more that Iām forgetting.
On the topic of a GPU cluster, the optimal design is going to depend a lot on what workloads you intend to run on it. The weakest link in these things is the data transfer rate, but that wonāt matter too much for compute-heavy workloads. If your workloads are going to involve a lot of data, though, youād be better off with a smaller number of high-VRAM cards than with a larger number of interconnected cards. I guess thatās hardware engineering 101 stuff, but stillā¦
The Lunduke Big Tech Show - Apr 9, 2023 - Hour 2
Listen now (45 min) | USB Flash Drive Bombs, the Great Apple Store Robbery, Googleās war on staplers⦠and Computer History! ā Read more
The Lunduke Big Tech Show - Apr 2, 2023 - Hour 2
Listen now (48 min) | The Mark I computer, The Altair Fest of 1976, & 1990s Linux Gaming. ā Read more
Look Ma: My computer is talking; letās create a simplified ChatGPT!
ChatGPT is all the hype now, but the math behind it is pretty complex - can we
create something smaller & simpler, possibly under 200 lines of Rust code? ā Read more
The Lunduke Big Tech Show - Mar 12, 2023 - Hour 1
Listen now (53 min) | Tech News, Computer History, and Other Important Stuff. ā Read more
The Lunduke Big Tech Show - Mar 5, 2023 - Hour 1
Listen now (60 min) | Tech News, Computer History, and Other Important Stuff. ā Read more
JMP: Newsletter: JMP is 6! Leaving beta this year! And FOSSY šļø
Hi everyone!
Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!
In case itās been a while since you checked out JMP, hereās a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.Ā Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one ⦠ā Read more
The impending first era of AI
Thereās an article in WSJ about the imminent āAI Boomā and how a couple of companies, the ones that have already been both enabling and controlling our existence, to a large extent, are bound to become even more powerful. Itās interesting to āseeā the interplay if youāve been working in computing technology for the past decade or so. Christopher Mims, the author of the WSJ article, posits that the computing requirements of large language models, latent text-to-image diffus ⦠ā Read more
The least happy computer users: Those running Arch Linux & Firefox
Used by the happiest computer users: macOS, Slackware Linux, & Brave. ā Read more
What will computer technology be like in 15 years?
Listen now (22 min) | The Lunduke Journal of Technology Podcast - Feb 3rd, 2023 ā Read more
Man discovers If Statements, becomes A.I. expert
āI can use these If-statements to actually make a computer think. To make decisions. Woah.ā ā Read more
Quantum computing is all well and good, butā¦
According to @RikerGoogling, the @EnterpriseCPU has FTL nanoprocessors! Can we start focusing on developing -that-?
Quantum computing is all well and good, butā¦
According to @RikerGoogling, the @EnterpriseCPU has FTL nanoprocessors! Can we start focusing on developing -that-?
ā Read moreThe Story of Otrona ā The Colorado Computer Company of the early 1980s.
The āBMW of portable 8-bit computersā⦠has been all but lost to history. ā Read more
A census for computer nerds!
Listen now (21 min) | The Lunduke Journal of Technology Podcast - Jan 23rd, 20223 ā Read more
JMP: Threads, Thumbnails, XMR, ETH
Hi everyone!
Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!
In case itās been a while since you checked out JMP, hereās a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.Ā Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Shar ⦠ā Read more
Digital Prepping, Part 1 - Off-Line Websites & Maps
The first step in making your computer usable when the Internet goes away. Because it will. ā Read more
The Great Lunduke Journal Computer Nerd Survey of 2023
Itās sort of like a census⦠except just for Computer Nerds. And also not all that much like a census. ā Read more
Two Wild Soviet Personal Computers of the 1980s
The Agat 4 and the Iskra 1256. The height of Soviet-styled, Sci-Fi inspired personal computers. ā Read more
BREAKING: Gizmodo stuns world by publishing Tech article
āWe wonāt let computers distract us from our core missionā¦complaining about Elon Muskā ā Read more
Commodore SX-64 ā The first color, portable computer
Bonus: The (real) story of the portable Amiga! ā Read more
** I read some books in 2022, and have some thoughts about computer science writing **
At the start of this year I set out to revive my long dead reading habit. After having kids it fell by the wayside. Iāve read 41 books so far this year. Mostly a mix of science fiction and nonfiction computer science books. Hereās the complete list of everything Iāve read. Iāve got mixed feelings about keeping track and sharing cou ⦠ā Read more
Lundukeās Favorite Stories of 2022
Listen now (38 min) | News, history, & satire. The computer-y articles that Lunduke found the most interesting over the last year. ā Read more
The Fork Bomb: What it is, how it works, and where it originated
The idea started in 1969⦠and itās been causing computers to crash ever since. ā Read more
What do Computer Scientists Read? - Computerphile ā Read more
JMP: Newsletter: Busy Year in 2022
Hi everyone!
Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!
In case itās been a while since you checked out JMP, hereās a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.Ā Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Sha ⦠ā Read more
JMP: Newsletter: Busy Year in 2022
Hi everyone!
Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!
In case itās been a while since you checked out JMP, hereās a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.Ā Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Sha ⦠ā Read more
š Obsidian October Winners & AI Integrations
A guide for using Readwise with Obsidian, a demo vault for computer engineering students, & the first Canvas plugins. ā Read more
āThe Sidecarā ā Adding advanced networking, and a Linux shell, to a Psion palmtop
One of the coolest designs Iāve seen for extending older computers via the serial port. ā Read more
** Thoughts on accessibility in smol computing **
What follows is my attempt to spark a conversation in a few converging, but separate communities I lurk in.
Iāve already had a bunch of amazing conversations around this topic with a lot of people. Those conversations helped to shape what follows. Thanks to everyone who was willing to think this stuff through with me.
Before I get into it I want to say at the top this isnāt meant as an accusation against anyone in these communities, nor the goals of t ⦠ā Read more
Should I sell my PC?
Iām not sure yet what Iām going to do with my desktop computer (ASRock Deskmini A300), which I donāt really use anymore since I got my new laptop. ā Read more
Experiment: The hidden costs of waiting on slow build times
How much does it really cost to buy more powerful cloud compute resources for development work? A lot less than you think. ā Read more
How to Pronounce Tech Words (part 2)
Watch now (6 min) | Some computer words are hard to say. Let Lunduke help you. ā Read more
Interview: Brian Hall (veteran PalmOS dev)
Watch now (63 min) | On: Newtons, Sony Clie PDAs, the end days of PalmOS, and emulating old consoles & computers. ā Read more
Lundukeās Normal Computing News - Nov 9, 2022
Listen now (35 min) | Apple worth more than Google + Facebook + Amazon, Microsoft sued for GitHub Copilot, Canonical shows future of Ubuntu ā Read more
of course the Soviet Union failedāthey didnāt have computers yet!
computational complexity theory of self-modifying code. probably not good for execution speed, but great for code size.
Lundukeās Weird Computing News - Nov 6, 2022
Listen now (30 min) | Haiku Beta 4 inches closer, Ladybird web browser can run Linux, GNU Make drops OS/2, Amiga, Cray, & Xenix. ā Read more
Lundukeās Normal Computing News - Nov 2, 2022
Listen now (48 min) | EU tells Apple how to make iPhones, Chromebook sales crash, & Ubuntuās Lunar Lobster. ā Read more
JMP: Newsletter: New Cheogram Android Release, Chatwoot Instance
Hi everyone!
Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!
In case itās been a while since you checked out JMP, hereās a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.Ā Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one ⦠ā Read more
RT @joinmastodon@joinmastodon
Some people ask us why Mastodon isnāt a single website. A single website that can serve the whole world requires so much computing power, infrastructure, and engineering, that it is practically impossible to do without big capital and monetization.
š¦š: https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1586886721706262530 ā Read more
Lundukeās Weird Computing News - Oct 30, 2022
Listen now (29 min) | Haiku Week is coming, FreeBSD 12.4 & financial woes, Ladybird browser improvements, and running classic Mac Software⦠without MacOS. ā Read more
Lundukeās Normal Computing News - October 26, 2022
Listen now (43 min) | macOS Ventura, Ubuntu 22.10, Microsoft looking to control how Linux boots, Windows ARM dev box, and⦠Linux dropping 486 support? ā Read more
Paul Schaub: Implementing Packet Sequence Validation using Pushdown Automata
This is part 2 of a small series on verifying the validity of packet sequences using tools from theoretical computer science. Read part 1 here.
In the previous blog post I discussed how a formal grammar can be transformed into a pushdown automaton in order to check if a sequence of packets or token ⦠ā Read more
The Lunduke Journal Video Interview Series!
Lunduke talks to someone interesting in the world of computing⦠every week. ā Read more
Lundukeās Weird Computing News - Oct 23, 2022
Listen now (34 min) | Z80 Computer, Solitaire via Gopher, OpenBSD, PumpkinOS file browser, and Ladybird Web browser. What a week! ā Read more