Yeah this is the first time I’ve heard of someone being taken while trying to leave the country. Very Kafkaesque.

Eh. It’s useful for finding what I want to know. The result to a query which goes like “Based on this paragraph from some documentation written in 2005 (link) the answer is <bunch of generated text rehashing the information I wanted to find in the first place>” is a whole lot more useful than “Here is a list of thousands and thousands of irrelevant and incoherently sorted results, of which one is probably what you were looking for. Good luck.” which was, unfortunately, the state of the art up to this point.

I lived through the dotcom hype cycle, the 5G cycle, the crypto cycle, etc. The useful (boring!) bits of technology remain and something new and shiny becomes the target of hype and speculation a few years later. Nothing new really.

Yeah the AI hype levels are insane, but at the same time I think there is some interesting and actually useful technology there. That’s my 2c anyway.

The search thing is specific to internal data sets btw. Anyone who has used intranet search engines at large companies would probably relate just how terrible they are. Much worse than Google is at searching the internet.

Sure, you can’t trust LLMs and just copy-paste whatever comes out of it. But it’s very effective as a way to find something in very large mixed datasets when you may not know which exact keywords to use for a traditional search engine.

Perhaps I’m using the wrong terminology. But being able to ask in natural language “why is something the way it is” and it returns references to code, bugs, and documentation along with a small summary is pretty cool. It works better than any of the half-baked corporate search engines I’ve used before. Is this not “knowledge retrieval”? In any case I can see the utility.

AI can be a useful tool and I think it will slowly become more common in the workplace, for example it can be very convenient for knowledge retrieval, but it’s laughable to think that it can replace humans. I’d wager any time “AI” can replace a human the job could’ve already been automated through other means.

I’ve been looking at possible phone options too. There are several degoogled Android options but it’s still Android of course. And switching to a Linux phone seems like it would be really limiting without access to Android/iOS apps. Do Linux phone users just use the browser to replace all those apps? I guess it could work, though it seems less ergonomic.

I don’t have an Android phone currently but I thought I’d check on iOS and, yep, Google Drive has access to all files. Well that’s a bit hypocritical.

Just a few years ago I watched the movie Bridge of Spies which, based on real events, dramatically portrayed the arbitrary Kafkaesque detention of American student Frederic Pryor by the evil Stasi and the unjust East German state. Well I guess we’re the baddies now.

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That’s probably just mail that lands in your spam folder without being entirely blocked. According to Microsoft and Google approximately 99% of incoming spam (of the ~160 billion spam emails sent per day) never even reaches their users mailboxes. I assume that’s roughly standard across email providers. I am concerned comparably sophisticated filtering may become necessary on the Fediverse eventually.

I’ve been using Fedi for a long time and from the very beginning I’ve been afraid of spam and bots ruining it, at least temporarily. Spam is still a problem with e-mail, and it’s been around for 40 years and for it’s developed very sophisticated anti-spam mitigations.

I wonder why they’re still proceeding with x86 instead of focusing on ARM or RISC-V. If you don’t have to worry about running Windows it seems like x86 is less future proof.

Some memorable moments in no particular order:

• Outer Wilds when you reach the Sun Station
• Descending into the Lost River biome in Subnautica
• Alan Wake 2: The Musical

I’m aware that’s true for complex multi chip systems like arcade boards. The Mister project for example. But a simple Z80? I expect it to emulate virtually perfectly. Maybe not? Hence why I’m curious.

Pretty neat. But why an FPGA? I would imagine if you want to run software targeting really old chips, like the Z80, you might as well run it on a modern x86/ARM/RISCV processor with an emulator on Linux.

To quote an old car show: Oh no! Anyway.