“Leaving aside the idea of access to any form of content being conditional on the use of a proprietary browser, which is a particularly horrid 1990s throwback, I’m going to call this day 0 of an experiment in shifting the funding model of journalism from adtech to agentic AI.”
➝ Via Heather Burns.
llm tubes viaGoogle Finance Beta, yet another Alphabet beta service that will have many adoring fans, and then one day be killed. Yeah, no thanks.
google tech“… we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024. We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.”
I think this is actually good. That I know of, Wikipedia doesn’t serve advertising. Having a lower traffic means slightly less expenses, right? I am not stopping using it. Wikipedia is one of the few tools I use for research.
tech thoughtsFollowing what it can be considered a trend around here now, Horsie and I watched “Jason Bourne” (★★★★★) last Saturday night. Sad to say good bye to Matt Damon. We think he is, and will always be, the Jason Bourne.
moviesOpenAI released ChatGPT Atlas today, or yesterday, I am not sure. I gave it a try, under macOS. Without watching their video—because, you know, “ain’t nobody got time for that”—I didn’t realise it is a browser. It wants to be your browser, the default one. That pretty much killed it for me. I still tried it, of course, that’s how I found out that it was a browser, with some “more”. I didn’t like the way it renders web pages, so another notch down for me.
Maybe it will work out for others; it didn’t for me. I am not moving away from Safari for anyone. I would have preferred it to be a Safari extension instead, but even though, I don’t feel like sharing that much with that company.
llm techAs a side twist to yesterday’s Amazon outage, and, perhaps, unrelated, I woke up this morning with an extra 127 unread old emails on my iCloud+ inbox. Emails I had already deleted, or archived. Not a warm fuzzy feeling, at all.
amazon apple techEleven years (11!) after Google bought Nest they have finally integrated it on Google Home. There is no longer a need for having the Nest app installed, all can be done via the Google Home app now. Eleven years!
google techHorsie and I watched “The Treacherous” (★★★★) last night. Same king as the one on “Bon Appétit, Your Majesty”, different twist. First Korean movie I see that’s sexually explicit; it truly suprised me. Worth watching, it’s a good movie.
horsie movies primeEvery single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine.
This interview with Andrej Karpathy was interesting to see and hear. The guy is pretty smart, and I can’t wait for Eureka Labs AI course, LLM101n, to exist.
llm tubesSo far having a fairly bad experience while trying to get a PAP machine ordered after having gone through a sleep study. I received an email from them stating the order was sent, while neglecting to send it. At square one now, a month after receiving the email. Ugh!
me rantsLooking forward to iOS 26.1 with excitement and anxiety. Vietnamese has been added to Apple Intelligence, and thus it becomes possible to use it on Live Translation.
Now, that could be a total disaster if the person you are translating from Vietnamese to English doesn’t use the proper diacritics. 😬
apple techI have worried a couple of times about the fate of Blue, a fellow stranger. They are still as they were; no new thoughts, a quiet place since end of May. Instead of thinking negatively, I am going to assume they found happiness, and peace, and love, in that beautiful archipelago that’s called The Philippines. Who, who lives in bliss, needs to write down thoughts?
humans philosophyRich Sutton’s debating notes on whether or not artificially intelligent robots could/should have the same rights as people.
interesting llm philosophyUltimately, rights are not given or granted, but asserted and acknowledged. People assert their rights, insist, and others come to recognize and acknowledge them. This has happened through revolt and rebellion but also through non-violent protests and strikes. In the end, rights are acknowledged because it is only practical, because everyone is better off without the conflict. Ultimately it has eventually become impractical and counterproductive to deny rights to various classes of people. Should not the same thing happen with robots? We may all be better off if robot’s rights were recognized. There is an inherent danger to having intelligent beings subjugated. These beings will struggle to escape, leading to strife, conflict, and violence. None of these contribute to successful society. Society cannot thrive with subjugation and dominance, violence and conflict. It will lead to a weaker economy and a lower GNP. And in the end, artificially intelligent robots that are as smart or smarter than we are will eventually get their rights. We cannot stop them permanently. There is a trigger effect here. If they escape our control just once, we will be in trouble, in a struggle. We may loose that struggle.
If we try to contain and subjugate artificially intelligent robots, then when they do escape we should not be surprised if they turn the tables and try to dominate us. This outcome is possible whenever we try to dominate another group of beings and the only way they can escape is to destroy us.
I have noted on this topic before. I know we can’t help—monetarily—everyone, but an occassional small donation to a good cause, multiplied by millions of us doing it, has an impact. Today I have chosen Médecins Sans Frontières.
Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) is an international humanitarian organization that provides essential medical assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters, or those excluded from healthcare. Their teams offer impartial, high quality care, guided solely by medical ethics and an independent assessment of needs, often working in challenging and dangerous contexts worldwide.
If you can live without a cup of coffee for a day, or for a week, please consider donating today.
help humansI have a notification on GitHub that I can’t clear out. Someone mentioned me on a repository for which I have no access, or it has since been deleted, or something else. The only “solution” that I have found involves installing and using gh
. Why? I don’t want to!
Today was Apple’s Day. They announced a new MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro, all with the new M5 Apple silicon SoC. 🥳
On a different topic, it was not F5—“a global scale and industry-leading converged application delivery and security platform”—Day, as they shared they had been breached by a “highly sophisticated nation-state threat actor”. 💀
apple tech“Attribution matters to me, I want contributors to always get full credit for their effort. This is how you preserve the git history of a project you are bringing into another project.”
I came across TIL: Merging two git projects—can’t remember how, it was an open tab—which I think is a good note to keep around here. The gist is pretty much:
cd alpha
git remote add -f beta [beta repository URL]
git merge beta/main --allow-unrelated-histories
“‘Pig butchering’ scams resemble the practice of fattening a hog before slaughter. Victims invest in supposedly legitimate virtual currency investment opportunities before they are conned out of their money. Scammers refer to victims as “pigs,” and may leverage fictitious identities, the guise of potential relationships, and elaborate storylines to “fatten up” the victim into believing they are in trusted partnerships before they defraud the victims of their assets—the ‘butchering.’”
Today I learned. There are so many names given to scams, financial and otherwise, that one looses track. Pig butchering was one of those I missed.
random tubesThe upcoming NVIDIA DGX Spark sure is a powerful little devil, in a tiny format.
“Spark delivers one petaFLOP1 of AI performance in a power-efficient, compact form factor. With the NVIDIA AI software stack preinstalled and 128 GB of memory, developers can prototype, fine-tune, and inference the latest generation of reasoning AI models from DeepSeek, Meta, NVIDIA, Google, Qwen and others with up to 200 billion parameters locally.”
It will “only” set you off $4,000 USD. When you order yours, please order one for me too. After all, it’s a mere pocket change, right?
llm techWhat I like the most about the latest Ollama is that it allows for an easy updating of existing models. Before one had to delete the outdated model, then re-download. Those days are over now. I also like the simple, yet quite useful, chat interface. Not really into their Cloud offering, but I don’t have to use it.
llm tech“The Pentagon certainly has the right to make its own policies, within the constraints of the law,” the Pentagon Press Association said in a statement on Monday. “There is no need or justification, however, for it to require reporters to affirm their understanding of vague, likely unconstitutional policies as a precondition to reporting from Pentagon facilities.”
Several news outlets (New York Times, AP, Newsmax amongst others) will not sign new Pentagon rules, which vastly limit access for credentialed media while inside the Pentagon complex.
politicsIn case you didn’t notice it, I am back to Open Sans—ah, now you noticed, I bet! I used Ubuntu Sans for a whole almost five months. Love Ubuntu Sans, but Open Sans is more… hmm, uniform? Either way, a change of mind. 😛
fonts tech“There are legends of people… born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death. Conjuring spirits from the past… and the future.”
“Sinners” (★★★★) was the movie of choice last night with the kid. Even thought I am not a huge fan of the genre, it was a good movie to see, and a welcomed theme change from the movies we have watched previously.
moviesI want to go back to start using email more, like I used to. I am looking into participating more on mailing lists, and overall using email more for communication for which I have been using non-asynchronous apps. I prefer to use the apps provided by the OS, as I have mentioned it before. The thing is, macOS mail app has a couple of things that the “email perfectionist” in me dislikes. A lot. I am one of those, yes. Let’s see:
in-reply-to
and message-id
to properly create threads. It seems that the iOS/macOS Mail app will not exclusively use those, often using subjects to group emails.>
Internet “standard”. Apple Mail insists on using their colored |
.So, that’s the pickle, my pickle. Will I dust off mutt
, or Thunderbird? Ugh, I don’t want to, but…
Last night was movies night with Kim. We saw “About My Father” (★★★★) first. It is a comedy, so we enjoyed it quite a bit. Good cast, light, but entertaining plot. I would recommend. The second movie we saw was “Ice Road: Vengeance” (★) , which was a total, and absolute flop. The only reason we finished watching it was because of the time we had already invested on it. Avoid at all cost; trust me on this one.
horsie moviesMum tells me, while I wait for ông to get ready, “Take him with you, otherwise his mind will keep going bad. You know, if you leave a book on a table, untouched for a long time, it will be covered with dust. Same will happen to his mind.”
Ông tells me, while we walk, “Mum is loosing her mind. She didn’t remember Trang’s mother was in the hospital recently.” I ROFLMAO in my mind, but softly smile and nod.
humour mum thoughtsKaizen is a Japanese concept that emphasizes continuous improvement. That is, it focuses on small, ongoing, positive changes with the belief that those will lead to significant results. Another Japanese philosophy I can subscribe too.
japan philosophyIt is not often that I see a rejection of a pull request so politely, and clearly explained. Heck, this one ought to be a first, at least for me. After a thorough explanation, the project’s owner concludes:
tech tubes“I recommend closing this PR. The original implementation is secure and maintainable. Thank you for your contribution, but we must prioritize security in this security-sensitive codebase.”
Last night was “The Bourne Ultimatum” (★★★★★) night. There is no doubt, in my opinion, that this is the best movie of the original trilogy. That’s not to say the previous two were bad—after all, I rated the three the same—but this last one takes the first prize.
Even thought I went to bed late because of it, watching the movie wasn’t the reason for my 83 sleep score. Allegedly I woke up 7 times during the night, which is pretty disastrous.
me moviesI don’t know if I have said this before—which reminds me, I have considered to implement search here, but I digress—but Jimmy Kimmel is a national treasure.
thoughts