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You pretty much have to have been living inside a farday cage with a stack of dead trees for company to have not heard anything about large language models taking the tech world by storm. Without going into too much detail (because that's not what this essay is about) you take some clever statistical math, a metric fuckton of GPUs, and several petabytes of text scraped from most of the Web, mix thoroughly with a couple of million USD from investors and some Python, and bake it all in a large network of virtual machines running in someone's network (usually …
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Note: There are some affiliate links in this post. You don't have to buy stuff with them if you don't want to.
One of the things I always wanted to build was a weather station. For some odd reason they always struck me as being intrinisically neat; sensors that could tell you about what was going on outside when you couldn't be outside yourself. Many years later when I got into amateur radio, I discovered that weather stations were a thing that people would build and put on the APRS network to broadcast local weather conditions. Thing was, I never …
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Time and funds permitting, I try to go on retreat every year or two. I like driving someplace new, someplace I've never been before, and getting off the grid for a couple of days. I find that it makes it much easier to relax, rest, catch up on my reading (or sometimes television), do some writing, tinker with locks a bit, and generally be nonverbal for about a week. It's not easy these days (and won't be for a while, I suspect) but it is something that I at least attempt periodically. The AirBnB I rented had a most unusual …
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Early in October of 2022.ev, we paid a visit to an exhibit of artifacts at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco from the reign of Ramesses II, third ruler of the nineteenth dynasty of Egypt. Since covid started we haven't done a whole lot of going places so we figured that, all things in our respective risk models being equal, this would be an outing worth making the time for. As I write those post I don't know if it's still there, but the museum's page didn't 404 so it probably is. If you're in the area, it's …
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Warning: I'm going to be geeking about about science fiction to provide context for the rest of the post. Either skip to the bottom and page up a few times or close the tab. Also, the narrative is going to wander around a bit because there's a fair amount of setup.
Note: There are a couple of affiliate links.
As my handle implies I'm a sucker for time travel stories. I love the idea of seeing history as it happens and not just reading about it. I'm not that inclined to talk about fandom, so I tend to not bring …
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I'm back from Pittsburgh. I think everything's done. Somewhere in the back of my head I have things to write about and maybe some photographs to post. I don't have the brainpower to do that right now, though. Hopefully I'll get my head together soon.
Anyway, I've updated my .plan file. The usual warnings apply, you have been warned.
I also finally got around to fleshing out and posting an essay that I've had going for a year or two, which is some of the stuff I ran into while running my mom's estate. It's not my best writing, it's …
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A very common problem one has if one has enough files stacked up in one place, is whether or not those files have been copied to another system already. Have they already been copied off? To where on the other system were they copied? Sure, you can deduplicate them through various means but that tends to be kind of a sledgehammer thing to do, especially when one of the things with files is a mobile device. You could always upload the files to a provider's cloud storage, like Google Drive or iCloud or something.
But what if you don't …
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thousand meter stare - noun phrase - Watching multiple poorly designed dashboards jam packed with graphs, meters, gauges, and other barely useful metrics, day in and day out. If you imagine the thousand yard stare into multiple displays showing said dashboards, that's it.
Inspiration: Rev. Nikolai Kingsley
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Fairly serious hardware hackers and makers like to post lists of all the gear they use for whatever it is they do (mostly the big-name Youtubers and bloggers who do a lot of retrotech work and reverse engineering). That's all well and good, but I'm just a schmuck from Pittsburgh who likes to mess around with stuff. While cleaning up my office over the holidays I decided that maybe I should put one of those lists together because maybe it would help someone later. So, here is just about every tool that I have sitting on, under, around, or within …
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If you've been following the news lately, undoubtedly you've heard one way or another that massive rounds of layoffs have been taking place. I got caught in one of them.
If you're younger than I am you may never have been laid off before. That's okay.
I've been laid off a few times in my career, so here are a few things to keep in mind if this is your first goat rodeo.
I can't tell you "don't panic" because you might have very good reasons for feeling panic. I'm certainly not going to judge you for it and …
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