Getting laid off just before the holidays has given me time to think about some things that, somewhat paradoxically, don't have anything to do with looking for a new job, doing paperwork, or worrying about insurance. Specifically it's given me time to reflect upon a conversation I had some months ago about how people relate to computers has changed in the last thirty years or so.
I'd been in a discussion about computers, how technology has changed over time, and how people have changed in how they interact with technology over the same period of time. Specifically, it involved folks …
Update: 20260315 - Another proof of concept in the wild.
It seems like everybody else is either saying that LLM technology is either true artificial intelligence and we should all bow down to it (it is not, and fuck that noise) and we'd best get used to it, or that it's going to destroy everything and we'd best get used to it (it's not but some mornings it feels that way). Plenty of people with more going on than I do have litigated this to hell and back, marketing companies are doing marketing company things, and frankly I don't care to …
Yes, I know that's not what Shakespeare meant. Not like that's ever stopped anybody in marketing or people with too much money and hungry for more.
Okay. You've been inundated in what the industry is calling AI technology for months on end. I don't need to introduce it because the only way you could have avoided it is to have been in the middle of nowhere for the last year 1 or so. I would ordinarily have said "in a coma" but the way word gets around it would surprise me not a bit if folks would be talking about …
Things seem to have calmed down a little so I've had more compute cycles free to do stuff. The last week at work was uncommonly... I don't want to say "uneventful," but "less eventful." This left me a little time to work on some projects that have been hanging fire for the last month or two.
Mom's estate is still in a holding pattern, more or less. I'm still trying to get through to her tax preparer, with no success. I've also reached out to the estate attorney I'm working …
octopus mud wrestling - A situation where multiple conflicting problems and solutions come together to prevent anyone from accomplishing anything useful. Every possible step toward a solution causes two other problems that further complicate things. Sometimes this means that something can't be fixed at all and a forklift upgrade is required. Sometimes attempts to fix everything cause an outage to occur, ruining everybody's day. So called because everything is dirty, messy, confusing, constantly changing and nobody will have any idea what's actually going on until it's over.
technical heresy - noun phrase - Openly demonstrating the imagination to come up with actual uses for a platform or application that it is currently popular to hate.
It's been an interesting couple of weeks, to be sure. While lots of different things have been going on lately, none of them are related in any particularly clear or straightforward fashion, so fitting all of this stuff together is going to be a bit of a struggle. You may as well kick back with the beverage of your choice in a responsible fashion while I spin this yarn.
I suppose it all started with wardrivingin northern Virginia many years ago. In a nutshell, I had loaded Windbringer up with a rather small for the time USB GPS unit …
A common theme of science fiction in the transhumanist vein, and less commonly in applied (read: practical) transhumanist circles is the concept of having an exocortex either installed within oneself, or interfaced in some way with one's brain to augment one's intelligence. To paint a picture with a fairly broad brush, an exocortex was a system postulated by JCR Licklider in the research paper Man-Computer Symbiosis which would implement a new lobe of the human brain which was situated outside of the organism (though some components of it might be internal). An …
In the last post in this series I talked about the origins of my exocortex and a few of the things I do with it. In this post I'm going to dive a little deeper into what my exocortex does for me and how it's laid out.
My agent networks ("scenarios" in the terminology of Huginn) are collections of specialized agents which each carry out one function (like requesting a web page or logging into an XMPP server to send a message). Those agents communicate by sending events to one another; those events take the form of structured, packaged pieces …
So, after going on for a good while about software agents you're probably wondering why I have such an interest in them. I started experimenting with my own software agents in the fall of 1996 when I first started undergrad. When I went away to college I finally had an actual network connection for the first time in my life (where I grew up the only access I had was through dialup) and I wanted to abuse it. Not in the way that the rest of my classmates were but to do things I actually had an interest in. So …
