Over the summer of 2022.ev, scholar.social (a node of the Fediverse that has cultivated a community of teachers, instructors, librarians, and academics of all stripes) held their biannual online conference called Summer School (Winter School, of course, is the other one). Summer/Winter School is described as an interdisciplinary online conference where denizens of the Fediverse could present their work and hold classes, predicated upon the belief that knowledge should be free and accessible to everyone. I finally heard about this year's conference before the fact and, as luck would have it I had a proposal for a …
Now that HOPE has wrapped, here's video recording of the panel that the_gibson, Tek, R¥, c0debabe, and I gave at HOPE 2020 this year, entitled Saving Hacking From Zaibatsus: A Memoir.
From time to time I carp about how generally lousy our bandwidth is out here. Verizon (our CLEC in the Bay Area) has all but given up on maintaining their infrastructure out here, aside from the bare minimum to keep the copper from turning to verdigris. They gave up on deploying fiber some years ago (local mirror) some years ago, and from the poking around I've done on their side of the fence, their general stance in the Bay Area appears to be "Get everyone on celllar so we can ignore …
A couple of days ago I gave a talk online to some members of the Zero State about my exocortex. It's a pretty informal talk done as a Hangout where I talk about some of the day to day stuff and where the project came from. I didn't have any notes and it was completely unscripted.
Disclaimer: I will attempt to be as unemotional and dispassionate as I can. I will undoubtedly fail for many reasons but I think I need to make the attempt anyway. I will make strive to comment only on what I witnessed personally, and keep what I (over-)heard to a minimum. I admit that I am an outsider and will do my best to not seem as if I am not. Nevertheless, compassion and conscience require me to speak out.
Disclaimer the second: I've probably forgotten details even though I have several pages of notes and will have to edit …
Quite possibly the holy grail of robotics is the anthroform robot, a robot which is bipedal in configuration, just like a human or other great ape. As it turns out, it's very tricky to build such a robot without it being too heavy or having power requirements that are unreasonable in the extreme (which only exacerbates the former problem). The first real success in this field was Honda's ASIMO in the year 2000.ev, which most recently uses a lithium-ion power cell that permits one hour of continuous runtime for the robot. ASIMO is also, if you've ever seen a …
