Black holes, LHC, Star Wars, quantum uncertainty… if it is of general geek interest, but doesn’t fit into one of the other categories, it lands here.
I read an article today over on The Register about how AI may be entering its ‘model collapse’ phase. The basic idea is that more and more of the content that AI ingests to produce its models is, in fact, AI generated. This means that, at its best, AI’s responses will decrease in quality. This sounds very bad, and very predictable.
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I am interested in virtual and augmented reality technologies. But I have fairly bad eyes with a complicated prescription, and these technologies all cause me some (quite literal) headaches as well as nausea. That limits my interest to the theoretical: I own exactly zero such devices.
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I came across this report of a bug with iOS Messages voice transcription feature and found it to be rather interesting. Cutting to the chase: Messages will silently fail if voice transcription tries to use an ampersand (“&”) as part of a proper name.
The example that started the investigation was a message containing “Dave and Busters”. This is the name of a U.S. restaurant chain with the proper name “Dave & Busters”. The Apple transcription feature smartly applies the correct trademark name using the ampersand, but Messages silently rejects the message containing the “&” as invalid XHTML.
Oh dear, Apple: that is embarrassing. But also all-so-human.
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I have a healthy fear of high current electrical equipment. Anything over an amp and I’m looking for a way to disconnect the mains and insulate myself. I don’t mess with microwaves or the internals of old CRTs without serious trepidation.
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Short version: Telus installed an upgraded network device. First it broke our landline phone, then our inbound network connectivity thereby disconnecting my blogs. I spent hours on the phone with Telus support, and fixed one of those problems myself despite their ‘help’. The phone still didn’t work, then a really good Telus technician came and solved all the problems..
Longer version… continue reading.
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The news the last couple of days has reported somewhat confusingly on new Chinese AI company called ‘DeepSeek’. I found a fairly clear report on the BBC about what is going on. DeepSeek itself isn’t the really big news, but rather what its use of low-cost processing technology might mean to the industry.
And that implication has cause a massive stock selloff of Nvidia resulting in a 17% loss in stock price for the company- $600 billion dollars in value decrease for that one company in a single day (Monday, Jan 27). That’s the biggest single day dollar-value loss for any company in U.S. stock market history.
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Is it possible to be truly ‘private’ while still having some sort of online presence? How much sharing is too much? What can the ‘bad guys’ find out about a person online?
These are all reasonable questions to ask. I respect that some people make a conscious choice to be ‘anonymous’ online, and aim to separate certain aspects of their personality from their ‘real’ identity. There can be any number of perfectly valid reasons for having such concerns and working to retain a degree of anonymity.
I read some good thinking on this topic from Lou Plummer and from Vixiss on the Viscissitudes blog a while back. As for myself, I don’t really attempt to hide who I am behind different presences online. I’ve had chats with people over the years who seem surprised that a ‘savvy’ technical person would be so seemingly unconcerned about their personally identifiable details being available on the internet. I’ve tried to explain my thinking with varying degrees of success, and this post is another such attempt.
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I run my blogs on a little web server in my basement. This is great because it means I control exactly how my web server is configured. It is also horrible because I control exactly how my web server is configured.
In simple terms, I screwed up. Some years back I configured Fedora to perform automatic updates after updating it to the then-current Fedora Core version 34. I thought automatic updates would keep the OS current. This was not correct.
Worse yet, my server wasn’t even actually running the Fedora core version 34 kernel: it was running FC kernel version 27. Fixing this took me far longer than it should have.
But I did finally fix it. This post explains a bit of how I resolved the issue, but for those in a rush: follow the instructions in the Fedora core documentation, including the ‘optional’ guidance to upgrade the GRUB boot loader. That bit about updating GRUB is not really optional for some releases.
If you are not in a hurry and want some details on how things can go wrong, then read on! The stooges would be proud of me…
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I read Monsterlady’s post earlier this week about ‘core fandom’ and their early Pokemon experiences. I have to admit that I really have no idea what ‘core fandom’ is versus just regular fandom. But reading that post triggered a set of old memories about how Star War’s impacted me back in the day: grist for a new post!
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