I wrote about the impacts of AI development a while back. One of the factors I mentioned was technology waste which touches on the concept of AI being a massively wasteful consumer of things like high-performance GPUs, disk storage, and RAM. This consumption is driving up prices for basic technology infrastructure at an alarming rate.
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I was saddened today to read of the death of Margaret Hamilton. She was one of the key programmers on the Apollo program having been responsible for much of the internal flight control system for Apollo 11. She is credited with inventing the term “Software Engineering”, and pictures of her standing next to towering stacks of printout paper from her work on Apollo are stuck in my memory banks.
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Superconductors are kind of bizarre even in their ‘normal’ state. Normally all materials have at least a little bit of resistance to electrical current: pass a signal through a wire and at some point it will lose all of its energy. Over small distances of hundreds or even thousands of kilometers the loss might be negligable, but it is still there.
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I have a lot of days, possibly the majority of my days, when I feel more negative than positive. Lyteforce has a post wherein they talk about their own experiences with these kinds of days. Their premise is that it is important to open up about these feelings and to have a receptive audience such as close friends, family, or a therapist who can be good listeners.
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I take a fair number of random photos around the house, several a week on average I’d guess. A common subject for my pictures are our animals: Irene isn’t fond of me taking pictures of her, and pictures of myself aren’t fit for human consumption, so that leaves our furry companions. And they are more photogenic than most of the subjects around here anyway.
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Fasten your seat belts as today my own personal “Wayback machine” is taking us all the way back to March of 2003. At the time the Iraq war was still only two weeks old, and Republican law makers in the U.S. had their sights set on critically important decisions.
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I came across an article on Wired during Blaugust of 2024 and thought I should write something about my own introduction to coding as a teenager. I sort of forgot to follow up until today, so here we are.
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Two years ago Wilhelm had some well-considered words to say (TAGN) regarding the state of blogging in the 2020’s. A couple of years have passed and I have considered my own thoughts on the topic. And then I came across this post over on the Dead Parrot BBS, which inspired me to assemble my thoughts into a post here.
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I was going through my notes from a year or so ago and came across a reference to this post from Axxuy on the topic of longevity as measured in blog posts. There are a lot of ways to calculate a lifespan: how many times will I shave before I expire, how many rolls of toilet paper will I use, or how many sunrises will I actually see. All of these calculations start with assumptions about how long you will live.
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Ten lions have been killed with poison in an attack on the wildlife in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation area. It is yet another incident where human factors outweigh the survival of the animals we share the planet with.
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