“Can you hear my voice?” was what the first woman who spoke on a phone first uttered. I got hold of this interesting photo from 1922. This lady, Rachel Smith and later as Mrs E.G. Sovereign, was the first woman who spoke on the phone. The person on the other side was the telephone inventor, Mr Alexander Graham Bell. Bell first placed his first phone wire between his home and Strawberry Hill high school in Brantford, Ontario. From the note attached to the photo, Mrs Sovereign was the bravest between the schoolteachers to have picked up the phone. Everyone else was scared. The first words that she uttered were “can you hear my voice?” rather than “hello”, per the note. What is interesting about this photo and the 100 year old paper attached to it is that there is no other reference to this event on the web. The web mentions that the first phone call between Mr Bell and Mr Watson was in 1876, and the first sentence uttered was “Mr Watson, I want to see you”. This note mentions that the word “hello” through the phone was not common at that time. This makes me believe that the event took place somewhere right after 1876. Now we take phone calls for granted. Actually, we hardly use ours phones to speak. We use it for messaging, instead. But imagine how it must have felt when someone like Ms Sovereign picked up an odd-looking device for the first time and heard a human voice through the wires. I am not sure if we will have a similar experience unless this generation will one day hear an alien voice from outer space. Or….. we may feel somewhat scared today when our phone rings and someone real human (not a spammer) says “hello”. #history #communication. People should really talk more with each others these days!
the 1945 TV of the future
Let’s see if the #tech folks can guess which year this particular table could have been created about computers. Pay close attention to the last column which includes words like “distributed computing”, “conversational order entry”, “on-line”, “automated scheduling”. #computing
I heard it repeatedly from many non-technical or young talents on how to get started with the web. If you or anyone you know is interested in how to get started with web development (you know… that coding thingy that existed and is still essential even during the #ChatGPT and #genAi era), please refer to the following site: https://lnkd.in/gwDhUHtk #techeducation #tech
1986 feels like 2024. #tech #ai #emergingtech #retrocomputing #mechanicalkeyboards
Over the weekend, I encountered my first generative AI spam message. The so-called anonymous “friend” texted me twice if I could pick up “him or her” from the nearby tire repair shop. The address, along with a shared map, was indeed for the tire store next to my house. While searching my notes to see if I had any records of the phone number used, I accidentally dialed the number but immediately hung up. Right there, I got another message from the “friend” saying, “I am sorry that I missed your call. Maybe next time.” The whole new experience took less than 5 minutes, but it made me realize that getting those emails in the early 90s about the king and the money or gold that he wanted to share with me was not so bad after all. #genai
It is the 60th anniversary of the IBM 360, the mainframe that started the enterprise computing industry. https://lnkd.in/gTaTRz-Z #enterprise #retrocomputing IBM
I am one of those techies who now believe that #generativeAI is the breakthrough of the 21st century that is kin to the discovery of computers and the Internet in the 20th century. On a more personal level, my brainstorming skills and technical development of AI solutions have fundamentally shifted in the last year because it is much easier and cheaper than ever before to have a sophisticated assistant at my disposal. I don’t treat #generativeAI as a product but as an essential tool in my work. I don’t use it to create emails or complete code, no matter how convenient that might be, because I am still old-school. Yet, it is my constant companion and essential resource for my daily work. I love it. Happy Friday.
I do not want to run out of disk space, so I ordered a ten-pack 💾
No one might find this post interesting unless they worked with computers more than forty years ago. The z80 processor that powered and continued to power vintage computers, such as CP/M-based computers, TI-calculators, arcade machines such as Pac-Man , old appliances, Roland music synthesizers, and various other vintage computers has reached its end of life. The processor was first manufactured by Zilog in 1976, and it continued to be produced to accommodate for the vintage computer hobbyists to this day. I used the Z80 processor with the Epson QX10 computer during my high school years in the early 80. Hardware substitution to the processor already exist, but the original to the standalone DIP-based form is ending based on April 15 announcement from Mouser Electronics. RIP Z80. https://lnkd.in/gXi4FkV5
Three magazines shaped the computing industry in the ’70s/’80s. Popular Electronics January 1975 cover story of the Altair 8800 that inspired geeks to create the homebrew computing club. The launch of Byte magazine in September 1975 became the magazine of the computer geek world and was later followed by PC Magazine and PC World. The premier edition of MacWorld in 1984 featuring Steve Jobs and the Macintosh. The magazine went to one to inspire designers and creative people for years to make beautiful things with the Mac. #computinghistory #publishing
Around this month in 1974, the microcomputer industry took off. Can you imagine that 50 years has passed? It all started with the Popular Electronics cover photo and accompanying article of the Altair 8800 in January 1975. That led to the homebrew computer club and the computers with the early Intel 8080 microprocessors and S100 bus. The club led to the first orders of the Altair 8800 , followed by the Imsai 8080 competitor, which is recognizable in the movie Wargames. The homebrew club led to the Apple computer, and the rest is history. (The copy of the rare magazine in the photo is my own). Members of the classic computing community seem to agree that April 1974 marks the launch of the Altair with the first commercial release. Hence, before this month is over, I would like to share a toast with all the computer enthusiasts out there that we ought to thank the month of April 1974 for all the computing machinery that we use every day. #tech #computinghistory
Over 350 indie games (Mac, Linux, Windows) are generously offered by indie game developers on itch_io for $8 as part of the “Palestinian Relief Bundle” to support the people and the children of Palestine and Gaza. Tomorrow is the last day. Please check it out. The link to the bundle is at https://lnkd.in/gt9GvKjs
I learned an important tip this week the hard way: pause and breathe when you are stuck. It is the only way to untangle haunting problems
Rest in peace, ICQ, the instant messaging app of the 90s. Its first release was 27 years ago, and it was an excellent desktop application back when we had no messaging phones. It was through an ICQ message with a previous colleague in Lebanon sometime in 2000 that he told me about a possible job opportunity at Verizon in the US. Eventually, I landed the job and moved to the US in 2001. Though I never used ICQ after that period, I got to give credit for my subsequent US career and continued work in building and integrating messaging solutions and bots. ICQ has been officially shut off on June 26.
The insurance agent allowed me to photograph her terminal screen home page. She finds the 20-year-old app extremely reliable. Her colleague of the newer generation hates it because she prefers the modern web-based app they also have. The more experienced one swears she can do everything quickly with the terminal, and the younger agent agrees. The moral of the story: #retrocomputing #terminal apps rule over modern web apps in terms of speed, efficiency, and productivity. Newer is not always better.
Privacy tip #1 If your personal source code means a lot to you, don’t store it in any remotely hosted code repository.Private repo are not private. Instead, only use git locally with a sync to your own server
Privacy tip #2: always keep a VPN running on your computer, tablet, and phone at all times. Enable the kill switch that disrupts your internet connection if your VPN is disconnected. Sacrifice some speed degradation for privacy, mainly when companies use your browsing to profile you and ultimately push more ads.
Privacy tip #3. Filling out a form, typing an email through webmail, and paying online through a browser has replaced all traditional mediums of the past. Many people think that only when you click send or press submit on the browser is your data processed electronically. Do you know that it is not true? Website designers can easily record every keystroke you make on their website before clicking submit. This also applies to web mail and social media. Knowing that may not stop you from what you are doing because our digital lives have taken over our analog lives. However, to protect your privacy, know that whatever you type can be stored from the moment you start typing. You have to take the website owner’s word that your data is safe because, frankly speaking, you have no choice if you care so much about that particular site. So, to protect your privacy, assume that whatever you don’t want to say, don’t type it in the first place inside your browser. You never know if what you deleted as you typed has not been stored somewhere without your knowledge.
Privacy tip #4: Malicious USB or lightning cables you use to charge your phone or connect to your computer can spy on you. Don’t assume that any cable you get for a steep discount, especially those you find or buy at odd places, is safe. Electronic cables have electronic chips that can be recreated to do many more bad things than you think cable does. Always know where you got your cables, and don’t just plug in any cable unless you know its source. If a cable acts or looks weird or asks you to activate something, don’t oblige and remove it immediately.
Privacy tip #5: Microphones: Some apps working in the background listen even when you are not talking. Know which apps have access to your phone microphone through the settings. Now you know why you see ads for something that you swore you only spoke about the other day with a friend in person. The social media app in question may not have access to the microphone, but that doesn’t mean that the company behind the app is not using other apps that it owns with the microphone turned on. It may be painful to turn off access to the microphone for apps that you use to send and receive phone calls, but at least now you know why some apps offer you a free service in return for collecting far more data through you. For desktops, it is best to keep the microphone on mute when you are not talking or are away.
Privacy tip #6. If you are not tech-savvy, don’t let anyone sell you the word “encryption” or “encrypted” without fully understanding what it means. Unless you know that only you have the key to whatever encrypted data you own, there is a possibility that someone else has the key. Hence, your data is no longer private. Some companies that claim to protect your data have yielded to giving their decryption keys. Some companies had their encrypted data stolen because of malicious attacks that stole decryption keys.Moreover, some people failed to recall encryption keys and lost valuable data, including crypto. So, anytime you encounter something related to encryption, learn precisely what it means and who owns the keys to the decryption. Hopefully, the owner is you and only you.
Final and ultimate privacy tip #7 AI: Once upon a time, we mostly used search engines to get information. The search output cannot lie. We see exactly what the web has as information about us. If something is wrong, we can flag the search results to the search provider so that they delete the information from the search index. Then, we can flag the content with our information to the site owner and request that our data be deleted. It doesn’t always work this way, but at least we had some control over our data on the web. With the recent transformation towards everything we search in AI LLM proprietary data with aggregated information based on previously scraped from the web without anyone’s permission, there is hardly any way to control what data is being shared by the renewed search engine providers on the web. Personal data leakage has become the norm rather than the exception on the web. What AI engineers refer to as a chatbot “hallucinating” is the irresponsible way of saying, “It is not the bot owner’s fault, but the fault of what is on the web, and we cannot change the logic of what we created to clean the web from what is right and what is wrong.” Hence, whatever personal data exists on the web about us is stored forever in AI models, online data archives, and copies and copies of web data that are impossible to track down. With more and more generations publishing personal and sharing content on the web, especially on social media, and more companies/governments pushing for more digitization of our identities and our lives in general, there will always be more threats against personal privacy and even lesser guarantees that our digital footprints are secured. My seventh and final privacy tip is as follows. Know that everything you do on the web is stored on the web forever. Every photo, video, document, code, audio, keystroke, text, and sensory information is stored somewhere, sometimes with your explicit consent because you desperately want to use the digital product due to the fear of missing out, sometimes with your implicit consent since you did not read the terms of service, and sometimes without your permission at all. Be wary of what you do on the web. Limit your exposure when you can. Educate yourself, your family, friends, and neighbors about what you learned against human privacy. Hopefully, through self-awareness, we can take back ownership of our digital data and be the ones who do not let others have complete control of our digital lives.
LLMs are great, but they completely sucked the fun of coding. For me, it is the same thing as switching from a badass fuel-powered, oil-leaking stick-shift BMW to a battery-powered, silent, no-thrill car with a tablet and no actual driving except keeping your hands on the steering wheel because you must. With genAI, coding is no longer a science but a mere trial and error in English linguistics where all you are required to do is replace a noun or an adjective in a prompt and beg for the LLM to answer you correctly. I work in AI, but I am so disgusted by LLMs and by anything that does not challenge you mentally or does not let you use your natural human brain appropriately.
It seems we are heading to a closed web rather than an open one as tech companies compete with one another on AI. I can hardly see any content without being required to sign in. For example, my family shares TikTok or Instagram videos with me, but I cannot view them unless I sign in to such platforms. I tried a YouTube link just now and received a message that I have to sign to confirm that I am not a bot to “protect our community” (our <- means the tech giant). I won’t be surprised if I won’t be able to access an open-source GitHub repo in the future unless I sign in. Reading tweets is already a distant past since I no longer wish to sign in to social media platforms. Even WhatsApp sent me a recommendation to share my email, not just my phone number. Imagine you are forced to sign in to Wikipedia to read something there. The irony is that much of the LLM data was built on large companies grabbing anything they can find online, including content from their competitors. Now that they have done that, they probably realized that there is a competing advantage between what they offer versus what their competitor offers. Hence, it is only wiser to lock any public access. Suppose they force people to sign in, especially to those platforms that were once accessible to anyone without signing in. In that case, they will declare that they are doing it to protect the community against “bots,” which, funny, are the ones that created such bots in the first place. Moreover, more sites requiring more people to sign in means more people using the same passwords on different platforms, which would lead to even more security hacks. Seriously, the tech giants’ actions against each other are not protecting the global community but instead protecting themselves from one another.
In the book-to-read-at-the-beach-for-ultra-computer-geeks like me, a compilation of essays from the 1980s discusses the future of computing. The articles correctly predicted generative AI, virtual reality, and computers taking over our lives. This excellent Omni Book of Computers and Robots (1981) authors include Ted Nelson, Arthur Clarke, Marvin Minsky, and many more. I highly recommend it. A downloadable pdf is available at https://lnkd.in/gXdi_6xC
One of the last remaining twentieth-century technologies on the streets is nonfunctional phone booths. For some reason, they are kept installed but terminated. These are some of the few bulky devices we place next to our ears that precede the bulkier mobile phones. I take a photo of them each time I encounter one for nostalgia’s sake. It’s funny how people on the streets look at me when I do this.
I don’t know if anyone noticed that no one is speaking about the recent massive technology failures, namely the Crowdstrike worldwide tech failures. The issue faded away in the public eye so quickly. Maybe corporate lawsuits are being brewed behind the scenes, but the public eye has already moved to look elsewhere. It was the same when the news flooded about massive financial market downturns a few weeks ago. It is now all old news. One exception is that Boeing’s massive failures are still not easily forgotten because they remain in the news. Yet, no one will stop flying Boeing (not sure we always have options), just as no corporation will stop using Crowdstrike because no one wants the hassle of changing. Welcome to the same old world where people are quickly moving on past corporate failures because the media has already moved on to the next issue. If such behaviors continue repeating like that, we will continue to give free rein to corporate recklessness and lack of accountability. I am sure if these happened in countries that the US considers opponents of human rights, companies of such countries would cease to exist because massive failures are intolerable. And that is not a bad thing!
Here is some free advice: If you didn’t know how to code before the recent version of AI existed, try to learn how to code without AI. If you know how to code, don’t leave behind everything you learned, and don’t put all your hands, feet, body, and soul in AI, hoping you can sit back, relax, and let it do the work. It won’t, plus you will become so lazy and technically useless when complex problems arise for those designated to solve challenging problems. Instead, blend your skills with AI skills. Only use AI when the issues are not easily solvable without AI. Be the yin and the yang with AI, and both of you together will get the problems solved.
A simple thought: when AI fails you, your human intellect is your best way forward. Spend less time prompting LLMs. Instead, spend more time writing, coding, reflecting, and, more importantly, thinking! What uniquely identifies us is our minds and not the size of whatever human part or tool we have.
I want to emphasize the difference between “keep looking for a solution” and “keep trying for a solution.” On the surface, both seem similar, but I believe they are worlds apart. The “looking” for a solution is someone checking for an answer on the web that matches the problem. The “trying” is implementing different approaches to solve the problem. If we only “look” and don’t “try,” we won’t learn forward to the next issue. Instead, we become accustomed to only looking at the same sources as more problems arise. However, the “trying” is tenser, more brainstorming, and allows for solid recollection of different approaches to future problem-solving. So the next time you need a solution, don’t LOOK for the answer with GPT since no one will be leading anything. TRY instead to solve it through strategy, exploration, and code.
It’s sad to see rare artifacts from computing history sold in an auction. The items were originally part of Paul Allen’s Living Computer Museum in Seattle, previously open to the public for many years. After his recent passing, his family is selling them all away, the proceeds will vanish into trusts, and the museum is permanently closed. Thankfully, the Computer History Museum in California still exists https://lnkd.in/gkkDJGg2
#seattle folks, visit the Interim Computer Museum on 3100 Airport Way S tomorrow Oct 6. You will see and use lots of cool vintage computers including smart hacked machines. There is no cost to entry. It is all run by volunteers. Details at https://icm.museum/
Who remembers the IBM PC from the 80s, the 5.25 floppy, and dos 2.11. #retrocomputing rocks
What a beautiful world when technology and media were best friends. The photo below is from Macworld magazine’s 1984 premier edition. The team on the left is the magazine staff, and the team on the right is the Macintosh team led by Steve Jobs. The photo, the headline, and all those faces should remind us that the tech world should not be centered around robotics, automation, and artificial products but around human relationships.
More than 15 years ago, I was at a games place with my kids when they were kids. They had just collected two token slips with single-digit numbers. Let’s say maybe 5 and 7. A young adult was at the toy booth. She looked at the numbers, picked up the calculator, and added 5+7=12. Then, she gave the kids something worth a quarter of a dollar. I should have been shocked about the ROI of taking my kids to that place, but what surprised me was using a calculator to add two single-digit numbers. She had no idea how to count or was too lazy to make a mental effort because the calculator is more intelligent since it generates the numbers by selecting the numbers to add. Fast forward to today. I think those “computer engineers” who use generative AI to let it code for them are acting the same way as that calculator lady. The less effort they make mentally, the more challenging it is to build on what is being generated. More importantly, coding is a mental capability, and the brain needs to be constantly stimulated, even the typing fingers. Not coding does not mean that the brain can think about more challenging problems. The mental laziness will carry over and become even worse. If someone needs generative AI to write code because they cannot write it themselves, they cannot call themselves programmers. Maybe they should label themselves “human computers,” just as the ones who used a microscope and a calculator to compute numbers were first called in the 1930s.
I acquired a vintage 1968 R203 triple flip flop for the famous PDP 8 minicomputers of the 1970s. Each flip-flop stores 1 bit of information. I don’t know if my computer class students would care to understand how bits were stored 50 years ago since I am not grading them about the past, but I will always do everything I can to showcase parts of computer history. Unlike what search engines tell you, PDP8 flip flops are not part of the shoe-wear category. #tech #computerhistory
First U.S. PhD in computer science: Mary Kenneth Keller (1965, University of Wisconsin) https://lnkd.in/gv2v87fX (from https://lnkd.in/gjqzejMp).
In the 30s, a “computer” was defined as someone who computes. This is an original book titled “Smith’s Computer,” published in 1937. It contained all sorts of computing tables for dairy farmers, ice cream manufacturing, live stock, and all sorts of business-related data. The book itself has proper indexing tabs (think Python Pandas) :), how to guide (think code repo’s README file), and even versioning (think releases). The first edition of the computer was in 1906. That is 119 years ago! The publishers were so confident with their data by saying “sold under a positive guarantee to give satisfaction or money refunded.” This is the 100 years old equivalent of a portable computer! Happy computing!
note: I am in (1)
In today’s age of AI, more food and beverage companies will get creative with manufacturing what we eat and drink. The government, as usual, is never serious about health. Otherwise, fast food and corn-based everything would cease to exist. As long as the non-GMO and organic labeling organizations are not tainted with for-profit goals, we should be much more literate and careful about what we eat and drink.
The Unix Philosophy is more important today than ever before:
This book is a masterpiece. If you are contemplating what to read during your idle time, I highly recommend the uncut edition of Robert Heinlein (1961), Stranger In A Strange Land. It is one of the most popular science fiction books ever published. I only discovered Heinlen’s work recently, and, halfway through this book, it is the best one that I have read this year.
It was 2015. I had turned 40 a year before and had just spent two years far away from tech as a lean Six Sigma black belt. My past employer, Verizon, launched their first hackathon within the company. Anyone with an idea was welcome to join, and other members were welcome to join one’s team. I was hesitant at first to join because I was afraid of the embarrassment if colleagues half my age (and half my responsibilities being 40 years old) could come up with a project and spend the required 48 hours to come up with a proof of concept, a working demo, or a presentation. Sitting in my cube, pondering about joining the hackathon, I thought, “What the hell, let me join and see what happens.” I thought about the real-life problem I was facing as a parent. How can I get my kids to spend less time on the Internet? Of course, I was not the only one who had the problem. When I submitted the proposed idea for the hackathon, two colleagues at Verizon asked me to join my hackathon team. Once the hackathon event started, we had 48 hours to do something. Our answer to the hackathon challenge was WizKids, a custom software running on a Raspberry Pi hooked to the Internet router that acts as a proxy server and a parent’s portal. Parents will create math problems via the portal. Whenever our kids attempt to access the Internet, WizKids will lock up their Internet access and prompt them to solve a math or science problem. The more problems they solve, the more time WizKids will allow them to use the Internet. WizKids then went on to receive the top prize award at the first hackathon! What was even more rewarding to me personally is that my fear of not competing because of my age is absolute nonsense. Entrepreneurship can happen at any age. I am close to 50 now, and my energy and passion continue strong, even though I may look older now than the photo below. If you are young, younger than me, old, or older than me, and have an idea, don’t hesitate. Go for it!
I started my first professional job as a computer technician in 1996. From then on, I progressed through the ranks at various companies I worked for until becoming a vice president in IT up to 2023. This year has been an important milestone in my career because it is the year that I decided that I no longer wanted my technology ideas or projects to be controlled by those that I work for. Instead, I wanted to be influenced and influence those who appreciate my skills and share my passion. I also wanted it to be less about managing and more about selflessly guiding others in technology and innovation. With that, 2023 has been a gigantic shift in how I approach projects and problems requiring technology solutions, especially in AI. As I carved my new path, I learned new ways of personal discipline, self-motivation, and problem-solving. I have let go of all the corporate titles and chose my professional title as “principal AI consultant” because it is what I do and will be doing for the foreseeable future. Some might think it is a demotion from a VP to an individual contributor. It is not! It is the most valuable promotion and the proudest title that I carry. The title carries over not just the last 20 years of my professional experience but goes way back to my childhood when I first picked an Atari at the age of seven and started helping others with computers ever since. I thank all my family, first and foremost, my customers, mentees, my network of friends, for a great 2023. I look forward to an amazing 2024.
I was caught reading the 1300+ pages of the Encyclopedia of Computer Science page by page. I can’t get enough computer knowledge. : 💾
All these technical skills, problem-solving, and not missing a beat with emerging technologies that I have accumulated, leveraged, and kept myself ahead throughout the past decades are paying off. The reward has never been materialistic nor monetary for me, but rather mental, happiness, and energy to innovate and tackle everyday problems through design, analysis, code, and results. I am focusing on all #AI and #genai stuff. If you know me, you recall that I was passionate about #ai over a decade ago, and even more, if you include everything I was obsessed with in computers. The pleasure that I get in problem-solving, whether it is through an old-school way or a modern-day, is equally the same. The critical part is always to focus and constantly break down the problem on paper or in note-taking. Feed your human neurons with a healthy diet, and try to (emphasis on try) avoid beating yourself too much when you screw up. Nothing is magic. Common sense does wonders! #mentorship #tech INFOCOM AI
Tribute to #retrocomputing when we used green screens! (Many of us still do..) INFOCOMET
It took me 20 years out of 40+ years with computers to realize that I am more happy being a consultant and subject matter expert than being hands-off. The gloves are off. Always bare my hands on the wires! Zzzzzz #mentalhappiness #middleagemindset
It’s April, and Uncle Sam is all around, reminding us that it is time to pay the taxes. A lot of focus has been on e-filing, but one point gets overlooked is accounting software to track one’s expenses throughout the year. Whether it is for the home or business, every other day, some new app comes up and promises to make your life easier by automatically connecting to your bank account, categorizing your spending, and maybe (if you paid extra) it might even do that taxes for you. I wouldn’t be surprised if people are already uploading their financials on ChatGPT and are attempting to find refunds. Even though I am all with automation and #genai stuff, I make it a habit to do it the organic way: double-entry accounting, reconciliation of transactions, and tracking of investments. I have been using the open-source app GnuCash, licensed under the GNU GPL license. I keep the data throughout the years on my storage, encrypted and adequately backed up. I avoid uploading my banking data to cloud solutions no matter what. I then work on my taxes through an e-filing process on my own. I have no interest in the advertisement of professional tax companies that promise you refunds. I never did. It takes a considerable effort to learn the tax rules, especially the worksheets that ask you to add two values here, multiply one value by another there, and then sum everything and divide with another … (sigh). It is a learning experience that is prone to mistakes but improves as time passes. If you are a person like me who prefers to handle things on my own, do check gnucash.org
I have been frustrated with the degraded internet quality in our two-story house. Initially, I focused on everything being wireless with a router connected to a one-g fiber to the home. Some devices would pick a 2.4 GHz WiFi, while others would connect to a 5 GHz. I have a mini data center in my house - multiple devices doing their stuff. So, over a couple of weeks, I turned the house’s network upside down. I installed two-gigabit switches, two routers-turned-access points, one dedicated router connected to the ONT, an Ethernet connection, and Ethernet cabling for dedicated devices throughout the house. I then configured dedicated local IPs for the devices. Then, I added a UPS for the critical equipment and surge protectors for everything. I even changed one of the breakers. Now I have the internet in the house under full control. #geekiness
I was reviewing my old stuff and found this note I wrote one day while waiting for a job offer from a past employer: what seemed endless, even if it was for a brief moment, was waiting for a job opportunity. It was more like, “How much will they (the employer) value my prospects?” or “Am I valuable to them?” The employer is holding the money at that moment and will call the shots just like a card dealer at a casino. They have thousands of resumes at their disposal. Through a mix of careful calculations, financial spreadsheets, and management feedback, they will make their selections. The receiving end, the candidates, are waiting. There may be several offers at the table or possibly none at all, but they must wait, regardless. Waiting can lead to increased anxiety, panic, and stress. We are humans, not machines, after all. Then, after the selection process is complete and the candidate is matched, another form of anxiety starts to take shape: acceptance, competition, and survival in the new workplace. This is followed by dissatisfaction, misalignment, betrayal, incompetence, and inability to adapt to the new environment and/or lead to success, career breakthroughs, and massive return on investment for both the employer and the employee. Then, the cycle repeats itself time after time. Is it all worth it?
During my Lean Six Sigma Black Belt days, I showed my mentor how to develop even better data analysis using Python and machine learning; he said something like, “I don’t care. Do it using Minitab”. At another time, I showed management and staff how to use AI for medical Q&A and voice digital assistants and build an innovative hub. I was told that the priority is securing the wifi, not the innovation. At another incident years back, I suggested an innovation playground and was told to find another job. The moral of all this is that if you believe in yourself and management doesn’t believe in you, don’t just stand there. If they don’t get you, someone will; if they don’t, then do it yourself. Believe in yourself.
I started INFOCOMET (formerly INFOCOM AI) a year ago. It was the best decision I made in my professional career. All the love and passion for code and computers that have often caused more pain than happiness throughout my corporate life are now deeper, stronger, and more powerful in me than ever before. I am able to be my true self, share my passion with others, and work with NO corporate bureaucracy over my head.
My self-grading first-year startup report:- bootstrap my way through the tech stack. Don’t buy services that you do not need at first, such as cloud services, software, or paid services for things that you can do. Grade: B- organize organize organize: take meeting notes (and tag the notes), keep a daily log of what you are doing, don’t lose it, secure it, and make it searchable for you only. Grade: B+. (Don’t go for an A because that time spent will take away from the core task - the work itself)- work-life balance, personal health, rest, exercise, and social life: Grade: C- but my number one supporter, my wife, is my lifeline and is understanding. - love the passion of the work: the code, the AI, the machines, and everything with computers: Grade A+- complete dedication to customer needs, tackling the issues, and solving problems they have: still being graded.
1st self-owned business anniversary. Exactly one year ago, May 11, 2023. I gave up my role as VP, an executive, and a corporate employee to start my own business, INFOCOM AI . The words INFOCOM AI stands for _ Information _ Communication * Artificial Intelligence. The four words that I focus my solutions on 24/7 and is what I always seek to deliver. The past year was challenging because starting from scratch is never easy. There is even a name for it: “the cold start problem.” With the strong support of my wife, Mayssaloun Tay- She/Her , I persisted, and I am happy with where I am right now. I gained the joy back with code I somewhat lost when I moved to the corporate world twenty-two years ago. That’s because I was always held back in what I could do because of management politics. I was constantly reminded to do my job as a manager and not to be hands-on. The job made it this way, even if they didn’t always explicitly say it. Not anymore. I love how I code, and I love everything about computers. That is who I am and how I am continuing as a 50-year-old geek in a couple of months.
My honest answers if I were to be hypothetically interviewed for a job, what is your race: human, not robot what is your gender: computer person what is your preferred programming language: it depends on the use casewhere did you work in recent years before your recent job: in companies that frankly were too obsessed with hierarchy and money rather than doing something beneficialwhat is your preferred ideal job? I love what I do todayHow would you help others? Sharing love for computers and hoping it can be infectious What do you think of generative AI? Overhyped. Many things can be done and have been done without it. It is helpful in some cases, but if you get too dependent on it, you will get locked up in the dungeons of the big companies that own the models. A follow-up to the previous question: What can then be done? Every engineer should learn the bare metal of computers before claiming to be an expert. Companies should embrace AI but should not be blindsided by the fact that everything must be done with AI. Do you think AI will replace humans? The famous sci-fi author Isaac Asimov quoted a dictum about computers and AI in the 80s regarding human teachers being replaced by machines: “Any teacher who a machine can replace should be!” I will generalize it by saying that if a machine can replace a skill, it should be replaced because the person owning that skill should always differentiate themselves and be more valuable than the machines. If humans keep improving their skills, then they will never be replaced. Hence, human education always matters! Where do you see yourself in the next future? Freedom of mind is the most important asset for me. I made the mistake most of my life of working for others who controlled me and rejected my code because it did not benefit their $$$ mindset. Others pushed me put out because I disrupted their statusquo. I will always help and work to help others, but I will never trade my freedom for those that only think about money.
My wife and I are in Mexico on a long-overdue vacation. I promised myself that I would not think about tech while I was there, so I didn’t even bring my computer(s) with me. Instead, I got a computer-related book and a notebook to write about computers. So, it is not precisely tech gadgets, right? Thankfully, my wife understands me after 30 years together. While staring at the seafront with a brain continuously thinking about computers, it got me thinking that a detox from computers is not 100% possible. Once you are in, you are in. I love the experience of not having a computer keyboard right now, except that my fingers are wondering where the mechanical keyboard is right now, and I am also I’m typing right now using my phone. Nevertheless, we, geeks or not geeks, need a break from time to time
My first personal computer was the Commodore Vic20, which I bought in 1984. Forty years later, my last computer is once again a Vic20.
Today is Labor Day in the US. Labor Day in other parts of the world falls under a different day. Nevertheless, such a day is supposedly a celebration of every person working their ass off to make a living, raising a family, and enjoying life during or after a hard day of work. Immigrants, blue collar, collar, locals, young, old, mom, dad, son, daughter, grandfather, grandmother, and any worker is to be celebrated. Supposedly, the one that earns money through labor work is the one to be celebrated. Yet, we are heading into an era of AI and automation that is generating, rightfully or wrongfully, massive layoffs. Those without jobs on this labor day are indeed not celebrating. They are desperately trying to find employment. I would not celebrate Labor Day when we are not benefiting society during the age of AI. I would encourage everyone who earns money not to do nothing on this Labor Day but rather, in any way possible, help those who are unemployed.
My 50th birthday coincided with disturbing events in my beloved country, Lebanon. On a positive note, I met the founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari 50 years ago. It is with Atari that my computer career first began at the age of six. The first thing that I said to Mr Nolan was thank you for what you invented, which shaped my life forever. I then got my 50-year Atari signed by him. it will be framed and hung in my home office as a reminder of such a beautiful invention.
Framed the two critical events in computer history: Allan Bushnell-signed 50yr Atari, the period where video games rocked the world, and, right before it, the Homebrew Computer Club was the place that inspired legendary geeks, namely Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to build the Apple I, hackers shared their personal computer hobbies, and Bill Gates famously broadcasting letter demanding everyone to stop pirating Altair BASIC by Microsoft.
A 3-minute casual, anonymous game is a sweet spot for me between playing chess for the sole pleasure of the game and allowing me to focus and think deeply about the project at hand. I don’t know who I am against, and the other does not know about me either. The game is timed as a 3-minute blitz game, which means that it ends either with a checkmate or the clock running down for the opponent. I used to play 1-minute games for fun, but 3-minute are my favorite. With anonymous mode, the game is at its raw best. When stuck in an AI or coding project, I switch to chess mode. It is the best way for me to solve problems.
A perfect example of when someone tries to be a smartass and loses. I was playing a chess game anonymously against an anonymous person. I had the black pieces and the other had the white pieces. I was losing and ended up solely with a king and no other pieces. The opponent had a queen and some pawns and could have checkmated me. Instead, that person decided to turn the pawns into four queens. That is a 36 to 0 score advantage against me. Even when losing, I don’t stop until it is a checkmate. What then happens next? Power does not necessarily turn into a win. With the opponent turning the pawns into four powerful queens, I was left with only the king, forcing a stalemate in the game because I strategically positioned the king so I could not move the king while not under threat (or check). By chess rules, this ended with a draw. Ouch to the opponent…. Lesson learned: never give up in the middle of a game. The power of the mind can defeat those with the upper hand even when under losing conditions. Forcing a draw against a sure win is as mentally rewarding as a win, if not more.
I saw this sign at a nearby coffee shop, and it reflects how I feel about my INFOCOM AI business. The idea of working for someone else is no longer what I do, and I will not do it. I deliver, and I give all the love in what I do. I always share and am never selfish; when I am wrong, I am wrong. I do not make up stuff or hide behind LLMs. What I do is genuine. I am proud of what I do.
Beautiful words found in a Leuchtturm1917 journal: “writing by hand is thinking on paper. Thoughts grow into words, sentences and pictures. Memories become stories. Ideas are transformed into projects. Notes inspire insight. We write and understand, learn, see and think - with the hand.
I will teach this January at Clark College what I consider a sexy course for geeks like me: computer organization and assembly language. Assembly language is the closest to the bare metal of machine code language that computers understand.
I will give my current students at Clark College a midterm in digital logic in electronic circuits. It is the first time that I am on the other side of the classroom tables. 🤣 feels different.
I work with computers at two extremes. On the minor side, I teach college students the hardcore logic of computers—the bare-bones logic design of circuits, including NAND gates and flip-flops. On the major side, I deeply code AI-related solutions. In between, I keep myself preoccupied with computer stuff, systems thinking, and deep thinking - all computer-related. Bits and bytes a day, all day, and every day keep me happily achieving everyday. INFOCOMET
I taught the following course at @clark college this semester: ENGR 250 - Digital logic design, testing and implementation, including Boolean Algebra, Karnaugh map and design of logic circuits to solve practical problems using sequential/combinational/synchronous/asynchronous circuits, application of standard SSI/MSI/LSI logic systems, design/test/implement development cycle and Verilog/ Hardware Description Language (HDL). For the upcoming semester, I plan to teach ENGR 270 - Digital Systems and Microprocessors: continuation of the Digital Design sequence. Covering synchronous/asynchronous state machines, shift registers, arithmetic circuits and devices, microprocessor internal and system architecture, design and subsystem interfacing, assembly language, and programmable logic devices, design for test, documentation standards, and use of computer-based tools. The course brochure is https://lnkd.in/geEfgdjH. If you know of college students in the Portland / Washington metroplex who wish to get super geeky, they should enroll in Clark and join the learning community. I want to thank Izad Khormaee for all the material he made available for the classes and made it easy to get on the instructing part without letting it disrupt my professional priorities.
Today is the final exam for my digital logic design students at Clark College. What’s cool about being a teacher is that you can incorporate your passion into the course material. So, part of the final exam requires the students to design the electronic schematic of the Atari joystick - the handle for movement and the fire button 🕹️. I wrote up the problem statement that you are a co-founder of the Clark-Ari gaming company, and you are designing the first gaming joystick:)
After my trip to the dentist (previous post), I stopped at the Bank to create a savings account with a (surprise) 0.01% interest for my business. The bank lady said, “I am a small business expert; let me help get the most out of your account.” The conversation went like this. She said, “You should take advantage of our high-reward credit card.” I said that I didn’t want credit cards and I only use debit cards. I have one credit (Apple card) for travel, and that is it. That killed the mood. She said you get a cashback reward for every dollar spent. I said I don’t value any rewards with spending. I prefer to be less motivated to spend and spend only what I know I have (debit), not what I don’t have (credit). She then said you should take advantage of our line of credit. Don’t you want to lease a car or get money to make money? I said I don’t have debt and prefer to pay off things first. She said that others usually take money and pay interest to make money. I said I don’t do that. I prefer to build on what I have. The whole conversation was weird, but it happened while she finalized my 0% savings account. She was eager to have me out of the office after completing the paperwork. That did not take long.
I think AI has turned social media into antisocial media. Here is why
Social media providers are promising and pushing more generative AI content on their platforms. The providers’ AI-generated content will take precedence over human-generated content because the providers are convinced that their creations are much more attractive than those by humans. This will be particularly noticeable on platforms that are losing to the popular human-generated content on TikTok today.
The ability for a natural person to sign onto the platforms is not as easy as before, such as solving a puzzle or matching photos, because the platforms need to prove that you are a human. That is not bad, but I don’t think it was intended for that purpose. Platforms should prioritize protecting consumer accounts from hacks instead of protecting their content from hacks. Governments should penalize companies that were hacked rather than defend them since such companies failed to prioritize security and privacy over profit. Also, such platforms reject AI bots from signing up, but they will push more of their own AI bots onto their platforms and maybe others.
More and more digital products, mainly social media, are embracing AI over building tools that bring more human interactions. I can’t think of any recent viral product that improved the way humans communicate with each other. If you can think of one, please share.
With generative AI that technically steals human-generated content to fuel its models with data and people spending more time interacting with bots, I see us heading to a future where less human-generated content and less human-to-human communication will take place. How often do you see people today chatting rather than sharing content?
What I like right now is to sit in a coffee shop in a Spanish or Italian town and talk with those around me, or, even better, borrow the DeLorean Time Machine car from the Back to the Future movie and head to a 1970s Beirut coffee shop.
Close to thirty years ago, at my first office job, an old man regularly cleaned the place. He would bring him a 3M spray, ask me to pause from working for a second and clean my computer keyboard. Then, he would wipe the desk and the screen. He always had a smile on his face, which a young adult like me would find reassuring, no matter what the problem was. To me, he looked happy, satisfied, and content. As for my 20 or so-year-old version, I was not pleased with anything except my love for my wife, my girlfriend at the time, and my passion for computers. There is always something to get angry at while coding; the irony is that you can’t code well when angry. Seeing an approving smile can turn technical problems into elegant solutions. Since then, whether working in an office or my home office, I have always remembered that smile while regularly cleaning my workplace before I do any work.
It was 1997. I walked around the American University of Beirut, giving Linux CDs away, and I could not convince them to use them. Hardly anyone had a clue what they were. My fellow students at the time were accustomed to Unix mainframes on campus and Windows machines at home. They viewed computers from a coding angle and not from a hacking angle. To this day, I still have trouble convincing many to use Linux, even though Linux machines are running on most computers worldwide.
When I was a 12-year-old, computer-passionate kid fleeing Beirut to my our village in the South of Lebanon in 1986, my grandfather once took me with him to a nearby city to get some farming supplies. There, I saw an Arabic-edition computer magazine called Al-Computer & Electronics. I later came to find out that it was the first Arab-based magazine in the region. I became obsessed with the magazine because it was my only window to the developments in the computer world. There was neither the Internet nor BBS or anything that tells you what was going on with computers at the time. The Vic-20 home computer that I had was not listed in the magazine because the magazine was geared to personal computers, except at times when the magazine included program listings for the Commodore 64, which I dreamed of having. I did not even know anyone that I could talk to or listen to about any of the machines. None of my soccer buddies knew anything about computers. So it was only me and this magazine that was affordable for me to buy and dream of those magnificent machines. Much of the words in the magazine did not make sense to me. It was looking at the pictures of computers that gave me the most pleasure. This magazine has been out of print for a long time. A few years ago, I contacted someone from the publishing house about acquiring any digital copies of this magazine, and I was told that there was some corrupt work at their office where someone took the entire archive and no copies exist. Only copies of this magazine are sold on eBay, and one can find some copies at thrift book stores in Lebanon if they still exist. Luckily for me, I managed to acquire the first edition of the magazine that is dated March 1984.
Twenty-five years ago, I quit 2 packs per day smoking because I hated the urge of being controlled by a cigarette. Plain yogurt saved the day. In the middle of 2024, I quit alcohol for good due to its potential impact on my health. I was only a casual drinker, but I am now fifty. My father passed away from liver cancer. Though correlation is not necessarily causation, I intend to stick to a healthier lifestyle, though it can be less joyful than when you have some spirit in your body. Quitting drinking cold turkey was not easy for me, not because of the drink itself, but because it was socially awkward around friends. Right before 2025, I quit red meat after feeling disgusted from watching a documentary on how American mega farms treat their cattle. Quitting red meat raised eyebrows, especially from my kids, who thought I had gone insane given my reputation for eating just about anything. I had to keep a solid stance on the subject with my kids, who think I am either bluffing or that I will succumb the moment I see a fatty-delicious steak on a grill. My 2025 resolution is to say boringly healthy. What is your 2025 resolution? #2025
]]>Vivaldi’s Winter sonnet in his masterpiece Four Season has an Allegro piece that is translated as “we tread the icy path slowly and cautiously, for fear of tripping and falling. Then turn abruptly, slip, crash on the ground, and, rising, hasten on across the ice lest it cracks up.” We are in AI winter right now. We reached a peak in machine learning algorithms, and the last significant result as the BFG (think game Doom) at the top is ChatGpt snowballing across all industries. People panic. Teenagers love it for their school assignments. VCs are getting their money’s worth. Engineers are in fear for their jobs. Philosophers are questioning morality and humanity. The world is turning upside down - a “stranger thing,” indeed. But no fear. If you keep Vivaldi’s music in repeat more, you will return to the Spring sonnet with its Allegro translation: “The birds celebrate her return with festive song, and the breezes softly caress murmuring streams.” The cycle repeats itself, and the world rebalances itself. Have no fear of ChatGPT. It might overpromise what Watson or other AI before it promised. It might look like it’s acting God right now, but the hype will eventually settle down, hopefully, once the winter is over. #chatgpt #technology #artificialintelligence (note: Four Seasons sonnets translation are taken from wiki)
The first reported computer bug dates back to the early 1900s when Charles Babbage son, Henry Prevost Babbage, carried his father’s work on the Analytical Engine. He made the machine calculate the value of pi to 20 decimal points. Unfortunately, the calculations were later found to contain errors. That was the earliest documented computer bug officially recorded. Well… computer bugs are always with us, some are our own doing, and some are by others; but we then exasperatingly fix them. If you happen to be checking my INFOCOM AI homepage (https://infocom.ai) and noticed it is looking weird, please note that I am squashing a bug at this point. Cheers. #work #startup
“Make Something Beautiful” - a free book released last April 2023 by Steve Jobs Archives that includes photos and speeches by the legendary man himself. Online access: https://lnkd.in/eee-V8dx or via Apple Books https://lnkd.in/eTh8GVE9 #tech #design
Before computers started talking and kids stopped talking while texting, did you know that there were 3 to 5 years old kids talking and talking back to typewriters in the 60s? They learned to type while the typewriter voiced each key back to them. Those kids, per the article below, went ahead and published their weekly newspapers: the 3yr old kids gathered the news, the 4yr old wrote the stories, and the 5yr old did the editing and layout. Pretty cool for #information and #communication between machines and children as early as the 60s. #vintageAI #retrocomputing #education #infocomai The article is from Creative Computing magazine, dated August 1983.
#ai dates back to the 50s. From AT&T archives, see the video of Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, demonstrating machine learning intelligence with a magnetic mouse, controlled by electric circuit, and learning its away through a maze. #infocom #tech #informationtheory
It is a family tv night in the 80s….. and it is time for one of those tv shows. Of course, it is about #chatgpt. … here is what the experience could have been. The video is produce by Jo Luijten (https://www.joluijten.com - amazing talent!)
The general population was in shock when computers first demonstrated their first “intelligence” as early as the 40s in whatever output it was programmed to display (a dot on a screen, beep, or print). What? Can it do that? Holy cow! From there on, programmers began building visuals, dashboards, colors, and anything to dazzle the consumers and themselves. A black and white or a 0 or 1 turned into deep colorful multimedia. Effects! Virtual reality! 3d! Power Bi charts! Tableau! Visuals. Visuals. Visuals… As years passed, that WOW became a YAWN even while technology advanced rapidly. Then, suddenly a single message came out from #chatgpt (not exactly one but a stream of simple text messages). No visuals at first. No graphics. A pure and simple text message that looked smart but behind is the aggregate of all computing inventions of our time. That WOW factor came back. This is the power of #information and #communication message through #ai. With INFOCOM AI (#infocomai), I plan to build on that. I am excited about the future and the adventures of starting up. (I wrote my story for INFOCOM AI at https://lnkd.in/e6BdP_nQ ). It is a new milestone in my career. It is time to execute my passion and liberate myself from the dogma of 20+ years working for institutions and other founders’ dreams. #technology #career
IBM released in 1969 a board game to show case how machines would learn and make decisions. Note that this was the 60s. AI machines, electronic or paper like this game, were pretty much basic: take one extra step in a random direction. If that step was bad, go back and try again but avoid that same bad step. If the step was good, remember it and move on to the next step. Through multiple iterations of the process mentioned earlier, the machine would learn its path to success. Unfortunately, such heuristic machines could not talk back and thank you for your supervisory assistance. #ai life was much simpler in the past. Hopefully, we can find ways to make it simple for its daily use. 🥹 #chatgpt #algorithms #expertsystems INFOCOM AI
An early edition of the New York Times Magazine (December 7, 1980) features one of the AI founders, MIT’s Marvin Minsky, on its cover. The article’s theme is similar to what we read nowadays in the news about AI: are we doing good or evil with ai? Such conversations even date back to the 50s. They always make headlines just like UFO discoveries. There is no right or wrong answer about AI doing evil because we all have different opinions. We must move from such conversation today, reflect on our moral judgments from the past, and focus on our personal development to do good for society. The planet is already suffering from our human actions, so why look at AI as the bad guy?
Pamela McCorduck’s (1979) “Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence” is an excellent book about AI that is neither technical nor academic but rather historical and philosophical. The book had the support of the significant grandfathers of AI, including Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Herbert Simon, Raj Reddy, and Allen Newell. The book is profound in the relationships between humanity and the making of artificial machines, even as far back as the mythical superhumans in 850 B.C. Greek mythology. I highly recommend checking this book out. Its ISBN is 0-7167-1072-2. #ai #artificialintelligence
A class-action lawsuit was recently filed against Open AI and Microsoft in the United States due to ChatGPT and its siblings invading people’s digital lives. The 157-page lawsuit describes several plaintiffs that use various social media apps or the web like many of us and now feel that they did not consent to allow such AI tools to leverage their digital footprint. Everyone has the right to privacy, but what frustrates me the most is that the United States, unlike Europe, was never a land of utmost privacy. Otherwise, all the digital “free-to-use” (did you read the TOS?) tools that everyone uses today, including this platform, would not have existed. How many documentaries have talked about the consumer as the product, yet people continue using the same less-privacy apps even more than before? The lawsuit requests a $ 3 billion compensation, which is, once again, a typical “let’s find more means to make money” (recall the lawsuit filed by someone who was not warned that a cup of hot coffee or tea is hot?). If people want to fight for privacy, they should sincerely do it organically and without placing money in between - know what you sign up for, read the terms of service, reject before you use it, and be accountable for your actions. #privacy #ai #digitalprivacy
Well said: “Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.” - computer scientist Alan Kay (2600 The Hacker Quarterly vol 40, issue 1 p65)
If computer pioneers in the past stopped at first “NO!” or “WHAT?!” or “WTF?” or “HUH?” or “WHO NEEDS THIS?” then many of the technological inventions would not have existed. History has not always credited contributors to the technology world due to politics, ignorance, media, luck, misinformation, and miscommunication. For example, the whole world knows how the US and the English technology pioneers, including IBM, helped the Allies defeat Nazi Germany in World War. Yet, the course of the war could have changed if Germany had not rejected the prototype of the high-speed computer by Konrad Zuse, a lone German computer scientist who invented the first binary digital computer, the Z1, and, the later, the first high-level programming language, Plankalkul, in isolation from the rest of the world. His inventions were remarkable but went unnoticed until post-World War when IBM needed some of his patents in 1946. Computing history awards the first modern computer invention to the US and English inventors at that time (I will discuss them in a later post), but Zuse’s pioneering work, while it was mainly done home alone in his apartment, is arguably the first recognizable modern-day computer if only others have said to him “YES!”, WE NEED IT.” #information and #communication, more than the product, is critical to the success of any innovator.
Computers between the covers of Time Magazines. 73 years captured in 46 seconds. #computers #ai #tech
Tomorrow is an important developers event: Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2023. I believe this one will be more exciting, impactful, and dominating than that of Google or Microsoft. Not to be missed. #coders #tech #startup #wwdc2023
Breaking news in 1993! Some company launched a TV in a limited PC window. Cost $349 (expensive at the time). Breaking news in 2023! (30 years later). A great company launched a TV in an unlimited PC window. Cost - add an extra zero (still expensive). Did people use the TV in a computer in the 90s? Not much. Will people use TV in Vision Pro mask today? TBD. #applevisionpro INFOCOM AI
#startups, #opensource businesses, and #developers should watch out for the dependency trap of popular 3rd party #api. A systematic pattern exists. Unicorns, such as Reddit or Twitter, Docker, and even ChatGPT-powered Bing, start as free and open their arms to the community by offering paid or unpaid API services. Developers build their products around the unicorns’ APIs, saving money and demonstrating agility by avoiding the “reinventing the wheel” scheme. The unicorns raise their prices for more revenue or in an attempt to shut down alternative solutions. Developer-consumers of the unicorn products call it unfair and can hardly do anything but quit. The unicorns would say it is unfair not to get paid for their services and innovation. Everything becomes chaotic - legal battles, breaking media news, and uproars in social media. Some turn it into political battles between David and Goliath, the copy-right versus the copy-left movements, or even the capitalists versus the socialists. There is no right or wrong, but there can be losses for those that depend on 3rd party APIs even if they paid for them. If you are a product developer, consider the opportunity cost of 3rd APIs at the START of the product development rather than as a backlog item that will surely backfire right after you celebrate a successful product launch. Don’t let APis sting you like the Western honey bee (also known as APIs Mellifera).
I am selecting some Apple Music playlists that align with the mood while coding, so you don’t have to :). When you are all caffeinated and in the “zone,” put the headset on and listen to the Intense Gaming” playlist When staring at the code in front of you and have no idea where the bug is, you should pause and listen to the playlist: “New Age Essentials” playlist If you are superangry, especially when your computer starts acting weird, and you can’t tell what you did, we need to calm you down with “The Works” classical music playlist If your code starts running perfectly fine after you went through the different mental stages listed above, we need to celebrate with the “Ibiza” dance music playlist
Today marks the 40th anniversary of the computer hackers movie, War Games. Many of us watched it a million times and continue to do so because it was awesome. A great quote from the movie “ “What he did was great! He designed his computer so that it could learn from its own mistakes. So, they’d be better the next time they played. The system actually learned how to learn. It could teach itself!” Reminds you of anything recent ? #ai #tech
It seems many engineers and data scientists want to jump into AI because of all the hype and the fear of missing out. They take some Coursera course or watch someone making a live video on YouTube. They get overwhelmed with the terminology that only gets deeper as more publications and engineering occur. They fear for their jobs. News media and major celebrities talking about AI taking over everything do not make them feel better. If you are one of those that are constantly worried, I have a suggestion for you. Learn to be full-stack using one backend and one front-end language, and make everything work locally on your computer. AI is not going away anytime soon. It can wait, but your skills must get better in coding and computing in general. You will then feel you have the control. From there on, you will lead and not be led by anyone else. That is my advice to you. Have a great weekend. You got this. #career #ai #engineering #coding
An excellent essay by Douglas Hofstadter, the author of the infamous book “Gödel, Escher, Back”, on why AI systems like ChatGpt4 can never replace the authenticity and the true human voice. In a nutshell, never let AI write in the form of “I” or allow it to impersonate you #human-authenticity
Godel, Esher, Back, and AI - The Atlantic
In today’s age of unlimited web scraping to feed AI datasets, it is critical to protect, encrypt, and keep private your intellectual property. Here is how I do it. Rather than host my code on so-called private repos on GitHub or Bitbucket, I host my own Git servers at home and in a remote European location with stricter privacy laws than the US. My home servers are the primary destination, and I sync up the code on the remote servers whenever I need to access the repos remotely or when I need to collaborate with others. I could have handled everything within my home network and exposed the repos to outside access, but I chose not to do so so that what is at home stays at home. I also do lots of note-taking, task management, and personal journalling that I do not wish to allow the good or evil AI engines access, and, for those, I store them only in my home computing center, including encrypted physical backups. I do this because I am obsessed with keeping my work to myself rather than showing up on some platform without my permission, but also to protect any work I do for others. At the same time, any open contributions I make would still take place on traditional commercial platforms because I chose to do so. With my actions, I balance my public and private work, which would keep me in control of my digital footprint in today’s age of AI. #ai #humanincontrol #privacy
In today’s tech industry, we need to be more than skeptical when companies use the term “open source”. It is not what you think it is. Meta can call Llama 2 open source as much as it likes, but that doesn’t mean it is
Running a #LLaMa inference on a local Mac m2 is easily done with LLAMA.cpp (https://lnkd.in/gWa6Er-C) and OpenLLaMa, an open reproduction (Apache license) Meta’s LLaMa. I first used the 3B token model, which only took me less than an hour to download and run everything locally in terminal mode at $zero cloud cost. I am trying the 7B OpenLLaMa model next. Such local setups and open license initiatives make it easier for researchers and developers to experiment without using their wallets to pay upfront for cloud-based subscription services. #ai #llama
Opening up ChatGPT: tracking openness of instruction-tuned LLMs is a live table depicting the level of openness for key #generativeai #llm models. The work is part of Liesenfeld, Andreas, Alianda Lopez, and Mark Dingemanse. 2023. “Opening up ChatGPT: Tracking Openness, Transparency, and Accountability in Instruction-Tuned Text Generators”. Paper: Opening up ChatGPT: Tracking openness, transparency, and accountability in instruction-tuned text generators github repo #opendata #open source
A side post: I had 1980 Peanuts Classics in the background while coding and came across a beautiful musical act when Jason Victor Serinus whistled Peppermint Patty’s ice-skating music, Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” as The Voice of Woodstock. The backstory is that when Peppermint competes in the skating competition, her music tape breaks. The moment where she is about to be disqualified from the competition, Woodstock, the bird, comes to the rescue and whistles the song while she dances. Beautiful music. Worth to listen to. It is one of the finest moments of a human making music with the help of nature and not machines.
In today’s tech industry, we need to be more than skeptical when companies use the term “open source”. It is not what you think it is. Meta can call Llama 2 open source as much as it likes, but that doesn’t mean it is
Arguably the first publication ever that mentions a video game is the Decuscope newsletter from April 1962 at MIT. The newsletter was for Digital Equipment Computer PDP-1 users at the time. In it, the first mention of Space War, considered the first computer game ever invented, way before Pong. History of the game is at https://lnkd.in/epeD4NKA! A scanned version of the newsletter is at https://lnkd.in/eQA5n2-t You can also play a JavaScript emulator version of the game online at https://lnkd.in/eKgh-4nb
Before Jupyter Notebooks for Python came Mathematica, SPSS, and others for data scientists. Such tools remain common among researchers for statistical data analysis to this day. The more techie would code their analysis using languages like Fortran, APL, and others. One particular approach that is nearly lost to time is Project MAC, an MIT research project sponsored by US government agencies in the 1960s. Dubbed “on-line analysis for data scientists”, the project consists of a library of computer routines for testing statistical hypotheses operated using teletype (old-fashioned fax-like machine) using a conversation-style approach. Like your Python-based notebook today, where you receive an immediate response to your statistical queries, the concept existed as early as the 60s. Just wanted to share in case you are wondering about the early days of interactive computing for data scientists before our beloved Python programming language came to existence. #computerhistory
Random #computerhistory facts: Notice the TAB key on your computer keyboard? You probably use it often to indent or skip spaces. But did you know that it was, in fact, a hardware device that dates back to 1900, roughly 15 years following the invention of the typewriter. The word TAB comes from the word tabulate, which means create a table. In the 19th century, typists had to click a lot of spaces and backspaces to form a table on paper using their typewriter. To make their lives easier, Frederic Hillard filed a patent for a tab rack with adjustable clips that act as a tabular stop. The device is pluggable and is placed inside the typewriter after you adjust the clips according to the spaces you need. After that, pressing the tab key would advance the typewriter carriage to the next tab stop. When computer keyboards replaced typewriters, the TAB key remained.
Rest in peace, Bram Moolenaar, the creator of the most ubiquitous text editor, VIM. He passed away at the age of 62 due to a medical condition. VIM is not dead, however, since Bram’s legacy continues through the work of other of his long-time associates as well as the open-source community with Neovim. Yet, it is sad to lose such a key figure in the computing industry #tech #linux #code
Rather than marvel and build the AI algorithms that would turn chatbots or robots into humans, we should spend more time focusing on nature. Climate change is real. The heatwaves and the fires are real. The storms and hurricanes are real. Those that entrust religion instead of science with saving the planet are real. Those in government that push any changes to the next government are real. Those unicorns racing one another on who ages last, who wins in a caging match, and who has a bigger xxxx are real. Our generation and the ones before them are failing our planet, our children, and their children. Building generative AI or going to Mars is not an answer. We are not getting the basics of universal human survival right. We ignore it because we do not think it impacts us, or we expect someone else to do something about it. What is happening in Hawaii is sad but is not new. Fellow people have died, and more are missing! We all know that, and yet, we move on because we believe that “it does not impact us!” IT DOES! No one will likely disagree with what I said. They will either like the post or ignore it and, subsequently, send me a private message that they love my post. How would that help? None. We need everyone to express their opinions first and foremost. Our feeds should be filled with topics around climate change. Something has to change, and it has to change fast before nothing is left except the useless junk of electronic circuits from our AI revolution. #climatechange #tech
an awesome demo of computer automation (a.k.a. AI 1.0) can be seen in the 1969 movie clip from “The Computer Wore Tennis Shows) https://lnkd.in/g9XKeCx9. #retrocomputing #ai
The SDF retro computing and home brew exhibition is scheduled for September 30 and October 1 in Seattle, WA. Per the site, “the Interim Computer Museum strives to preserve and share the history of computing through interactive exhibits using vintage computer hardware with modern enhancements.” There are no entry fees. The exhibition is held in partnership with Seattle Retro Computing. I hope to see you there. Please message me if you plan to visit. Link to the exhibit https://icm.museum #unix #pdp #timesharing #telex#retrocomputing #bbs
Pick up the National Geographic November 1970 issue from eBay or whatever store still has it and read the article “Behold the Computer Revolution.” Read it now, 53 years later, and you will hardly tell the difference between the impact of computers on the world at that time and today. The impacts of computers on society, including education, homes, businesses, governments, and warfare, have mostly stayed the same except for advanced technology. Some leaders say that the current breakthroughs in hashtag#AI are the following best things after the Internet. AI is not as impactful as how computers have affected societies from the 19th to the 21st century and, in some cases, before that. Computers and the humans that invented them made everything we currently speak of in digital (plus quantum and analog) technologies today. hashtag#ai hashtag
Before coin-operated arcades, our parents and grandparents parents had television and movies as the latest modes of entertainment. I found out through the archives of a press photo agency that there existed a miniature coin-operated movie machine in the 1940s that let you watch your favorite orchestra or movie for 10 minutes once you dropped a dime. Isn’t that cool? This might be the first-ever pay-per-view or video-on-demand that was ever invented for home entertainment. It should make the myriad of streaming providers today realize that none of them was as as creative as the one that preceded them all!
All these “breakthrough” announcements, including ChatGPT xyz or Gemini Ultra/Ulta/whatever or Company TZ announcing GenAI model alpha,beta, theta don’t really matter to me. What I need is a common sense that 1) helps me get my timezone-aware meetings straight (a.k.a productivity), 2) tells me where I should be saving (not necessarily investing) money for the unknown future (a.k.a safety), and 3) how to help my kids be successful in life (a.k.a family). If Maslow was still still alive I would prefer to discuss it with him in person and not discuss it with a Maslow-impersonator gpt.
It is official. The word of the year in 2023, according to dictionary.com, is ……. “Hallucinate”. The #ai community wishes to thank all #llms starting with #chatgpt and ending with the entire #genai products and services. https://lnkd.in/g2SHfyj7
What’s the difference between both watches? One is 10 years battery, the other is 10 hours (or less) battery. One keeps bugging me with all sorts of sound and vibrating notifications, the other ones would only beep once if I asked it to. Both are supposed to make us less stressed about time, but, instead, one keeps us on our toes all day (charging, calls, health checks - yeah that is worth it, alerts, fear of ruining a ~$300 device, etc.), while the other encourages us to make best use of our time (not to worry about charging, not to worry about alerts - we already have the phone for that, make a real effort with time management, and it is only costs $30). So which one is worth it?
It is fascinating how HI (Human Intelligence) works in sharp contrast to AI (Artificial Intelligence). I was head-banging on a software issue for two days. That )()??;gf would not work. I left the problem for a day and went on finishing other stuff. Then, out of the blue, an aha moment came out of nowhere, and I solved it in only a few minutes. If, instead, you needed AI to tackle the same, that other ghgcggf;);; would keep trying and trying forever. #HumanVsMachine #HumanIntuition
A teacher created an artificial (AI) student called “Glenn” and gave it the same test in computer science algorithms that he gave to his real students. Glenn got a C-, while the class test average was in the mid-80s. AI Glenn will fare better in a makeup test and can catch up with its fellow students if allowed to learn from its mistakes. But, AI Glenn is not a human being who will take pleasure from A-cing a test. That is for us humans to do. We (humans) need to treat students like “Glenn” nicely and fairly. The results will be an A+ for humans and machines working together. Read “Glenn” story - I Secretly Let ChatGPT Take My Final Exam
It is funny how things happen just unexpectedly. Last week, I opened one of the AI books in my home library. The book was a few years old. In it, the author acknowledges the Python Portland community (Python PDX). I wasn’t aware of such a community not far from my home in the Vancouver, Washington metropolitan area. I searched them online and discovered they have a meetup group and were also promoting the Google Generative AI (the one I attended last week, thanks to the Python PDX alert). After I accessed the Meetup app to sign up for the Python PDX meetup group, I searched for nearby activities and discovered that there is a local Chess community that meets in person each Tuesday. I met up with the chess folks last night and had a great time! I am excited because I have been working from home, interacting with the outside professional world, and playing chess as a hobby online only for the last four years. You might say that no such events are hidden from plain sight if you know when and where to look. Hence, none of these are unpredictable events. True, but one random unrelated event in which I picked one of my many books in my library brought several exciting encounters to me. The moral of my story here is to embrace random acts of chance, but, of course, mainly for good (or geeky) reasons.
eBay updated its terms of service to include artificial intelligence material. I find their update to be somewhat weird and contradictory sometimes. One paragraph says, “You assume full responsibility for the item offered and the accuracy and content of the listing, including listing content created using tools offered by eBay or third parties such as translation, image editing, and generative artificial intelligence tools.” Another paragraph says you cannot “use any robot, spider, scraper, data mining tools, data gathering, and extraction tools, or other automated means to access our Services for any purpose, except with the prior express permission of eBay.” Another paragraph says “Artificial intelligence-based tools may be used to provide you with content; availability and accuracy of these tools and content are not guaranteed.” If I summarize all these paragraphs together, I can then deduce the following: users cannot bring their own AI stuff to eBay unless they can successfully manage to talk to eBay, and you, the user, is responsible for whatever AI eBay forces on you, even if in error. Is this how the commercialization of AI will take shape in e-commerce? Like it or not, mistakes or not, you must accept their AI products. What do you think?
I highly recommend the 1982 novel “Silicon Valley” by Michael Rogers. It is a fiction story that is as relevant today as it was decades ago. It has all the critical technology and business components that make it so realistic- artificial intelligence, chatbots, hardware chips, Turing Test, entrepreneurship, startups, legal issues, acquisitions, open source, family struggles, politics, competition, and more.
The trend is clear: people worldwide lost interest in NFT, Crypto, and the Metaverse; Blockchain remains the same; Generative AI is on the upward trend. Google Trends search output
I am watching 1931 Frankenstein. Why is it relevant to #ai and computers? For one, its author, Mary Shelley, used to hang out with Lord Byron, the father of the first programmer, Ada Lovelace , in the eighteen hundreds. Her writings were influenced by Lord Byron, who himself is a renowned poet. Furthermore, Frankenstein, in the story, wanted to be God by creating the monster that ultimately turned rogue against its creator and humanity, in general. Dr Frankstein’s mistake was that his assistant stole the “wrong” brain to fit it into the monster. Why is this relevant today? We do not want creators like Frankenstein creating human-like machines as monsters. #ethicalAI
Frankenstein Part II After watching the original movie, I saw “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935). The latter has all the ethical and nostalgia of AI. The monster goes through speech training and develops sentiments about what is good or bad. It tried to become human but realized that only of its kind are friends.The “male” monster meets its “bride” machine, who rejects “him’ and runs to its human creator, Dr Frankstein, for safety. The monster realizes that Dr Frankstein and his human wife are good. It sets them free and destroys himself, his machine counterpart, and an evil scientist. I snapped a photo of the monster and his bride attempting to bond through a human-like touch. Like any other robot, that touch can never work without a human heart. So net-net…. humans … GOOD.. machines BAD.
I read a ’60s fiction book last night about a salesman going to business offices and pitching automation tools that will replace human employees to save money and be more productive. Such stories are real, and their impact was both constructive and destructive during the computer and the industrial revolutions of the past centuries. At first, I was entertained by the story because, up to that moment, I always considered myself, like many computer geeks, one of those developing automation solutions for businesses. But as I was starting my day this morning, I realized that even developing technology skills falls under a marginal utility formula in this age. As many technical skills as you can acquire or claim to possess, businesses, not technologies now have the upper hand. They would replace the people developing automation tools with automation tools because they can save money and be more productive. I don’t know what the next decade will look like for independent computer engineers compared to large LLM models that known tech giants control. Still, I do know that we must keep innovating and helping others, even if at the expense of our future selves. #tech #ai
Found a note card in one of my books written by anonymous: “THE PERFECT PROGRAMMER: ‘No program is that perfect’ they said with a shrug. ‘The client is happy… what’s one little bug?’ But he was determined. The others went home. He dug out the flow chart. Deserted. Alone. Night passed into morning. The room was cluttered with memory dumps, microfiche. ‘I am close, “ he muttered. Chain smoking, cold coffee. Logic. Deduction. ‘I’ve got it’, he cried. ‘Just change one instruction.’ Then change two, then three more. As year followed year. And strangers would comment “is that guy still there?” He died at the console, of hunger and thirst. Next day he was buried, face down, nine edge first. And his wife, through her tears, accepted his fate, said ‘he’s not really gone. He’s just working late”. 😁 #tech #coders
You probably know Ada Lovelace or Adele Goldberg as famous computer programmers of our time, but you should be familiar with the names Ruth Teitelbaum and Marlyn Wescoff. Ruth and Marlyn are the original programmers for the ENIAC computer, the first programmable digital computer from 1945. The ENIAC was unveiled to the public in 1946, making headlines worldwide. Unfortunately, the attention of the ENIAC was mainly towards the male hardware engineers rather than together with the software team. History must give more credit to first-generation women programmers, including Marlyn and Ruth. The photo below shows Ruth and Marlyn wiring the ENIAC with a new program in 1946. In this post, I would like to recognize all software and hardware engineers, especially the women who need to be credited more or get the front light in the computer industry, including the recent AI movement. #tech #womenintech #ai #computerhistory
I saw Titanic the Musical last night. (SPOILER ALERT if you plan to watch the movie.) We all know the ship sank in the end, so no surprise here. However, the theatrical adaptation of the story made me realize that what happened with the Titanic is what happens in many entrepreneurial projects. There are three key players: the owner (the money guy), the engineer (the designer of the ship), and the project manager (the captain). The stakeholders are at different levels (first class, second class, and third class passengers). The owner hangs out with the first class, promises speed to delivery (reach the designation before lunchtime), and instructs the captain to do so in front of the first class stakeholders. The captain, under pressure, pushes the workers and ignores the multiple warnings of an iceberg ahead. He trusts his instincts. The engineer is egoistic and believes his design is 100% error-free. The Titanic hits the iceberg. The lifeboats are closer to the first class by design, so the first to take boats are the first class, followed by the second class. The third class is left behind, except for one that kept hanging around the upper class. The owner saves himself and jumps into a lifeboat that remains mostly empty. That boat could have saved many of the third class. While the ship is sinking, the engineer reflects on his design and finds the error, but it is too late now. The captain blames himself, and so does the co-captain. The captain, the engineer, a senior first-class couple, all the workers, and the third class drown. The owner and the rest of the first and second class are safe. Isn’t this typical of technology unicorns? The owner survives, and the first and second-class stakeholders usually stay, but the third-class stakeholders and the workers are generally the victims of products and businesses going bad. #projectmanagement #enterpreneurship #product
For the “VIM” editor fanatics (me, one of them), do you know why the keys, H, J, K, and L were used for left, down, up, and right, respectively? The creator of VI was using the ADM-3A, a 1976 computer terminal that had the arrow keys associated with the keys mentioned. You can see this in the photo below. Also, do you know that “VIM” was not a modified version of the 1979 “VI” editor but the 1987 VI clone for the Atari, called “Stevie?” The original VI editor was based on the 1976 “ED” editor that was owned by AT&T and required an AT&T license. To get around that, the creator of Stevie built a complete replica of VI without using any of the original VI code and made it open-source. Based on Stevie, “VIM” was later developed. (Reference: https://lnkd.in/gdAyT2ez) #computerhistory #tech
I left Verizon in 2017. On my last day, I visited its in-house museum and took pictures of their vintage phones. Those phones have brought people worldwide closer and ever more connected. Lovers, families, journalists, businesses, and everyone would use them to communicate. We no longer use such devices, but it won’t hurt to remember their significance to society now and then. Thanks, Verizon, AT&T, the Bell companies, and all the telecom companies worldwide. #communication #technology #tech
How far we have come. The lady in the photo, taken in 1956, is holding an abacus in front of an analog computer. The abacus is a calculating device dating to as early as 2700 BC (4723 years ago). The analog computer dates back nearly 70 years. Both are now primitive compared to what we have today. We now have every technology device out there, on the cloud, in our pockets, brains, bodies, and mother nature, but we still need more. #technology #innovation #ai #automation #computerhistory
In the seventies, I advised my parents on what to do with me as a child using every human sense in my power because I wanted to play video games. In the eighties, I advised my friends what to do with their home computers even before I had my own. In the nineties, I advised small businesses on personal computers before I had my own. In the millennium, I advised companies on website development and hosting before I had my own. In the decades that followed, I advised enterprise colleagues on product solutions before leaving to start my own. Now, I advise parents, friends, small businesses, and enterprises on #AI. I guess what comes next is my kids telling me, “Hey, Dad. Let me advise you with ….” Until then, feel free to seek my advice about #ai at INFOCOM AI because my experience is an aggregate of everything about computers from the past to the present, at least before the kids take over.
Notice the hologram on your credit cards? Holograms were created using laser techniques in the 60s, but you need to thank National Geographic for being the first to print a hologram at scale on its cover for everyone to see. Due to the magazine’s popularity, the printing of the Eagle hologram on the cover page of its March 1984 edition was done on a large scale. A few years later, credit card companies followed similar techniques as the National Geographic magazine to print holograms at scale on our credit cards to protect against counterfeiting. #computerhistory #tech
I am impressed with Satya’s leadership in handling the Open AI Shakespearean drama that unfolded over the weekend. For those who did not catch up on the news, the OpenAI board fires Sam Altman. Its CEO. The president, Greg Brockman, and some staff members resigned in protest, while many others at the company, including the CTO, declare their support for Altman. The board tries to undo its decision by asking Altman to return. Altman contemplates, “Hmm… yes? No? …. No!” and, before you know it, Satya, the leader of Microsoft, releases a statement that Altman, Brockman, and some others are joining Microsoft to build a special AI team. Satya also states Microsoft’s continued commitment to OpenAI for the foreseeable future. No matter how people interpret the weekend events or judge any leadership actions of Microsoft or OpenAI, I should give it to Satya to step in and take swift action to tame the chaos around the company OpenAI and its leadership that is behind the hottest tech product of today, and that is ChatGPT. #openai #chaos #leadership
A profound thought for a Monday. To your left is e-business in 2000. To your right is ai-business in 2023, twenty-three years later. Regardless of the fame and fortune of those in the photos, which side should cheer or thank the other when it comes to shaping our digital world? Is it the e-business folks that drove online commerce and made the web more popular today and generated the data for the ai-business folks, or is it the algorithms of the ai-folks that made the web more exciting today, such as that, without ai, we might not advance in the modern age? #ai #digital #tech
Mental fatigue is probably more real nowadays than at any time before. It may be due to recent world events, economic conditions due to rising prices, fear of AI apocalypse taking all jobs away, end-of-fiscal year layoffs, or you might be having bad days. In any case, it is crucial to stay on top of your current condition through a systematic approach that can keep you focused while suppressing any emotional distress. For instance, when my days feel too much, I would walk with my wife around the neighborhood. I also look forward to my weekly chess club with acquaintances-turned-friends at a brewery each Tuesday. I occasionally take my mind off the computer screen by picking up one of my 300 70s/80s computer magazines from my bookshelf and reliving the technological events of that era. Sometimes, I would play a game of Galaxian or Galaga on the Nintendo. It all helps me reset my mind after only 30 minutes. I understand everyone’s schedule is different, and taking 30 minutes to read a magazine or play a video game may not apply to everyone. But at the end of the day, whether it is the job or the environment around you that causes mental fatigue, I argue that humans are intelligent enough to find solutions before seeking help from other humans, such as doctors, or asking unhuman chatbots for advice. Have a great day week. Happy Monday! #mentalhealth #tech #mondaymotivation #hobbies LinkedIn
On November 30, 2022, Open AI launched ChatGPT. AI and the world has not been the same since then. What an A-nn-I-versary!
Mental fatigue is probably more real nowadays than at any time before. It may be due to recent world events, economic conditions due to rising prices, fear of AI apocalypse taking all jobs away, end-of-fiscal year layoffs, or you might be having bad days. In any case, it is crucial to stay on top of your current condition through a systematic approach that can keep you focused while suppressing any emotional distress. For instance, when my days feel too much, I would walk with my wife around the neighborhood. I also look forward to my weekly chess club with acquaintances-turned-friends at a brewery each Tuesday. I occasionally take my mind off the computer screen by picking up one of my 450 70s/80s computer magazines from my bookshelf and reliving the technological events of that era. Sometimes, I would play a game of Galaxian or Galaga on the Nintendo. It all helps me reset my mind after only 30 minutes. I understand everyone’s schedule is different, and taking 30 minutes to read a magazine or play a video game may not apply to everyone. But at the end of the day, whether it is the job or the environment around you that causes mental fatigue, I argue that humans are intelligent enough to find solutions before seeking help from other humans, such as doctors, or asking unhuman chatbots for advice.
I missed posting this by a day. I should have posted it on Dec 20. The computer geeks of the world may remember the 1977 mainframe computer, DEC System 20 (also known as DEC 20) that was used for timesharing applications. One of the last remaining machine from 46 years ago is in Seattle. (Wiki details is at https://lnkd.in/gw3DFqiJ). A terminal experience using the DEC 20 is still possible today at https://twenex.org. If you encountered some people saying yesterday “ HAPPY DEC-20 DAY”, now you know why. #computinghistory DEC 20
When we were kids, we used to type in a BASIC program listing made available in our favorite computer magazines of that day. Here is a happy holidays one from Family Computing Jan 1985 edition made for the Atari computer. The complete listing and the particular issue is at https://lnkd.in/gJP72tkX (page 65)
I got a story about the Atari game Olympics. It was the first and last Atari 2600 game that I bought. I was eight years back then. I had saved a lot of money from returning empty bottles and doing chores as a kid living in Cyprus. My dad took me one day to a computer store to buy a game. I chose this game because 1) the cover looked cool and 2) it had the number 50, which meant that there are 50 games in it. After returning home that day with my happy purchase, I played the game cartridge on my Atari for the entire day until the screen starting messing up. I might have burned some electronic chip in the game cartridge because the other Atari games that I had continued working just fine. Anyway, I asked my dad to take me back to the store to fix or replace it. My dad thought that his tinkering skills will help fix it for me. He had no experience with electronics whatsover. Anyway, in only 5 minutes, he cracked the game cartridge open, could not decipher anything on that electronic board, and threw the broken game in the trash. I would have been traumatized back then, but, as parents now, we may not understand all what we kids would be going through in our minds. How many times we beleive that our decisions are more rational than our kids? That game was gone for me until yesterday, 40 years later. I found the same game at a gaming store and purchased it for few bucks. I have an Atari, but I plan to keep this game on my shelf as a reminder of my childhood and as a reminder that “parents should some time listen to their kids and not always take matters in their own hands.”
2023 has been ai interesting on many fronts, but we continue to witness companies doing things their way. I wish to remind the technology gurus that if it were not for the standardization of the punch cards in the late 1890s and early 1900s, thanks to IBM, we would not come a long way with universal computing. According to Edmund Berkeley (1950) book “Giant Brains or Machines That Think”, “the punch card is a masterpiece of engineering and standardization.” The specific dimensions and thickness of the cards, the location of the punches associated with each letter of the alphabet, and everything else related to processing punch cards as input and output to the computers made it possible for a universal approach to data processing. One can argue that if one company, such as IBM, established a standard at the time, then why not future companies enforce their own standard. True, but what IBM ultimately did after the punch card is popularizing the personal computer industry with the PC 5150. IBM allowed other companies to prosper. I hope that we see a 2024 period in #ai where all the major technology companies would focus on standardizing their approaches for the benefit of the industry first and foremost.
The AI cover edition of Newsweek, except it was not for 2023 but for 1980!
Psychological impact of AI on human workers vetting ChatGPT data. It is real and disturbing
I love AI but I am totally against infusing AI into art. I believe that art is a human gift and should not be infused with generative AI. Yes we do leverage digital technologies effectively in photo editing, video production, music synthesizers, writing assistance, and more but there must be a limit to how much we allow ourselves to let artificial intelligence more work for us. The lazier we become by delegating more work to machines, the less mental and physical fit we become. We will then find ourselves drowning in illness, boredom, and helplessness. Signs of humanity pushing back against generative AI tools in arts is happening, and that is GREAT! For instance, fans of the popular game Dungeon and Dragons rebelled against an artist and the publisher when they spotted signs of AI art in certain “original” illustrations. The hardcore fans were extremely focal about it which forced the artist to take down the arts, the publisher would issue an apology and update their artist guidelines. (Wizards of the Coast updating artist guidelines after AI art found in ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ book). When corporate and governments fail to limit the depth of AI in all aspects of human lives, the people themselves will likely force a balance. They won’t revolt on everything AI-generated per say (#NFTs are not dead, and #generativeAI is hot). Their social reactions against AI-generative art just like the case of AI in the Dungeon and Dragons illustrations, however, will possibly be that invisible hand in the AI market economy.
It is fascinating how HI (Human Intelligence) works in sharp contrast to AI (Artificial Intelligence). I was head-banging on a software issue for two days. That )()??;gf would not work. I left the problem for a day and went on finishing other stuff. Then, out of the blue, an aha moment came out of nowhere, and I solved it in only a few minutes. If, instead, you needed AI to tackle the same, that other ghgcggf;);; would keep trying and trying forever. #HumanVsMachine #HumanIntuit
A teacher created an artificial (AI) student called “Glenn” and gave it the same test in computer science algorithms that he gave to his real students. Glenn got a C-, while the class test average was in the mid-80s. AI Glenn will fare better in a makeup test and can catch up with its fellow students if allowed to learn from its mistakes. But, AI Glenn is not a human being who will take pleasure from A-cing a test. That is for us humans to do. We (humans) need to treat students like “Glenn” nicely and fairly. The results will be an A+ for humans and machines working together. “Glenn” story is below
I Secretly Let ChatGPT Take My Final Exam
All these “breakthrough” announcements, including ChatGPT xyz or Gemini Ultra/Ulta/whatever or Company TZ announcing GenAI model alpha,beta, theta don’t really matter to me. What I need is a common sense that 1) helps me get my timezone-aware meetings straight (a.k.a productivity), 2) tells me where I should be saving (not necessarily investing) money for the unknown future (a.k.a safety), and 3) how to help my kids be successful in life (a.k.a family). If Maslow was still still alive I would prefer to discuss it with him in person and not discuss it with a Maslow-impersonator gpt
]]>Starting my own business reminds me of a childhood moment. I am at a new elementary school and hardly know the kids. We had just moved to a new country, so we hardly knew anyone in general. A Halloween event is at school. My mother took me to buy a Halloween custom the day or weekend before, I can’t remember. I wanted to be Superman and save the world from evil. The costume was costly, so my mother decided to sew one for me. I went to school, caring less about how I looked or how people saw my weird-looking S for Superman, the belt, or the shoes that didn’t match. I was all over this world and fearlessly always wanted to help others. Buying hardware or services to look expensive is not in my upbringing. Being cheap is not as well! It is about building and loving everything you do, like sewing that big S for HEART on that shirt. INFOCOM AI #startup
It is Friday. You spent the week working your ass off - coding and consulting. It’s a beautiful weather. No office. Your on your own. Your home is your office, and you need a break. What do you do? You take one of your bikes, and go! #startup Happy Friday! #mentalhealth
You know the saying, “Always listen to your mother,” right? So my story goes, as it was repeatedly narrated by my mother when I was a kid: I once looked up at the upper floors of my primary school and asked her, “What is up there?” She said that those floors are for the upper classes. I then said that “I just need to get up to those floors and be done.” What I meant by “be done” is to be done with school. She translated the words as early signs of my ambition to grow and prosper in my career. Yes, I did thrive in my career, but that doesn’t mean her words came true. I truly wanted to be done with school! But in reality, I always keep working, learning, and developing without obsessing for the upper floors. I want to enjoy the current floor that I am on and occasionally look down in case I missed checking some rooms on the lower floors. My moral of this story is 1) mothers see things differently (bless them) but don’t always listen to your mother (my mom is not on LinkedIn, thankfully). 2) before you rush up to all the floors that are above you, stop and enjoy the floor that you are on. That floor could be the best floor you ever stood up on because one of the rooms on that floor can be full of awesomeness. Open all the doors on your floor, and then, once you feel satisfied, take the stairs, not the elevator, to the next floor. #career #learning #startup
What does it take to get my coding ass on fire … an electronic machine (the computer), a human (me), natural ingredients (coffee), ambient music (bulky headset), a noisy environment (coffee shop), a geeky shirt, and a positive spirit! #coding
I am excited to support the Global Mentor Initiative by connecting with my mentee from #Lebanon next week. Thank you, Global Mentorship Initiative and its CEO Jon Browning, for establishing a global platform that brings mentors and mentees together. For anyone interested about the #mentorship program, the details are at becoming a mentor
I volunteer some time in helping older people at a nearby senior living center struggling with their phones, computers, and electronic equipment. Sadly, they are left out of the mainstream tech community. To make the process easy for them, I created a self-hosted voice portal with an easy-to-remember phone number and easy prompts for them to call me and tell me the issue. Usually, someone from the front desk calls on their behalf. Once they leave their message, I have a subsequent workflow system that I coded which turns their issues into a task list, adds transcription to their recordings, and notifies me. I would then handle the tasks when I could. Some still prefer to leave me a note in a binder with a sweet cover from the friendly staff. I wish more techies would help seniors around them. They need us with tech. #volunteer #community
Five years ago, I presented on AI at the University of Texas in Dallas. I emphasized the doing-it-yourself principles and showcased various software and hardware techniques, including running a machine learning algorithm on a Commodore 64 emulator. Wanting to share and help others is hereditary, I suppose, since most of my family are either educators or journalists. #education #mentorship
Our Lebanese generation and those of our parents and their parents have grown up reading the As-Safir newspaper each day. Its creator, Mr Talal Salman, passed away today at 85. He may not have remembered me after leaving Lebanon for over 20 years. Still, I will never forget his influence, work, and boldness in keeping As-Safir a genuinely independent and unbiased newspaper in Lebanon. My dad worked at As-Safir, and I also worked there during my past employment at Knowledgeview LTD. He was inspirational for us all. Moreover, he was extremely kind and caring, especially as you read his writing, such as when he wrote a heartfelt article about my dad after he passed away from cancer ten years ago. RIP, Mr Talal Salman. صوت الذين لا صوت لهم
That READY[] computer prompt sparked my lifelong passion for computers when I was ten (forty years ago). Always #ready to consult on #ai, go deep with #fullstack code, orchestrate #DevSecOps and #MLOps systems, mentor #emergingtalent, or have a coffee with fellow geeks discussing #computerhistory. INFOCOM AI
What is happening in Morocco is heartbreaking. Over 2,000 lives were lost from the earthquake; God knows how many are still stuck or have become homeless, and the beautiful historic city of Marakesh is damaged.
My late dad carried a Samsonite. 50 years later, I am carrying a Samsonite. Times don’t always change.
