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Archive: December 23, 2022
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 It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas ... and feel like it too, Brr..!
Big change around here, I've experimented with a new feed reader, Feedly, to replace my venerable SharpReader. So far I like it, especially that I can read feeds on my iPad and my PC, and they're synced. More on this...
Meanwhile, it's all happening!
 It was big news when DeepMind's Alpha Zero learned to play Go - beating top humans and even devising new strategies - and ever bigger news when it became the strongest chess program. But now it has mastered Stratego, which is even more difficult due to the number of move combinations and the fact that each player defines their own starting position - unlike Go or Chess, where the starting position is fixed. Cool! 
 Jean-Louis Gassée gives thanks to Silicon Valley. "Now a happy grandfather, I have the time and freedom of mind to gratefully reflect upon my move to Silicon Valley more than 35 years ago." Amen.
Also Jean-Louie Gassée: ChatGPT: Its Nothing, You Don't Need It. And We'll Have It In Six Months. After years of work, suddenly the tip of the AI-ML iceberg becomes visible in a way that gets everyone's attention. It sure got mine!
Philip Greenspun: ChatGPT agrees with me about Lisp. Hard to disagree, actually.
Ah but can it code? Ars Technica: DeepMind’s latest AI project solves programming challenges like a newb. I'm waiting for an AI bot which codes a stronger version of itself.
 Jon Udell: Mastodon, Steampipe, and RSS. Quite interesting. In the wake of Elon Musk's acquisition of, and subsequent changes to, Twitter, many have experimented with Mastodon, a would-be open Twitter competitor. Definitely a lot to play with here. I question whether anything can overcome the network effect of Twitter however; the Twitterverse is just so large now.
I have a Mastodon account, but don't use it to "follow" anything. Should I relay my posts here to there? Probably could ... but dlvr.it, my current Twitter cross-posting tool, doesn't yet support it. Maybe I have to create my own bot to do it.
 Ars Technica: Mastodon is hurtling toward a tipping point. Nah. It's doing fine but "tipping" is going to require a massive rate of adoption way beyond what's happening now.
Tim Bray wonders: Is Moving to Mastodon Ethical? A strangely non-technical take from him, that does not seem like the right question.
Bari Weiss on Twitter. "We did not selectively retrieve, or cherry-pick, files with an eye toward servicing a particular agenda. Our goal was simply to figure out what had happened at crucial moments in the history of the country and the company." One of the journalists selected by Elon Musk to publish "the Twitter files".
Elon Musk: Should I step down as head of Twitter? ... of course he never planned to lead Twitter forever, any more than he runs SpaceX day-to-day.
Dave Winer: Advice for Elon Musk. It's fascinating how so many people think they know better than Elon, when he's the world richest person and arguably the world's most successful. He started or was an early investor in PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and OpenAI. Maybe he can figure this out :)
 Related: Clive Thompson: Tiny Snippets of Code that Changed the World. "Only a few short lines can have a massive, global impact" ... like the first pop up ad! (ugh)...
 With Christmas shopping upon us, we ponder: Popular Retail stores that no longer exist. Sniff.
I was just in Macy's, they're still very much alive, and I wondered: what allowed them to survive when so many others did not?
Ottmar Liebert: 17 Years Ago. "What is the purpose of millions of years of evolution? Let me tell you a secret: it’s YOU! It’s all so you can experience this life." Not sure evolution has a purpose, perhaps result would be more accurate.
Well that's a lot - I guess my new Feedly RSS system causes me to review a lot, and share a lot too. Onward.
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 I mentioned I've switched from SharpReader to Feedly for my daily reading of RSS feeds. It's a big change; I've been using SharpReader for years and years, and it served me well.
Time was, I didn't "believe" in RSS, sigh. But that was long ago, and I've seen the light. Even created some nice cookbooks for you to get started. RSS is the single biggest productivity gain I've ever had. But I digress.
First reference to RSS: in Feb 2003, right after I started blogging.
Later in Feb 2003: Why Aggregators are not good. How wrong could I be?
April 2003: I'm tempted to give it a try. And then: I bit the bullet and tried it. But then: I'm giving it up. By May 2003 I was back, never to leave again.
August 2003, a survey: Do you use an RSS reader? 60% yes, 30% no, 9% uh, what's RSS. I bet if I did this today, "yes" would win, but "what's RSS" would compete with "no" for second. To be tried?
November 2003: blogrollcleaning. In which I found blogrolls were superfluous given RSS readers (and especially, OPML, which I discovered in Jan 2004).
May 2004: My first RSS Cookbook. Perhaps zero of you were reading me then, and tried it, but I know some of my colleagues at the time did. I don't know why but back then it was just slightly too hard to get started. Maybe it still is, despite the best efforts of Feedly and it's competitive kin.
(Love, love, being able to find all these old posts with my Simple Search. Same as it ever was...)
This change was driven by two wants and one horrible need.
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Read RSS feeds on my iPad. My morning routine is to check email, review my calendar, and read "the news" on my iPad, away from my desk. Adding review of my RSS feeds to this was becoming a must, since I get most of my news that way.
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Easily sync feeds and read items between my iPad and my desktop PC. Definitely did not want to read things twice - already such a huge volume of items to skim - and if I found things I wanted to save (e.g. for posting to my blog), wanted that to move from one to the other.
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Stop launching IE! For "reasons" the 20-year-old version of SharpReader cannot be taught not to launch IE when links are clicked. It's an early .NET program and must use some facility that never contemplated the possibility of a different default browser. For a while it did launch Chrome - I think - but now I can't get it do to this, nor to launch Edge (which would be okay).
Anyway I'm trying Feedly, it works on my iPad, works on my PC (via a web interface), enables me to sync back and forth easily, and launches Safari on the iPad and Chrome on the PC. Yay!
So far there is one huge unexpected benefit to this switch. Feedly automatically marks reviewed items as "read" and won't display them anymore. At first I was afraid this would cause me to miss things, but with literally thousands of items flowing through each day, it's better this way. I can consume more items faster. Onward!
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 So I've started blogging again, after a two-year gap, and during those two years I was reading RSS feeds and saving items, and I now have a compendium of about 70+ items saved for posting. (I've been ruthless; there were originally way more.) These have been sitting in SharpReader, patiently waiting for me to post about them, and I will dribble them out as appropriate. Here you go!
Loved this picture I saw online - on Facebook, so yeah can't link to it :( - it's been cold enough in the Netherlands for the canals to freeze, enabling ice skating. How great would that be to do? Definitely on my list!
 Apr 2016: Amanda Peet via Salon: Never crossing the Botox Rubicon. "What's the point of doing it if everyone can tell? I want the thing that makes me look younger, not the thing that makes me look like I did the thing." Such a tough choice.
Noted May 2016: StoryWorth via Daring Fireball. "Invite your mom, and each week they'll send her a question. She replies with a story through the app, email, or even a landline. After a year, they'll bind her stories in a hardcover book." Such a good idea. I didn't follow though, but I should do, now...
I left this item in my saved feeds mainly so I wouldn't forget it. Need another way to remember. Although, since it is now seven years old, I guess it didn't work that well, did it?
 Nov 2016 from Digby Parton on Salon: After a bitter election, a new America: Our first female president and the most diverse coalition in history. It precelebrates a Hillary Clinton victory. I saved this because it was so wrong, but OTOH it wasn't as wrong as I thought at the time; did not expect Biden to defeat Trump.
Interesting to note how many new portals like Salon now protest when you have an ad blocker; back then, nobody cared. They're easily defeated but annoying.
Dec 2016: Not another MNIST tutorial with TensorFlow. I was obsessed with TensorFlow back then, and still am; a wonderful tool for solving the toughest problems in unusual ways. ChatGPT and all the rest are children of this breakthrough.
 Apr 2017: Doc Searls: Open Word - the Podcasting Story. For reasons Podcasting never rose to the level of blogging or especially microblogging, nor of video, but it's still out there, and it's open. Weirdly unlike microblogging and video there haven't been walled gardens housing podcasts. I guess Apple kind of tried, but it didn't take.
 May 2017: The incomparable xkcd: Machine Learning.
This is one site where virtually every post is worth reading. Still.
Oct 2018: Instapundit: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship. I was enthusiastically supportive of this - still am - but it didn't happen. Right now the US is flooded with illegal immigrants who are (among other things) having "beachhead babies".
Dec 2018: Jon Udell: Where's my Net dashboard? On RSS readers and infoglut. Same as it ever was, but I think Feedly and it's brethren are helping. The amount of inbound is incredible.
One approach, as taken by many of my friends and colleagues: let others do the filtering, and use social media as their inbound. I do this a bit too, but OTOH I'm one of those "others" doing the filtering :) It works a bit like the layers in a neural network ...
Feb 2019: Joi Ito: Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto. On the nature of "success".
Sept 2019: Instapundit recalls the NYTimes: Airplanes took Aim. The NYTimes have been a flawed and prejudiced source of "news" for so long now, it's a wonder anyone regards them as credible.
 March 2020: Become a Master of Python Programming. I did, or at least I tried. It's been the latest hotness since ... well since 2004 when Bittorrent was coded in it by Bram Cohen at least, and it's stayed hot due to AI. Definitely the 2020s version of "one word: plastics".
Well, that takes us up to the Covid pandemic, aka [to me] as the Wuhan flu pandemic. There are more to follow ... stay tuned!
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 Hi all, Merry Christmas Eve Eve!
Yes of course there is such a thing ... my family always celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, so today is the Night before ... Christmas Eve, aka Christmas Eve Eve. We have a house full of people, the table is set, presents are positioned under the tree, and there is some last minute wrapping and indeed shopping going on.
I spent the day blogging - excited about Feedly and my new RSS-to-blog-via-Ole-filter pipeline - and also coding. I figured out how to call a C++ DLL that uses CUDA directly from Python, so that was fun. An image array operation that ran at about 6/s now runs at about 600/s. Yippee.
I can't say the world looks like it's in great shape right now, many things are not perfect, and unfortunately it feels like the trend of many things is down. But ... who knows what 2023 will bring? I choose to be optimistic.
In the meantime, tonight's Christmas Eve Eve! I hope you're having a nice one, and are spending it quietly and peacefully with those you love...
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