Bonus Tab-Clearing Post: Physics and AI

Article over at Quanta.  Impossible to describe, go read the whole thing.

And yes, Demers' take is pretty close to mine too.

Can't Wait Until Next Christmas...

... when this book comes out.  Here are a couple of teasers:

• A New Christmas Fable
• Joyous Noel!

Because this is how you get new scientists, engineers, and innovators.

Just Some Random Stuff

Random numbers have figured highly in my work for decades, but I've never had a really great random number generator at hand.  Oh, the ones out of Numerical Recipes have usually been more than adequate, but not provably adequate.  Now however, there's this...

• CURBy – the University of Colorado Randomness Beacon project
• Abstract on Bell-certified quantum random number generation

Probably more random than you bargained for!

Holman on Deep Tech – Pretty Wild Stuff

Back in September Jim Rutt posted an interview with Pablos Holman on the topic – and his new book – on what he terms deep tech.  Holman's central thesis is that we've gone too far down the software road, and while it's been a good road, we need to concentrate more on hardware and, you know, actually building cool stuff.  Autonomous shipping, mosquito-zapping lasers, safe nuclear reactors, high-speed rail, the list goes on.

And he does have a valid point.  In a 100 trillion dollar world economy, less than 5% is in the computer tech sector.  However it somehow vacuums up the lion's share of talent, venture capital, and press.  [Side note: I think a lot of reason tech has thrived over the last half-century is that it's largely immune to regulation and ignored by regulators.  Try to build a new computer operating system and The Man don't care; try to build a new type of trebuchet or nuclear reactor or choo-choo train and The Man will definitely inquire.  Close rant & back to the subject at hand.]

Some parts of both the interview and book come off as eccentric and out of touch with real developments in the real world these past few decades.  Take shipping for example.  Yes, cargo ships are still largely operated by humans.  However the number of crew required to run a ship is a fraction of what it was 75 years ago.  More importantly, containerized shipping has radically slashed port handling costs.  Overall cargo shipping costs have dropped by something like 90% since 1950.  Yes, there are always optimizations remaining, but come on, apply a generalized version of Amdhal's Law to the situation and give the industry another decade to catch its breath.  Dropping the remaining crew of ten to just one is insignificant when compared to what has just happened.

On the other hand, the guy was there at the start of Blue Origin, which just racked up a major success.  Furthermore, rocket boosters dropping out of the sky and landing on robotic barges has become something of an everyday occurrence.  Clearly it pays to think big, and especially in terms of making a profit.

Well, listen to the podcast interview (link above), read the guy's book, flip through the online footnotes for the book, then make up your own mind.  My take here is that, despite some weird twists and turns, the guy's onto something.

USB Port Color Code

Article over at ZDnet.  Huh, I did not know that there even was a code.

In case that link ever evaporates into the aether, here's the main part:

• Black: Denoting USB 2.0, this is the second most common you'll see on devices of all types, supporting speeds of up to 480 Mbps.
• White: These are first-generation devices -- USB 1.x -- with the slowest potential transfer speeds that don't typically exceed 12 Mbps. They're also some of the most common, found on devices that don't require data transfer or high power delivery.
• Yellow: These ports can support either USB 2.0 or 3.0, and are "always on", meaning they can supply power even when the device they're connected to is off.
• Orange: Like yellow, but with support for USB 3.0. Always on. You might see these on your pair of headphones.  
• Blue: Supporting USB 3.0 SuperSpeed technology and above, blue ports identify a device capable of fast data transfer: up to 5 Gbps (that's 5,000 Mbps) -- a significant jump from previous generations. Besides laptops, you'll see blue ports on thumb drives and external storage.
• Teal: Just like blue, but denoted as USB 3.1, supporting faster transfer speeds of up to 10 Gbps.
• Red: These are the newest and fastest devices available, categorized as USB 3.1 Generation 2 and USB 3.2. They support another significant increase in data transfer speeds -- up to 10-20 Gbps. Red USB ports are also always on.

Yes, blogging has been light lately.  Working on that part.

In Which Apple Declares War On Its Customer Base

These last  few years, I've noticed my Mac Mini (Intel CPU, purchased late 2020) has been running hotter and hotter with every OS upgrade.  Sleep the machine at night, and then it's almost too hot to touch by the morning.  Digging around, it seems that Apple has installed some media-scanning software that runs in the background, categorizing faces, places, songs, etc.  I've spent a couple of hours trying to turn this stuff off and keep it off – it automatically turns back on within minutes – and digging for solutions.  It seems that there were work-arounds for all of this, but Apple reads the various relevant forums and has been diligently thwarting these efforts.  About the only thing left that seems to work is to launch your own search-and-kill job that wakes up every minute or so to hunt down the offending daemons and zap them.  You can read about how to do this here (search down to the large font "If you are on Big Sur (11) or newer, forget about all*the above solutions, none will work!" for how to deal).  I'll get around to doing just this later today, and I am reasonably sure that Apple will come up with a lock-out even for this in the next round of sidegrades.

Linux man, it's looking better by the day.  I don't need another hobby though.

ps, a few hours later: All seems to be working fine, with the computer's temp down to something reasonable.  The three minute cron cycle seems to be working well on my Mac.  Also, don't forget to make the script in the above link executable; you can see how to do this in item #3 at this link.  Which, by the way, contains some excellent general info on cron which makes it worth reading to both give you some confidence when running crontab and for your own knowledge base.

pps: Apple, fix this business ASAP.  If it's ticking off a die-hard like me, imagine what it's doing to more casual users.

Good Basic Advice

Over at The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian (aka Lawdog) delivers a brief and useful treatise on socio-political epistemology titled Why do you still listen?  Go read the whole thing, it'll take about two minutes.  

While the author focuses on the night terrors of right-leaning readers, this advice applies to all poles of the political spectrum.  From which, I must add, I've heard a constant keening about 'teh end of democracy!!' this and 'zomg book bans!!' that for the last decade or more.

We all have friends and relations who are so afflicted (again, I stress of all persuasions), so recommend this essay to them.

Also, the AI-generated art is pretty damn awesome.  Worth the click-through for that alone.

Defeating Predictive Text on a Mac

Apple's questionable feature of predictive text was driving me nuts whenever I was trying to write, and this rainy evening I finally got around to switching it off.  The simplest how-to explanation came from this link to reddit.  The important part is quoted here:

The setting to disable it is a bit hidden away and it took me ages to find (which is why I've posted this in case anybody else has the same difficulty). Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Input Sources > Edit > All Input Sources > Show inline predictive text and toggle it on or off.

Right now I'm testing it out while posting this.  Wow does it ever feel good to have that thing gone.  Curiously, I left the auto-correct on (it's in the same control panel).  It puts its suggestions in a small bubble below what I'm typing, which I find not nearly so distracting as putting predictive text on the same line ahead of what I'm typing.

Steve Jobs would never have put up with this shit.  As his influence slowly fades, the encrustification of Apple products marches onward unabated.  Linux is becoming a stronger possibility for my future.

New Fortran Compiler

Back sometime around my birthday last fall, somebody put these over at GitHub for various Mac OS versions on both ARM and Intel hardware.  YeeHah!  Just downloaded it, will install sometime tomorrow – wait, lookit the time – today.

Here, let's have some suitable celebratory music: Lyndsay's Gonna Drive by Rumble Club.

ps, mid-day: Installed in less than a minute, worked without any weird unix-fu invocations.  Onward & upward!

A Couple of Neat Techniques

In the past few days, I've stumbled across some neat tricks that are worth passing on.  Both of these apply to ham radio, but the first one also applies to any 12v wiring (cars, boats, etc.) that uses blade fuses.

Using an extra blade fuse as a fuse puller, very short at 1:21.  Once you've seen it you'll recognize the utility of this type of fuse's design, despite its non-obviousness.  One of those tidbits of knowledge that should but doesn't get passed around, I guess.

Setting microphone gain and speech compression using an external power meter, starting at the 6 minute mark (but you probably should watch the whole thing).  I sort of knew of this, and you can do this after a fashion with only a transceiver's power meter, but it was always so poorly documented.  It's much clearer how to do this once you've seen it in this video.

All for today.

Picking a AA Battery

Hey, it's Christmas and everything needs batteries.  Project Farm just put out a video to answer which is best, be they alkaline, lithium, or rechargeable NiMH.  20 minutes, well worth the time (if you're into such).

TLDW + my humble experience: Lithiums have amazing capacity.  Eneloops are the best of the rechargeables, and at 12+ years I can vouch for that.  They're pretty much all that I use.  Alkalines?  Who cares.  Too many of them will leak and ruin good equipment.  Duracells especially – exorcise those cursed objects from your household ASAP.

Finally, I thought after a $185 repair bill to replace my HVAC's thermostat due to Duracell leakage, that I had finally gotten rid of the last Duracell in the house.  Nope.  Last week I found one more, in a little flashlight I kept in my briefcase for years.  One more old faithful tool destroyed by the Curse of the Duracell.  Hopefully that's the last of them.

Master Yoda Speaks

Remember the early, weird, somewhat useless, and often just-for-fun web?  funtranslations.com is a throwback to that era.  Directed there to the Elmer Fudd translator by yesterday's post at The Silicon Graybeard, it was a link away from the Yoda translator.  So here's the classic phrase:

Master Yoda speaks in RPN.

Which translates to:

In rpn, master yoda speaks.

If you're a fan of RPN-based calculators you'll recognize that old joke immediately.  Onward with the day.

Still Crimped

Legs are still feeling a little crimped after Saturday's 50 miler, so let's go over crimping wires today.

Huh.  You can learn something every day.  Wish I'd known this decades ago.

The Keys

But you're probably not going to like 'em all that much.  Behold:

From SMBC sometime last week.  Link here.  Be sure to click through for the mouse-over & big red button.

Bit Rot

I've been noticing that many of the older images have been mysteriously disappearing from this blog.  While I understand IP, copyrights, and all that, a lot of these pictures I took myself or pulled fair-and-square off of Wikipedia.  Google, dammit, you're erasing the past and crippling my writing, and it's pissing me off.  Probably ought to start searching around for a new platform.  Maybe in the new year.

Stay tuned.

Write It Down & Teach Others

Just by chance, after writing yesterday's post about a somewhat involved task, I noticed that Sunday's NASA's APOD was about the Antikythera Mechanism.   There were techniques used in that device that were soon lost and not re-invented for another 1700+ years.  Look, if something's worth figuring out, it's worth documenting at the very least, and quite possibly worth teaching other interested parties about in a direct, hands-on manner.  Also it's quite likely that you'll be back at those notes for a quick walk-through before making repairs or jumping into a related future project, so even doing it for yourself is reason enough.  (Publish the results anyway, because you never know.)

Logbooks, journals, memorandum reports, videos, blogs, apprenticeships, grad school, etc.: They're what separates us from the ancients with their expensive penchant for repeatedly losing knowledge.

More Swear Words = Better Code?

I dunno, but it kinda works for me.  Link to original paper.  From the abstract:

We find that open source code containing swearwords exhibit significantly better code quality than those not containing swearwords under several statistical tests. We hypothesise that the use of swearwords constitutes an indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer with the code and its inherent complexities, thus yielding better code based on a thorough, critical, and dialectic code analysis process.

They Make a Tool for That

After some years of fighting quick-links into place on bike chains, it occurred to me that there ought to be a tool to do this more professionally.  Turns out, Park makes one.  Behold the MLP-1.2 Master Link Pliers:

Forget the single-item shipping charges, I ordered one today after fighting that 12-speed chain's new quick-link for about a half-hour+.

BTW, the original 12-speed mtb chain held up pretty well.  Didn't get into the red zone on the chain-check tool until 540 miles of mostly gritty off-road use.  The chainline is wonky as hell on the inner cogs, but OTOH the narrow chain's so floppy that it doesn't seem to mind.  I still think that drivetrain technology reached its apex with the 3x8 systems circa 1995, but that's just the retrogrouch in me speaking.  The new 12-speed surf works just fine.

RSX-11

I've been saying this more and more lately.  Hmm.

Hoo boy.  Wrote a GUI-driven data reduction suite on a uPDP-11 running RSX-11 in one former life.  Anyway, there's an article over at Hackaday about a VHF packet link between a Mac and a PDP-11, allowing the grotty old game Adventure to be played over the air.  Enjoy.

I remember Alto.

 

Article about the Xerox PARC Alto at IEEE Spectrum.  Medium-long read, so get a fresh cup of coffee.

As usual, click to embiggen.