I wanted a version of Tetris that had a logarithmic board instead of a square grid. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, so I turned to AI.
Read moreMultitasking got to the best of me today when I distractedly decided to update my web host server from Ubuntu 20.04 to 24.04. At or around 11:15am EST, I brazenly went forth on my attempt to update my AWS instance. As I was running apt update I realized that I should created at least one backup of the instance, and took a snapshot. It’s a good thing I did, or I wouldn’t be here today.
Read moreTrust can be found between individuals, within organizations, and between an individual and an institution. When we consider the concept of trust, we might think about people we trust to be vulnerable around when we are going through a difficult time in our lives. We might think about the trust that we have with the institutions in our lives, such as trusting that we will be able to access medical care when it is needed. As of 2023, Generative AI was trusted more than any institution – which includes church, Congress, the military, businesses, and schools.
Read moreOn the list of “things that annoy me about AI”, trying to upsell AI features as part of a service is close to the top. I’ve recently noticed that my LinkedIn feed has been shoving an AI icon and related “coaching prompts” into my feed, and my solution of hiding every post that had the icons on them wasn’t actually filtering the system the way that I wanted. Today I spent a few minutes learning
Read moreThe “personal computing” market has dramatically shifted from the original visions evolving out of Xerox PARC and the innovation labs of the past into a multi-level mediated… mess.
Thankfully, open source operating systems are thriving, and the barrier of entry into an actually personal computing experience that is tailored to your own environment is lower than ever. With that in mind, in December, I started looking at how I could start to extend my Ubuntu desktop.
This was a really fun project to take on, and I’m itching to start doing more of this as I think through what kind of ways that I want to expand and customize my personal computing environment.
Read moreAs I’m writing this, I’m wearing a green t-shirt with a giant eyeball over my rapidly growing stomach. It’s Halloween, and I’ve decided to dress up as Mike Wazowski – it feels like I’m all stomach these days, so it felt appropriate. My partner dressed up as Boo. Halloween is an especially interesting time of year to reflect on identity and persona: it’s a holiday that encourages people to step into a different character and
Read moreBack in 2015, I bought the domain ‘livi.link’ to use as a shortlink domain. Why? It’s freaking adorable, and it meant that I could leave links around the internet that would be immediately identified as mine. I set up a bit.ly account with Twitter authentication, and used “livi links” for years. Then, I deleted my Twitter account, and forgot to detach it from my bit.ly account. Oops. Yesterday, I wanted to make a short link
Read moreWhile LLAMA 2 is certainly interesting, and more openly licensed than some other AI language models, it’s definitely not open source. Open source is a term that is defined by a non-profit called the Open Source Initiative. The OSI explicitly calls out that it is not sufficient for code to be open for something to be called open source. The actual definition of open source includes provisions that must be true for the licensing of the software. LLAMA 2’s “permissive” license doesn’t apply.
Read moreI wanted to build Firefox from source in order to implement the changes found in the patch stack linked above. That’s the beauty of open source – I was able to be sent a patch that someone wrote last summer, and even though it hasn’t been made production-ready and merged, I can start working with it immediately.
Read moreThe open source movement gives me hope. It’s how I’m able to run multiple different interfaces to local language models that can be fine-tuned on my computers with my own data, and know that it’s not leaving my own environment. It’s how I can build the Firefox web browser locally, and add custom patches so that I can run experiments with my browsing history safely. It’s how I can picture re-imagined fair value exchange systems working.
The commercial software stack is collapsing, locking users into increasingly tightly controlled environments where customization is locked away, abstracted because of its complexity. This is not the way.
Read more