The similarities and contrast between this book and AI Snake Oil are striking. For example, AI Snake Oil describes generative AI as something which largely works but is sometimes wrong, whereas this book is very concerned about how they’ve been rushed out the door in the wake of the unexpected popularity of ChatGPT despite clear…
Network Effect
I’m not really sure why, but I found it harder to get going on this book than the others in the series. It might have been that I was also reading a particularly good non-fiction book at the same time, or it might have been that the premise for these books is starting to wear…
On GitHub merge queues, reliability, and multiplexed serial connections
Assuming anyone was paying attention, which I suspect they are not, they would have noticed that there are a lot of queued up pull requests for Shaken Fist right now. There are a couple of factors leading to that — there are now several bots which do automated pull requests for code hygiene purposes; and…
AI Snake Oil
Nick recommended I read this book, so here it is. The book starts by providing an analogy for how we talk about AI — imagine that all transport vehicles were grouped by one generic term instead of a variety like “car”, “bus”, “rocket”, and “boat”. Imagine the confusion a conversation would experience if I was…
Understanding the Intel 4004 clock circuit
Noting that the Intel 4004 was normally sold as a chip set called the Intel MCS-4, the standard clock circuit used appears to be this (from this PDF, kindly provided by this vendor of MCS-4 test boards): Which means I want to work out what this circuit is doing. First off, let’s understand these flip…
FastCDC, puzzlefs, and de-duplicating container and VM images
Since about 2017, a group at Cisco has been working on an “OCI native operating system” under the title “project machine”, which is a terrible project name. I note that most of the people publicly involved in the project according to github commits no longer work at Cisco, so I cannot vouch for the health…
The Four Tendencies
I tend to be a bit concerned by psychology books from people without psychology qualifications, but Cat was keen for me to read this book based on her encounters of the author in podcast form. Luckily, Psychology Today seems to have relatively positive things to say about the book so I decided to give it a…
Getting Vevor 7in1 weather stations working with rtl_433, MQTT, and Home Assistant
Now that we’ve defeated QNAP’s slightly broken udev, we can run a Docker container with rtl_433 in it to wire up our Vevor 7in1 weather station to Home Assistant via MQTT. First off, we need a Docker container running rtl_433, which assumes you’ve already setup the udev rule mentioned in the previous post, even if…
Configuring USB device pass through to Docker on QNAP NASes
So, this was a lot harder than it really should have been, especially because rtl_433 is a bit thingie about where the device appears in the /dev/ file system as an added sting in the tail… In my specific scenario, I was given a Vevor 7-in-1 wireless weather station for Christmas. They seem fairly solid…
Remapping Keychron K15 (QMK) media keys to control Sonos
Disclaimer: despite what people seem to assume when you buy a mechanical keyboard, I am not a keyboard fetishist. I’ve been using Microsoft Sculpts for over a decade because of historical repetition injury issues, and with Microsoft discontinuing the Sculpt and the new manufacturer taking their time taking over, all I want is a keyboard…